Category: Film Review

It has fifteen parts and is currently being aired on Studio TV. We have watched three episodes with great interest, and occasional comprehension.
What we like is the low-key presentation and comments, the worldwide scope from Zimbabwe to Afghanistan and the generosity of spirit that underlies both. All so rare on the air these days when shouting replaces thought, when the crass drives out all else, and the relentless me-focus shrinks the world, and that is on the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)!

The most recent episode was an account of the last days of celluloid filmmaking before the CGIs (Computer Generated Images) conquered all.
Among those in the spotlight were Lars von Trier one whose films deadened me when I was a film festivalian, but he gave a modest and cogent explanation for his approach, as did some others, though none of it encouraged me to watch their films. They make ‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’ (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961) seem like an action movie! It is all so intellectual, dessicated, retentive, inward, abstract, meta, self-referential, reflexive, slow … well you get the idea by now or you never will. Gone are plot and character, gone are place and time, and with them, meaning. Instead the images on the screen are to trigger some unconscious response in the viewer. Uh huh… Well, unconscious anyway.
However, the broader theme was that actors are human beings and CGIs are not. Accordingly, Mark Cousins featured directors who concentrated on film characters as human beings. They have imperfect bodies, which age, sag, and sometimes let them down. (Amen.) They also have emotions that cannot be articulated in an six-second scream but have to have portrayed. (For an example, BCGI (Before CGI) recall Steve McQueen, without a word, bouncing the ball off the wall in ‘The Great Escape’ [1963].)
Tsai Ming-liang, a Taiwanese director, had some insightful things to say, and talked mainly about his ‘Vive l’Armour‘ (1994). His comment on the Hollywood fetish of CGI concerned the deadening effect of the screen busy with multitudes of CGIs from spaceships, endless weapons, to vampires, and a deafening surround soundtrack. Sadly that is too often true.
Tsai Ming-liang
Cousins focussed on the last scene in ‘Vive l’Armour’ where a distressed young woman cries, and cries, and keeps crying in an exhausting (to watch) seven-minute take. Emotions engulf and cannot be switched on and off, that is the point. I appreciated that argument intellectually, but I confess it did not inspire me to sit through any of his work.
Here she is.
As said above, I found much of the material covered in this segment, as in some of the others, to be inward looking, made only for other directors, not an audience. Though much was said about humanity in the program, it seemed there was little for the actors to do but stand in front of the camera. These directors often prefer a single handheld camera, cutting the cost of elaborate camera work, producing little more than a home movie to my eye. The director is the auteur who creates everything, when everything else has been discarded, the actor is the last prop. More than once Von Trier has done films without sets, leaving only actors. Maybe next he will dispense with them, too. That would leave the director doing a selfie into the camera, which some of these films seem to be anyway.

“The Caine Mutiny” (1954) at the Dendy Quay on the very wide screen.

What a treat! A great cast, a rattling story, superb performances, starting with the conscience-stricken Executive Officer Steve Maryk played by Van Johnson (showing the scars on his face of a car accident before filming started). José Ferrer does a star turn in the last segment (with a bandaged hand, a result of a sporting injury off the set). These blemishes add to the authentic feel of the movie. Fred McMurry, E. G. Marshall, Claude Atkins, Lee Marvin, Tom Tully, James Best, and more offer chiseled performances.
But none can match Bogart when he testifies. No rolling of eyes, no histrionics, no drooling, none of that Jack Nicholson stuff. Click, click, click go the ball bearings as he goes off the deep end, and then, oops, tries to pull back, but it is too late – the Mad Hatter has been seen by one and all. It is the one scene everyone remembers.

Bogart said he never did understand Queeg so he just did what the director, Edward Dmytryk, told him to do. Ever the professional Bogart did it well for a short guy with bad teeth, a receding hair line, and a weak chin. No matinee idol good looks had he. He’d never make it today in Hollywood.
The film is much more focussed than Herman Wouk’s novel, which wanders all over the landscape of the civilian lives of the officers and men, yet the film did seem long to me at 124 minutes. The ingenue Mr Keith seemed an unnecessary distraction, though perhaps he is what Maryk was two years earlier. But his mother, his girl friend, his immaturity are annoying. While in the cutting room I would also have cut some of the repeated vistas of the mighty U.S. Navy and the repeated passages under the Golden Gate Bridge.
The film is a set of character studies, of Queeg, the worn out captain, of Maryk the Executive Officer in over his head, the glib but spineless would-be novelist played to a T by Fred McMurray, the defense lawyer who knows the mutineers were both right and wrong, and the ingenue.
For all of that I see that the imbecile factor is such that it rates a 7.9 on the IMDB just ahead of some of Adam Sandler’s films, a benchmark for puerile nonsense.

