Jerry Lewis stars as a newly widowed octogenarian who becomes obsessed with a mystery about his late wife in MAX ROSE
MAX ROSE (Daniel Noah, 2016)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
September 2-9
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.facebook.com/MaxRoseMovie
In his first starring role in more than twenty years, Jerry Lewis is superb in the otherwise clichéd and maudlin melodrama Max Rose. Lewis plays the title character, an eighty-seven-year-old former jazz pianist whose just lost his beloved wife of sixty-five years, Eva (Claire Bloom). While dealing with his sudden loneliness, Max finds a small compact that a man named Ben gave to Eva on November 5, 1959, with an inscription declaring his secret love. Max becomes obsessed with finding out who the man is and determining whether his marriage was a fraud. Meanwhile, his granddaughter, Annie (Kerry Bishé), is helping Max through this difficult time, even though her own marriage might be in trouble, and Annie’s father, Max’s son, Christopher (Kevin Pollak), is experiencing his own family dilemmas. Christopher tries to reestablish a relationship with Max, but the father keeps pushing the son away. Writer-director Daniel Noah’s feature-film debut has all the hallmarks of, well, a Hallmark movie of the week, laden with genre clichés that the talented cast fights to rise above. Bishé (Argo, Halt and Catch Fire) is absolutely lovely as Max’s dedicated granddaughter, but Pollak isn’t given enough to do as Max’s beat-upon son. A scene in which Max cavorts with a group of new elderly friends has a bittersweet joy to it, at least partially because all four actors — Lewis, Rance Howard, Lee Weaver, and Mort Sahl — were in their eighties when it was filmed. Dean Stockwell, who recently turned eighty, makes a strange appearance near the end, and Bloom is an octogenarian as well.
The plot jumps around, as does the emotional manipulation, heightened by Michel Legrand’s overly sentimental score, and Noah throws in a few odd references, including one to Kurt Vonnegut, which harkens back to Lewis’s appearance in the critically despised Slapstick of Another Kind, an adaptation of Vonnegut’s 1976 novel, Slapstick, that earned Lewis a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Actor. (He lost to Sylvester Stallone in Rhinestone.) Noah also has a thing about flowers, from Max’s last name, Rose, to the name of the social administrator, Ms. Flowers (Illeana Douglas), at the assisted living facility he moves into, but that never quite reaches full bloom, like the rest of the narrative. But throughout the film’s eighty-three minutes, it is impossible to take your eyes off Lewis; the director, and the camera, love him, and for good reason. Sitting in his favorite chair in his red sweater, legs spread, rising pants revealing long white socks that approach his knee, Lewis recalls his role as Jerry Langford in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, when he was kidnapped and tied up, the look in his eyes revealing all you need to know about his character, only now much sadder and forlorn. Best known as a slapstick comedian and muscular dystrophy telethon host, Lewis is a graceful and talented actor, his every movement filled with the knowledge gained over a long life. An early version of the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013; the movie is finally getting its theatrical release, playing a short one-week run at the Landmark Sunshine. Deduct a star if Lewis is just not your thing.
New York City native Jim McBride’s directorial debut, the seminal David Holzman’s Diary, presages the YouTube Generation and reality shows in its depiction of a man obsessed with capturing virtually every moment of his life on camera. L. M. Kit Carson stars as David Holzman, a twenty-five-year-old unemployed schlemiel who goes everywhere with his 16mm camera, photographing the streets of his Upper West Side neighborhood, his model girlfriend, Penny (Eileen Dietz), and the woman in the apartment across the street. He also often turns the camera on himself as he discusses his life and moviemaking, directly and indirectly referencing Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Orson Welles, and Luchino Visconti. The black-and-white film is set up as if it’s a documentary, with choppy cuts and a barely audible soundtrack of a radio playing music and sharing the news of the day (July 1967). Holzman is happiest when he gets a new fish-eye lens and shows it off by carrying it through the streets above his head, offering a different perspective of the city. Like today’s world, McBride (The Big Easy, Great Balls of Fire!) brings up issues of voyeurism and privacy, because to Holzman, it’s as if nothing really exists unless it’s on film or television (or, now, the internet). Thus, it makes sense that David Holzman’s Diary is screening as part of the Anthology Film Archives series “Voyeurism, Surveillance, and Identity in the Cinema,” being held in conjunction with the International Center of Photography’s inaugural exhibition in its new downtown space on the Bowery, the multimedia 
“Your eminence, I am not happy,” Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) tells the cardinal (Tito Masini) halfway through Federico Fellini’s self-reflexive masterpiece 8½. “Why should you be happy?” the cardinal responds. “That is not your task in life. Who said we were put on this earth to be happy?” Well, film makes people happy, and it’s because of works such as 8½. Fellini’s Oscar-winning eighth-and-a-half movie is a sensational self-examination of film and fame, a hysterically funny, surreal story of a famous Italian auteur who finds his life and career in need of a major overhaul. Mastroianni is magnificent as Guido Anselmi, a man in a personal and professional crisis who has gone to a healing spa for some much-needed relaxation, but he doesn’t get any as he is continually harassed by producers, screenwriters, would-be actresses, and various other oddball hangers-on. He also has to deal both with his mistress, Carla (Sandra Milo), who is quite a handful, as well as his wife, Luisa (Anouk Aimée), who is losing patience with his lies. Trapped in a strange world of his own creation, Guido has dreams where he flies over claustrophobic traffic and makes out with his dead mother, and his next film involves a spaceship; it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out the many inner demons that are haunting him. Marvelously shot by Gianni Di Venanzo in black-and-white, scored with a vast sense of humor by Nino Rota, and featuring some of the most amazing hats ever seen on film — costume designer Piero Gherardi won an Oscar for all the great dresses and chapeaux — 8½ is an endlessly fascinating and wildly entertaining exploration of the creative process and the bizarre world of filmmaking itself. And after seeing 8½, you’ll appreciate Woody Allen’s 1980 homage, Stardust Memories, a whole lot more. “Weekend Classics” continues September 9-11 with Fellini Satyricon before concluding September 23-25 with City of Women.
I remember the first time I saw the BBC series Ways of Seeing, thoroughly entranced by the host, a curly-haired British art critic with the cutest little lisp of his “R”s who promised that, while looking at European painting in a whole new way, “we shall discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.” Years later, I was distraught when I couldn’t find my paperback copy of the companion book; my wife quickly ordered it and it was soon in my hands, where I devoured every word and image again and again. So I was terrifically excited when I heard about the new documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, which opens August 31 at Film Forum. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I came away from the four-part film feeling disappointed and let down; I selfishly wanted only Berger (pronounced with a soft “g”) but instead got too much of his friends and colleagues. And to make matters worse, the directors are too often what Berger tried so hard to avoid being throughout his long, influential career: pretentious. The film begins in winter with “Ways of Listening,” in which director Colin MacCabe focuses on Berger and his longtime friend, Oscar-nominated actress Tilda Swinton, as they talk at Berger’s farm in the small French town of Quincy, where he moved in the 1970s after becoming fed up with England. Filmed in 2010, the segment works best when Berger tells personal stories about his father and war; Swinton listens while peeling apples, the camera on her as much as on him. It occasionally feels as if she can’t decide whether to share Berger or keep him to herself; they already have a special connection, sharing the same birthday, albeit thirty-four years apart. But I wanted to make my own connection with Berger, a down-to-earth intellectual with a lust for life and a wide-ranging legacy, an artist, critic, “radical humanist,” social commentator, political activist, husband, father, farmer, and self-described “revolutionary writer” who prefers to simply be known as a storyteller.
