Frozen River

written and directed by Courtney Hunt
USA; 2008

Why this film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance is an indication of the way most audiences watch independent and art-house cinema. To the movie-goer that doesn't live and breath film the way some of us do, an art-house movie is a piece of culture that causes the viewer to be placed on a higher plane of awareness. It's a talking point at a social gathering, or an impressive venue for a date. So it goes hand in hand that films based on "issues" from "real life" become such hits. The problem is that these films often set themselves up to fall, as the tightrope between social cause and narrative art piece is a very thin one to walk. Paradoxically, though, most viewers of art-house cinema will forgive a film for its narrative, dramatic, visual, or other artistic shortcomings in the name of its worthy social cause. Often the issue is hardly explored, as in the case of Frozen River, and it's as if this simplification makes it more powerful, perhaps because it's easier for audiences to digest. In the end, the filmmaking is distracted and ultimately suffers, but it's the coverage of the issue itself that suffers the most. Print articles, news media, and even documentary films are more appropriate outlets for journalism than narratives.

Frozen River's director Courtney Hunt employs some silly plot contrivances to drive a dull story. The climax requires a significant stretch of the imagination in order to make any sense at all, but what's really sad is that actress Melissa Leo's skillful performance as hero single mother Ray Eddy is sabotaged by a horribly contrived character flaw. She has no problem trafficking Chinese people across the Canada-US border, but when a "Paki" family hops in her trunk, she objects with: "As long as they're not the kind that blow up themselves and everyone else." Why Ms. Hunt would imbue an otherwise intelligent character with such a rock-headed red-state racism eludes me, other than perhaps to imply that "simple folks" have "simple ideas," or some other such nonsense. It's pathetic, and it merely serves to motivate Ray Eddy's decision to leave an important "package" on the ice and add some narrative spike to an otherwise flattening story.

The scenes at home in the trailer are far more interesting than this manufactured story, or the vague glimpse Hunt provides into a seedy underworld that barely scratches the surface of what is involved with human trafficking. The trailer scenes at least resemble a well-made film. By the end, though, there is too much clunky plot in the way. The entire climax plays out with two scared and omnipresent Chinese women in the background. I refuse to be tricked by narrative convention into caring more about Ray Eddy's comparably luxurious existence when Hunt quite clearly is allowing me to see a much larger problem looming in the background. Want to raise awareness? Skip the narrative and make a documentary.

American Teen

written and directed by Nanette Burstein
USA; 2008

Halfway through the film, Megan Krizmanich commits an irresponsible act of vandalism, bordering on hate crime material. She is suspended from her student council position, and nothing more is mentioned about it. It's a confusing sequence, incongruous and, in this unresolved state, doesn't serve the story. Director Nanette Burstein quite obviously alternates between reality and drama, and often confuses the two, as if she is unsure whether to prove that art imitates life, or the other way around. It's an old conundrum, and it's no surprise that she stumbles. Colin Clemens' father, Gordy, offers a half smile every time he mentions Colin's college prospects. He is a man who is afraid of committing, and uses his sense of humor to overcompensate. This is confusing and frustrating to a son that clearly loves him and harbors many interior insecurities himself. I'm a lay psychoanalyst (having almost no training in the area, admittedly), but this is what I gleaned. This is what I gleaned despite Ms. Burstein's mishandling of this same material. Again, it's as if she is unsure whether this will make good drama (a father who tells his son that a basketball scholarship is the only hope for a college education) or a glimpse into a deeper cultural issue (the complex relationship between a father and his son). She's in directorial limbo, despite a Sundance win in the Directorial category no less (the animation by the way? wtf?). To be fair, with this kind of comprehensive coverage it's hard for a critical audience not to indulge in some deep psychological prying, and likewise it's hard for the subjects not to find themselves in a constant performance, making simulacra of themselves in an effort not only to define their own personal identities, but also to remain interesting subjects for the doc. But as a straight story most of this is old hat, while conversely there is far too much of the editorial hand to take it seriously as a verité thought-piece.