This film comes from Chile and offers an account of the advertizing campaign that unseated the Pinochet dictatorship.

To placate world opinion in 1988 (perhaps in anticipation of the medical care that tyrant might one day need, and mindful of the example of the Shah of Iran in 1977) the dictator of Santiago decided to stage manage a plebiscite.
It was contrived to insure a victory. The proposition was a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the continuation of the one-man rule of Pinochet.

Pinochet
The graylings of the regime assumed (1) ‘Yes’ could not lose on such an All or Nothing vote and (2) the many opposition parties would never unite but would rather tear themselves apart, confusing and repelling votes by the ever more holy competition among themselves. As additional insurance the campaigning was be limited to two 15 minutes time slots on the television every day. The ‘Yes’ segment to be aired first in prime time. The ‘No’ segment at 11 pm, when honest workers should be asleep. Finally, leaving nothing to chance the voting day and poll hours were chosen to minimize turnout. Begins to sound like Georgia.  

As much by accident as design one of the opposition parties hired an advertizing consultant who in time shapes a very simple, very direct, very funny set of television advertizements.

The ad man is reluctant to be hired, the money is laughable, the people are tiresome, it threatens his place in society and the firm to consort with such outsiders. He is threatened and yet, well, his father was exiled, friends from university disappeared, and he feels the pall that hangs over the past, so he took it on after hours.

Then there are the committee meetings. My god, I thought I had endured Dante’s committees, but these surpassed even Mr. Aligheri’s curriculum meetings. They are Olympian in scope, starting at 8 p.m. and going on and on and on, as everyone present airs every grievance they have against the regime with the demand that it be included in every installment of the 15 minute episodes. It is attrition by the self righteous.

There is indeed no agreement among the many opposition groups, several of which depart in moral outrage and make their own episodes, 15 minutes of a very sincere talking head putting any hapless viewer into a trance. Some of the programs seem like televised therapy for the talking head. ‘Now is my chance to tell my story of trial and suffering to indict this despicable regime.’ Others dwell on stern didactic messages documenting the many misdeeds of the past, and there were many, in mind-numbing detail.

The fact that it is all true does not make it either good television or good advertizing.

This is the lesson some of the opposition leaders have to learn and it is an emotionally hard lesson to realize that today’s generation does not much care about the dark deeds of the past. [Pause and consider how much Reader you really care about the dark deeds done in the 1950s and 1960s to aboriginals by people who are still alive and to whom you politely yield your seat on the bus.]
The final indignity to those who had so long risked life and limb to resist the Pinochet dictatorship and its willing thugs was the advertizing jiggle, calculated to catch on! What they wanted was a stirring anthem, what they got was a 30 second lilt!

By the way, the No vote was 55% and the Yes 45% in a 97.5% turnout! Having invited the world media to witness the affirmation of the Pinochet regime, the outcome could not be concealed, but instead led to constitutional revisions that in time eventuated in a reformed regime. (Stan Freberg always said advertising worked, and he was right!)

I am not quite sure what conclusion to draw. Are voters so fickle that a catchy tune sways them? Is voting just another product?

Or, are people motivated more by the future, which was the focus of the episodes? Are viewers more receptive to a message delivered with wit and good humour than one presented in self-righteous hellfire and brimstone?

What I got out of it can be summed up in this way, ‘It is not about me.’ That was the mistake so many of those oppositionists made, too much about me, my suffering, my tears, my journey, my commitment, my sincerity, my trials. Just another kind of self-centred self-absorption that is rife everywhere.

By the way those committee meetings are still going on. The Wikipedia entry for the film and the IMDB page are replete with combatants still claiming that everyone else was wrong!

