After the film’s festival showings, scissors-happy Miramax trimmed eight minutes from this lively 1994 piece of exploitation about the travails of a gay priest in Liverpool, but it still packs a wallop; whether it can sustain much reflection afterward is another matter. It started out as a four-part TV miniseries scripted by Jimmy McGovern, who spent a day cutting away two-thirds of it when it got approved as a feature; director Antonia Bird (Safe) serves up the telegraphic remains in punchy docudrama style. Apart from the inner conflicts of a young priest (Linus Roache) who’s actively gay, the movie throws in his dilemma at being unable to expose incestuous child abuse revealed to him during a confession — a subplot handled in the style of a lurid horror thriller — and generally manages to whip up feelings of righteous indignation about the moral hypocrisy of various Catholic officials while adhering closely to the manner of 50s Hollywood-liberal agitprop. If entertainment passing as deep-dish soul searching is what you’re after, you won’t be disappointed — though with the use of You’ll Never Walk Alone on the sound track, it’s debatable whether the filmmakers know how to stop when they’re ahead. Read more
A “Critic’s Choice” from Chicago Reader, June 5, 1998:
The social status of filmmaking among ordinary people, central to Abbas Kiarostami’s wonderful Close-up and Life and Nothing More, is equally pertinent in this entertaining and sometimes beautiful film. Through the Olive Trees (1994) concludes a trilogy begun with Where Is My Friend’s House?, which focused on the adventures of a poor schoolboy in a mountainous region of northern Iran. Life and Nothing More, the second and best film of the three, fictionally re-created Kiarostami and his son’s return to the area, which had recently been devastated by an earthquake, to look for two child actors from the earlier film. Through the Olive Trees is a comedy about the making of a film, mostly emphasizing the persistent efforts of a young actor to woo an actress who won’t even speak to him. Like Kiarostami’s more recent Taste of Cherry, all three films strategically elide certain information about the characters, inviting audiences to fill in the blanks and in this case yielding a mysteriously beautiful and open-ended conclusion. If you’re unfamiliar with Kiarostami — one of our greatest living filmmakers and certainly the greatest in Iran–this is an excellent introduction. Read more
Terry Zwigoff’s penetrating, thoughtful, and disturbing 1994 essay about the great underground comic artist Robert Crumb, best known for Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural as well as his Keep On Truckin’ drawings, though also a semiprofessional musician and connoisseur of early jazz and blues. Made over a six-year period by a longtime friend and fellow musician, the film’s intimate, multifaceted portrait is exceptional in many respects. For starters, it presents Crumb not as a cartoonist but as an artist, plausibly described by critic Robert Hughes as the Brueghel of the second half of the 20th century. It then shows how difficult it is to assess artists, exploring in considerable depth Crumb’s dysfunctional family background, sexual obsessions, working methods, and political positions. By the end of two hours we’re persuaded that if Crumb weren’t drawing constantly and compulsively he’d probably be as doomed as his brothers Charles and Max, both of whom are also comic-book artists. Never letting his participants or his audience off the hook, Zwigoff traces Crumb’s ideological and psychological ambivalence toward his art through the perceptions of friends, acquaintances, relatives, former lovers, and Crumb himself. Zwigoff not only presents a complex human being and the range of his art but also guides us through a profound and unsettling consideration of what it means to be an American artist. Read more
