The Power of Art (DVDs on Oscar night)

We're in Kansas* (from Infamous)

MOVIES have the power to transport us, sometimes almost literally. More than once at the end of a Woody Allen or Fred Astaire movie when the lights go up I've been startled to find myself surrounded by foreigners in London or Paris, because I think I've been in New York with Woody or Fred.

At my boarding school, we had first-run movies on Saturday nights. We also had a place called "the Wade House" where seniors could smoke and play cards. One weekend we saw Truman Capote's moving In Cold Blood: the movie portrays one of the two brutal killers as an unredeemed psychopath while making the other killer, Perry Smith, a more complex and sympathetic figure (Norman Mailer called Capote's Smith one of the two or three most interesting characters in American literature).

The murderers' lives, and the movie, ended in a midnight downpour: the two convicted killers were hung in a warehouse in the middle of a very heavy rain. It's a very moving scene, so when the lights went up and a friend said, "Let's go up the Wade," I replied, "We can't go there. It's pouring rain." He had to take me outside to convince it wasn't.

I was reminded of this when I watched Infamous on DVD. The movie starts with a light touch and a good comic portrayal of Capote by the English actor Toby Jones, but by the time it gets to reenactments of the murders and then the hangings, the comedy is over. Anyone who liked In Cold Blood will probably find Infamous interesting — maybe very interesting.

More DVDs below.

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The movie starts on a weak note, with a musical scene that is supposed to set up the movie and its major theme that doesn't quite work. Gwyneth Paltrow sings Cole Porter's What Is This Thing Called Love? at the famous El Morocco, a quintessential New York setting for the young Truman Capote. At one point, she breaks down, and her band stops playing, but we don't understand why, and so the opening scene has the opposite effect of the emotionally gripping final scene of In Cold Blood. Instead of being pulled in to the world of the movie, we are made detached observers of artifice, and the movie has to overcome that to gain our trust. Slowly it does, but while it does, we appreciate the early parts of the movie less.

Watching the movie a second time around with the commentary from Douglas McGrath, the writer / director of Infamous (also the writer / director of Gwynnie's Emma), we hear McGrath's explanation of how the opening scene relates to Capote's experiences with Smith, and his life after Smith's death, and the whole film becomes tighter and better. Seeing the early scenes through new eyes, we're more involved in the story, and more understanding of McGrath's theme of the power of love.

A lot of McGrath's commentary makes a good movie better. We learn about the recreation of El Morocco and La Cote Basque, hear more details about Truman's childhood abandonment and how he lived out his mother's dream, and discover more about Truman's emotional relationship with Perry Smith, and how it affected the rest of his life.

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Sketches of Frank Gehry does not portray the power of art very well. Gehry's friend and biographer, the director Sidney Pollack, admits that he doesn't know much about architecture, and he simply lets Gehry talk, and talk, about his design process. But for his part Gehry admits he's not particularly conscious of, or articulate about, his design process. And (not surprisingly to anyone who knows much about him), he turns out to be quite an egomaniac. Happily for him, he's reached a stage in life where patrons pay him well to indulge the idea that everything he does is genius. Some of the results, like Bilbao, may be. More are merely odd and mildly anti-urban, or even plain ol' bad.

Others in the film set the context for Gehry's egotism. Mildred Friedman, represents the Modernist establishment idea that the job of an artist is to create something never seen before, even if the process often leads to failure. Art-world power figure Julian Schnabel frequently appears in the movie in his bathrobe, wearing sunglasses and holding a drink and a cigarette. He should have a sign around his neck reading "My balls are bigger than yours."

Only Gehry hints that architecture is a public art, with a responsibility to the making of the city and the public realm. For a better movie about architecture, watch My Architect.

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The Celestine Prophecy, the third DVD I watched over the weekend, could say something about the power of love, but it lacks the power of art. James Redfield, who also wrote the best-selling book the movie's dramatizes, doesn't dramatize well. He's both the writer and the director of the film, which comes across as an amateur effort. But I've started writing a blog post about one of the "insights."

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Watching DVDs: In movie theaters I get more involved in movies if I sit up front, where I can't focus on the entire screen at once. I feel surrounded by the experience, and more easily shut out the world.

So I like watching DVDs on a big-screen laptop in bed, with the lights out. Your eyes have to move back and forth across the screen to catch everything. If you have a good set of headphones, or can plug your laptop into a good set of speakers and turn on the SurroundSound, the experience is very different than the detachment of watching something on tv.

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* In the picture at the top of the post, that's Sandra Bullock on the left as Nelle Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird), and Toby Jones as Truman Capote on the right. Notice how each is dressed and how much each luggage each had.

Below is Julian Schabel as himself.

Click on either photo for a larger view.