A sports documentary like no other!
The film tracks eight (8) players making their way to the World Table Tennis championships.
That sounds conventional and boring. NOT!
These athletes, both women and men, are each 80 or older, well Dot of Australia owns up to 100. The Germans Inge and Ursula are in their 90s, Inge having found that her ping-pong training seems to stave off dementia. Rune from Norway jogs to keep fit at 85. Sun from Mongolia is not sure whether he is 82 or 83, the papers having been burned long ago by the invaders, either Chinese, Japanese, or Russian. Who can say?

Les has been devoted to body building since he left the RAF and never misses a chance for press ups, or cleaning and jerking twice his own weight! Terry has been repeatedly told he has only a week to live for the past two championships, but there he is, at the bell with paddle in hand.
Then there is that self-described reverse Marshall Plan, the wise-cracking Viennese from Texas Lisa (85) who wants to be first and best at everything! She may have only 1/8th of the camera time but she steals the show and wins the women’s final in a walk. Terry feels a failure when he finishes second, but looks forward to next year, just to prove those doctors wrong.
Les, in between reps in the gym, composes poems about life, nature, and people. Sun decides he has to change his training to compete. Lisa searches for a spot on the mantle to display her latest triumph.
What a crew!

When reviewers do not know where to start a review, they sometimes start by slagging off at other reviews. In that spirit I recall a review of an exhibition of Impressionist paintings complaining that it was too French; another that faulted a film about cricket for too many references to cricket. Then there are film reviews that find Hollywood movies so American. I can say, without fear of contradiction that ‘The Great Beauty’ is very Italian. That is why we went; to see some of Italy without the travel.

‘La grande bellezza’ poster
The film features that greatest of Italian film stars: Roma itself.
The other actors, fine though they be, are supporting players to this great star with its architecture, its lavish art works, its vistas, its history evoking buildings, it inspiring sunsets and ravishing sunrises, its profligate statuary, its intimate chapels and by-ways, its grande boulevardes, its…. Well, one sees the point by this time, or will never see it. The film is a paean to Roma.
Jep, played superbly by a very serious actor Toni Servillo, has frittered away his talent as a novelist along with his humanity, by living the indolent life Roma offered him with a spacious apartment overlooking the Colosseum, bedding so many willing women that he has long since lost count, rising at 3 pm on many days to party the night away. His being is certainly light in the sense of Milan Kundera’s ‘the lightness of being.’ To reach for another metaphor, it is the ‘feathered life,’ as the Aztecs offered their sacrificial victims before the knife. I read it as a character study but he could be taken as an exemplar of the milieu in which he swims, and thus the film offers some social criticism, too.
Sounds familiar? Yes, ‘La Dolche Vita’ (1960) comes to mind and there are many fountains. By the way, ‘La Dolche Vita’ is thirty (30) minutes longer than ‘La grande bellezza,’ which is listed at 142 minutes. Yet it held our attention as did ‘La Dolche Vita.’ Confession, one also thinks Silvio Berlusconi who defies parody. Then there is Fellini’s own ‘Roma’ (1972) with the Master’s taste for disconnection and the grotesque.
‘La grande bellezza’ has many tributes to Federico Felllini in its tableaux, its return to the sea, and — it has to be said — the dwarf, who here is a real person, not a circus prop, and even a giraffe, a knife thrower, performance art, and on and on.
Jep at 65 is bored, bored, bored, bored; he is also sometimes boring. He lives like a king, dresses like a prince, wanders the haut monde with nary a care in the world, except the dawning realization of his mortality. Jaded, cynical, and worn he is, yet he is not bitter, not angry, not a victim. But he is defeated. He wrote one novel forty (40) years ago, yet he still occasionally meets people who quote from it. He brushes off their admiration and when they ask him about another, second novel he is so long-practiced at diversion that the question does break his emotional skin. Instead he writes witty fluff for a newspaper which must pay him way over the odds so he can afford all those perfectly tailored 3,000 thread-count suits he wears.
It is all trip and no arrival. Much happens, but nothing matters. A tourist faints. Is that part of the story? It is not part of Jep’s story, no, but it is part of Roma’s story. A young man is killed in a car crash, or kills himself by crashing his car and either way drugs may have been involved. His life does not go on, but Roma’s does. One of Jep’s girlfriends dies and he hardly notices. He goes on … for now. Roma goes on forever.
In addition to the gorgeous photography of Roma in its many faces there is a wondrous array of music — some ethereal, some energising, some reassuring, and some that sounds like a train wreck — in the soundtrack, and all the Milano style in the clothes on the actors. Though in Roma the Milano labels would be cut out. Eye and ear candy supreme.
For the viewer it is two and half hours spent following a camera around Roma over the shoulder of a wastrel named Jep. The camera is at times sinuous, at other time inert, then it seems to dart through the air, or float over the Tiber. However, Jep, no fool, is completely self-aware and perhaps he may yet try to write another novel, but probably not. It makes no matter to Roma.

