DVD Picks
BY GLENN MCDONALD, Correspondent
Two films new to DVD this week demonstrate how mainstream Hollywood movie-making can still produce stories that take your breath away. When the multiplexes are full of summer action bombast – that new “Transformers” trailer looks like a demolitions training film – it can be easy to forget that serious artists are still at work out there.
Director Sam Mendes' “ Revolutionary Road” is so good it hurts, quite literally, and as a movie experience is just this side of traumatic. Well, it was for me, anyway – Kate Winslet has my number, quite frankly, and any movie that puts her in distress just about puts me in the hospital.
Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, reunited here for the first time since their game-changing teamwork in “Titanic,” play a suburban couple in the 1950s, navigating the treacherous waters of marriage, kids and dreams deferred. Considering the state of their relationship, it's probably best that the Titanic sunk when she did. Saved Jack and Rose a lot of heartache.
If you've managed to avoid spoilers up to now, you're better off going into this without a lot of advance information on the plot. The film, based on the 1962 novel by Richard Yates, is a ruthless dissection of the American Dream circa 1955 – which, in its essentials, is perhaps not so different than what we dream today. See Mendes' 1999 Best Picture winner “American Beauty” for bookend comparison.
Director Mendes, and his two lead actors, do an amazing thing here – articulating a particularly slippery strain of American despair that is no less devastating for being ubiquitous and more-or-less invisible. By telling a specific story with such rigorous emotional honesty, they break through to some universal, and uncomfortable, truths about life and love. (Mendes and Winslet are married in real life, by the way, if you feel like diving through that little rabbit hole.)
It's interesting to reflect that a movie like this, so subtle and keen, simply doesn't get made without the star power of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. So say a little word of thanks that at least some of our movie stars still insist on being artists.
Another emotionally powerful film debuting this week, “ Defiance” stars Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber in the true story of the Bielski brothers – leaders of the largest and most successful Jewish resistance operation of World War II. Under their leadership, more than 1,200 Jews were rescued and established a community in the forests of present-day Belarus. For two years, they fought against the Nazi occupiers and their collaborators.
Largely faithful to the historical record, “Defiance” attempts a tricky maneuver – infusing standard-issue action heroics and melodrama into what otherwise presents as a historical document. “Defiance” succeeds, too, due an appropriate sense of restraint. As the DVD extras reveal, director Ed Zwick demanded a painstaking authenticity in all aspects of the production.
The movie was shot on location in the same forest that the Bielski partisans lived, and period details inform everything from costuming to props, dialects to pyrotechnics. For instance, when the German shells fall, there are no dramatic fireballs or airborne stuntmen – these scenes look like wartime documentary footage, and are much more terrifying for it.
The result is a movie that feels authentic, even when the story meanders for requisite love scenes or unlikely arriving cavalry diversions. Check the several featurettes included on the DVD for more historical perspective.
Or even better, check out the History Channel's excellent 2006 documentary “ The Bielski Brothers: Jerusalem in the Woods,” issued this week to coincide with the DVD release of the theatrical film. “The Bielski Brothers” weaves survivor interviews with historical footage in typical History Channel style. But be aware that the DVD contains relentlessly disturbing elements and images – this is the real story of the Bielski Brothers, and of the Holocaust and its atrocities.
Watching “Revolutionary Road” and “Defiance” together, I thought about their different approaches to the distillation process that is filmmaking. Each tells its particular story artfully, and with care. Both are reminders of the power of movies to make us think and feel.