The Strange Little Cat

THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT   ***1/2

Ramon Zürcher

2014

IDEA:  An extended family in a middle-class German apartment prepares for dinner as tensions and curiosities emerge from their interactions.


BLURB:  The characters in The Strange Little Cat might be stuck in a time loop. Although the perfunctory efficiency of their domestic routine has bred a certain complacency in their lives, thus eliminating the chance that they would pick up on this, an unusual number of incidents and objects reoccur within a very brief span of time. We notice it far more than they ever could: in a formal strategy that comments as much on their blinkered vantages as on the way cinema organizes vision, Zürcher employs fixed takes, often from oblique angles that crop out significant spaces and actions, that restrict our focus to only what he wishes us to see. So, we notice the pesky moth that has invaded the kitchen even when the family does not. Oranges, frequently invoked in dialogue and in image, keep repeating in front of the camera, signifying connections, and meaning, that may not exist. Glasses of milk, bottles, bloody fingers, and shopping lists take on talismanic value. Behavior is both disjunctive and familiar; conversations, by turns digressive and direct, stress the banal mysteries of private experience. Zürcher does not prescribe some explanation for the mild yet acute strangeness of his otherwise mundane scenario. He is interested in locating cosmic questions in the interstices of ordinary moments, in mapping the eternal over the quotidian, and with removing us just enough from recognizable reality that we can look at ourselves askew, keeping the little enigmas of human life idiosyncratic and ineffable. The Strange Little Cat is as teasingly gnomic as they come, filled with playful elisions and dead-ends that make it an exemplary cinematic koan.

Captain Fantastic

CAPTAIN FANTASTIC   **

Matt Ross

2016

IDEA:  A man raises his six children in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, instituting a robust curriculum of physical and intellectual pursuit. Following the death of his wife, he and the family travel back to civilization to honor her burial wishes.

BLURB:  The first red flag is the impromptu family jam session. The tone doesn’t feel quite right; the interaction is forced, the gradually flowering sense of bonhomie less an organic result of an authentic dynamic than an engineered moment of whimsy. That dissonant, naggingly phony tenor runs through most of Captain Fantastic, a film that presents a morally and ideologically provocative scenario only so it can smooth over its actual implications in the name of quirky setups and crowd-pleasing resolutions. The approach is especially hypocritical coming from a film that wants to both endorse and critically assess its family’s counter-culture lifestyle. Instead of offering trenchant observation on either side, the film limply addresses the hazards of their ways while ultimately celebrating even their most troubling qualities as cute, easily reconcilable foibles. Ross takes up their nontraditional, anti-establishment philosophy, and yet he ends up falling back on convention as much as they flout it, his script requiring his actors to become purveyors of eccentricities calculated for optimal audience approval. If any of it registers as more than an excuse for another twee indie fairytale, it’s mostly due to Viggo Mortensen, who textures his casually radical patriarch with shades of righteousness, pomposity, and enviable, if inimical, conviction. He is the grit and complexity in a complicated social portrait that more often than not resorts to facile feel-good sentiments.

Swiss Army Man

SWISS ARMY MAN   ***

Daniels

2016

IDEA:   A man about to hang himself on a deserted island is rescued by a flatulent corpse, whose sundry abilities allow the two to survive.

BLURB:  A sophomoric jape hijacked by dramatists with a sincere interest in exploring human behavior, social conventions, and the warped face of millennial angst, Swiss Army Man is a disarming blend of the vulgar and the humane that insists such qualities are inextricably enmeshed. Kwan and Scheinert present what is a fairly straightforward allegory of the return of the repressed – a timid, despondent man is visited by the moribund embodiment of man’s primal, suppressed urges, and finds his will to live again by reanimating in him what has died – and deliver it with berserk yet unwaveringly earnest commitment via their outlandish buddy-movie conceit. Defying belief, what sounds puerile and thin on paper is robustly moving on screen, as Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe work in perfect sync with the Daniels’ vision, throwing themselves (literally) headlong into this fantasia of lurid corporeal activity while fleshing out an intimate, borderline romantic pas des deux. Central to being alive, the film asserts, is to be a body in space, and to have a mind that can operate that body in all its weird, improbable glory. Kwan and Scheinert offer up bodies, and a tactilely handcrafted world around them, in contradistinction to a culture growing increasingly dematerialized and disconnected, placing ecstatic emphasis on bodily functions and the simple affinities they afford. One wishes their film was even stranger and more transgressive than it is – for all of its colorful inventiveness, it still succumbs to aesthetic and narrative triteness, with too many montages and what amounts to a depressingly familiar ennobling of male solipsism. Still, their main character isn’t let off the hook here, and if he looks kind of psychotic by the denouement, the film mordantly argues that we would too if we all acted our real selves.