Tony Servillo as Jep
I refered to Toni Servillo as a serious actor because I have seen him many times before, including as the very humane detective in ‘The Girl by the Lake’ (2007), a surprising story of what people will do for love. He also directed ‘Propaganda’ (1979) and ‘Guernica’ (1985). Both as serious as the titles suggestion. Though he smoked enough cigarettes in this film to reduce his chances of doing much more work.

Who is the greatest philosophy of the Twentieth Century? 
Before reacting with answers, think about the question. The question implies there are many philosophers from whom to choose, after all ‘greatest’ is a superlative that is the third is a series: great, greater, and greatest, and before that the very good, good, and so on.  Taking the question in that light several names come immediately to mind:  Bertrand Russell for ‘Principia Mathematica’ (1910) and his other technical studies of knowledge, language, and logic;  Jean-Paul Sartre for ‘L’étre et le néant’ (Being and Nothingness’)(1943) and the essays that led up to it; or even — in the German world — Martin Heidegger for ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Being and Time) (1927).  Maybe even Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ (1979).  Remember the honour is the ‘greatest’ and that excludes both the great and the greater, like Michel Foucault, John Rawls, Roberto Unger, Martha Nussbaum, and more.
But what if we re-phrase the question? What if we ask ‘Who was the only philosopher in the Twentieth Century?’  That question requires us to think about what we mean by ‘philosopher.’
Hannah Arendt is my answer. If by ‘philosopher’ we mean someone who makes sense of life, then she is in a class by herself.  Always was, always will be.  She was the only philosopher in the Twentieth Century. This sense of the word ‘philosopher’ is what Aristotle meant by it.
It has taken two generations for the dust to settle on the story that lies at the centre of this film, for her life and works to be appraised in their own light, not against national priorities, political necessity, ethnic identity, ideology, the lust for revenge, blind emotion, crowd mentality, etc.  In this context the film, by letting her words and ideas speak for themselves, is a tour de force.  And more. Here’s a word one does not see often: magisterial. 
With clever staging and segmenting of the story, Arendt’s singular voice is heard just enough to show how penetrating her thought was, and how naively courageous she was in pursuing that thought where it led. Publish and be damned! 
She did publish and she was damned!  Lifelong friends from childhood (and as an Jewish exile émigré she had few of those left to lose), genial neighours, editors, professorial colleagues, personal friends until then, shunned her. The hate mail, obscene phone calls, attacks on her husband, and her ever loyal intern multiplied, threats from Israel’s Mossad, a deathbed denunciation by an uncle, (her only living relative thanks to the Holocaust), feces smeared on the door of her apartment, and so on (the film omits as much of this as it includes of all this, details to be found in the biographies), none of these stopped her. 
Give her the Socrates Medal for putting Truth before all else.  
In the film, her greatest sin is the passing remark (ten pages of 300 in the book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’) that in some cases some leaders of Jewish communities co-operated with the Nazis as the Final Solution was implemented. These leaders calmed their followers, tried to slow the process by working with it, took over the administration of death at its zero point, selected their fellows for transportation on those railroads run by Adolf Eichmann and his ilk. Indeed this very point was made in passing during the Eichmann trial which is why she reported it.
It is this factual observation that lit the atomic bomb that almost destroyed the ‘New Yorker’ magazine where her articles on the Eichmann trial appeared.  To wash this linen in public was the sin that had no atonement, not that she was ever about to atone. It was to blame Jews for their own destruction. It was to betray Israel. It was to blaspheme Judaism. It was ….
Her second sin was to believe her eyes. She saw Eichmann as a nobody, a nothing.  How then to reconcile the equation with on one side the unbelievable evil of the Holocaust and on the other side this insignificant nobody?  The Darkest events of Dark Times were not committed by John Milton’s magnetic Satan of ‘Paradise Lost’ (1667) nor by Johann Goethe’s breath-taking Mephistopheles from ‘Faustus’ (1808).  Instead, Eichmann was just what he appeared to be, everyman, anyman, noman.  Just a man, not the raging beast of Baal.  Evil could work through such a man. Though there is no denying, and she certainly did not deny it, that there were evil men and women in Nazism, but they worked much of their evil through everyman and anyman. A very fine, if harrowing, empirical study is Christopher Browning, ‘Ordinary Men’ (1992). But this too was unacceptable because if a nobody could destroy Jews then Jews were… weak, or should have resisted, or something…
What the film elides, though there is an early reference for the cognoscenti, is that Arendt’s ‘On Totalitarianism’ (1951) argued the unpalatable case that every means, device, and tactic used by the evil dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and their many imitators in Europe, had been developed, tested, applied, refined, implemented, and perfected by the Enlightened Western European colonial powers in Asia, and most of all in Africa, and, in truth, in Australia, too.  Selective murder, denigrating humanity, rape upon rape, displacing populations, mass murder, separating families, slave labor, industrial-scale cruelty, brutality for fun, group punishments, dehumanizing victims to themselves, genocide, all of these are well documented in colonial history long before 1939. Every colonial power made use of these atrocities.  Though she is careful to distinguish between the degrees of evil among the colonial powers, while she is ruthless on the collective guilt of the peoples of those colonial powers who did not (want to) know the evils done in their names in far away places that produced the riches that we still see today in a city like Brussels.
What the Twentieth Century dictators did was to repatriate those practices to Europe. They invented nothing.  But brought to new levels the technologies of destruction perfected in the colonies. (By the way this return from the peripheries is just what Michel Foucault detected in other social institutions at a lower level.)
Even generous reviewers have found it hard to work up much enthusiasm for this film about ideas with virtually no action, though there are enough tensions to produce heart attacks, fist fights, and brain aneurisms all around, and to ruin more than one career.  Apparently this is not enough to hold the attention of even a sympathetic reviewer. Admittedly, the film also features much thinking time when Arendt broods on what she has seen and concluded, and sees how all those other journalists who were there have trumpeted the conclusions they took with them. They react; they do not think. Thinking takes time and this director respects that and expects her audience to have the attention span to cope with it. Amen!  
The film integrates black and white film footage from Eichmann’s trial and it is essential.  Because, at least to this viewer, it confirms everything Arendt said.

