Down in the Valley is a strangely ethereal, contemporary western (deconstructed yes, but not overtly so) which centers on a tender/tragic love affair between Harlan (Edward Norton), a drifter pushing thirty, and a seventeen-year-old girl, October (Evan Rachel Wood), who picks him up one afternoon and takes him to the ocean. They fall in love. Dad (David Morse) gets in the way. Tobe’s diffident younger brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin) believes Harlan to be a kindred spirit; he’s the avuncular ideal Lonnie’s father can never be. Conflicts arise. Harlan’s desire to forge a new family unit by pushing dad aside sets into a motion a series of events where things go uncomfortably awry. I’ll leave it at that. It’s a great film. I’ve never really been a big fan of Norton’s work but here he delievers a hauntingly enigmatic performance; he’s a postmodern innocent, a restless American archetype, a 21st century cowboy cast adrift in the San Fernando Valley. Imagine Forrest Gump crossed with Travis Bickle shot through the quietly savage yet graceful style of a Terrence Malick film, and you’re getting close. Director/screenwriter David Jacobson does borrow from Taxi Driver and Badlands and Norton appears to be paying homage to De Niro in a couple of scenes, but the film never feels explicitly derivative. Even though I recognized the influences, I found myself surprised by this melancholic film again and again (as well as Jacobson’s ability to make the audience sympathize with a character on the edge of delusional breakdown). The acting in this film is exemplary. Rory Culkin has been perfecting a role like Lonnie since You Can Count on Me, but he plays the sweet-tempered, vulnerable teen with aching perfection. I’ve known Evan Rachel Wood was going to be a star ever since she stole scene after scene in the fortysomething ABC drama “Once and Again” a few years back. She is a tremendous talent. David Morse is another underrated actor who always surprises. The climactic scene of Down in the Valley plays out on location at a film set for a remake of My Daughter Clementine and Norton’s character, with childlike glee, finds himself in the world for which he was made until the artifice of the moment is shattered and his “reality” starts to crumble. The final moments of the film, set in suburban house still under-construction, is heartbreaking.
The Dardenne Brothers’ 2005 Palm d’ Or winner L’ Enfant is also worth watching as a wrenching, verite character study of a homeless, twentysomething, petty criminal, Bruno, and his equally irresponsible girlfriend, Sonia, who has just given birth to the couple’s first child. I really thought this film was going to be a difficult and unpleasant one to watch, but it is quietly and unpretentiously hopeful about human agency as Bruno’s rawly compassionate search for redemption in the final scenes lifts the film into something altogether unexpected. I loved The Son, one of the best films I have seen in the last five years or so and I don’t think L’ Enfant is a greater film, but what surprises me is how benevolent and generous the Dardenne Brothers are to their marginalized and difficult to like characters.
I remember Down in the Valley got some wildly divergent reviews when it was released. Some loved it, some hated it. But even if it fell into the hated category, it seemed like an interesting failure. I didn’t bother to see it in the theaters, but I will try to rent this based on your comments here.
I saw an interesting pairing of films the other night, now I can’t remember what they were. That’s not a slam on the movies as much as it’s a reflection on my frame of mind.
i came here to write a few lines on l’enfant, too! i think maybe i liked it a little more than you did, jeff, because i liked it so damn much. i thought it was up there with la promesse, which i consider the best of the dardennes’ films. i liked the son a lot, too. it’s a more complex, therefore more extrinsically worthy film, than either la promesse or the child, but the actor who plays bruno is amazing and extremely charismatic, and he does magnificently in both films (he’s the protagonist of la promesse, too). when i finished watching the child i wondered if there is any other filmmaker who consistently portrays childhood so poignantly, soberly, and heartbreakingly. i am reminded, here, of the scene in the son in which olivier gourmet chases the boy throughout the lumberyard. the scene is an amazingly powerful display of sheer human fatigue and exhaustion and exasperation and ultimately incredible unspoken tenderness between two lost souls. in the son i was struck by the whole, long, mugging sequence: the interaction of bruno and steve follows the same tour de force of physical endurance, exhaustion, and ultimate unspoken generosity as the lumberyard scene. it’s really good stuff. i also liked the fact that the child of the title is all of them, bruno, sonia, the little baby, steve: they are all children cast adrift, trying to find themselves, and eventually finding themselves in each other.
the dardennes have found a way of dealing with kids that is both unsentimental and very intimate. they make their actors stay serious and close up on their almost expressionless faces over and over. there is no cuteness at all (the only indulgence to string-pulling is the children’s flying hair, which of course features prominently in the movie’s poster). expressionlessness, barren and grey urban landscapes, and lots of silence work wonders. as long as the dardennes keep on coming up with good stories, there is no reason why applying this formula over and over should not make for one great movie after another.