L’Enfant and Friends With Money
“L’Enfant”, 2006. Written and directed by Jena-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Starring Jeremie Renier, Deborah Francois, and Jeremie Segard.
Now showing at the Edina Theater.
If you’ve ever lived in Michigan, specifically Detroit or one of the constellation of broken-down factory towns on the eastern side of the state (Flint, Saginaw, Bay City), you’ll probably have a special feeling for L’Enfant. The people that have to survive in these towns–and burgs like them everywhere in the world– have found their champion in the Dardenne Brothers.
There’s one scene in the Dardenne’s L’Enfant that really sticks with me: of Bruno (played with verve by Jeremie Renier) wandering down broken sidewalks beside a busy street, shoving his pram along, going nowhere. There is no score in this gutsy little film, just the soundtrack of poverty, where we hear what people too poor to get an iPod or a television have to listen to: trains and cars, shouting, the hydraulic grind of buses when you have the change to ride, and the slamming doors of homeless shelters. These are noises I’m somewhat familiar with, and I have to say that there’s a certain beauty in the way they’re rendered here. Life just happens in L’Enfant, without dressing, without pomp. With its verite camera style, the thoroughly unglamorous look to the actors (Renier appears as if he hasn’t washed his face in weeks), and the only light seemingly filtered through relentless clouds, L’Enfant is refreshingly real and honest. It is to the Dardennes credit that they refuse to beat any manifesto into your head, allowing their simple story to affect you.
L’Enfant opens with Sonia, a girl of eighteen, clutching a six-day old baby, Jimmy. Coming home from the hospital, she discovers that Bruno, who is also the father of the child, has sublet her apartment to a pair of lowlifes who won’t let her in. The opening minutes of the film show her wandering through the foul Belgian coal town of Seraing looking for Bruno. In doing so, she no doubt gives concerned mothers in the audience a coronary by being driven around on a scooter, clutching the baby while the vehicle swerves through traffic.
Sonia finds Bruno living under a bridge, chides him for leaving them without a place to sleep, and then shows off Jimmy for approval. Bruno’s jacket is dirty, his face peppered with acne, and Sonia beams despite a future about as bright as the gray skies and polluted river that wanders by like a freight train. These kids are playful, horny, ignoring their fate but full of energy, as if sleeping under an bridge and having a child was the coolest thing in the world.
L’Enfant isn’t brutal–there’s no indication that the Dardennes are trying to slap you in the face with the hardship. Instead, we get the simple details: the walking by the busy street, swaying on a bus, making a cup of instant coffee and the endless search for a match to light the last bent cigarette. In fact, for the most part, these two seem quite content with their lot in life, which involves petty theft, waiting for unemployment, sleeping in homeless shelters, and then tossing whatever money they glom away as soon as they get it. They’re so broke Bruno, at one point, has to sell that damned hat. Invisible forces push and pull them in every direction–Bruno gets a call to come to this seedy bar or that sewage pipe, to check stolen merchandise or fence it. He is scruffy and infinitely stupid–I would contend that he is the child of the title–but has a swagger of youth about him, and we can see why a young girl like Sonia, herself no genius, would be charmed.
The plot is itself a fascinating little machine, subtle and fraught with tension as any action film. The Dardenne’s spent a great deal of their career making documentaries that focused on the underclass and the aforementioned verite style–handheld cameras, following their actors around seemingly without direction, no musical score–makes this fictional piece alarmingly realistic. But somewhere along the line they became master screenwriters–L’Enfant should be heavy-handed, should be as dry as a documentary, but it moves as swiftly as the best film noir, without any of the window dressing. Plot twists pop up when least expected, usually coming in through Bruno’s cell phone. A casual hint from a fence gives Bruno the bright idea of selling the baby without grasping any of the implications. While Sonia waits in line for her welfare check, Bruno takes the baby for a walk.
