Movie Review: "Borgman"

Beguiling Borgman

By Rainey Wetnight

“I saw a magician.” -Isolde, the daughter of one of the two main characters in this fascinating fable

Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet) first appears in the lives of an upper-middle-class family as a homeless man. All he wants is a bath, he says, because he is “quite dirty”. One might wonder why he doesn’t ask housewife and artist Marina (Hadewych Minis) for something to eat first, but it turns out he has his reasons for wanting to be clean right off the bat. Her high-profile TV mogul husband, Richard (Jeroen Perceval) is immediately suspicious - so suspicious that he attacks Borgman and almost kicks him to death. To make up for this violent outburst, Marina offers the gray-bearded tramp not only a bath, but a meal and a night in her summer house. “I’m sorry,” she says, but Borgman replies sympathy won’t cut it. “I’m in pain,” he informs her. “Nurse me.” She does, over the course of a few days, but Marina is the one who needs help.

Why? Clue number one: One opening scene of Borgman involves a priest. Two: There are also two men with the holy Father, one with a makeshift spear and the other with a shotgun. Three: See the italicized quote above. However, our villain is not just any magician, or even any evil magician. He can make a little girl’s fever vanish (as well as himself), but for what purpose does he need a surgical team? Like a regular stage prestidigitator, he has several assistants, namely Ludwig, Pascal, Brenda and Ilonka. “You’re early,” he tells two of them that Marina can’t see. “Off with you”. However, they’re currently in greyhound form.

With all this supernatural weirdness going on, what’s just as intriguing are the tense familial dynamics. Marina feels underappreciated, mostly by her husband. A gardener (disposable yet biodegradable) looks after the grounds, while a beautiful nanny named Stine looks after the children. Surprisingly, there’s none of that kind of hanky-panky going on, but someone sure is looking to wreck this supposedly happy home.

The best scene in the movie is a late one, a family dinner to which Borgman and his friends are invited. However, despite their malevolent nature, their being present isn’t really necessary in order to make these solid suburban citizens tear at each other’s throats. Richard has just been fired, and the son of his former boss also happens to be at the table: Stine’s new boyfriend. As before, Richard springs into action. He aims to pummel this threat as he had the bearded, tattered old one, but Marina immediately stops him. Later she asks her gardener for a favor: “He has to die, Camiel.” Is her request utterly unreasonable?

What director Alex van Warmerdam excels at is subtlety: the sound of flies buzzing whenever a certain character is around, shots of glasses of dark red wine, the harried scraping of a knife on buttered toast, and metaphors of kisses and a white child near a lake. Even though his touch is deft, sometimes it’s almost too light. You might start wishing that the protagonists would just go off the proverbial deep end already and quit standing on the diving board. However, once they do, it’s absolutely riveting to watch.

In most movies about a capital-A adversary, the main character knows pretty quickly with whom s/he’s dealing. Negotiations ensue, the rate of exchange for temporal happiness is revealed, and a deal is made (blood-signed contract optional). In this one, though, the Tramp can take his time. In one hour and fifty-two minutes, he slowly worms his way into the hearts and minds of his human prey, discovering and warping their desires. “There will be consequences,” Borgman warns Marina when she wants to hire him as the family’s new landscaper. However, she barely bats an eyelash. Does she not suspect…or not care?

Calamity befalls us in several ways. We can lose our jobs, our homes, even our families, due to events that we neither plan nor control. However, with actual evil - as with a fictional vampire - you have to let it in.

RAINEY’S RATING: 3.5 STARS

Movie Review: "Night Moves"

Night Moves, Then Darkness Dawns

By Rainey Wetnight

“I’m not focused on big plans; I’m focused on small plans.” -Jackie Christianson, eco-filmmaker

Here’s a thought experiment: If you knew that according to science, marine biodiversity would be gone by the year 2048, what would you do? If you also knew that protests, online petitions, “Likes” on Facebook, and even environmental filmmaking wouldn’t catch most people’s lasting attention, how far would you go to get it? That’s the question three young people have to answer in Kelly Reichart’s Night Moves. Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning) are organic farmers living at a cooperative which they and their fellow environmentalists call Nature’s Harvest. Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) is Josh’s brother, a former Marine trained in demolitions. These three seek to make their cause known with a bang, not a whimper.

The Green Peter Dam, on a certain unnamed river, prevents salmon from swimming upstream to spawn. They perish with their purpose as fish unachieved, and with no fish, the river’s ecosystem will collapse. Thus, so must the dam. All it takes is five hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, wires, a detonator, a timer, and an unassuming rich senior’s named speedboat - from where the film’s title comes. Early on, the eco-terrorist trio shows more remorse about destroying the boat than the dam. “Well, we don’t really give a [expletive] about longevity,” one of them comments with a rueful look in his eyes. They plan their attack so carefully, pondering each step with as much concentration as a chess grandmaster considers his moves. Nevertheless, even the smallest missteps can cause monumental repercussions.

The most tension-fraught scene in the whole film is not the one at the fertilizer store, but the one on the edge of the obsidian-colored reservoir where the gang plants their boat. They notice that on the opposite side, someone gets a flat tire and has to change it. Meanwhile, there’s only fifteen minutes left until ‘big dam go boom’. “That’s not a good spot,” Dena murmurs in a near-whisper. “No,” says Harmon. He returns to the loaded vessel, looks at the bomb timer, and waits. In the end, however, he must decide: Whose life is more important, especially in the long run? Is it worth turning back when so little will be changed?

Afterward, all of them believe that they’re - in fact, they are counting on - going back to normal, as if nothing happened. (Why is it that criminals in movies almost always think this, and then their conscience betrays them? Since the days of Dostoevsky, this has been true more often than not). What two of them realize too late is that nothing will ever seem normal again - eating dinner with one’s friends and family, working, listening to gossip, or even sorting vegetables for CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture). They’ve all worked so hard to support life through what they do, and in the end, they’re prepared to take it.

Half of this film’s excellence lies in its powerful nature shots: the dam being turned on in the morning and spilling an effervescent geyser into the reservoir, the reservoir itself under cover of darkness, the woods, and most powerfully, a forest of dead trees standing up in the middle of the river being dammed. This is the price we pay for our digital gadgets, our mass-produced food, and industrialization in general. Nothing comes without a cost, without sacrifice. Unfortunately, the trio here is prepared to sacrifice not only their own lives, but the lives of bystanders and strangers, to teach the world (or at least the locals) this lesson.

The question that haunts me at movie’s end is this: How much of an impact did they really have? As one of Josh and Dena’s coworkers mentions: “One dam? You’d have to blow up twelve dams to make a difference. I don’t call [what the perpetrators did] a point. I call that theater.” Real-life terrorists know that scale is crucial: the more people who die, the more attention they’ll get from the media and governments. What Dena, Josh and Harmon do is terrorism, yes, but it causes no widespread panic. Even though their crime makes the national news, there’s (oddly?) no nationwide manhunt. What they thought was a “big plan” ultimately turned out to be small potatoes, at least in terms of people’s response to their message.

My only other critique is that the ending of this film is so dull and anticlimactic that it will resound with a thud in viewers’ minds. None of their questions, or mine, will truly have been answered.

RAINEY’S RATING: 3½ STARS