Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."
In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including the comedy Web site, comicwonder.com.
He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. In this week's installment of the Screening Room, Mark looks at "Interview" and "Reservation Road."
INTERVIEW (2007)
When actor's produce, write, and direct films, the work tends to be what is known in the industry as "character driven." That means that the dialogue and the acting, the characters themselves, are more important than location, special effects, or even, sometimes, the story.
"Interview" is a low-budget film with very few actors, just two locations and a lot of very emotional, and complicated acting from Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller.
There isn't much story. Just two people working off each other, playing mind games with each other, looking for power and leverage -- it's like a long improvisation between two actors who are playing characters very close to themselves. The actor's version of tennis. I found it very compelling and entertaining, but it's not for everyone.
There is a lot of alcohol and some drugs are involved, and Sienna Miller plays a B-movie actress who is trying to take herself seriously by doing a nighttime soap opera, so it is familiar territory for me. I also like to watch actors do this kind of work. We love to do the close, personal, emotionally difficult scenes. Exposing ourselves to each other, risking everything, not in a physical way like jumping out of an airplane, but in a psychological way, like when you fall in love, or convince yourself that you have fallen in love, or tell a secret that no one knows. And Buscemi is very good at it. So is Sienna Miller.
I thought she was very good in "Factory Girl," but it was a movie about a vapid person in a vapid time in New York, when emptiness was being celebrated and elevated to the status of tragedy by people with a deep need to feel superior to other people, so the movie itself wasn't very interesting. She has a little more edge here. She is playing a person who everyone imagines to be an empty headed bobble head doll with a great body and sexual appetite to match, but she really has more depth than that. (Don't we all?)
Buscemi plays a man who is a failure in his work and his life but is trying not to believe it about himself -- a political reporter assigned to interview a second-rate TV and movie star. They spend the night together playing a version of truth or dare with no rules. When it is over, nothing has really happened, except one of them has won the psychological tennis game. It's not Jimmy Connors against Bjorn Borg, but it's good.
RESERVATION ROAD (2007)
This film opens by cutting back and forth between two happy families. One at their son's cello recital, then the beach, and then the long drive back home to the little New England town where they live.
The other features a man and his son at a Red Sox game really enjoying each other on what is probably his one overnight with his son due to a difficult custody battle with his wife.
At that point, I wanted to stop watching because I don't need that. Like Garp in "The World According to Garp," I think about disaster all the time. So I don't need to be taken through the scenario by someone else. But I like the actors and I liked the way they got me to that terrible moment so I kept watching.
The first 45 minutes are well observed and well acted. There are some wonderful moments by Jennifer Connelly as she tries to understand how her son could be so stupidly taken from her, and tries not to blame herself, and begins the interminable process of going on with her life by taking really good care of her surviving daughter.
The film starts to sag when Joaquin Phoenix begins to become obsessed with the hit and run driver who killed his son. I think he is a very good actor, but there is such deep sadness and seriousness about him that the aggressive obsession the character needs when he gets carried away with finding the responsible person and with revenge does not play well.
Somehow, he remains passive and a victim when he needs to become aggressively active in the pursuit of what he properly perceives as a murderer. And then there's Mark Ruffalo. It somehow doesn't always ring true that he is the guilt-stricken man who ran in fear, with his own 10-year-old son in the car, and lies to the police and to his ex-wife and his son, and goes to special lengths to rid himself of the car he was driving. He sometimes seems to be doing it by the numbers, without true spontaneity.
But, the ironies continue to pile up. Because they live in the same small New England town, the character's lives intersect. Ruffalo's ex-wife, played by Mira Sorvino, is the dead boy's, and his sister's, music teacher. When Phoenix looks for a lawyer to help motivate the police to take the search for his son's killer more seriously, he goes to the law firm where Ruffalo works and the man who ran over his son becomes his lawyer. The rule seems to be, "if it's plausible, then you have to go along with it," and it is plausible, but it stretches it somewhat.
There is a wonderful moment when the daughter, played by Elle Fanning, plays a piano recital, after being coached by her music teacher, and dedicates it to her brother, because her mother has told her that you can hear music in heaven, and the parents seem to come back together after falling horribly apart. There is hope, there is healing, but it is only temporary.
The inevitable final confrontation between the two men is not satisfying for several reasons. Phoenix doesn't quite have the madness of revenge fully developed and Ruffalo's final break feels like it is there because it is in the script, not because the character arrives at it through his a natural progression.
It is very difficult to do and I think they could both have used more help from the director both in the development of their characters and in the pacing of the edit.
Overall, it is difficult to watch because who wants to practice experiencing that kind of loss. Whereas Connelly manages to transform the pain into a kind of beauty, neither of the men quite makes it happen. And when you are telling a story like this, that is where the effort goes, towards finding the human beauty in the suffering, to somehow make it understandable.
Mark Metcalf is an actor and owner of Libby Montana restaurant in Mequon. Still active in Milwaukee theater, he's best known for his roles as Neidermeyer in "Animal House" and as The Maestro on "Seinfeld."
Originally from New Jersey, Metcalf now lives in Bayside.
