Review: "Colette"

At first blush “Colette” sounds like a retread of the recent wonderful film “The Wife” starring Glenn Close as the wife of a Nobel-winning author who (spoiler alert) actually wrote all of his books.

But in fact “Colette” is more or less the original tale of a long-suffering woman creating great art under her husband’s name, and is based on the historical early life of arguably France’s most celebrated female writer.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley) was a simple country girl who married a famous Parisian author some years her senior, Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West), known by his pen name, Willy.

It may seem shocking to us that writing could be published under another person’s name, but as the film makes clear, it was common practice in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (And, as I can personally attest, it still is.)

Willy was a publisher himself who kept a stable of writers working feverishly to crank out stuff under the Willy brand -- generally salacious romances for high-society types. When their finances grow slim and he cannot afford to pay his ghost writers, Willy suggests that Gabrielle dash something off.

Her novel, “Claudine at School,” becomes an overnight sensation, detailing the lascivious thoughts and practices of a 15-year-old schoolgirl from provincial Burgundy. More books followed, chronicling the character’s rise to the Parisian salons and increasingly volatile romances. Willy and Colette become the toast of Paris, until the inevitable resentment over his assuming authorship of the books comes to loggerheads.

West is blowsy and self-pitying as the libertine Willy, suit vests barely able to contain an ample belly, a gray squiggle of goatee dancing off the end of his chin. He’s like a well-meaning but incorrigible walrus who always promises not to steal all the fish, but gives in to his appetites every time.

For him, this means basking in the attention of the French literary world, as well as the attendant feminine attention for a purveyor of socially acceptable smut.

At first decimated by his cheating, Gabrielle soon finds herself indulging her own romantic interests with other women -- with Willy’s blessing and urging. An early affair with a wealthy American socialite (Eleanor Tomlinson) becomes a public sensation, as both Gabrielle and Willy trade turns under her sheets. This provides more fodder for the next novel, of course.

This is where the movie is at its best, exploring how a provincial girl morphs into a worldly woman testing the boundaries of social constraint. Knightley -- who seems not to have aged a line since breaking out 15 years ago -- lets us feel Gabrielle’s surging passions and how they translated into art.

She and Willy enjoy a love/hate relationship, not exactly abusive but certainly controlling. He actually locks her in a room and forces her to write. As time goes on, she casts off more of his yoke, particularly via her long-term relationship with Mathilde de Morny (Denise Gough), a renowned noblewoman who dressed in suits and essentially lived as a man.

It’s almost as if Gabrielle dreamed up a parallel universe of affairs and scandal at Willy’s suggestion, and then they were determined to live out this shared fantasy.

The latter third of “Colette” loses a lot of narrative steam, eventually devolving into what seems like a series of naughty vignettes with little connective tissue between them. New lovers come and go like a theatrical parade.

Gabrielle’s marriage to Willy essentially dissolved over the course of some years, the rights to the Claudine books were sold off and she lived at a near-poverty level, subsisting as a stage actress. Her greatest works -- under her own byline -- came later, including “Gigi,” which had its own cinematic adaptation.

Director Wash Westmoreland (“Still Alice”), who wrote the screenplay with Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Richard Glatzer, struggles (as many filmmakers do) with folding the messy, chaotic ends of a real life into a 1¾-hour movie. The result is an engaging biopic that loses steam.

By the way, I promise you I wrote this review myself, and did not force my wife to do it. Although who knows? Maybe she could’ve done a better job.

Video review: "Still Alice"

Julianne Moore gave the performance of the year in 2014 for her deeply affecting portrait of a woman battling early onset Alzheimer’s in “Still Alice.” She won an Oscar for it -- and every other award on the planet, it seems -- and deserved to.

We’ve seen this sort of role before: Julie Christie in “Away from Her,” for instance. But those movies have usually been about characters in the twilight of their lives. Here we saw a woman in her prime, one who has defined herself by her prodigious intellect, watching her semblance of self slip through her fingers like grains of rice.

She plays Alice Howland, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University. She has a devoted husband (Alec Baldwin), three adult children and is at the pinnacle of her career. Since she is so intelligent, Alice is not unaware that her mental grasp is slipping. She gets lost while jogging around campus, cannot place familiar words, and so on.

Writer/director team (and real-life couple) Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland treat their characters with tenderness and respect. There is not a single sappy moment or false emotion in the entire film.

(I feel compelled to point out that Glatzer wrote and shot the film while enduring his own brave medical struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. He passed away this March.)

Many people tend to shy away from these sorts of movies of characters enduring tremendous physical and spiritual struggles. They have so much pain in their own lives, they don’t feel like witnessing more, even if fictional.

But be brave. “Still Alice” is one of the most life-affirming movies I’ve ever seen. There is beauty and truth in that aching.

Video extras are merely adequate, and are the same for Blu-ray and DVD versions.

There are three deleted scenes, and three making-of featurettes: “Directing Alice,” “Finding Alice” and “Interview with Composer Ilan Eshkeri.”

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Review: "Still Alice"

“Still Alice” has been the phantom of the awards season, much talked about but rarely seen. (At least outside of L.A. and New York.)

Sony, which had a few problems awhile back you may have heard about, declined to screen the film for many regional critic groups, including here in Indiana. And yet star Julianne Moore has been running the table during the awards cycle, racking up a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild, among other prizes, and is now seen as a mortal lock to take home the Oscar.

So I went into a press screening in a state that could best be described as a combination of high anticipation and annoyance. I came out knowing I had just seen the finest performance of the year --actor or actress, lead or supporting -- as well as one of the best movies of 2014.

