"Wild Tales": The Measure Of An Anthology

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How does one evaluate how good an anthology film is?  Essentially a collection of short films, there often is no overarching plot that connects them, unless there is a framing devise to do so.  Do you evaluate the short films individually?  One could do that, but it takes away from the experience of seeing them in a sequence specifically designed to communicate with the audience.  So what do you evaluate?  A method that I’ve read about and generally agree with is to treat the film like a music album.  The tracks may vary in their composition, but they are all part of one piece of art, and that piece of art can be evaluated as a whole based on the general feelings the individual tracks give you.

So how does Wild Tales fare under this model?  The six short stories are compiled in such a way as to give an introduction with one of the most interesting stories, then start from the bottom and work its way up in an ascending scale on intrigue.  The general motif of the picture is revenge and how those who deserve it will get their just deserts, usually in death.  That theme is established early, but each successive story toys with the premise in different ways, such as setting two wrongdoers against one another, making the villain a government entity, and deceiving the public as to who the real criminal is after a hit and run.

By slightly ramping up how perverse the idea of revenge is, the theme twists in on itself, conditioning the audience to have certain expectations of how a story will end, only to either follow through or subvert those expectations, and becoming less and less predictable as to which it will do.  By the last couple of stories, the expectation of a twist ending or a murderous moment is so conditioned that when it doesn’t happen as you expect, it hits all the harder.

So is Wild Tales a good film?  The answer is most assuredly “yes.”  To attempt to evaluate the shorts on their own would be an exercise in futility, as they are thematically shallow individually, but the entire album is thematically rich and subject to interpretation.  The consistent tone and quality of the shorts is likely due to them being written and directed by one man, Damián Szifron, an Argentinian director whom I hope to see more of in the future, perhaps with a feature length narrative.  In the meantime, though, Wild Tales is a hell of an introduction to his work.

What anthology films do you enjoy?  Share them in the comments below.

"Welcome To Me": The Problems Of Portraying Mental Illness As Comedy

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On paper, Welcome to Me doesn’t really feel like a movie that should be a success.  Its premise is bizarre and fantastic, yet is often tragic in its portrayal of mental illness.  We’re expected to laugh at the antics of our protagonist, yet also recognize that borderline personality disorder can be debilitating to those who have it.  This film should be a complete and utter failure for its inability to find a consistent tone.  And yet, somehow, it works.  Not perfectly, but it works.

The aforementioned protagonist is Kristen Wiig as Alice, a woman prone to severe mood swings and so grounded in habit as to have kept her TV on continuously for eleven years.  One day, she happens to win the lottery, coming into possession of $86 million dollars.  She decides to use this money to buy her own public access TV show, titled Welcome to Me, which functions as emotional exhibitionism masqueraded as an Oprah-style talk show.  Through the bizarre spectacle of re-enacting supposed traumatic moments from her life, cooking seemingly inedible meals, and neutering dogs on live television, Alice simultaneously garners a cult following for her narcissistic display and alienates her closest friends.

Though the film is a work of pure fiction, it feels more like a take on the real life products of insanely wealthy film auteurs than it does a serious representation of mental illness.  Had Tommy Wiseau (The Room) decided to take a different approach to cinema, we might well have ended up with something as bizarrely autobiographical as Alice’s show, and the homage to the unhinged nature of Wiseau and his contemporaries feels deliberate.  Wiig’s self-centered auteur is every bit as artistically deficient and socially oblivious as her real life counterparts, and Wiig makes her simultaneously believable in her bizarre antics and otherworldly in her disconnection with reality.

As I stated earlier, though, this portrayal has its drawbacks, very closely walking the line of making fun of a serious mental illness.  It’s established early on that Alice is a very ill woman, yet we’re expected to laugh at what in normal circumstances would be black comedy gold.  But when the film wants us to feel sorry for Alice, the tragedy is always couched in terms of her diagnosis, and only in the film’s final scenes do we see her actually struggle with a character-developing conflict that isn’t directly attributable to her disorder.  Instead of writing Alice as a specifically diagnosed patient, it might have been preferable to portray her as merely an eccentric, removing the guilt inherent in laughing at a suffering woman while still keeping the basic essence of the comedic performance intact.

And yet, despite this glaring issue, I thought Welcome to Me was an entertaining film.  The climactic conflict feels somewhat tacked on with a resolution that doesn’t make much sense if you dwell on it, but the main reason to watch this film is to see Kristen Wiig step into the role of a self-obsessed film auteur using her newfound wealth to make her dreams come true.  And in giving that bizarre character a spotlight to shine in, this film achieves its raison d’etre, even if the dramatization of borderline personality disorder distracts from the film’s chief pleasures.

Do you find portrayal of mental illness problematic in films, or is it alright to portray comically insane characters?  Are the two mutually exclusive?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Timbuktu": Preaching To The Choir

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Coming from a world of academia with a focus on social justice issues, it is sometimes easy to forget that certain nuances of world affairs are lost on many people.  Take, for instance, the distinction between the religion of Islam and the terrorist organizations that have appropriated Islam as a tool.  Many Western people don’t make the distinction, and equate the violence committed by militarist factions as their only conception of what Islam is really about.  It is therefore all the more unfortunate that many Western film audiences will ignore or be ignorant of Timbuktu, a film that directly addresses that distinction but is relegated to the indie circuit by virtue of its foreign origins.

Taking place in the titular city, a militaristic group called ISIL (a none-too-subtle nod to a certain real life militant extremist group) has taken over the city, bearing guns and spouting new rules in the name of God.  Prohibitions on women’s dress, cigarettes, soccer, and even music are implemented, placing the city on virtual lockdown as tensions between the militants and the city’s residents begin to mount.

What is most striking about this set-up is that it is painfully obvious that the militants do not believe the rhetoric that they spout.  Many are seen smoking or talking about sports, despite their compatriots’ mandates that such acts are sinful and against the will of God.  At one point, a militant calls his superior to ask what he should do about a group of singing townspeople, as their song is in direct reverence to God.  It would almost be comical if the situation weren’t so obviously dire for the people imprisoned within their own city.  This point is hammered home no more clearly when punishments start being meted out, resulting in severe brutalization and often death.

If the film has one major issue, however, it should be apparent in what is missing in my review thus far: a protagonist.  Sure, the residents of Timbuktu are all sympathetic, but none of them are anything more or less than normal people without any sort of character arc.  Eventually, one resident develops into a makeshift protagonist, but the driving action behind his arc doesn’t take place until over halfway through the film, and by that point his case is merely especially demonstrative than anything specifically relatable.  That may have been the point though, to tell a tale of a city rather than of a single person; but if that’s the case, it seems strange to have a protagonist shoehorned in so late in the running.

That quibble aside, though, Timbuktu is a fine film that eloquently hammers home a point that will, unfortunately, be likely already obvious to a Western audience culturally aware enough to know of this film's existence.  It may have been a better film as a short subject with a tighter narrative structure, but that would have made even many film fanatics miss out due to a lack of distribution.  As the film stands, it is a fine piece of filmmaking that is well worth watching, even if you are aware of the difference between religion and rhetoric as a means of social control.