Adolf Eichmann
It is unmistakeable. No re-enactment, not even I suspect by the great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, could do it better, and Ganz even briefly made Hitler seem almost human in “Der Untergang‘ (Downfall) (2004).
Barbara Sukowa offers a superb performance.  She projects a laser intelligence that burns through all the irrelevancies thrown in her path.  She dominates the camera when she sits silently in a crowd watching Eichmann testify as she seems to suck out of the air his every word, twitch, tic, hesitation.  It is a remarkable sequence in which she alone seems alive to what is there before all but she alone sees him for what he is – nothing.  It is a scene that is repeated in the press room among the cynical and jaded journalist there seeking sensationalism, and finding it. They react. They are satisfied with the prejudices they came with, but she, silent and still, is not. Though she is silent and still she is more alert, alive, and active than any of them because she is thinking, and they are not. So said Plato of Socrates’s silences.
Margarethe von Trotta is a very experienced director and I found her ‘Das Versprechen’ (The Promise) (1996) which mirrored the Cold War history of Berlin in a love story memorable for its compassion.  She also made ‘Rosa Luxemborg’ (1985) and ‘Katrina Bluhm’ (1975).  Both of these I found heavy-handed.  
But for this film she deserves her own medal for taking it and conceptualizing it in a way that could be filmed, and then selling the project to those that supported it.
 
Hannah Arendt
In the film nothing is made of Arendt’s most important book ‘The Human Condition’ (1955) and most important essay ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ (1963).  There is nothing else Iike either.
The official website for the film which is in German but there is an English translation button.
http://www.hannaharendt-derfilm.de

When Alain Resnais died a few weeks ago I stopped to think about his films, well to be exact, the ones I have seen.

