Anodyne
Saturday, October 20, 2012
 

"We see short chapters, sliced from Freddie’s time after the Navy, showing what it meant to be knocked aside, rather than swept up, in the nation’s postwar boom. Freddie becomes a photographer in a department store, making out with a model in his darkroom, where he brews a cocktail in a chemical beaker, and then, in one extraordinary passage, taking offense at a customer—a robust and portly type, who wants his picture taken—and laying into him, as though ignited by envy at such unattainable well-being. The colors here burn with the soft, civilized half-glare that we associate with the heyday of Kodachrome—a matchless example of Anderson’s period detail being driven less by fussiness than by his unfading avidity for anything that will saturate the real.

More startling still is the sudden cut to hard, unglamorous gray-greens, and the sight of Freddie hacking the heads off cabbages in a California field. We sense that he is drifting not because jobs are scarce but because no regular slot can hold him or stop him exploding from within; hence the catch-your-breath sequence that sees Freddie bursting through a dark doorway, which is framed like the final shot of John Ford’s The Searchers, and then sprinting and panting across the brown ridges of plowed earth, the camera travelling beside him at a pace that would have left Ford in the dust. And so the Anderson patterns, familiar to fans of Magnolia and Boogie Nights, reassert themselves: elegy followed by convulsion, stasis interrupted by the chronic need for speed, nerves no sooner gathered than lost."
- posted by cjb @ 10:46 AM


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }