There are ten stories and two dozen characters that fill Short Cuts, and a plenum of human melodrama, drama, and darkness that fill the screen: joy, sadness, jealousy, fear, reconciliation, pain, infidelity, and death-accidental, murder, and suicide are among them.To reproduce the episodic and multi-narrative entanglement would be an unproductive exercise here. In a nutshell, it is a modern-day angst movie, with people misunderstanding, begrudging, beguiling, disappointing -- and even killing -- one another. In a work this pervasive, some plots will be inevitably weaker than others. But the overall feeling is that Altman, maker of Nashville and The Player, has pulled off another ensemble coup, with commendable assistance from Lily Tomlin, Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Waits, Bruce Davison, Fred Ward, Robert Downey Jr. and many others. Altman's movie is a harsh, almost fatalistic overview of modern-day sufferings in the less-exotic suburbs of California. After all the various plots have been introduced, developments (usually negative) cause many of them to intersect. The unfolding of events between Ward and wife Anne Archer who are invited to dinner for the first time with bickering spouses Julianne Moore and Modine is utterly mesmerizing. You watch enrapt, as these people experience the unrelenting tragicomedy of being alive. Although the omniscient design of Short Cuts is enthralling, it's indistinct. That indistinction leads us to believe we are watching something telling and profound. Short Cuts is a film almost wholly devoted to the written word, as all great films are, but its ‘little above average’ goodness, rather than greatness, stems from the fact that the words of Carver-as hit and miss in prose as Altman is on film, are never allowed their full power nor poesy.
The Royal Tenenbaums is a story of five psychologically unstable and immensely melancholic individuals. The Tenenbaums own a gigantic house in New York. The patriarch is the Royal Tenenbaum who has left his family behind and leaves in a rented hotel room with his loyal attendant Pagan (who once tried to kill Royal in India), essentially on credit. His wife Etheline, who has an African-American accountant-cum-suitor, looks after the three gifted children, but all of them have turned into neurotic adults. Chas was a financial virtuoso as a kid who has lost her wife in a plane crash and since then has become hysterical about his two children's safety. Margot was adopted who had won a big literary prize as a kid and is caught in a loveless marriage with a psychiatrist with no offspring. Richie was once a tennis champion in the international circuit who threw away his career and secretly harbors a deep love for Margot. All of them live in the mansion except Royal Tenenbaum. Their most prominent neighbor is Eli who writes best-selling Westerns that receive terrible reviews and who is also in love with Margot. Even though they share the mansion, each of them is an island in itself. Eccentric behavior of each Tenenbaum covers a grave sense of loneliness. Amid all these, Royal Tennebaum fakes cancer during a dinner-table conversation seemingly in a bid to get close to his three children and win back his estranged wife. Some of the Tenenbaums respond with pity and arrange for Royal to stay with them. However, Etheline's suitor reveals in a spell of jealousy that Royal has been untruthful about his illness, which causes an immediate eviction of Royal from the family home. After a string of bizarre events, everything falls into the right place: Etheline and her suitor take the vow, Richie and Margot reveal their love for each other, for the first time in the family history Chass displays emotion and love for his father and lets go of his OCD regarding safety concerns, Eli accepts his mediocrity and renounces his love for Margot, Margot's husband writes a famous book on one of his patient's delusions, and Royal Tenenbaum passes away, peacefully. Nobody knows of Pagan, though. Wes Anderson's film is an uncommon combination of comedy and sadness. There are situations that produce big laughter and there are moments of quietness. But just when a contemplative and gloomy scene evokes sentimentality on the screen, Anderson suffuses the scene with edgy comedy or sarcasm. This queer juxtaposition of sorrow and humor has always been a defining feature of all of Anderson's works. Characters in Anderson's films almost always verge on the eccentric side of the persona and all of them suffer from a collective delusion out of which an orderliness emerges. The Royal Tetenbaums is no exception. The movie is effortlessly funny, flagrantly peculiar, and emotionally uncertain. At a fundamental level, the film documents a broken family's preposterous effort to carve out strategies to find emotional connectivity and strange characters' outlandish mannerisms to hide their emotional loneliness.
The film centers on a woman (Eva played by Tilda Swinton) whose psychopathic son has pushed her to the edge of sanity. We Need to Talk About Kevin delves into Eva's mind by periodically moving between past and present. Eva lives with her husband, son and daughter in an expensive home in an idyllic small town. However, from the interiors of the house we could gather that the house has never become a home for its inhabitants. These people share a common physical structure, but their psychological structures are innately different from each other. Eva is skeptical of the marriage, doesn't want a child, and lacks instinctive kindness towards children. Her husband Farnklin (John C. Reilly) is an aloof man who appears situationally supportive of his wife, son, and daughter, cheerful,but lacks serious familial attachment and commanding position required of him as one of the parents. He is completely clueless about the alarming dynamics between his wife and son. Only the daughter, Celia, who is really young seems to be normal, but her normalcy is constantly shattered by Kevin, the son. Kevin is instinctively fiendish, who is supremely talented as to how to wound Eva, snub her, deceive her and make her soul bleed. Kevin seems to be living embodiment of the Devil. Kevin's character is depicted at three ages. As a baby, Kevin can try the patience of a saint. A relatively younger Kevin is such a little devil who enrages Eva so much that she breaks his arm. In the movie, this particular incident is seen more like a vicious triumph of Kevin than an instance of child abuse. As a teenager, Kevin is loving towards his father, but deliberately designs ploys to hurt Eva. The film starts with Eva dreaming about a lake of blood that ultimately turns into an annual tomato festival. Throughout the film the director uses the color Red as a route to emancipation for Eva while at the same time the same color is used to capture the disturbing psyche of Eva. Though the film is titled as We Need To Talk About Kevin, they never talk about Kevin. As if, by averting any dialogues and discussion about Kevin, the film emphasizes the need for such talks and on another level forces us to consider an important question that might plague the minds of the parents of troubled children: Is it nature or nurture? We Need to Talk About Kevin is a powerful film about a disturbed child and the magnitude of psychological trauma created in the minds of parents by a series of devilish acts by the child. The parents helplessly take the back seat like an audience and are ultimately nudged in the direction of psychosis.
The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film festival.
