Star Trek
US 2009
Synecdoche, New York
US 2008
Little Ashes
UK/Spain 2008
STAR Trek the re-imagined motion picture strikes sparks from its young and mostly unknown cast filling the V-insignia sweaters vacated by William Shatner, DeForrest Kelley, James Doohan et al. Only Leonard Nimoy as the Vulcan purveyor of logic, Mr Spock, returns, passing the catchphrases “Fascinating” and “Live long and proper” on to his successor, Heroes star, Zachary Quinto.
Crucially, this is a story of parents and children. Feisty and impatient James T Kirk (Chris Pine, who has Shatner’s eyeliner if not his eyes) has a father to live up to. “Twelve minutes in charge of a star ship and he saved 600 lives – beat that”, his tutor Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) tells him. In an audacious opening, Kirk’s mother delivers baby Jim at the exact point that an escape pod fleeing the ailing USS Kelvin achieves maximum warp.
Meanwhile Spock has his own problems, his Vulcan father (Ben Cross) having married a human (Winona Ryder) thereby compromising a Vulcan’s lack of emotion. Admitted into the Science Academy in spite of his “disadvantage”, Spock chooses instead to join Star Fleet. Quinto’s Spock is far more emotional and testy than Nimoy, who perfected controlled dispassion, but you can forgive this re-working.
Elsewhere the film is short on lookalikes, yet Karl Urban channels DeForrest Kelley’s style of delivery perfectly as Dr “Bones” McCoy. In the most radical reinterpretation, Zoë Saldana’s Uhura only has eyes for Spock (the relationship is clearly two-way), while Simon Pegg bears no physical or vocal relation to James Doohan’s Scotty, although he gives it his own comic spin. I felt for the fan in him as he shared his first scene with Nimoy.
Star Trek episodes and films rarely have memorable turns from the villains and my great hope that Eric Bana would give us Mark “Chopper” Read as the time-travelling Romulan, Nero, was dashed by his rather muted performance.
The plot involves Nero wanting to punish the 127-year-old Ambassador Spock for failing to save the Romulan planet from a supernova. He steals some red matter to create a black hole that destroys the planet Vulcan, making Spock watch, and then intends to do the same to Earth. A disgraced Kirk has to be smuggled on board the USS Enterprise and then take command in order to fulfil his destiny, which is neatly laid out by the older Spock.
With writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, director JJ Abrams injects the necessary humour to leaven what could have been be a reverential, lifeless exercise in the manner of Robert Wise’s Star Trek the Motion Picture. Abrams provides both pace and an obvious enthusiasm for the franchise. There is, however, little wonder. Abrams negotiates the idea that difference has to be managed and the Federation – an alliance of planets – cannot always deliver on its obligations, which is a 21st century rather than a 1960s notion. Oddly, this negates the initial premise of Star Trek – boldly going and all that. This is an exciting, thoroughly entertaining reworking, but you don’t sense that Kirk’s crew is going to find much on their inevitable future movie mission.
More than any other screenwriter working today, Charlie Kaufman deals with impersonality. His screenplays, such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, deal with a desire to sublimate the self. Kaufman might work from a fantastical premise, but he does not arrive at profound or revealing conclusions. There is no sense of progression, rather an aching sadness, enlivened by quirky detail.
His first film as director, Synecdoche, New York, illustrates all that is good and bad about his work. It falls into two halves. The first is a study of a man, theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), coping with decay. The second is an attempt to represent Caden’s life as a piece of theatre, with the lives of real people and those portraying them becoming intertwined. It ends with a bleak final line spoken into his ear by an actress (Dianne Wiest) playing a cleaning woman whose identity Caden assumes and who then becomes the director. Yes, it is that complicated.
Caden does not directly articulate his own concerns about the world. Rather, his anxieties are about his house as his sink breaks, leading him to gash his head, and with his body, as he gets toothache, leading to a snappy montage of progressively extreme dental treatments. There is a bleak commentary on the impersonal nature of medical treatment that extends to human relationships – intimacy with the body does not mean a personal investment in it.
The liveliness of the early scenes dissipates when Adele takes her young daughter to Germany and leaves Caden behind. This follows a moment when he urinates in her artist’s sink; in an unspoken sense, this is the ultimate insult. Nevertheless, Caden has no shortage of women interested in him. They include Hazel (Samantha Morton), the cashier who buys a house that is aflame and is around fires whenever seen in a domestic setting; his counsellor, Madeleine (Hope Davis), who tells him: “I can give you a book for getting better. It’s called Getting Better – $45 please.” His lead actress, Claire (Michelle Williams) later becomes his lover, as does Tammy (Emily Watson), the actress who plays Hazel in Caden’s evolving play of his life.
The “joke” is that Caden’s play, situated in an abandoned warehouse that is slowly turned into a miniature New York, never gets an audience. Rehearsals last years. Caden’s daughter reaches adulthood. Her diary (written aged four) tells of her life as an adult. Caden attempts suicide. The piece evolves without a title. Tedium sets in.
At times, scenes are fantastic – in both senses. At the naturalistic end, Caden’s daughter expresses repulsion at injury: ‘I don’t want blood in my body”. At the unnatural, Madeleine appears on Caden’s flight as he reads her book. Their encounter is described as he reads it.
There are moments of great subtlety and powerful scenes, too: the lead actor’s suicide and a gospel-like oration (by Christopher Evan Welch) that comes out of nowhere. Kaufman’s weakness is that he needlessly over-complicates his scenario and does not prime his audience to accept his tonal changes. Even so, Synecdoche, New York is extraordinary in the literal sense.
Individually, the playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, film-maker Luis Buñuel and painter and self-styled genius Salvador Dali are compelling figures. Collectively, as portrayed in Little Ashes, they are something of a bore.
Screenwriter Philippa Goslett and director Paul Morrison use the Spanish Civil War and the death of Lorca to give the drama meaning. Nominally, it is about contrasting attitudes to machismo. Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) is a proto-macho homophobic man, a student who first meets Dali (Robert Pattinson) at his student digs in Madrid in 1922. Lorca (Javier Beltrán) is a famous playwright and poet, a gay man who is drawn towards the sexually ambiguous Dali. While Buñuel thumps a homosexual in the streets, Lorca and Dali begin an affair, culminating in a substitute sex scene: the couple circling each other in the sea.
Buñuel moves to Paris, enticing Dali to join him. In a cruel incident, the best in the movie, Lorca struggles to appear heterosexual, allowing his rich friend Magdalena (Marina Gatell) to have sex with him watched by Dali. The scene inspires moments featured in Dali and Buñuel’s first film, Un Chien Andalou – the title referring provocatively to the Andalusian Lorca, who is naturally upset.
Little Ashes is an unsatisfactory mix of an artistic menage à trois and a tale of artists trying to find an appropriate form to respond to Spain’s increasingly divided society. The protagonists’ hardships are psycho-sexual; the general population’s problems are socio-economic. The two never really meet.
The ending bears little relation to the aspirations of either Dali or Buñuel. The former comes across as self-absorbed, the latter as disingenuous. The film loses verisimilitude by being in English.
Director Morrison succumbs to cliché. At the film’s worst point, he stages a black-and-white fantasy sequence featuring, in no particular order, can-can dancers, naked women, Christ on the cross and the goring of a bull to show the pressures on the male psyche. I wonder what he would think of a Spanish filmmaker depicting the Welsh through rugby, leeks and Katherine Jenkins and Tom Jones having a sing-off in a valley. Perhaps I could get Arts Council funding for that.
Patrick Mulcahy