The scenes of him moving aimlessly to the dropoff point, his face registering the anxiety and confusion of a daft hoodlum, are riveting. Finally, Bruno steals into an abandoned apartment, removes his jacket, and tenderly lays the baby down. Then he retreats to another empty room, its shades bent and plaster cracked and peeling. Bruno waits, pacing, hearing the sound of people opening doors, closing doors, walking away, all the while staring at his cell phone, waiting for it to tell him what to do. There is no music, no swelling violin or solo piano piece telling us to be afraid or melancholy. When he gets the call, his jacket is full of cash, and Jimmy is gone. And we are devastated.
Bruno can’t seem to understand what’s wrong about selling the baby. After all, he reasons, it would be easy enough to produce another, and besides, as his cell phone again informs him, the baby will be going to someone with real money in their life. Sonia, after finally catching up with Bruno, collapses at the news. Bruno takes her to the hospital, and she tells the police what’s happened. Soon he is being questioned by the cops, manhandled by the thugs who sold his baby (which Bruno managed to buy back), and, in trying to get back some of the money he now owes, ends up being chased by vigilantes and nearly killing his young accomplice during a purse-snatching. And yet Bruno flits through his life without malice, and his redemption, though small, is a difficult scene to watch. But I could watch it again. A dozen times.
L’Enfant is not without its faults. For a movie so embedded in reality, the baby is merely a prop. The Dardennes, in an interview in this month’s Sight and Sound, admitted that the baby had to remain an object, which I think slightly undermines some of the realism–we eventually notice that at no point in the movie does the child cry, or the characters react to a full diaper, or even scramble to feed the thing. And I was dying to understand Sonia as more than just a mother. The brothers supposedly came up with the idea for the film after seeing a poor young woman pushing a pram through the city and wondered where the father was. He’s here, in abundance, but the mother is given virtually no definition. But then, this is Bruno’s story, a story of a minor redemption, of how guilt eventually asserts its place in his soul, and makes him a wiser human being. But still without options.
L’Enfant didn’t just thrust me into a pleasant melancholy but it also depressed me, because I wish–oh, how I wish–that we had the Dardenne brothers for Michigan, for Newark, for Gary, capturing the struggles of impoverished youth here. Paying careful attention to every detail of the life of our poor, or the kids begging for change in front of Calhoun Square, or the bums sleeping by the abandoned Tiger Stadium. Of course, there’s not a director here who would dare tackle such subjects with such humility. Any film in the American ghetto has to have a soundtrack to make the proper dough, filled with stars parading about for their Oscars, and with hamhanded plots. Belgium, then, is fortunate: L’Enfant captures beautifully the struggles of the truly poor and truly uneducated, the people for whom life holds such little promise but in the Dardenne’s eyes, also a little poetry.
“Friends With Money”, 2006. Written and directed by Nicole Hofsteder. Starring Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, Scott Caan, Greg Germann, Jason Isaacs, Bob Stephenson, Ty Burrell and Roman Polanski look-alike Simon McBurney.
Now showing at the Uptown Theater.
First of all, this review is going to have some plot spoilers in it. Secondly, I’m going to tell you straight away that I hated this movie. Thoroughly, and with a passion that rivals my wife’s loathing of Rachel Ray (“fuck her thirty minute meals!”). I’ll admit that Friends With Money inflamed my own sense of class prejudice, and seems especially trite in light of having recently seen L’Enfant. Perhaps this is an unfair comparison, like suggesting that The 40-Year-Old Virgin has no merit when you’ve just sat through, say, Shoah. And yet, I found myself consistently frustrated by Friends With Money, in the end feeling that I just wasted two hours of my life with a group of foolish people I would never spend ten minutes with in real life. The characters are lack insight, have crises that seem to be made for a weekly television show and are spoiled rich–even Jennifer Aniston’s poor girl, who is as ridiculous a caricature of a lower-class person I’ve ever seen. Frankly, I don’t have a clue why anyone would watch this movie. To be blunt: Friends with Money is the most hateful, uninspired, and shallow film I’ve seen in ages. It is a study of assholes and infuriating.
