film roundup
Heimat is a Space in Time
KEITH UHLICH
Heimat is a Space in Time (Dir. Thomas Heise). Documentary. In this four-hour essay film shot mostly in black-and-white, German documentarian Thomas Heise moves mesmerically through the history of his country and his family, many of whom lived through, and actively resisted, tyrannical regimes. World War I, the rise and fall of Nazism, and the Berlin Wall (both its construction and destruction) are the macro touchstones. Around this Heise explores specific tales from his ancestry, such as a series of anxiety-inducing letters from his grandmother (read over a slow-scrolling backdrop of Nazi documents containing innumerable Jewish names) or a provocative formative incident from his own boyhood in which Heise and his brother kissed each other in a darkened movie theater. The boundaries between personal and communal experience are collapsed, though never entirely obliterated. Time and again Heise reminds how difficult it is to be an individual while living among oppressively powerful forces, actual and existential. Somehow we endure—our struggles, hopefully, remembered. [N/R] HHHH The Personal History of David Copperfield (Dir. Armando Iannucci). Starring: Dev Patel, Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton. It seems an odd fit: The acidly funny Armando Iannucci (one of the main minds behind the corrosive political satires In the Loop and The Death of Stalin) adapting Charles Dickens’s more gently satiri12
cal coming-of-age novel David Copperfield. And at first, it seems that Iannucci has succumbed to a kind of aggressive, Wes Andersonian whimsy as incidents from the life of his protagonist (Dev Patel) pile up inelegantly, at the speed of a hurricane. What emerges from this maelstrom, fortunately, is a blissful paean to language. At heart, this Copperfield is about Iannucci paying tribute to a time-honored talent who shaped his own love of words. It also boasts a cast that is splendid from stem to stern, best in show being Hugh Laurie’s absentminded Mr. Dick and Ben Wishaw’s scheming Uriah Heep. [PG] HHH1/2 The Invisible Man (Dir. Leigh Whannell). Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Harriet Dyer, Aldis Hodge. Universal’s big-budget, interconnected “Dark Universe” series collapsed after a single release (the lamentable Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy). So the studio went smaller and stand-alone with Leigh Whannell’s take on the classic imperceptible movie monster. The eponymous “Man”—an uberwealthy expert in optics, natch, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen—isn’t really the focus. It’s his victim, abused girlfriend Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss), who takes center stage, which gives the proceedings a post-#MeToo charge. She breaks out of her gilded cage in a tense opening scene, then spends most of the rest of the movie trying to convince anyone who will listen that her former beau is stalking her sight unseen. Moss is
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excellent as the gaslit, increasingly distressed protagonist, and Whannell orchestrates several good fright sequences, the best occurring in a crowded Chinese restaurant. By the end, though, the film’s desire for of-the-moment relevance overwhelms the well-choreographed genre thrills. [R] HH1/2 The Wild Goose Lake (Dir. Diao Yinan). Starring: Hu Ge, Gwei Lun Mei, Qi Dao, Liao Fan. Chinese filmmaker Diao Yinan’s seedy noir is an alluringly rain-drenched fever dream, its smeary neon color palette something Michael Mann might envy. The film is told partially in flashback courtesy on-the-run gangster Zhou (Hu Ge), who works with a gang that steals and resells motor bikes, and who now has a price on his head. There is, of course, a femme fatale (Gwei Lun Mei), who plies her trade as a “bathing beauty” (a beachside prostitute), in addition to all manner of cops and criminals whom Zhou has to avoid, at least until he ensures the physical and fiscal safety of his wife. Our antihero is convinced his death is inevitable, and the air of fatalism that hangs over the movie is potent. Though it’s more likely you’ll remember the squalid ambience (a sex scene in a boat climaxes with a loogie for the ages), not to mention two shockingly graphic kills, one via umbrella! Style might be paramount here, but there is substance enough in the grubby visions that Diao conjures. [N/R]
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