Moore plays Alice Howland, a fantastically successful woman who is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. A linguistics professor at Columbia University who has always defined herself by her titanic intellect, Alice is forced to deal with rapidly losing her ability to remember words, her lifetime of research, and eventually simple things like the location of the bathroom or the name of her eldest child.

It’s the performance of a career, as Moore is utterly convincing as Alice rages, despairs, fights and eventually comes to accept her fate -- “Mastering,” as she puts it, “the art of losing.”

“I wish I had a cancer,” she says at one point, and she means it. “I wouldn’t feel so ashamed.”

Writer/director team Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland previously made the little-seen (but quite good) “The Last of Robin Hood” a couple of years ago. In adapting the novel by Lisa Genova, they eschew an emphasis on plot and secondary characters, dumping any distractions to focus on their star’s incredible screen presence.

If you think “Still Alice” falls into the sappy “disease of the week” type of filmmaking, then I’m here to tell you there is not a single moment that is maudlin or contrived. We never catch Moore playing to the cameras or exaggerating a moment. If anything, she keeps things close to her vest, as a woman with a strong internal dialogue would.

For instance, her diagnosis is not a complete shock to her. Alice is smart enough to know that she’s been slipping, e.g., having to pause during a lecture to recall the term “wordstock.” Not exactly surprising, given its obscurity. But then she gets lost while jogging on the university campus, or introduces herself to her son’s new girlfriend moments after previously doing so.

Alec Baldwin plays her husband, John, and Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish play their children. All give trim and tidy performances, in the sorts of roles that are written to showcase the leading actress. The kids don’t have too much identity on their own, other than Stewart is an aspiring actress who feels unsupported, and Bosworth is her mother’s spitting image in terms of drive and ambition.

Baldwin is quite adept as the husband, a man who must balance his genuine devotion to his wife with his own considerable professional aspirations. It’s a smart and observant take on the loved ones of those who are dying, who must give them all the care and support they need, while also making their own plans for what comes after. How crushing, how true.

I also quite admired Stephen Kunken as Alice’s doctor, who strikes a good balance between being a clinician, emotional bulwark and booster.

Having been so frustrated at being denied the chance to see “Still Alice,” I’m now over the moon that I finally have. What craftsmanship, dedication and poise in this indelible portrait.

Review: "The Last of Robin Hood"

More than 20 years ago Kevin Kline had a lovely performance in “Chaplin” as an aging movie star playing out his last hand as a wastrel playboy. He was so good as Douglas Fairbanks that when it came time to cast someone as Errol Flynn in his declining years for “The Last of Robin Hood,” Kline seemed an obvious choice.

He terrifically captures Flynn’s fizzy, rakish persona, which showed little difference between his on-screen swashbuckling and his off-screen adventures. (Flynn chronicled them himself in his posthumous autobiography, “My Wicked, Wicked Ways.”) He spent so much time carousing, drinking and drugging, seducing young girls, sailing on his yacht and otherwise dribbling out his days, it’s hard to believe he found time to make movies.

Done up with Flynn’s signature pencil mustache and cravat-and-evening-jacket outfit, tumbler of booze perpetually in hand, Kevin makes for a pretty spot-on physical impersonation, too.

(Normally I would feel compelled to point out that, at nearly age 67, Kline is rather too old to play Flynn, who died at 50. But Flynn’s hard-charging lifestyle aged him prematurely. And Kline, in several shirtless outings, flaunts a surprisingly athletic figure that helps the age concerns vanish.)

“Robin Hood” takes its title from perhaps Flynn’s most famous role, but focuses on the last two years of life when his star had fallen and he worked only itinerantly. He notices a young starlet, Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning), and in the classic Hollywood seduction method, sends a flunky to fetch her.

Their initial coupling is, to say the least, brief. Not surprising, considering this is a man who was charged with statutory rape in 1942 (and acquitted) and bedded so many ladies they coined the phrase, “In like Flynn.”

But a couple of factors work to sustain the relationship beyond a one-night stand. First is Flynn’s profound self-awareness, including the thought that that his ability to attract women is rapidly waning, and he’d rather not be left alone at the end of the party. The other is a certain Machiavellian aspect to Beverly: the sense that she’s using him as much as he is her.

This is honed and encouraged by her mother, Florence (Susan Sarandon), a showbiz mom who pushes her daughter to sing, dance and act her way to easy street. In Beverly’s case, the talent is not an even match with the ambition, so when Flynn turns up offering to “help” the girl’s career, Florence offers a few perfunctory objections before signing on.

Of course, there’s more revelry than actual opportunity. At one point Errol and Beverly disappear for five months to Africa, and in the finished film she only has one line of dialogue. But the pair seem to be a genuinely affectionate couple, with Florence often tagging along as chaperone.

At some point I should mention that Beverly is only 15 when she and Flynn start dating, and just 17 when he dies. This comes as a shock to him when he finally learns it, though not so much to quit the affair. Obviously, this information puts the entire dynamic of the relationship in a different, disturbing light.

Writing/direction duo Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland tell the story from a flashback perspective, with Florence narrating her side of events to a book author after Flynn has passed and a media firestorm erupts over his teenage damsel. Sarandon paints a picture of a profoundly deluded woman, who gave up her own dreams of stardom to push her kid to unwholesome lengths.

If the movie has a weakness, it’s that Flynn and Florence are vivid, engaging characters and Beverly remains something of a cypher. Fanning does what she can with the material, but the script doesn’t lend her a lot of opportunities to reveal the character’s interior architecture.

But “The Last of Robin Hood” is worthwhile, if for no other reason to see Kline scamp and strut as the iconic bad boy. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” goes the classic Hollywood line -- one that could’ve been written about Errol Flynn.