REEL UNDERGROUND

FILM REVIEWS
AND CALENDAR
BY PAUL D. GOETZ




Oscar-Worthy 'Georgia' Strikes an Honest Chord

Opening in January

Georgia
(written by Barbara Turner and directed by Ulu Grosbard)
Played with perceptive restraint by Mare Winningham, Georgia is a dispassionate yet successful country music singer who is embarrassed and oppressed as much by her sister Sadie's near-manic intensities and ravaged lifestyle, as by her penetrating honesty. Jennifer Jason Leigh turns in an Oscar-worthy performance of searing veracity as central character Sadie, who is an unsuccessful, post-punk evocation of Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, and Courtney Love. Often in an alcoholic haze, or quietly humming to herself in the middle of the night, or weeping openly as she listens to her sister sing, Sadie is a bundle of discordant impulses; at once desperate and disarming, hopeless and hopeful. Through it all, Leigh manages to strike the deepest collective chord, overwhelming our desire to despise her with an honesty that breaks the surface like an open wound.

When we first meet Sadie, she's cleaning Seattle motel rooms between shots of liquor, and impulsively taking up with a domineering blues musician with a fondness for guns. The association, though brief, is enough to get her back on the bowling alley and bar mitzvah circuit with the band that once kicked her out. Look hard and you'll find in her journey the set-up, conflict, and resolution common to most dramas, but linear plotting takes a back seat to the accumulating, revealing details that bring her character brilliantly to life. Leigh's complex portrayal and Turner and Grosbard's attention to the tangled woof and warp of real life make it plausible when a polite, sweet-natured boy delivering booze and groceries (an outstanding performance by Max Perlich) ends up staying and, eventually, marrying her.
More often than not, she ends up on Georgia's doorstep. While Georgia loves her, she can't get past being reproachful. The root of their conflict lies somewhere in the shared traumas of childhood, but, refreshingly, the film refuses simple explanations and simple solutions as it comes to a head. More illuminating than the minimal dialogue between them is their on-stage performances. Grosbard heightens the energy and immediacy by recording his actresses live using few cut-aways, turning songs that often becalm many music-related films into riveting revelations. During "No More Hard Times" (while Sadie looks on with tearful admiration and self-pity), we see the survivalist in Georgia struggling to cordon off the pain, and when Sadie unleashes a lengthy compelling version of Van Morrison's "Take Me Back" - illuminating Sadie's love-hate bond with suffering - an uneasy Georgia looks on and then needlessly joins in because she thinks Sadie needs to be rescued.
This engrossing portrait is, by turns, intense, quiet, brave, fractious, and disorderly - and all the better for being so. It's also an insightful, non-judgmental look at the price of serenity and suffering at opposite ends of the music business ladder of success, leaving the viewer to decide which sister is paying the bigger price. It's the kind of film Oscar often overlooks. But that's okay. Its honest look at human nature is its own prestigious reward.



The Varsity
(4329 University Way NE, 632-3131)

The Jar
January 12-18 (in Persian with English subtitles, written and directed by Ebrahim Foruzesh).
A crack in the large jug that supplies a grade school's drinking water becomes the simple impetus for a series of seriocomic crises that test the character of a poor Iranian community and provides an ever-widening, parabolic portrait of its complex personality.

Behzad Khodaveisi plays the newly-arrived school teacher whose increasing attempts to have the jar repaired are met with resistance and accusations until he nearly leaves in disgust. The townspeople's complaint that the government should replace the jar only serves to underline its indifference.
Embarrassed by his father's unwillingness to repair it without payment, a student runs away from home rather than face his school-mates. His abusive father, thinking his son was thrown out, arrives at school and, learning the truth, grudgingly reconsiders. Much hilarity ensues as the students try to collect the ash, lime, and eggs needed to make the grout. They learn about trust, generosity, repentance, and forgiveness when the teacher, accused of taking the yolks since only the whites are needed, dispels suspicions by using them to make lunch for his students. While Foruzesh stresses the value of cooperation, he also celebrates individual initiative when an indomitable mother (Fatemeh Azrah) takes it upon herself to collect money to buy a new jar when the repair work fails and a boy nearly drowns in the local stream (setting off accusations that she's absconded with the funds).
Though quietly observed, evenly paced, and grounded in the specificity of place and the naturalism of mostly non-professional actors, the film resonates with universal truths drawn from the concentric arrangement of the jar, school, community, and country.
A metaphor for his people's weaknesses and the precariousness of their desert life, Foruzesh also provides a lesson on the value of community will - as necessary to their (and our) survival as water.



The Seattle Art Museum
(100 University St., 654-3121)

The Seattle Art Museum SAM's Fall Film Series "Shadow Street: The Film Noir Cycle" concludes December 14 while its Winter Series "January Sunshine: Fifty Years of French Film Comedy" gets under way January 11 and runs through March 14 on successive Thursdays. Series tickets for the 10 comedies (seven in 35mm) are $37 for museum members and $42 for the general public. While series tickets often sell out, individual tickets can usually be purchased at the door.

The Manchurian Candidate
December 14 (1962, directed by John Frankenheimer).
Paranoia runs deep in this still chilling Cold War thriller which caused quite a stir when it was first released during the Cuban missile crisis. Audiences were alive to it - dividing them in the way truly vital American cinema always does. As the decade moved toward anarchy and the assassinations mounted, the memory of the film gained in gravity and gloom. From the '90s it may look somewhat like an absurdly hysterical artifact from an era in extremism, but the film always swung frantically between jet-black comedy and deadly serious drama, and it still delivers considerable jolts. Since then, one only has to look at the recent, empty-headed "Patriot Games" or "Assassins" to understand how vacuous and irrelevant our thrillers have become.

Captured by the Russians during the Korean War, Sgt. Raymond Shaw and his unit are taken to Manchuria where they are subjected to three months of "reconditioning" after which they are returned to the states with a fictitious story of a valorous escape. Lawrence Harvey gives a harrowing, tormented performance as the "war hero" Shaw with a deadly agenda of which even he is unaware. Frank Sinatra is memorable as intelligence officer Ben Marco, a member of Shaw's Korean unit who is plagued by surreal nightmares that suggest Shaw may have been turned into a deadly assassin awaiting post-hypnotic instructions from an American contact. And Angela Lansbury is a revelation as Shaw's scary, dominating, incestuous mother who may be using her son to propel her Commie-hating, McCarthy-like husband to the White House.



The Seattle International Film Festival's Women's Film Series.
January 26-28
The Seattle International Film Festival is presenting a series of 10 films by women filmmakers. The program will include features, documentaries, and short films. Contemporary and archival works will be shown with many of the filmmakers in attendance. Two panel discussions addressing women's roles in the film industry and emerging women directors of the '90s will be presented. The panels will be composed of key industry professionals, critics, journalists, and film directors. Full series passes are available to Cinema Seattle members for $65. For more information, call 324-9996.



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Contents on this page were published in the December/January, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1996 WFP Collective, Inc.
Goetz