The hero is Hannah Bailey, whose emotional crisis prevents her from performing ad nauseum. Poor girl, Burstein attempts to make a story out of her rebound romance, even creating an odd-man-out fifth character of the guy, putting him on the poster, etc. This guy serves as nothing if not a cookie-cutter foil to Hannah's explosiveness. She's the star of the show, and it's for all the same reasons that her story is a difficult one to tell. Hannah's best moments are when she is utterly confused, because confusion is the prevailing state of most high school seniors. Certain elements are very confusing in Hannah's story, like the staged conference with her conflicted parents, an ambiguous relationship with her best friend, a lack of real insight into what her home life is like. In retrospect, Burstein should have embraced a more confused take on the footage, rather than fit poor Hannah into the Ally Sheedy arty misfit role and move on. To be fair, there is an attempt by the filmmakers to allow their subjects to transcend these social roles, but the weight of the stereotypes drag down this film in the end.

Doc films and reality television have created an environment where performance is second nature to many subjects. A film that resonates is Operation Filmmaker, which premiered earlier this summer and tracked the European sojourn of an Iraqi film student whose school had been destroyed in the bombs. Filmmaker Liev Schreiber, in a moment of humanitarian action, offered this student, Muthana, a position as a PA on the production of his film Everything Is Illuminated in Prague. Muthana at once sees himself as the star of the show (considering filmmaker Nina Davenport's camera follows him everywhere), and, like many young men with stars in their eyes, objects to the menial role of assistant and the labor involved with it. In his case, there is a war surrounding his life, and the hollow performance is coupled with real feelings of sympathy. American Teen similarly invokes real sympathy for high school seniors and the perils of that position. The characters perform in some culturally mandated response to the original sin of adolescence, even going so far as to provide epigraphic apologies during the closing credits. But Muthana and the "A-Teens," no matter how you look at it, are still performers.

Encounters at the End of the World

directed by Werner Herzog
USA; 2007

Herzog's on screen persona has changed slightly as of late, probably due to a newfound popularity after the success of Grizzly Man. Not that he's never been funny, far from it. Humor has been a major element in Herzog films since his auspicious beginnings, often providing viewers some stability through several of the more challenging sequences. His doc work especially is peppered with in-jokes and absurdities: the rooster man in White Diamond, a sardonic self-awareness in My Best Fiend, the entire concept behind How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck. This newest one, though, part of a string of American releases, has a different kind of humor. Werner this time is conscious of himself as a joke-teller, and yuks it up quite unabashedly. Where in the past the filmmaker would have made a much more subtle comment and allowed the humor to happen naturally, Encounters is lined with witticism after forced witticism, and Herzog's usual "play dumb" persona loses its charm. Whether this is a product of his "arthouse buzz" status or yet another element of filmmaking with which Herzog is experimenting remains to be seen.

The marvelous underwater photography, Herzog's reason for visiting the continent, is interesting enough, but quite rightly the filmmaker devotes more time to examining the strange underwater sounds of the seals and other arctic creatures. A weird natural phenomenon like some kind of alien implantation on earth, this is classic stuff of Herzogian mystique. The humans, though, are far more run-of-the-mill. There's the scarfed British volcano expert, soft-spoken in a hard environment, the career travelers, one of whom can fit herself into her own suitcase, the dry humor of an introverted penguin expert. Everywhere Werner goes, he digs up the fringe fascination that exists there, yet at the titular "end of the world," he appears comparatively bored. It took Herzog a trip to the most distant refuge of humanity to out-weird him, and all he can do is crack jokes about it.

The "bucket-head" sequence is a perfect statement about the film. Most documentary makers, on Discovery money, would have shot the penguins, the icebergs melting, the sunsets. For better results, Herzog finds the most interesting thing happening is a white-out training session where people tie themselves together and fix buckets over their heads to simulate zero visibility. A far cry from penguin shots, we instead have images of a string of humans with white 5-gallon buckets and painted-on faces, inching their way across the white arctic frost. Later a liberated penguin breaks from the flock and waddles away toward the mountains, alone. Later during a conference between two researchers excitedly discussing a new species discovery, Herzog obtusely asks, "Is this a great moment?" Images like these will stay with audiences for a long time, and Herzog continues to prove why he's one of the greatest but in the end, this installment should be considered a minor effort, whatever that means.