EXPECT BOTH rich purple fantasy and dire tragedy this winter at the movies—blame the ever-darkening days before the solstice or just blame the Oscars. Maybe it’s the inevitable approach of the new Fockers film, Little Fockers (Dec. 22) that makes one think of gathering darkness. But there are alternatives to watching De Niro, Danner, Hoffman and Streisand sitting around the house volleying low-level double-entendres.
The most seemingly foolproof holiday movie is the Coen brothers’ True Grit (Dec. 22). Jeff Bridges stars as one-eyed U.S. Marshall Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, late of Quantrill’s bushwhackers, bribed by an adolescent orphan to find a fugitive hiding in Indian Territory. It’s not a straightforward job. The killer (Josh Brolin) is very bad news, Cogburn is not a young man, and the arrest is complicated by a typically fancy Texas Ranger called LeBoeuf (Matt Damon) who has a competing claim on the corpus.
Previews indicate this is not at all a remake of Henry Hathaway’s magnificent 1969 Western, featuring John Wayne’s most affecting acting. That movie, for all its beauty and sadness, lacks the Twain-worthy comic understatement, the evil humor and the dark places of Charles Portis’ novel. And the Coens are the perfect savage humorists to adapt the book more faithfully, as seen in the best parts of No Country for Old Men. Moreover, they’ve retrieved the book’s actual settings, the older True Grit being filmed amid the golden aspens in the Colorado Rockies. The new version takes place in the sticks, briars and swamps of Arkansas and the ever-mysterious Sooner State. Can anyone who loves the “rare, fragrant Dude,” in David Thomson’s words, wait to see Bridges in the role?
Geeks of a certain age are all over TRON: Legacy (Dec. 17), a retro-future sequel to the pioneering computer-graphics movie, exploring the revived sentient video game, with its cold neon and hot cycles—and starring the aforementioned Bridges as the game’s inventor, imprisoned in his creation since the 1980s. After seeing Tangled, one is more convinced that Disney is the last refuge of truly rich color and worked-out storytelling. That conviction means more than the memories of the original, which was, let’s face it, so-so for anyone other than those who were age 12 in 1982.
The Illusionist (Dec. 25 in the big cities) proposes a bold use for (flat) animation: bring back the shade of M. Hulot! Sylvain Chomet (of The Triplets of Belleville) directs this never-produced script by the elegant and strange Jacques Tati in which an elderly magician on the skids befriends a young girl naive enough to believe his magic is real. Advance word recommends this work of happy retroism. Chomet crustily defends a medium that some (well, when I say “some,” I mean “some idiots”) have said is dead. As Chomet told the London Guardian, “Saying 2-D is dead is like saying a car race is the future of the Tour de France.”
In a contrast between old, male and bitterly experienced and young, female and hopeful comes Somewhere (Dec. 22 limited release). Sophie Coppola directs Elle Fanning as a daughter reviving her jaded film star father (Stephen Dorff), cooling his heels at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. Coppola is sure-footed in such stories, as we saw in Lost in Translation. Incidentally, Fanning also plays the little girl Mary in the catastrophic 3-D CGI orgy known as The Nutcracker in 3-D (Nov. 24). Even sight unseen, one prefers the treatment of Tchaikovsky in Black Swan (Dec. 10), Darren Aronofsky’s mad salute to Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes. It’s a psychotropic story of a prima ballerina (Natalie Portman), cracking under the strain of competition and the terrifying implications of Swan Lake.
Given a sex change, the sea-change play The Tempest (Dec. 10 limited release) sounds suitably rich and strange in Julie Taymor’s adaptation, with Helen Mirren as “Prospera.” Some memory of Taymor’s interpretation of Titus Andronicus makes one recall the Onion headline “Unconventional Director Sets Play in Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.” We haven’t had a version of The Tempest since Peter Greenaway gave the play a golden shower in Prospero’s Books. The all-star cast includes Russell Brand as drunken Trinculo, Djimon Hounsou bringing out the political subtext and Ben Whishaw (Bright Star), a natural for Ariel.
One special event is definitely worth noting for film lovers. On Dec. 2, Carl Dreyer’s The new Mike Leigh feature, Another Year (Dec. 31), charts wintery dissatisfaction and autumnal humor with Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as a contented couple. Welcome back to a big part for Sheen, whose performance in Leigh’s High Hopes remains the exact moral center of 1980s cinema, the embodiment of gentleness and loving kindness.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) plays at the art-deco Paramount Theater in Oakland, accompanied by a live version of the oratorio Voices of Light by Richard Einhorn. Revivals of elder movies at the beloved and always-affordable Stanford Theatre are essential to the holidays: the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Sonja Henie’s frosty heinie battle for attention in Sun Valley Serenade, billed with Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (Dec. 18–20). Then there is the faithful holiday double bill of The Wizard of Oz and the ever-complex, ever-touching The Shop Around the Corner (Dec. 21–23). The ultimate seasonal treat, It’s a Wonderful Life, plays on Christmas Eve.
