CANNES - In the ongoing saga of Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, apparently there was a desperate rush to get a subtitled print ready, they missed their first two screenings, then they show up for the 7:30 pmscreenings last night and there's two prints, one for the press and one for the gala audience. But Screen International got the screening time wrong.
A friend who saw it it described it as Last Year At Marienbad meets In The Mood For Love. I'm guessing it's not a comedy.
BIOPICS - The last two nights of Cannes are occupied with showbiz biographies, which is kind of odd, with The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers tonight and the Cole Porter bio, De-Lovely, closing the festival.
They're both odd, Brechtian constructs designed to let the work comment on the life and, in the case of Sellers, to let Sellers step into the other character's roles if he feels the need to rewrite. This offers a great opportunity for Geoffrey Rush, who does a positively eerie Sellers, with strong support from Emily Watson as his first wife, Anne, Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick, John Lithgow as Blake Edwards and Charlize Theron as Britt Ekland.
Ekland complained about Theron's casting - I suspect she didn't want people to think that she was flat-chested. Director Stephen Hopkins lets Theron show a lot of leg instead. The odd thing here is that almost all the actors are taller than their characters - Theroní' not just taller than Ekland, she's taller than Sellers was.
It's a fascinating construct, rooted in Sellers oft-cited statements that he had no personality of his own. I'm not sure about the theatrical plans for the film. HBO, which has a bit of a specialty in this sort of film (their Don King biopic, Only In America, which won Ving Rhames an Emmy, is probably the best of them) are the producers, so it may be going straight to cable.
It does a lot of recreations of some of Sellers's most famous bits - the telephone conversation from Dr. Strangelove, for example - which has the perhaps unintended effect of inspiring in the viewer thoughts like "I wish I was watching Dr. Strangelove RIGHT NOW."
As for De-Lovely, it's a movie based on a dreadful idea. Let's scramble up Cole Porter's life and work, focusing on his marriage, and let the songs comment on the action, as if a song written for High Society in 1954 can really comment on Porter's life in 1936. Then, let's hire a bunch of contemporary pop singers and have them do Porter songs.
To make a distinction. Van Helsing is a great idea for a movie. It was a great idea when they were doing those "Let's get all the monsters together" pictures like House Of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. It's just a good idea that's never been done particularly well.
De-Lovely is such a bad idea for a move that no one's ever done it before with good reason. (Night And Day, with Cary Grant as a conspicuously heterosexual Porter, was basically a showcase for MGM's catalogue of Porter song - DVD is due June 1, by the way.)
Kevin Kline plays Porter throughout, and Kevin Kline is a fine actor. He's also 56 years old. When Cole Porter met his wife, Linda, in 1918, he was 27 - a talented young man at loose ends in Europe. Kline can play down to about 35, but barely. What he looks like here is a near middle-aged failure taken on by a powerful woman - Ashley Judd is very good as Linda, and Kline's fine once Porter grows out of his "Tennis, anyone?" phase.
The idea of hiring fresh pop singers to do the songs isn't a bad idea. The bad idea emerges as we soon realize that Robbie Williams, Elvis Costello and Alanis Morisette have almost no idea of how to sing Porter, who wrote witty lyrics and caressing melodies. One would think that Diana Krall would have the chops to sing Just One Of Those Things, but the arrangement is a botch job. And the director may have realized what he was stuck with and started cutting away from the singers after about a verse. The only ones who come off are Caroline O'Connor, who does an eerie Ethel Merman on Anything Goes and Vivian Green's Love For Sale. Of course, neither of them is a famous pop star. They were apparently hired because they could actually sing the numbers well. (Somewhere, Ella Fitzgerald and Fred Astaire, superb Porter interpreters, are spinning in their graves.)
As to direction, Irwin Winkler used to produced movies like Rocky and New York, New York. He took up directing at 50 with Guilty By Suspicion and has continued to direct, despite showing not much talent for it.
The staging of the musical numbers is pretty much a botch job - Be A Clown is as maladroit a construction as anything in Grease 2. While we're on the subject of historical recreation, in the Broadway stage numbers, just what are those black dancers doing in the chorus line? These are the 1920s, after all, and there was more than one reason to think of Broadway as The Great White Way.
After De-Lovely, I felt like the audience in The Producers that has just seen the Springtime For Hitler production number. I know I've seen it, but I can't believe it.
Of course, De-Lovely is the closing film at Cannes. I think the last time they closed with a good picture was Thelma And Louise.
