Unread by me, an A.S. Byatt novel, Possession, became in 2002 a weak film directed and co-written by Neil LaBute.  Such LaBute films as Your Friends and Neighbors and Nurse Betty are dismally offputting, while this one is merely poorly written.

In it, two literary researchers in London (Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow) try to solve the mystery of whether an illustrious 19th century poet, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), began an extramarital affair with a fellow poet, the lesbian, or bisexual, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle).  It so happens he did, and so does Eckhart begin a licit if dullish affair with Paltrow, playing an Englishwoman.  The crosscutting between time periods yields on screen the two researchers more often than the two luminaries, which is a shame since Ash and LaMotte are the more interesting couple—and with Northam and Ehle outacting Paltrow.

The script, one of whose writers is the playwright David Henry Hwang, has its people saying things like “I have known incandescence and must decline to sample it further.”  To the scenarists’ credit, though, elsewhere the dialogue shines.  But characterization matters little here—less, in fact, than dialogue.  We wish to know more about Ash, this fictitious poet laureate to Queen Victoria, a man whom Paltrow’s character calls “a soft-core misogynist.”  Ostensibly a feminist, Paltrow’s character herself is a zero.  Then there’s Blanche (Lena Headey), Christobel LaMotte’s lesbian companion who turns out to be mostly a punching bag.

Possession was not a mature work for LaBute.  He may have avoided his usual misanthropy, or whatever it is, but why do it in an adaptation of a book by A.S. Byatt?  Generally his directing is not only good but expert, and once again he gets plenty of vitality from Aaron Eckhart.  Luciana Arrighi did the spot-on production design, Jean Yves Escoffier the cinematography.  Thanks to this pair, the look is modestly painterly—appropriate for a small but artful opus.  Alas, a small but artful failure.  LaBute is a gifted man with a baffling career.

Two-Lane Blacktop (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Footage of the rural road in America, with plenty of medium-long shots and no score, dominates the screen in the 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop, directed by Monte Hellman.  A flick about two car nuts who routinely race other street drivers for money, it is so low-key it is practically asleep at the wheel.  Neither James Taylor (the singer) nor Dennis Wilson (the Beach Boy) is a good actor as they play the Driver and the Mechanic—no names, please—respectively.  But Warren Oates is, and Rudolph Wurlitzer‘s screenplay is provocative and amusing.

Oates plays a man who, though proud of his car, is no longer young and has problems.  Reduced to mendacious talk, he is a lost soul, while the Driver and the Mechanic are empty souls.  As their girl companion (Laurie Bird) observes, their lives are no “better” than those of the noisy, mating cicadas they hear.

Apropos of Bird’s character, simply called the Girl, everything is a letdown.  The Driver tries to retain his relationship with her, such as it is, by murmuring, “Figured we’d go on up to Columbus, Ohio.  A man got some parts up there he wants to sell cheap.”  But what goes on with these car nuts is cheap, and blandly the Girl replies, “No good.”

Two-Lane Blacktop has nothing new to say, but it can be a strange treat of “white trash” naturalism.  If you haven’t been on the rural roads in a while, and you actually miss them, this is your film.

The French film The Clockmaker (1973) tells us that France in the Seventies is a country in which a loutish, abusive security officer is allowed to get away with the garbage he does.  As the picture opens, the somewhat political son of the tale’s main character, a clockmaker (Philippe Noiret), has murdered the security officer and fled.

The film was directed by Bertrand Tavernier and so is not without artistic merit.  Even so, it does not take the murder of the depraved man seriously enough, but more or less excuses it.  At heart it is a politically radical film, consistently distrustful of authority.  Based on a Georges Simenon novel, it was screenwritten by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who, in their seventies at the time, should have known better.  It is a relatively simple but also foolish work.

Its counterculture attitudes could be appropriated for the sake of present-day people in America who are not exactly bending to the big Ideological Will.  Two or three years ago, Wisconsin police illegally raided the homes of certain conservatives (probably Scott Walker supporters) and confiscated their computers.  In a case involving the refusal to honor a same-sex marriage, any Christian defendant who did not show up in court would have a warrant sent out for his or her arrest.  The current Attorney General wishes to expand the seizure of property, before a trial, of suspected drug traffickers.  See what I mean?

The French film The Clockmaker (1973) tells us that France in the Seventies is a country in which a loutish, abusive security officer is allowed to get away with the garbage he does.  As the picture opens, the somewhat political son of the tale’s main character, a clockmaker (Philippe Noiret), has murdered the security officer and fled.

The film was directed by Bertrand Tavernier and so is not without artistic merit.  Even so, it does not take the murder of the depraved man seriously enough, but more or less excuses it.  At heart it is a politically radical film, consistently distrustful of authority.  Based on a Georges Simenon novel, it was screenwritten by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who, in their seventies at the time, should have known better.  It is a relatively simple but also foolish work.

Its counterculture attitudes could be appropriated for the sake of present-day people in America who are not exactly bending to the big Ideological Will.  Two or three years ago, Wisconsin police illegally raided the homes of certain conservatives (probably Scott Walker supporters) and confiscated their computers.  In a case involving the refusal to honor a same-sex marriage, any Christian defendant who did not show up in court would have a warrant sent out for his or her arrest.  The current Attorney General wishes to expand the seizure of property, before a trial, of suspected drug traffickers.  See what I mean?

Dunkirk (2017), written and directed by Christopher Nolan, presents war in Europe within the broadness, or openness, of time—and even within a relatively brief duration of time.  Three time periods meet, in all of which men are warring and struggling to survive; all demand endurance.

How credible some of the details in the film are I don’t know, but an enthralling and exciting enterprise this is.  Although it contains more heroism than (British) patriotism, patriotism is there.  So are great surprises and little mysteries, as when a charitable old man compliments the British soldiers but never makes eye contact with them.  And when two of the soldiers quickly haul a wounded grunt on a stretcher a strikingly long way to a seabound ship, where, as it turns out, the grunt is in greater danger than he was before.

Unlike other war movies today, Dunkirk never becomes even slightly boring until, I’d say, the last 15 minutes.  But, as well, it is gratifying to see that it bounces back a bit before those minutes are over.