Garden State (2004)
The ghost of iconoclast director Hal Ashby permeates writer-director-star Zach Braff’s aesthetic even more than it informs auteur Wes Anderson. This is not a bad thing. Ashby is an oft-forgotten genius, and Braff builds on his techniques to establish himself as more than a mere sitcom actor, elevating his status to that of a sensitive leading man and documenter of elusive details and ignored lives. Exquisite imagery, delightful cinematography, and skillful gags are artfully deployed in this gentle, unassuming love story. Peter Sarsgaard gives the potentially typical funny-slacker-pothead character layers of depth and sad appeal; Natalie Portman sparkles in a way she hasn’t since she was an astonishing child in Léon: The Professional; Ian Holm is pitch-perfect, as usual.
The Great Gatsby (1974)
An all-star cast and crew—including Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Bruce Dern, Karen Black, and Sam Waterston acting, Francis Ford Coppola writing, Jack Clayton directing, and legendary Douglas Indiana Jones Trilogy Slocombe shooting—somehow manage to turn F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Great American Novel into a turgid, stultifying experience. The dazzling stars, cinematography, and set/costume design should be captivating, but poor Clayton and in-his-prime Coppola dig Gatsby a deep grave in the cemetery of boredom just the same. Although the movie is technically loyal to the novel, watching the film is so numbing you’ll never want to read the book, which is a dirt-dog dirty shame. Rumor has it that Coppola only had three weeks to write the screenplay after Truman Capote’s draft was rejected, and the Patton scribe/Godfather director was not yet enough of a moviemaking titan to demand more time or a shot at directing the flick himself; very regrettable. The film’s critical and financial drubbing left Clayton in a funk that kept him from directing for nine years. Gatsby is a bold undertaking, to be sure, but unmistakably a resounding, somnambulating failure on all fronts.
Hud (1963)
Paul Newman was never as good of an action star as his mega-cool rival Steve McQueen, but he consistently beat McQueen at the game of artistic triumph. Nor have the principal heirs to Newman’s status as an artistically accomplished, bankable, über-manly pretty-boy superstar—namely, Robert Redford and Tom Cruise, and, somewhat less successfully, Keanu Reeves, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, the fallen Kevin Costner, and wannabes Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, etc.—ever eclipsed his ability to balance big budget popcorn successes with numerous nuanced performances in commendable, unforgettable films. Hud is one such film. Based on Larry McMurtry’s novel Horseman, Pass By, and sometimes described as a rethinking of Rebel Without a Cause set in a 1960s update of the Old West, this revisionist modern Western is also reminiscent of the McMurtry scribed The Last Picture Show and Newman’s later performance in Nobody's Fool. In its detailed depiction of quiet desperation, small-town misery, loner rebellion, interfamily strife, and coming of age in changing times—rife with societal subtext that’s still relevant today—Hud stands tall, drinking viewers under the table with poetic depression.
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