Tag: SLIFF 2009

SLIFF 2009 Review: STOLEN LIVES

stolen lives

Don’t let the overly qualified cast list fool you.  STOLEN LIVES is about eight commercial breaks short of being a movie of the week, not one, but two kidnapped child tales that intersect in highly sporadic and, overall, loose-fitting ways.  It feels like it’s moving fast, but it plods and plods until all the loose ends seem to magically tie themselves off and then, simply, end.

Jon Hamm and Josh Lucas star as two fathers in completely different eras.  Hamm plays a cop in the present day who is obsessed with his missing son.  He, along with his wife, played by Rhona Mitra, is the first on the scene when news hits him that a child’s body has been found buried underneath a construction site.  Upon taking the skeletal remains to a pathologist, he learns the child is not his son but, rather, that of a child who was murdered some 50 years before.  Cue the flashback score, as we jump back to Lucas’ character’s story.  He plays a newly single father in the 1950s who is trying to find work while caring for his mentally handicapped son.

Sadly, STOLEN LIVES seems to only have enough juice in either its story or its direction to cover one of these stories thoroughly and well.  The story covers the modern day narrative well, while the direction by Anders Anderson seems to have its head in the clouds of the ’50s.  Nothing comes together skillfully in the film, and the jumps back and forth add jarring to the list of this films characteristics.

At just 90 minutes, the pacing is all wrong.  There are moments where we are finally beginning to see a semblance of attention and focus on any, one aspect only to be quickly rushed back to the other storyline for no, clear reason.  STOLEN LIVES, perhaps, could have benefited from a little breathing room, some padding in each, respective story to not only flesh out some of the side characters these two fathers are contending with but to give us, the audience, a bit of time to sort out the stories in our own heads.

Not to say the film is convoluted.  Far from it.  If anything, it’s too simple, and it begins to feel like we are shown rather than told the segment from the ’50s just to keep this from being a short.  We know where the film is headed long before it gets there.  Any sense of surprise or thoughts of a genuine twist are quickly lost.  As if working against an already set run time, the film rushes through its ending revelations like a third grader trying to get through the last, few paragraphs of that week’s chapter.  It doesn’t hold on anything, blazes through even the most rudimentary of details, and, ultimately, leaves us far behind.  At this point, we don’t even care if we keep up.

The one element STOLEN LIVES has going for it in spades is in the performance of its cast.  Hamm and Lucas are, each, terrific in what they are given.  Mitra sits on the sidelines, but she even does that skillfully.  Even James Van Der Beek shows up to prove he can still hold his own.

Lost in the woods of its own devising, STOLEN LIVES tells two uninteresting stories in particularly uninteresting ways.  Anderson’s camera work is satisfactory, and the acting chops provide the only meat on this film’s bones.  Unfortunately, there is just far too much working against it.  In the end, the film amounts to very little, a forgettable gust of wind that believes itself to be a cyclone.  It talks big, but, aside from the acting, it doesn’t live up to its own hype.

STOLEN LIVES will screen at Plaza Frontenac on Saturday, November 14th at 7:15pm and on Sunday, November 15th at 7:00pm during the 18th Annual Whitaker Saint Louis International Film Festival.

SLIFF 2009 Review: THE NORTH FACE

the north face

It’s not much of a qualifier, but writer/director Philipp Stolzl’s THE NORTH FACE, NORDWAND in its native German, could very well be the greatest story about mountain climbing put to film.  Full of staggering cinematography, incredible performances, and an epic sense of bravery in the face of tragedy, it is a truly engaging tale of man versus nature that never fails to rise to the heights set forth by its natural antagonist.

The film is based on the true story of Toni Kurz, played by Benno Furmann, and Andreas Hinterstoisser, played by Florian Lukas, two, young German men who always had a knack for climbing things, challenging themselves all along the way.  In the Summer of 1936, as Germany was preparing to host the Olympic games, these two men set out to do something none had ever accomplished.  In July of that year, they set out to climb the north face of the Eiger, the 13,000 foot mountain in the Bernese Alps.  Accompanied by two Austrian climbers, Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer, played by Simon Schwarz and Georg Friedrich, who began the climb as competition for Kurz and Hinterstoisser, the team works through perilous ice and rock attempting to achieve success where none has ever been found before.

This story is broken up by the presence of Luise Fellner, played by Johanna Wokalek, and Henry Arau, played by Ulrich Tukur.  Arau was a newspaper editor covering the glory or tragedy at hand, whichever was to come to pass, and Fellner was his photographer.  Fellner was also childhood friends of Kurz and Hinterstoisser, so, when tragedy appears to be looming, she puts down her camera and turns towards her own sense of bravery.

While the setting up of the story is solid and effectively engaging, the film doesn’t truly kick in until the climbing team sets first foot on the Eiger.  At this point, Stolzl’s direction and Kolja Brandt’s breathtaking cinematography truly begin their own ascent into greatness.  Not only do the climbing scenes of THE NORTH FACE offer powerfully suspenseful moments of real intensity, they do so without the blatant use of cheap special effects.  This is a story about men who knew how to do something incredible, and they did it time and time again in effortless manner.  Stolzl’s task here was to take these effortless skills and transcribe them onto film, doing so with actors and mountain climbing consultants who had to contend with the gear and techniques of the film’s era.  Not only is this done successfully, it is accomplished with very little in the way of noticeable movie magic.

The acting involved is commendable, as well, though, for the most part, the performers on the mountain are covered by whipping snow and bulky clothing.  Furmann and Wokalek are given moments to shine, and they take them.  Tukur, most notable from THE LIVES OF OTHERS, gives a rousing performance, even though his is a fairly thankless role.

The resounding score by Christian Kolonovits must not go unmentioned, either.  Equaling the epic sense of the story and the task at hand in one moment and alluringly simple in the next (his usage of a piton being hammered in for certain notes is a thing of true brilliance), it captivates its audience just as the scenes do.

The true stars in this film, however, are the story, the mountain, and the way the film crew shoots it.  THE NORTH FACE is a beautiful film in so many ways.  Tragic and bold in its story, your breath is taken away in more than a handful of scenes.  Never mind that these were German men in the beginning of the Third Reich.  That aspect is a formality and is barely brushed on.  THE NORTH FACE tells a humanistic story, one whose fascination is derived twofold.  It first grasps your attention wondering if the team is going to be successful.  Then, it becomes a simple matter of survival.  All the while, your attention is hammered into the story, and you cannot let go.  THE NORTH FACE is a thing of beauty, both in story and in its execution.

THE NORTH FACE will screen at Plaza Frontenac on Friday, November 13th at 6:45pm and on Saturday, November 14th at 7:00pm during the 18th Annual Whitaker Saint Louis International Film Festival.