When asked about the future of human society, George Orwell, author of 1984 said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot on a human face – forever.” When Diane Keaton’s character in Sleeper asks Woody Allen’s character if he believes there’s someone out there watching over him, Allen’s character answers, “Yeah, unfortunately, it’s the government.” In article three of the spotlight on the films of Woody Allen, we see Allen’s penchant for homage, allusion and satire continuing in his fourth film, Sleeper. It’s clear that the boot and the watcher in the above statements are interchangeable images with what / who Orwell famously dubbed “Big Brother” – an all pervading governmental, corporate and military power, which monitors and controls every aspect of civilian life. Both writers are essentially pointing in the same direction, except one of them has a wry smirk on his face.

If the spirit of the film is Charlie Chaplin meets Orwell, the actual plot (and title) is a clear reference to H.G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes. Allen follows the general trajectory of at least the first part of Wells’ 1910 story, where a man falls asleep for hundreds of years and is awoken in the future where he is asked to participate in a revolution. Of course, Allen’s revolution features a lot of bumbling antics performed foreground to jazz music (which Allen wrote and performed) in scenes clearly redolent of Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and the Keystone Cops. Many would say that the scene where Allen goes out the window on the spool of automated tape is a direct reference to a scene in Chaplin’s Modern Times. Homage or not, for my money, Sleeper contains some of the funniest physical comedy passages in all of cinema.

In this, Woody Allen’s only traditional robot and hovercraft science fiction spoof, the plot is suitably untenable. Allen plays Miles Monroe, a health food storeowner and jazz musician (“Miles,” is surely not an accidental character name for a jazz musician) in 1973 who goes into the hospital for a simple peptic ulcer (an emblematic establishment of the character’s neurotic personality, which Allen often employs) and is cryogenically frozen when complications set in. Two hundred years later, a group of political resisters awaken Miles in order that he might slip through the societal loopholes and uncover the details of the mysterious “Aries Project,” so that the resistance might be able to overthrow the totalitarian regime. They explain that, “Everyone here has a citizen’s record. We’ve all been computerized, catalogued, fingerprinted, photographed, voice printed. But you don’t have a number. You can be used to penetrate.”

Allen doesn’t skip a beat in the rhythm he’s established of alternating between serious cultural observations and pure comedy, by next having Miles explain how unfit he is for the job of intrepid rebel spy. Miles pleads with the resisters, wringing his hands: “I’m not really the heroic type. I was beaten up by Quakers.” The coward in the face of heroic duty, which we saw in his first two films, is one of Allen’s favorite shticks through which he recalls the comedy of Bob Hope. Even Allen playing Allen enjoys strumming on this riff, as he once quipped in an interview, “I was classified 4P by the draft board. In the event of war, I’m a hostage.”

Feeling he doesn’t have much of a choice, Miles stays with the resistance. As he does throughout the movie, Allen uses little crevices in the plot as moments to parody his own time period via the vehicle of the future. In this instance, his captors sit Miles down and ask him to identify various photographs of historical figures. Miles cycles through the photos, giving sometimes benign and sometimes cutting commentary on his contemporaries. When the man holds up a photo of Richard Nixon, who, as of the run of this film in 1973, was still in office, Miles responds to the photo by explaining, “Whenever the president went on foreign leave, the White House staff counted the silverware.” It was a gutsy and rarely executed move back then to criticize the current president.

When the police captures the people who awakened Miles, he takes on the task they had given him and, by way of disguise, ends up as a robot servant in the wealthy household of Luna Schlosser (Keaton), socialite and poet. Here, Allen skiffs from the preoccupation with politics of his early films into some of the themes that will be his mainstays through the rest of his work – including his query as to what makes real art and what makes a real artist? As it turns out, Luna has a gathering of pseudo artists that night, which sets the stage for a one-two satirical punch. Luna and her friends are rich and without care. When Luna recites a mordantly trite poem, it becomes clear this is a group who are not only without care but also without talent. Allen takes this moment to jab at socialite artists of all mediums who dabble on the surface of the arts because their lives are so sheltered that they have nothing meaningful to say. Ironically, Allen was himself on the cusp of that very crux, going from mainstream darling, slapstick technician to auteur and self-possessed artist.

Because of the science fiction 1984-esque context of Sleeper, the scene at Luna’s permits a broader socio-political annotation. All of these socialites have every distraction they need: a government issued orb that gets one high, a sex machine for mechanized intercourse, a house with robot maids, and colleagues to tell one that one is talented when one is not. In this case, the government has designed life, entertainment (the television is government run), sex (robbed of it’s power), and intoxicants that keep people safe and complacent. The question Allen seems to be posing is, how different is this from the growing level of control and manipulation in our own society? The skill of such profound commentary, on both the parts of Allen and Keaton as actors, is that it’s all done without a break in the humor.

Miles kidnaps Luna when she discovers he’s not really a robot, and the two go on the lamb. When Luna attempts to turn Miles in, they want to arrest and reprogram her too, and so she joins forces with Miles to escape. After a hilarious flight from the police in an inflatable suit, and some light banter about god, a trademark motif which essentially manifests in this film, Allen offers another nugget of contemporary social commentary, this time about the NRA: “They were an organization that helped people get guns so they could shoot citizen. It was a public service.” Soon after, Miles is captured, reprogrammed, and given a government issued life, while Luna escapes to the forest where she becomes involved in a group of Marxist rebels living off the land.

Allen seems to be making a profound statement about the trinity of corporation, government, and religion in a scene where the re-programmed Miles visits a confessional machine and offers this confession: “Um, once this week, I questioned my supervisor. And I missed a couple of minutes of our leader’s speech on television. And, um, you know that blonde girl, Rainer, who works in my office with me, with the long blonde hair and the great tomatoes? Well, we’ve been sneaking into the slide projection room on our lunch hour and making love together. And I know if they catch us, it’s against the rules. But, uh, I can’t help it, because, um, and I hope that you forgive me.” The machine then beeps and spits out a sheet of paper, ostensibly containing his pardon. Allen seems to be saying that linking the three powers of corporation, government, and religion into a totalitarian state creates a morality that is both oppressive, and because it’s not innate but enforced, completely disingenuous. In these moments of extreme social reflection, Allen often uses the tactic that the weightier the social commentary is, the more comedic the scene should be.

Meanwhile, via the twist of the plot that lands Luna, former snob, into a back-to- the-land political group, and in a clever, writerly maneuver, Allen uses the character of Luna to illustrate the downfalls of both the conservative rich and the Marxist counterculture. In Keaton’s character, Allen illustrates his opinions first of the banal, self-involved existence of the privileged, and then of the well-intentioned but unrealistic idealism of the Marxist driven counterculture – though he clearly has a soft spot for the rebels. In fact, Marxism is one of the topics of interest that gets repeated over and again in Allen’s films: from one liners to brief commentaries, in so far as Allen’s political discourses, Marxism is always the star.

The plot continues absurdly when Luna and the band of rebels rescue Miles from his government-issued life and take him to live with them in the forest. In one of the funniest scenes of the movie, the rebels set about deprogramming Miles by creating a re-enactment of his family life, which inexplicably leads Miles into a passage from the cinematic version of Street Car Names Desire – with Miles playing Blanche Dubois and Luna playing Stanley. Most notably, Keaton’s outlandish imitation of Marlon Brando is one of our first glimpses of her comedic aptitude. Allen once talked in an interview of that scene, saying that they could barely get through it because he found Keaton so funny that he kept breaking up.

At the rebel encampment, Miles realizes that he has feelings for this new, liberated Luna but that she’s turned to free love and is involved in a dalliance with the rebel leader, Erno. Soon, Erno sends Luna and Miles on a mission to finally discover what the “Aries Project” is, where they discover that The Leader was killed by a rebel bomb months before and the only thing that has survived is his nose – whether Allen, in his love of Freudian allusion, intended the nose as a phallic symbol, we can’t be sure. Government doctors plan to clone The Leader’s nose before the population realizes they’ve been living in an ungoverned state. Miles and Luna spring into action pretending to be doctors so they can obtain the nose and destroy it. These last scenes with Allen and Keaton acting in tandem are comedically very successful. In this, her first film with Allen directing, once Keaton is allowed to step out of the role of the un-likeable socialite, she comes into her own. The camera loves them together, and you can see the burgeoning of what they will perfect in the upcoming Love and Death, a male/ female slapstick team. An almost unheard of phenomenon.

Take the Money and Run, Bananas, and Sleeper create a continuum of progress on the part of Woody Allen as a writer, director and actor. Thus far his progress has been in the form of potentially serious topics that are given a comedic treatment. In Sleeper though, Allen transitions out of a tendency to gloss deeper issues into a willingness to include moments of more weighty inquiry – even if those moments produce a laugh. A premium example of where Sleeper sits on the spectrum is the final dialogue where Keaton lobs Allen softballs that allow Allen to orate briefly on his favorite topics. As Allen does sometimes, he constructs the end of the film in a way that sets up his next movie – sort of like the idea of “a leave” in pool playing.

Keaton: Oh, I see. You don’t believe in science. And you also don’t believe that the political systems work. And you don’t believe in god, huh? So then, what do you believe in?

Allen: Sex and death. Two things that come once in my lifetime. But at least after death, you’re not nauseous.

This last dialogue “leave” not only sets up the themes and tone of his next project, Love and Death, but actually situates Keaton and Allen into conversations that they will continue there in the context of 19^th century Russia.

When Woody Allen released Bananas in 1971, it was greeted with a benevolent review by legendary film critic, Vincent Canby, of The New York Times, which concluded, “Any movie that attempts to mix together love, the Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird – and most welcome.” After the critical appreciation of Allen’s first film, Take the Money and Run, MGM contacted him to make an adaptation of Richard Powell’s comic novel Don Quixote, U.S.A. Allen’s first idea was to turn it into a short story, which got turned down by both Robert Morse and The New Yorker. Consequently, Allen re-wrote the story into a film.

If you’ve never seen the film, Bananas, Canby’s synopsis gives you a good idea of the texture of it: pure hilarity. Allen catapults himself out of Take the Money and Run and, gathering both momentum and confidence, pulls off scenes that were too absurdist to try in his first creative endeavor, including the above mentioned scene where Allen goes into town to order food for his whole troupe of rebels and begins with ordering 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches. This scene is exemplary of Allen’s increasingly bold emulations of his comedic idols: The Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and Bob Hope. In this case, the sandwich passage is highly reminiscent of the famous Marx Brothers “stateroom scene” where Groucho orders an enormous amount of food (mostly eggs) to his tiny ship cabin in A Night at the Opera.

From the moment the film commences with a scene of the assassination of a fake Latin dictator, hosted by Don Dunphy with Howard Cosell providing commentary, the viewer knows they’ve signed on to take a ride. The basic plot of the film is that Fielding Mellish (Allen) falls in love with a young political activist, Nancy, (played by Louise Lasser, from whom Allen had recently divorced). When she breaks up with Fielding, he goes to the fictitious country of San Marcos to become politically involved and prove his bravery to Nancy. Via a wacky series of events, Fielding ends up being a trusted member of the opposing rebel forces. Once the rebels depose the second dictator, Fielding is persuaded to take the role of the new president. When he goes back to the U.S. to ask for financial support for San Marcos, he gets put on trial.

Bananas has the potential to be a controversial film, especially in our politically aware times. Allen was satirizing a serious issue: the instability and violence of some Latin American countries, and the U.S. involvement in it. Some might find his light touch trivializing, and perhaps it was meant to be that way. Another way to see the film is that no one is taken seriously, and no one ends up looking smart or less guilty than anyone else. The viewer can’t really take the Latin dictator seriously when after a dinner party he fumes about Fielding, saying, “I could kill him! He brings cake, and doesn’t even bring an assortment!” As the writer, Allen makes his views on the U.S. involvement apparent when, after assassination number two, a CIA agent explains the U.S. stance regarding the new faction: “The CIA’s not taking any chances this time. Some of us will be for them and some against them.” The driving theme of Bananas is the same as is proffered in his only two other politically focused films Sleeper and Love and Death, which is that, in the end, revolutions and political squabbles are pointless because, no matter how noble a person seems before ascending to power, once there they will fall prey to power lust and corruption.

To illustrate his point, Allen includes a shot of the latest dictator explaining the new rules of San Marcos: “From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish…(the crowd rumbles) Silence!…In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now…16 years old!” It’s clear from the beginning that Allen is satirizing everyone, most of all his own character.

Bananas represents an incremental progression of Allen’s burgeoning style. Even though Allen leans a little on outside narration as he did in Take the Money and Run to explain the story rather than show it, here he maximizes the inventiveness of the technique by bringing in Don Dunphy and Cosell as co-commentators. In the final scene, he maneuvers the conceit of the commentators into purely comedic territory where they’ve set up their cameras in the nuptial bed of Fielding and Nancy, a scene which one could say presages his next film, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. In any case, with the help of Lasser’s reliable comedic timing, Allen’s able to write a few of the funniest scenes of the movie between he and his ex-wife. A prime example is Fielding and Nancy’s break up scene, where Fielding is trying to get the equivocating Nancy to explain why she wants to break up:

Nancy: Something’s missing.
Fielding: I mean, I love you and you love me.
Nancy: No, I mean it’s not because I don’t love you.
Fielding: Then, you love me?
Nancy: No, I don’t.
(….)
Nancy: You’re immature, Fielding.
Fielding: How am I immature?
Nancy: Emotionally, sexually, and intellectually.
Fielding: Yeah, but what other ways?

And the scene keeps going, turning into one of the cleverest writing and acting sequences of Allen’s first two movies.

As director, writer (co-written with an old high school pal, Mickey Rose), and star of the film, Allen pursues his love of reference and homage unrestrained. In a demonstration of his high esteem for the silent era, he orchestrates a subway scene in which a gang of ruffians terrorizes the occupants of a subway car. One of the scoundrels is a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone, and the whole passage is one of physical comedy acted to a silent film-style piano riff. In another tribute to “Marxian” humor, near the end of the film, Allen executes a courtroom scene where he includes every slapstick gag imaginable, including a bit where he cross-examines himself. At some point in the melee, Fielding announces to the judge, “I object, your honor! This trial is a travesty. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.” Nothing’s missing but the cigar.

The writing in Bananas is not as intellectually ambitious as in Love and Death, which will follow in 1975; nor is it as emotionally mature as Annie Hall, in 1977. On the other hand, Bananas is both more risky and more efficacious at its risks than Take the Money and Run was. And, as Allen said of Bananas, “[It] was still a film where I only cared about being funny. I wanted to make sure that everything was funny and fast-paced.” In this, his second movie where he has full creative control, we see Woody Allen reach a mastery of emulation of the comedy classics, but he has yet to take that and make it completely his own. It’s similar to how painters used to go to school and copy the paintings of the great masters over and again until finally their own conceptions shone through. In Bananas, Allen proves his competency at adapting someone else’s book to screen, at recreating Marx Bros. like slapstick humor, and at paying homage to Bob Hope’s early characters, who are humorously cowardly in the face of duty – but the depth of the psyche and intellect of the filmmaker, Woody Allen, has yet to be wrought.

Woody Allen once said in an interview that when he first showed the executives of Palomar Films his first movie, Take the Money and Run, one of them leaned over about ten minutes in and asked, “Is the whole thing going to be like this?” And thus began one of the most illustrious, prolific, and celebrated film careers in history. Of course, Allen had been writing jokes professionally since he was a teenager, and had written and acted in three films previous to this – actually, he was by this point a household name in comedy; but this was the first film over which he’d been given complete creative control: he wrote it, directed it, and starred in it.

Take the Money and Run follows the life of Virgil Stockwell (Allen), a bumbling, well-meaning guy, who just happens to be living a life of crime – and a rather unsuccessful one at that. That being said, as one might expect, already in evidence is the classic Allen bravado shining through the self-conscious character he casts himself as. In and out of jail, Virgil tries to make ends meet by snatching women’s purses and robbing pet stores, when one day he meets Louise (named after his then current wife, Louise Lasser, who has a cameo at the end of the film) played by a sweet faced Janet Margolin. Virgil narrates upon meeting her, “I was so touched by her. I don’t know, after 15 minutes I wanted to marry her. After a half an hour, I completely gave up the idea of snatching her purse.” In an effort to make money so that he can settle down with Louise, Virgil attempts to rob a bank but is so nervous that he misspells the hold-up note, leading to likely the most famous scene in the movie, where the cashiers send Virgil to get the note initialed by the Vice President, and Virgil ends up with 15 bank employees standing around him, arguing over the spelling of the hold-up note.

The premise and plot are basic: Virgil falls in love and is, in the meantime, continually arrested for his inept robbery attempts. Most of the nuanced information the viewer receives is via Virgil’s narration, or mock interviews with people who have known Virgil, including his parents. Take the Money and Run is often credited as being the first mockumentary film ever made. Though Allen wields the mockumentary format here with unseasoned sensibilities, using it to allow himself the freedom of developing character through the proverbial telling instead of showing – a sin in Writing 101, as we all know – he soon brandishes these tropes with such a masterful hand that they become some of his trademarks.

A seed contains all the genetic qualities of the fully formed plant, and what we have here is an artistic seed. In Take the Money and Run, we see glimpses of most of Allen’s later tendencies. In evidence are, not only the model of the incompetent, unlucky-in-love lead character he will play many times in future films, but his love of directly or indirectly referencing other pieces of art, mentions of most of the themes he will build on for the rest of his career, and cinematic approaches that will become the hallmarks of his style.

Woody Allen is the James Joyce of cinema, delighting in making allusions to other films and pieces of art. For example, knowing Allen’s love of Russian literature (see Love and Death), some have posited that this film, with its confessional narration and theme of transgression, is a literalist spoof of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In addition, there is an almost sure reference to the critically acclaimed film Cool Hand Luke, released just two years prior to Take the Money and Run, in the chain gang scene, where the cold-hearted lead guard demonstrates to the men what will happen to them if they try to make a break for Florida. Not coincidentally, Cool Hand Luke features a frighteningly hardened guard who rules over a chain gang in Florida.

Allen also directly references another film by naming the psychiatrist “Julius Epstein,” the name of the screenwriter of the legendary film Casablanca. This may seem incidental except for the fact that when Take the Money and Run came out, Allen’s play, Play it Again Sam, a piece comedically based on Casablanca, was showing on Broadway. Allen delivers many other references as well, including the unexplained Groucho Marx glasses Virgil’s parents are wearing as disguise in their interview.

As a freshman in college, already having been a Woody Allen buff for many years, I took a short winter term class called “The Films of Woody Allen.” It was there for the first time that I noticed the obvious: all of his films contain the same basic thematic inquiries, and the way he addresses them are subtly (or unsubtly) altered and refrained from film to film. Years later, sometime in the middle of getting my M.F.A. in writing, I realized that his films are like sestinas, poems in which certain key lines are repeated and rotated throughout the poem. The primary themes that continually surface in his films are: fear of death; the psyche and psychoanalysis; the nature of objectivity vs. subjectivity; what happens after death?; is there a god?; if so, what is god like?; what is love?; can there be extended relationship without infidelity?; what’s the role of sex in love?; is religion valid?; what’s the function of art?; what’s the function of the artist?; what makes art “good”?; how does one find fulfillment in a life they know is temporary?; and what is morality, especially outside of the notion of god?. Occasionally, he dabbles briefly in political notions as well as some other less prevalent topics, but these are his most fervent inquiries. In Take the Money and Run, we see Allen introduce many of these issues, albeit in the most rudimentary slapstick forms.

We also see in Allen’s first full creative endeavor the seeds of approaches and tropes that he will use throughout the next four decades. The first approach we see is the use of an outside narrator, which is a tactic Allen uses in later movies such as Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Broadway Danny Rose, and Mighty Aphrodite. In Take the Money and Run, sometimes Allen sometimes becomes his own narrator, a trend of his, which continues in movies such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, Love and Death, and Hannah and Her Sisters. Also introduced in this film is the use of interviews, a device, which is used in many other films including Annie Hall, Zelig, and Husbands and Wives.

In the late 1960’s, not only were the use of these journalistic/ documentary conventions unusual in narrative film, which made them avant-garde, but they served a crucial function to Allen as story-teller. Whether Allen utilizes an outside narrator, an interviewee, or his own narrating voice, these conceits allow him to effortlessly furnish the viewer with extra information that may have been more difficult to convey with action or dialogue. It was also natural for a writer who’s fundamental art form is comedy to turn to this trope of narration as a platform on which to offer more jokes. Many of the brilliant jokes of his early movies find their way on to the screen via narration. Recall, for example, the opening of Annie Hall. It’s just a close up of Allen’s face as he recites this joke: “There’s an old joke – um…two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place s really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions.’ Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life – –– full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.” It’s simply more difficult (though definitely not impossible for Allen) to get stand-up comedy style humor into a dialogue sequence. He enjoys the same economy of effort with the interviews as an easy way to tell rather than show character traits and background information and deliver a few jokes in the meantime.

