In Search of a Masterpiece

By Susan Thea Posnock

Once upon a time in the far off and whimsical land of Jersey—the “New” version—a young girl dreamed movie dreams and begged her parents to take her to see Rocky as often as they could stand it. She and her older brother would listen to Bill Conti’s glorious theme and reenact the final, tear-jerking moments, complete with a gut-wrenching yelp of “Adriaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!” It was, in her 6-year-old opinion, the BEST MOVIE EVER.

A year later, she changed her mind, having been introduced to a new man—we’ll call him “Han” for short—and Star Wars ruled the day.

Years have gone by. The young girl is in her thirties and has loved many films and performances since those heady days of cheering for the contender. But her affection for him (and Han) lingers.

Of course, I’m referring to myself. And as I observe the debates over this year’s five Academy Award Best Picture nominees, I think it’s important for all of us to remember that inner film geek and how we got here in the first place. I’d guess a lot of us have “first film loves” that we cling to, even as our tastes have matured. I know that the Oscars are all about rewarding the “best” NOW, but I also think that whatever the film, it’s important to understand that our perceptions and feelings aren’t static. Despite this, most film reviews are the artistic version of a phone call to a friend after a first date. It’s all about snap judgments—over praise or dismissal in an instant.


I’ve certainly gone overboard for a film before, and not just when I was six. Yet I’ve tried not to confuse my personal longing for movie greatness, with something I just can’t have yet: Time. It’s very possible that in 10, 20, 30 years, I’ll look back on films that I love today and wonder: “What was I thinking?” Many will be forgotten and perhaps some I don’t appreciate right now will stand out in my mind as shining examples of the medium.

A more critically and commercially successful film has a better chance of being remembered—but it’s no guarantee. Regardless of their success (or failure) at the time they were released, the lasting masterpieces, cultural milestones, cult phenomenons and crowd pleasers are measured by the years. Something about them touches a nerve—intellectual, emotional, comic—that metaphorically keeps their images in Technicolor even as others inevitably fade to black.

One such film is The Searchers. When it was released in 1956 it garnered no Oscar nominations and not much critical notice, despite the fact that director John Ford and lead actor John Wayne were both legends. Ford did receive a Directors Guild of America nomination, but other than that… nothing.

The film was both ahead of its time and of its time, as it explored topics including racism, identity and America. I won’t argue that it aged perfectly—but it would be hard to deny its overall power.

This past year was a very impressive one for cinema. But are we ready to say what kind of impact No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, Juno, There Will Be Blood, or Atonement will have 50 years from now?

No Country for Old Men is my personal favorite. It even has more than one visual and verbal nod to The Searchers, like when Kelly Macdonald’s character throws out a blasé “That’ll be the Day,” a refrain of Wayne’s from the 1956 film.

I admired There Will Be Blood for its Icarus-like attempts to reach the sun—even if it left me cold emotionally. Like No Country, it has a quality that transcends the modern—and not just because of its period setting.

Juno’s comic quirkiness—so much a product of the now—may not translate over the years. But we react to comedies in a very personal way and Juno’s passionate fans could keep it alive with the sort of cult-like devotion one sees for movies like Caddyshack.

The picturesque Atonement is being marketed as an epic romance, but to me its merits are found in its exploration of truth, loss and redemption. The green dress worn by Keira Knightley is lovely, but I hope it’s not all that’s remembered.

Michael Clayton is my least favorite. Even so, I can’t underestimate the charismatic turn by George Clooney. He makes ethical dilemmas look gorgeous. That undeniable star wattage could give the film the kind of staying power I’d associate with a top-notch thriller like The Fugitive.

Overall, in comparison to other recent Best Picture line-ups, it’s a pretty noteworthy list—top to bottom.

The full bloom of each film’s greatness will come with, as Wayne said in The Searchers: “The turning of the earth.”

*Originally posted at Awards Daily.

STP Talks!

Recently, I had a chance to TALK film online versus just writing about it when my friend Nathaniel at The Film Experience asked me to participate in an Oscar nominations discussion as part of his new podast feature. Joe Reid of Low Resolution also pitches in.