Friends With Money is ostensibly the tale of a poor woman named Olivia (Aniston) who works as a maid while her other pals, the friends with money, fight their existential struggles. The details are as empty as you would see on TV: we know that Aniston is poor because she has to scam Lancome samples and can’t afford to buy the $70 dollar bottles (the price is mentioned in the film–a fine use of research). She has no problem dining out in the fancy restaurants of her friends, doesn’t have to take the bus, or even live in a dingy apartment. She smokes pot, which helps us understand that she’s aimless. Olivia was also once a teacher at a private school, but quit because the kids made fun of her cheap car. How she survived her student teaching, I’ll never know.
Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack, three of my favorite actresses, are the friends, and are given nothing to work with. Keener is a screenwriter who apparently has been arguing with her husband since their wedding day, and yet collaborates with him daily. He is a jerk, ignoring her needs, making mean comments about her ass, and obviously cares little for their child, who, like all the kids in this movie, is nothing more than a moppet on which plot turns can hinge. Keener and the jerk are in the midst of building an addition to their house that ruins their relationship with their neighbors, and pushes their own marriage to ruin. McDormand is afraid of getting old, of losing the spark in life, and is growing more and more bitter, and taking to insulting acquaintances and strangers in public. She has a fine relationship with her husband, a polite, well-dressed fellow whom everyone believes is gay–a joke so startlingly original I’m shocked to the core that it hasn’t been used in other movies or television shows. McDormand’s tale is resolved as if this were a sitcom that needed its ending shoehorned in before advertisements (it also relates to McDormand washing her hair). Joan Cusack, one of the most gifted comic actors in movies today, is utterly wasted, a happy at-home mom who just plays with her kids and allows the Hispanic nanny (yet another truly poor character tossed under the rug) to do the hard work. She seems not to have too much to do other than donate her two million dollars (that’s right) to her kids’ school–what else is she going to do with it? Hell if I or anyone else knows; I’m sure financial planners and family members have no ideas whatsoever.
All the while there’s bickering and fighting, four actresses chewing their scenes in the hopes of a future Oscar nominations, divorces and stale jokes that sound as if they were picked up off Nora Ephrom’s cutting room floor. Friends has not a whit of understanding, and is insulting to anyone who’s ever cleaned a house for a living.
There may be some truths in this film, reflections of shallow people in their shallow worlds, but the point was lost to me. No one learns anything in this film, and Aniston, lucky girl, gets to finally fall in love with a fat man who shares her love of pot, a belief that fundraisers are silly, and who is unbelievably wealthy. She will get to spend her days picking out curtains for him and this is, apparently, good. Between her and Cusack’s stay-at-home mom, they are the only two women who have found happiness. The women who express themselves and work hard at what they do–as a screenwriter and fashion designer–are devoutly unhappy.
Jennifer Aniston might end up a decent actress someday, if she can get it out of her mind to star in films like this one and The Good Girl. In the same way that it’s ludicrous for Tom Cruise to parade about as a grease-monkey in War of the Worlds, so it is that Aniston looks ridiculous pretending that she’s the one of all her friends who is flabby and out of shape. Since she’s apparently unwilling to soften that rock-hard body of hers for roles like these, or bring any insight to them, she’s doomed.
Friends With Money has been receiving decent reviews, and maybe it’s worth watching: perhaps my own background keeps me from appreciating a movie about people who are too daft to notice that they’re nothing more than materialistic bastards. The director, Nicole Holofcener, has worked in television, and seems to have hauled the worst of its mechanics onto the silver screen. To make matters worse, this film, considered to be ‘art-house’, uses up space that the Landmark Theaters could seemingly dedicate to foreign films (dozens of which will be shown soon at the Mpls/St. Paul Film Festival). L’Enfant is being shuffled off to the Edina this weekend, while Friends gets to use up the large tracts of Uptown’s squeaky seats.