So there was Woody Allen, fledgling filmmaker, sitting with a movie that the executives hated. If he had given up, the world would be short some 40 films. Instead, he brought in editor Ralph Rosenblum, whom he credits as saving the film. Allen was smart enough to keep him on as editor for a string of subsequent movies, including Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death, and Annie Hall. As megalomaniacal as he’s been accused of being, he’s always known that to be the best, you must work with the best.

In the end, Take the Money and Run is a thoroughly original, absurdist film that ended up being nominated for four awards as well as breaking some theaters’ ticket sales records. It happens to be the first Woody Allen film my father ever showed me, so I have a soft spot for it. But for any film lover, it’s exciting to watch this first endeavor, already knowing what comes later. If one were to watch each of his films, one after the next (trust me, I did it in that film class), it would look like a time-lapse image of the development of Woody Allen – one film building on the next in style, theme, and execution. As his first movie, Take the Money and Run’s ambition is to be a funny film, not a great film, and it most often hits that mark. In the making of the next several films, Woody Allen slowly raises the bar on himself, as he shifts from just referencing artists (though he never stops doing that) to becoming one.

When I saw the preview for Rust and Bone, a French film directed by Jacques Audiard, my interest was immediately piqued. The preview was a sequence of striking images, scored by emotional music, with a subtext of evocative themes. By the end of it, I’d marked it in my head as a film I wanted to see but then suddenly realized that, even though I felt viscerally stimulated, I had no idea what the movie was about. I liked something there, even though what I got from it were scattered but pleasing fragments that didn’t seem to fit together. This was a foreshadowing.

Rust and Bone opens with Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) scavenging food for him and his young son on the train they’re taking to stay with Ali’s sister and brother-in-law in Antibes. Soon, he scores a job as a bouncer at a club and there meets Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), an Orca whale trainer. He saves her after she is hit by a man and takes her home where he finds out she has a boyfriend. Ali and Stephanie don’t see each other again until she calls him one desperate night after a whale training accident, which leads to the amputation of both of her legs. Seeing her as a conquest like any other girl, he accepts the call and they end up spending time together. He takes her swimming, the one activity, which seems to liberate her, and she accompanies him to Fight Club-style muscle fests where he earns a partial living from people betting on him.

Visually, the film is inventive and sometimes striking, alternating between watery blues, orange, grainy passages, and shots of, usually Cotillard’s character, as bleached-out bright light. A short way into the film, one realizes that they’re seeing a visual interpretation of “rust” and “bone,” and it’s genuinely beautiful at times.

The film is also sonically, artistically ambitious, playing especially with sounds of breathing, water, and music. Audiard constructs a sonically primal world, in which the characters live out the primary theme: men are beasts and women tame the beast – although, in the end, the film seems to say that the most pleasing specimens have a little of both the beast and the tamer in them.

In so far as the acting is concerned, the main characters all offer deft performances. Schoenaerts plays the self-absorbed cavemanesque Ali convincingly. He’s not afraid to be deadened, brutish and dislikeable, and it works. Cotillard, already a star of French and American cinema, steals the show. It would be difficult to be a more understated actress than Cotillard in this part. A couple times the director writes her into scenes in an overblown way, as when she’s supposed to dance around in her apartment in her wheelchair, but she as the actor is relaxed and submerged into the character throughout.

All this being said, the film falls short of its intention. The fundamental challenge of the film is that it’s based on a book in which the characters go on truly extreme physical and emotional journeys. It seems that the journeys are too profound and complex to be covered in this two-hour film. The most obvious testament to this theory being that Ali’s life-altering experience occurs 15 minutes before the film concludes, with not even close to enough time to believably demonstrate his ostensible transformation.

The secondary challenge to the movie is that, while both lead actors are wonderful inside of their own characters, they seem to completely lack alchemy together. I’d go so far as to say it was like they were acting in two separate movies, so distant did they seem from each other. Separately, they’re smoldering, but they don’t smolder to, or at, or with each other. To be fair, they are both playing characters who either have very little emotional content or struggle to suppress it. Nevertheless, that hardness should have created a friction and a jarring kind of chemistry. Instead, there was nothing. Each of them acted their characters side-by-side and just happened to be on the same screen together.

One could easily extrapolate that lack of synthesis between the characters to explain Rust and Bone as a whole piece. The cinematography and sound are lovely. The acting is true and compelling. The events of the story are gripping. But when you put the parts together, they don’t resonate with each other. It’s difficult to say if the film tried too hard or too little, but either way it falls apart.