The segment follows an interview Nat conducted with 12-time sound Oscar nominee Greg P. Russell, who is up for another sound Oscar this year for the Transformers.

Download the conversation here.

Marisa Tomei Shares Pieces of a Part

By Susan Thea Posnock

A performance is in many ways a collection of fragments: Take one versus take five; an edit here or there; a close-up versus a long shot. The filmmakers decide what the audience will see onscreen. Yet elements that don’t reach the final cut can still inform it.

For actress Marisa Tomei, some of her personal pieces in this process are literally collecting dust. That’s because with each role, she keeps a black-and-white composition notebook. It’s her way of finding time to “daydream” about the person she must become.

“I’ll have ideas or images or the timeline of the character’s personal history, or just questions [in the notebook],” she says.

Once she moves on to the next persona, she throws the books down into her basement. Who knows, maybe that’s one reason Tomei, who turned 43 in December, looks so damn good. Perhaps those notebooks are a kind of “Picture of Dorian Gray.” In addition to the immortality offered by movies, her filmography lives on, discarded but not destroyed in those books.

There’s her portrayal of spunky mob daughter Lisa Provolone, which turned the gangster spoof Oscar into a guilty pleasure. As pregnant reporter Martha Hackett in The Paper, she nailed the nagging persistence that drives daily reporters to get the story. And in her Academy Award-winning turn as Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny, she created a memorable character with every stomp stomp stomp of her stiletto heels.

I felt an instant kinship with Brooklyn-born Tomei when she told me about those composition books. My own tendency to hang on to notes and papers often threatens to overtake my small studio apartment. I was glad to hear she’s kept each one, even if she’s never opened them again.

“I ask myself why am I keeping these,” she says, her own laugh track a constant presence as she speaks. “It’s like I’m superstitious or something.”

I wonder aloud if they’re a part of her experience she doesn’t want to get rid of completely.

“Yeah, exactly,” she says. “It’s also ephemeral like, ‘okay I did something.’ I didn’t build a bridge, but I did something that year.”

This year she added several new pads to the pile, most notably the part of Gina Hanson in director Sidney Lumet’s bleak morality melodrama, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. Caught between her husband Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and her lover, his hapless brother Hank (Ethan Hawke), her specter lingers despite only a few scenes. She’s a catalyst for both men in the non-sequential story that offers different perspectives of a jewelry heist-gone-wrong as it morphs into family tragedy. The film also features Albert Finney and was written by Kelly Masterson.

Filling in the Blanks

Tomei was thrilled by the notion of working with her co-stars and the legendary Lumet, but had some concerns about the part. She says the intensive two-week rehearsal sessions prior to production (which the 83-year-old director is known for) proved invaluable.

The sessions took place in a large Ukrainian dance hall.

“It was almost like the old live TV sets where you roll from one set to the next in the same space. Each set would be mapped out on the floor. You’d walk from one scene then across the room to the next scene, all within the same giant space,” she says. “It’s great because the film is out of order, but we got to do it in order to really understand where our characters were before it became dismantled.”

In some ways, she says the process raised more questions.

Some of Gina’s motivation is clear—the power struggle with her husband and the way in which his brother’s love impacts her self-worth—but other aspects are outside the text. “Her energy is very integral to the motivation of the guys, but there’s not a lot of screen time to find out what she’s about,” she says. “Sometimes she seems to know what’s going on and sometimes she doesn’t. It all adds to the mystery of the film, which is great, but what does it mean for her? Who is she?”

Part of the answer was that Gina’s more like a leaf in the wind than someone standing on solid ground. “She’s in the moment and she’s where she is at any given time without a lot of forethought or afterthought,” Tomei explains.

Playing a part like that was a little scary, she says, because she wasn’t sure it would add up.

Addressing those gaps—or perhaps accepting them—was a lesson she took from the rehearsals. “One thing that I always have to remind myself when I’m working on a piece is that life is so untidy and we never really know ourselves,” she says.

Despite narrative ellipses, what wasn’t hidden was the character’s body, with nearly every inch before the camera’s gaze. While Tomei had some reservations when she read the script, she came to realize this was also an integral part of Gina.

