Hal Holbrook is brilliant

Outside of puppies being thrown off of cliffs, is there anything more sad than a lonely elderly man? In Into the Wild Hal Holbrook plays Ron Franz, a man that the real-life Christopher McCandless met on his trek towards Alaska. Ron embodies everything that Chris (played by Emile Hirsch) is trying to get away from: responsibility, maturity, family, tradition. And yet, through the course of their interaction, Franz becomes a kindred spirit, looking out from his years of experience and trying to help Chris find his path.

But oh, how heartbreaking is Hal Holbrook's performance! He infuses Franz with a quiet dignity and as well as a sharp sense of loneliness. He makes you feel like Chris should stay (as opposed to venturing into the wild) if only to become family to this man.

Maybe because its so rare to see an 80-year old on screen, I noticed every line on his face, the squint of his eyes and his shuffling steps. When he recounts to Chris that he lost his wife and child in an accident years ago, all of the shallowness and futility of Chris's treks to avoid civilized life, to avoid family and attachments, are brought to light. I don't think its what the movie was trying to say, but I came away from it feeling like the real answers lie with men like Franz who quietly live on despite pain and sorrow.

I don't know what happened to the real Ron Franz, and I don't know how true to life Holbrook's performance was. All I know is that he transformed the movie for me, bringing me to tears. His performance completely and utterly broke my heart. And he lost the Best Supporting Actor to Javier Bardem. I hope that he has another role like this soon; I would hate to see an actor as good as this not get his due.

Bjork + Michel Gondry = Brilliant

Bjork's song "Bachelorette" is tremedous. With an arrangement that is both orchestral and modern, topped by her phenomenal voice, even if the video had consisted of nothing more than her singing in front of a backdrop of trees it would have been amazing. But instead this video takes her beautiful song and transcends to a new level of interpretation.

Directed by Michel Gondry, himself a master of realities skewed and reassembled, the video is a story within a story within a story, one that you could watch countless times and each time construe new meanings, new messages, new realities folding in upon themselves.

It starts out with Bjork, forest sprite that she is, in old black and white film digging in a forest. Her vioce over tells us how she found a book that started writing itself. It says "One day I found a big book buried deep in the ground." The words fill up the page as her story continues. Doing "exactly as the book" tells her to, she gets on the train, takes the book to the city, finds a publisher who loves the book and next thing you know, her book, with her own face on the cover, is being published. In hardback. On a printing press. And she and the publisher fall in love, which is subtly communicated by a still photo of them together. And everyone on the subway is reading her story.

Now the subject of some public interest, she and her new love meet with a producer and next thing you know "My Story" is on the marquee at an old-school theater, and based on the lights and the crowd its opening night. As her lover watches from the audience she acts out the story by opening the book and reading from it as the words appear on a forest backdrop behind her. The events in the first part of the video, her taking the train to the city, arriving and walking the streets, her finding the publisher and showing him her book, all take place again, but with fake sets on a smaller scale. Even the man playing the publisher in this version is a smaller version of the original man, wearing an outfit identical to the one the real publisher wears in the audience.

After they meet with the producer in a smaller office, the walls drop behind him and the "play" part of her story unfolds on the stage, but to do so, they've constructed a smaller version of the play with the audience included on the stage so that now there are two audiences watching, one real and one actors, two publishers/lovers are watching, and Bjork is once again acting out her story within her story, but this time on a smaller stage. Again, all of the events from her story unfold on a smaller scale, but its intercut with paparazzi footage of Bjork and her lover quarreling and a tabloid with the headline "Its Over!" Her lover looks despondent in the audience. And the words on the pages of the book begin to disappear.

And it happens yet again. The story within a story within a story unfolds with still smaller sets and still more actors. And the actor/publisher begins to look confused and suspicious. And the publisher/lover from the original audience turns into a tree. As the words on the pages of her book disappear, Bjork rushes from the stage and finds that on her set everything is turning to trees and forest: the actors, the audience, the sets. In the final room she enters, the branches of the trees are reaching out to take her under and her book is engulfed by forest.



What does it mean? Was the only truth the forest where she started? Or did her story become so complicated that she had to return to the forest to locate it again? I cannot say. But I love this video because it reminds me of these two mirrors that were hung facing each other in my grandparents' house. When I would look into one mirror I would see reflected in it the mirror behind me as numerous mirrors, each catching a different, smaller and smaller glimpse of the mirror across. It felt like infinite universes were opened within them, even if each of those universes was only a reflection of another.