With the movie scene currently dominated by so much dismal trash like Couples Retreat, Zombieland and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, it would be a treat to welcome an artistically viable valentine to the most dynamic city in the world with a huge star-studded cast. New York, I Love You is not it.
An eclectic group of 11 directors with varying degrees of talent play global leapfrog, skipping and jumping from Chinatown to Central Park to Greenwich Village to Coney Island to helm 11 overlapping stories about the Big Apple; it was completed in eight weeks. (A 12th, Scarlett Johansson, has been eliminated, for reasons never explained. Maybe her little vignette was too boring and empty to include, but it couldn’t be less satisfying or more inconsequential than some of the others included here.) This is the second in a continuing series of movies dedicated to the unifying theme of love in big cities from producer Emmanuel Benbihy (Paris, je t’aime). Next up at bat: Rio, Shanghai and Jerusalem, in what you might seriously call a true definition of vay izmir. The New York rule: Each director had a deadline of two days to complete his segment. The result is every bit as truncated and zigzaggy as you might imagine. The whole thing looks like it was edited with pinking shears.
Horrible, streaky, dizzying camera work leads you across the bridge into the city by taxi while two passengers argue about how to get to Brooklyn. The driver throws them out of his cab. In Chinatown, actor-director Wen Jiang, who co-starred with Gong Li in Red Sorghum and is often called “the Robert De Niro of China,” tells the tale of a scruffy slacker pickpocket (Hayden Christensen) who follows a girl into a cafe, returns her stolen cell phone and gets into an argument with her boyfriend (Andy Garcia), whose wallet he has previously pilfered. Next, India’s Mira Nair enters the diamond district to film an encounter between a Hasidic bride-to-be (Natalie Portman) and a Hindu diamond merchant (Irrfan Khan), whose cultural differences find a shared common ground as they talk about everything from food restrictions to her shaved head. On the Upper West Side, a British musician (Orlando Bloom) works intensely to finish a score for an animated film, staying in touch with the outside world through cell phone calls from the director’s assistant (Christina Ricci), who insists he read two novels by Dostoyevsky in order to understand the project. He’s confused by this strange request, but when she shows up at his dark, grungy apartment to help him with his creative task, he learns a whole new meaning of Russian literature. Directed by Japan’s Shunji Iwai, who knows how to make two minutes feel like War and Peace.
The whole thing looks like it was edited with pinking shears.
The best story in the film comes from Yvan Attal, the Israeli-born French director and husband of gruesome-looking actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. It focuses on a fast-talking Soho pickup artist (Ethan Hawke) who puts the make on a sexy married woman (Maggie Q), without knowing she’s a professional hooker. Mr. Hawke’s seduction techniques are both charming and hilarious, giving the lie to the theory that Manhattan hustlers, from Times Square to the meatpacking district, have all the answers before you can even ask the questions. Moving uptown to Central Park, on the day of his senior prom, a heartbroken, lovesick 17-year-old kid (Anton Yelchin) goes to a pharmacist (James Caan) to buy condoms. The old man proposes the boy do a good deed for humanity by taking his crippled daughter (Olivia Thirlby) to the prom in her wheelchair. The dour mood shifts like a lightning strike after the dance, when they are forced to walk home through the park. The kid gets the romantic surprise of his life when the pitiful girl unexpectedly trains him in the nuances of handicapped sex. Little does he know she’s an actress, preparing for a role. In the most pretentious and incomprehensible vignette of all, written by Anthony Minghella, interrupted by his death and finished by Bollywood success Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), the great Julie Christie plays a retired opera singer who checks into a posh hotel on the Upper East Side and shares a glass of Champagne with a crippled bellhop who brings her violets (Shia LaBeouf). He throws himself out of the window to his death, but when she reports it to the hotel manager (John Hurt), the body has disappeared. Before the weirdness ends, the suggestion is apparent that everything has either happened in the woman’s past or been a figment of her imagination. Pure twaddle.
There’s more, in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of pointless brushes with destiny. Two distraught lovers (Drea De Matteo and Bradley Cooper) speed toward one another across Manhattan, one by subway, the other on foot, as they try to figure out if their one-night stand might produce the same sparks the second time around. Cult director Allen Hughes and writer Xan Cassavetes, daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, collaborated on this one, which pants with energy and pace, if not content. Actress Natalie Portman returns, in the role of debut director, to frame the story of a black baby sitter who raises eyebrows as he escorts his charge, a pink and pretty all-American little girl, through Central Park on a sunny afternoon. Two housewives praise him for being a great male nanny, but when he returns the moppet to her mother at the end of the day, he turns out to be a ballet dancer—and the child’s real father.
And so it goes, with characters from one episode sometimes rubbing elbows with participants from another. The hooker who left Ethan Hawke on the curb in Soho drops off her lingerie in a Chinese laundry and is shocked when the next customer (Chris Cooper) speaks perfect Cantonese. On the boardwalk at Brighton Beach, Abe (Eli Wallach), an old man recovering from a broken hip, is doomed to endure the nagging of his annoying, mean-spirited wife of 63 years, Mitzie (Cloris Leachman). She’s the worst, but she’s all he’s got. The movie bounces back and forth between these characters like a game of table tennis. The vignettes are like a collection of New Yorker short stories, too often with little or no literary or cinematic trajectory, and almost always too fragmented to add up to anything substantial. There isn’t one that I would call involving enough to engage the emotions. The goal is to paint a colorful canvas of a sprawling metropolis with an ever-changing scenario thanks to a constantly fluctuating population. Unfortunately, it’s a portrait of “the city that never sleeps” that often needs a NoDoz. The very nature of New York’s vastness as a melting pot of contrasts makes it a natural for a movie like this, but it’s the movie’s downfall, too. So many stories to choose from, but hard to connect the dots.