“I think the impact of the nudity visually says a lot more than I realized it was going to say,” she says. “Seeing it you get ideas about her self worth [how comfortable she is] or what makes her tick or what turns her on. Just because of the starkness and boldness it says more in terms of how she relates to both men and in terms of who she is.”

Oscar’s Blessings

Tomei left Boston University for a gig on the soap As the World Turns and did time on Cosby spin-off A Different World before her big film breakthrough. Winning an Oscar early on was a defining moment.

“It let me begin to do what I really wanted to do,” she says.

Like any performer her career has had its ups-and-downs, but Tomei has proven her longevity and that the award for supporting actress—while considered a surprise at the time—was no fluke. Despite no runaway hits, her work over the years has included effective turns in films like Welcome to Sarajevo and Slums of Beverly Hills. She was nominated for her second supporting actress Oscar for 2001’s In the Bedroom. This year her Oscar fate is unknown, but she’s up for an Independent Spirit Award.

While she’s shown her dramatic abilities among her most recent attention-grabbing roles, it would be great to see Tomei get a plumb comic part again. She says that’s easier wished for than done.

“Really great comedy with intelligence and some wit is hard to find and it’s also hard to find directors who understand it and know how to shoot it,” she says.

There are plenty of good comedies written for men, but she says the parts for women are usually less interesting.

That’s why she thinks audiences respond so strongly to exceptions like Leslie Mann in Knocked Up and Ellen Page in Juno.

“Give her a mouthful to say and it’s fantastic, but it’s rarely written,” Tomei says.

Regardless of the type of role, she says she tries to align her spirit to that of the character. “One of my favorite things about acting is that you’re forced to see that you actually can transform. You can transform your mindset, you can transform your mood, you can transform your outlook,” she says.

Staying Busy on Stage and Screen

Tomei has a full schedule this year. First, she’s in the new Darren Aronofsky film The Wrestler (which starts shooting in February). She says the film, which stars Mickey Rourke, is about a man whose love and livelihood come from his body and what happens when he can no longer depend on it. She plays a dancer who serves as a parallel to the main character.

Then beginning in April, she’ll appear in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. The play features an all-female cast and focuses on the role of women in the modern working world.

Tomei returns to theater frequently, having recently finished a well-received run Off Broadway in playwright Will Eno’s Oh, the Humanity.

Performing live offers a palpable experience she can’t get in movies. “Even though [the audience] can be really quiet, I’m hearing every little laugh or move and there’s a dialogue that we have,” she says. “There’s something sacred about that to me.”

*This article first appeared on Awards Daily.

Lovemadness, Puerto Rican Style

By Susan Thea Posnock

Early on in Maldeamores (Lovesickness) I realized I wasn’t watching a conventional take on romance. In place of bright-eyed, beautiful protagonists who have a “meet cute” and then pretend to hate each other for an hour, the film—which is the official Oscar foreign language entry for Puerto Rico—features stalkers, adulterers and most compelling and surprising of all, old folks.

It was written by Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz and Jorge Gonzales. Ruiz co-directed with his wife, Mariem Perez Riera and his brother Luillo Ruiz is the producer. It features an ensemble led by Luis Guzman, who plays a cheating husband, a part that was written for him. Actor Benicio Del Toro served as an executive producer and it was one of the first independent films to receive funding from the Puerto Rico Film Commission’s new incentive law.

This isn’t a Sleepless in Seattle version of “love in a movie,” but a messy, heightened mixture of love, sex, and hate—blended together with a strong dose of humor. It shows how the onset of these emotions can afflict people of all ages, but it was the septuagenarian love triangle I found most intriguing.

The introduction of two of these elderly performers, shown slurping soup in a loud duet amidst a series of close-ups, initially grossed me out. But as the story develops between Flora (Silvia Brito), Cirilo (Chavito Marrero) and interloper Pellin (Miguel Angel Alvarez) my squeamishness evolved into enchanted amusement. Flora and Cirilo are a divorced couple that have been living together for nearly 30 years. The rhythm of their soup slurping is suddenly interrupted when Pellin, Flora’s first husband, returns to live out his final years with his love from long ago. This may not be the pretty portrayal of romance I’m used to, but it felt lived in and authentic, if not “realistic.” The actors—Brito in particular—are wonderful.

