Venice diary part two

Dave Calhoun catches 'Elizabethtown', 'The Brothers Grimm' and the new oddity from Matthew Barney.

Sep  6 2005

You can rely on artist-filmmaker Matthew Barney to split, astound and often completely bewilder cinema audiences. His earlier 'Cremaster' series of five films were born out of the filmmaker's background in fine art, sculpture and performance.

They delighted and bemused as Barney's work progressively embraced the world of cinema without compromise and culminated in the higher-budget, magisterial 'Cremaster 3', part of which involved an intoxicating live performance by Barney himself in New York's Guggenheim Museum.

'Drawing Restraint 9' is no less compromising. Barney's two-and-a-half hour work may not contain one word of dialogue for over ninety minutes, yet it is brimming with humour, ideas, bravado and beauty.

The theatre for 'Drawing Restraint 9' is a Japanese whaling ship, allowing the director to continue his fascination with petroleum jelly.

This time, it's whale blubber that Barney moulds and squeezes into a dance-like narrative as the ship sails off the Japanese coast and both Barney and his partner Björk (who wrote the music for the film) gradually carve off each others' legs and transform into whales.

It's bewildering, dense stuff, but not once does Barney lose grip on a tightly-conceived idea that embraces ideas of evolution, creation, imprisonment and liberty.

Footnotes would be helpful though - and that's a compliment when faced with some of the lighter, less cerebral and more clichéd stuff (ie American movies) on offer here at Venice.

One such example is Cameron Crowe's 'Elizabethtown'. It feels mean-minded to knock a film which is relatively uncynical and conceived only for base amusement and tears - but I shall anyway.

Orlando Bloom plays a successful trainer designer who, as the film begins, loses his job amid a multi-million dollar corporate scandal which is all his fault; he has designed a dud shoe. Then his dad dies, forcing Bloom to travel to Kentucky and meet all the family he barely knows and embrace the memory of a well-loved man he hardly knew either.

He meets Kirsten Dunst - an air hostess - on the flight there, and her sense of humour, beauty and intelligence help him to get over the loss of his job and the death of his father.

The film is played largely for laughs but becomes so sentimental, so damn soppy as it progresses that it becomes nauseous. And, for my money, Bloom can't act for toffee.

Poor old Terry Gilliam. Floods washed away the set of his aborted Don Quixote movie. Then Miramax reportedly messed him around over the casting and then the edit for his latest feature, 'The Brothers Grimm'.

But it was worth it in the end? Not really. The finished film displays some heart and flashes of Gilliam's proven imagination but is ultimately a bit of a rambling mess.

Neither Heath Ledger or Matt Damon - both Grimms - prove to be charismatic in the film's lead roles, and the film doesn't feel magical enough, which is strange for a story that mines the real Grimm brothers' wealth of fantastic tales.

There are moments of impressive production design and effects work, but they are few and far between. The film partly suggests that all the Grimms' fairytales were happening all around them anyway in an enchanted forest; they simply had to look about them. Which is somewhat ironic considering this film was part-made by Disney. Haven't they been doing the same thing with the Grimms' stories for years now?

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