The only thing New York, I Love You really proves is how difficult it is, in today’s culturally bankrupt film industry, for good actors to find jobs.
When Amelia Earhart, the world’s most famous aviatrix, disappeared in mid-air July 2, 1937, somewhere over the Pacific between New Guinea and a Howland Island refueling station after 22,000 miles into the first solo flight around-the-world, she became the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation history. Why has it taken so long to get her story on the screen? Shirley MacLaine tried in vain for years, and others experienced the kind of daunting challenges that could only be equaled by Amelia herself. Here, at last, is the biopic we’ve been waiting for, neatly wrapped up in a broad but sketchy screenplay by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, directed by India’s Mira Nair, and starring diligent, indefatigable two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. It has beautiful cinematography, a star performance that is shocking in its authenticity, a careful eye for nuance and detail, and an irresistible blend of action and romance that should spell automatic success. I am sad to report that the one thing Amelia doesn’t have is excitement. The real Amelia had gonads. Amelia has none. It’s a respectable film that is too meticulous to be dull, but the way Ms. Swank plays her, she’s an icon so aware of her self-important image she couldn’t be blasted out of her complacency with a hydrogen bomb.
This Amelia is a spirited, dauntless, reckless woman with blinders on, but curiously unemotional even in the face of the ultimate crisis. When she runs out of fuel and faces her own mortality, her tough, heavy-drinking and basically unshakable navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) sweats, shakes and starts praying. But Amelia is as stoic as Lincoln. You want to pinch her. The light dawns. Maybe it’s this sense of marble-faced, dispassionate tranquility that made a cinematic dossier on the life of Amelia Earhart so resistant to adaptation in the past. There is evidence here that despite of her heroics, she just wasn’t the stuff of movie heroines. You don’t really learn much about her growing up in Kansas. You just know she’s in love with the freedom of flying (cut to birds), the independence of the sky (cut to clouds) and the beauty of airplanes (other girls were attracted to boys; Amelia hung out in hangars. Following the success of Lindbergh, she found the key to fame in a man’s profession when she was sponsored by eccentric publishing tycoon George Putnam (Richard Gere) to become the first lady pilot to cross the Atlantic but got no further than a segment from Boston to Newfoundland. The movie chronicles the weather problems and near-death escapes from open doors that would have sent other women to the nearest secretarial school for safety. Not Amelia. On her first solo Atlantic crossing in 1932 from Boston to Ireland, she landed by mistake in a sheep pasture in Wales, but it resulted in world publicity, dinner at the White House, endorsements for Eastman Kodak, a series of best-selling books, her own brand of Amelia Earhart luggage, a line of fashion styles at Macy’s, and a close, lasting friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones), whom she took for midnight rides in the cockpit. Idolized, celebrated and toasted as “Lady Lindy”, she made enough money to finance her flying expeditions and purchase the love of her life—the famed twin-engine, orange and silver Lockheed L-10 Electra airplane in which she eventually disappeared in 1937. She believed in herself to the exclusion of sex, marriage, and the distraction of human relationships, but finally managed to have two affairs—with the controversial Putnam, whom she reluctantly married in 1931, and with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), aeronautics executive and the father of Gore Vidal. Both affairs had to be predicated on the promise of independence and a minimum of emotion. (Amelia loved her Electra more than her husband or her lover.) She would not rest until she flew around the globe, although many women pilots had died trying it. Despite faulty landing gear, electrical storms, sleep deprivation and other health risks she and Fred Noonan left Miami in June, 1937 backed by Putnam’s love, loyalty and money. Driven and determined to prove something to the world—and to herself—Amelia almost made it, ignoring Noonan’s advice, taking off from Calcutta in a monsoon , and shrugging off her detractors’ accusations of being a crazy, irresponsible, foolish, fame-seeking celebrity. Based on this movie’s research, you begin to agree. Halfway between New Guinea and California, the radio transmitter went dead, cutting off all signals, and a dead battery in the U.S. Navy signal transmitter made it impossible to her to receive any incoming instructions. It was the last anyone heard of Amelia Earhart. They’ve been looking for her ever since.
Lots of facts, lots of calendar entries, and a computer full of information from the files of the U.S. Aeronautical Board provides the necessary tools for a documentary, but not enough heart-pounding adrenalin for a tragic historical film biography. There is so little warmth in the character of Amelia that I’m not sure I like her very much. I liked the movie a great deal more, in spite of its shortcomings, but the most amazing thing about it is Hilary Swank. With short russet hair, a nose covered with freckles and a total abstension from makeup, she looks exactly like the subject. Then, miraculously, when you see actual newsreel footage of the real Amelia Earhart, she looks so astoundingly like Hilary Swank I thought I was seeing double.