“Silvia Brito the 80-year-old actress that plays Flora is a charm and a woman with such a character that by the end of the story you look at her as a sexy mama,” says Ruiz, who answered a series of questions I sent to him and actor Guzman via email.

He says the response to the older triangle has been uniformly positive and it was a plotline he felt was essential in giving a fully rounded view of love in all its irrational glory. “We know that generally love and sex among older people are not included in films and that’s why we wanted so badly to make the audience watch a love triangle between old people,” he says. “We wanted to show love in every stage of life—childhood, adulthood, elderly. We felt that sometimes in the elderly stage of life love is mistaken with compassion and the fear of being alone, but there is only the need of a spark to start a fire. So it was important for us to show how our grandmothers never lose passion and the need to feel.”

It’s an interesting idea, but the possibility of it makes me feel slightly confounded. It would be just a little comforting to think that lovesickness is something that we get too wise to fall for in our golden years. Not likely.

Ruiz says the material came out of his obsession with the “absurd idea of perfect love” that’s seen in the majority of films. “When I met Mariem Perez, my partner in crime, we decided to make a film showing the real face of love as the egoist, obsessive and masochistic feeling that moves this world,” he explains. “The stories in the film are very close to us because they come from real events of our friends and our families.”

Rather than perfectionism, Maldeamores shows the perverse side of love, with what Ruiz calls flawed characters and absurdist situations. He says he and Perez frame these with dark humor and cynicism.

One of those flawed characters is Ismael, a man who cheats on his wife with her cousin, brought to comic life by Guzman.

“Ismael’s are all over the place,” the actor says. “How many guys have cheated on their wives with other family members…I put myself in that position and went for it…”

Guzman says Puerto Rico has great storytellers with a lust for passion. “Whether it’s through comedy or drama, we have an incredible pool of talent,” he says. It was the effectiveness of the screenplay that attracted him to the project. “I really dug the three story lines and how they paralleled life and its realities. It was funny, smart, witty and clever,” he says.

The actor—perhaps best known for his work with Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson—grew up in Puerto Rico, so the fact that the film was shot there was also a big plus. “I showed up a week before shooting and played a lot of dominoes, downed a few pina coladas and I was good to go,” he says.

The popularity of Latin American films in general and the film commission’s new incentive law for filmmakers are helping to turn Puerto Rico into an island movie paradise. Prior to the incentive law, Ruiz says there really wasn’t a film industry. “It was really hard for young filmmakers like us to even dream about making films in Puerto Rico,” he says.

In the past, he says a movie would get made once every six years. Last year eight films were produced because of the fund, with 80 percent of financing coming from the government. “Because of its small size [Puerto Rico] constantly emanates a feeling of confinement and claustrophobia,” he notes. “This gives us the perfect setting to explore, throughout the film, the traumas and foibles of our collective madness.”

While a perfect setting to film Maldeamores some believed that pressure and confined space would challenge the marriage of Ruiz and Perez—who had fallen in love after they returned from studying filmmaking abroad, in Chicago and Cuba respectively.

“People were concerned if our relationship would last through the film. You know it is intense to work for two years with your partner in a film about bad love,” he says. “But it was a piece of cake for us. We share the same sensibility and taste for storytelling. We were in love with the characters and the stories and we felt privileged to be able to work every day in something we loved so much,” he says.

He says their next project—they’ve signed as directors with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and have been reading scripts—will likely be a dark comedy shot in English. They are also working on a new screenplay that deals with youth in Puerto Rico.

He says Del Toro, who recently filmed The Argentine with Soderbergh in Puerto Rico, has called movies the next national sport for the island. It’s a sentiment shared by Ruiz.

“There is a new breed of young filmmakers that are competing to put their voice out there,” he says. “This is the starting point of the developing of an industry that is growing fast and steady.”

*This article first appeared on Awards Daily.