Recently when browsing ‘Le Monde’ I saw another tribute to him and that prompted me to be more systematic about my own recollections. I put them in three categories: (1) compelling, (2) entertaining, and (3) undecided.
1. Compellng does not always mean comprehensible.
‘Nuit et Brouillard’ (1955)
A very short film (22m), believe it or not, a lyrical meditation on Nazi death camps from the German ‘Nacht und Nebel’ in Wagner’s Rheingold where it is magic spell, but it became a code for extermination. The many enemies of the Reich began to disappear into the ‘Night and Fog.‘ Understated and cryptic.
‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’ (1961)

Everyone tries to figure our what it all means, and like James Joyce it may mean nothing at all but it is gorgeous to look at it.
‘Muriel’ (1963)

Though not a word is said about the Algerian War (torture, genocide, coup d’état, betrayal, treason, lying, cover-ups, assassination, a putsch) and yet its shadow falls across everything. Long silences. Social dysfunction. Unspoken and unspeakable guilt and shame.
‘Providence’ (1977)

John Gielgud writes a novel which Dirk Bogarde Ellen Burstyn, and David Warner are living, or are they? An ode to the creative process of the novelist.
2. Entertaining is not always funny.
‘Le guerre est finie’ (1966)

The most acessible and explicit of his films, an absurdly romantic vision of a communist cell plotting against the Franco government, but Yves Montand burns with conviction.
‘Pas sur le bouche’ (2003)

A musical comedy is a real change of pace for the master at 81 years of age; it is fast and furious. ‘Not on the lips’ is the title.
3. Undecided.
‘Hiroshima mon amour’ (1959)

War is bad, atomic war is worse, yes, I got that much but as for the rest, it is too deep for me.
He made a lot more films, I see from the Wikipedia filmography.

Missed this film during its short theatrical release in Sydney, but noticed it in Civic Video après le gym the other day. There was only one copy on the shelf.

It is a very clever and daring film. Silent and in black-and-white, so that means 95% of those under 40 will ignore it. On the other hand, because it is silent the language barrier is lower and the title cards are far fewer and easier to read than subtitles.
The film transplants ‘Snow White’ to Seville 1925 in the milieu of bullfighting and bullfighters. The usual suspects are present: the evil step-mother, the helpless father, the seven dwarfs who are aspiring bullfighters. It all hangs together though Snow White as a bullfighter takes some getting used to.
By the way, the bullfighting sequences make it very Spanish but are filmed very carefully for an international audience, i.e., not cruel or bloody.
In addition to the step-mother, Snow White also has to deal with a corrupt and incompetent press and a manipulative and scheming promoter. It is a lot for a fairy tale to deal with, but she does well, despite the downbeat end.
The Brothers Grimm would approve.
Technical note, the black-and-white in this is not monochrome. Believe it or not monochrome film stock is far more expensive than colour these days. The technical notes on the official web site it was shot in colour and then it was developed as black-and-white, I think it says that. Some will notice this film lacks the subtly of monochrome which offers a world of greys. Whereas in this film, and perhaps it fits the story, everything is either black or it is white.

We had to see it, and see it we did. It is King Lear in worn jeans with grease under the fingernails.
For plot details see the Internet Movie Database entry at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821549/
Or the official web site: http://www.nebraskamovie.co.uk

What I liked about it included, the wonderful cinematography that made the Sandhills seem almost alive in the background of the long drive.
But even better was the slow and steady camera survey of the ruined and wrecked Woody’s face in confusion, despair, determination, loss, repose, fatigue, purpose. Bruce Dern is center stage and mostly silent while the camera follows the emotions across his face.

Viewers may remember Bruce from ‘Coming Home” (1978) or ‘Silent Running (1972). If not, they should!
Having yielded reluctantly his kingdom to age, like Lear, Woody tries to reclaim it a little of it in that lottery scam.
One of his two sons, having nothing better to do makes the futile trip with him. During the drive this son, David, learns many things, some about himself and some about his irascible, volatile, not very loving or lovable father. And he meets many very nice people and a couple not so nice. Such is life.
David sees in Woody lost opportunities, mistakes, quiet achievements that no one knows about but his wife Kate, who wants to stomp Woody more often than not but destroys those others who might criticize or take advantage of him. All in all, it gives David a lot to think about in his own life, about 40, going grey, bunking alone in a motel room.
The other son, Ross, seems completely self-centred, and yet when he is needed, he is there. Capped with a marvelous scene when the two brothers momentarily return to their youth, communicating preternaturally, and off they go to get that damned air compressor. They learn next time not to take quite so literally what is said by someone diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Well, maybe not diagnosed, for when a well-meaning stranger asks David if Woody has Alzheimer’s he replies in the payoff line of the movie: ‘No, he just believes what people say to him.’ It is such a gem I thought, in my perfect hindsight it should have come later to cap it off.
The most powerful scene? Several come to mind, but none can beat Kate, Woody’s long suffering wife, when she bellows down the ravenous relatives who think Woody has indeed won the lottery. Jane Squibb as Kate blows their hair off, and the eyes of her two adult sons pop when she does.
I could not find an image of this scene, but here she is pensive.

But even more moving is the short drive down the street with Woody at the wheel of a new truck with an air compressor in the back. Redemption without a word.
Some critics, seeking always to be critical, which is usually translated as different if not perverse, suppose the director, writer, producer Alexander Payne is mocking the people who inhabit this story. I heard that a lot regarding his earlier movie ‘About Schmidt’ (2002) and let it go through to the keeper since the very assertion betrays an incomprehension so deep no remedy applies. It is a conclusion only a critic could draw.
This is not the country of Bill ‘The-Cheaper-the-Shot-the-Better’ Bryson.
Payne shows us a world, complete unto itself. It is light and dark, and within its confines, it has good and evil, too, but they shade into and out of each other. It is life.
I did not know Hollywood still made movies about real people, living real lives. It is a pleasure to see it is. Made by adults for adults.
I have no doubt that higher being Roger Ebert would put all thumbs up for this one.

‘Casablanca’ has slipped a rung in the list of the greatest movies ever made.  ‘Backyard Ashes!’ Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ has got nothing on it.  That chess game is dead boring by comparison. The drama! The pathos! The barbecue! The googley! It has everything!  And it has more!  
Text
‘Citizen Kane,’ move over.  This is an instant classic.  ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ is so last century. Why bother? [Confession: I thought that at the time.] But before cinema history is revised let’s go back to the beginning.
Blue ticket in hand I set out from the Ack-comedy on the 370 bus which wound about to Coogee Bay Road where I dismounted and walked around the corner to the Randwick Ritz, an Art Deco picture palace.  Leaving the wind and the rain behind I flashed the receipt on my iPhone and entered.  The password was ‘Cinema 2, on the right.’
The Best and Brightest showcase, unanswered emails, summer projects, the Machiavelli exhibit, the British International Studies Association conference paper, the remaining 400 pages of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ the Prague utopian presentation PowerPoint, mysteries of the slate roof, all of these fell behind in a thrice. The lights went off and the magic started.  
After some initial stereotypes to set up the people, the place, and the tensions, time flew by all too quickly.  There was so much snorting and guffawing I am sure I missed some imperishable dialogue. A fellow nearby slid off his chair laughing.  At the end several patrons seemed unable to move, paralytic with amusement.  
Shades of Big Merv, the key in the wicket, Dennis the Mo, Richie, body line, to say nothing of the specter of BRADMAN which hangs over it all with Wilma and Mack.  Best for last, that ball from Seven-Eleven.  
Oh, and the cat!  
If only Roger Ebert could see this.  He’d love it for what it is: Warm, witty, wise, and wonderful. Just like Wagga Wagga.
I do feel sorry for the professional critics who have to find fault with it, e.g. ‘rough around the edges,’ ‘a cast that combines professionals with some amateurs inevitably…‘ Here’s a perfect example: ‘Wearing its heart and hopes on its sleeve may help patch over the repetition and derivation that monopolises the movie; however, the passion of the production can’t conceal the standard and less-so elements,’ says one reviewer on ArtsHub giving it a measly two stars from five. But wait, ‘repetition and derivation that monopolises the movie,’ what does that mean? How can ‘derivation’ ‘monopolise’ anything. Is this Monash English? Only a self-described film critic can answer that. This Einstein also finds the references to cricket in a movie about cricket to be annoying. Go figure. I know what Spock would say…. [In this case, Spock is one of the cricket players.]
Such reviews are as infantile and self-obsessed as 90% of posts on Trip Advisor. This film is a GEM.