MOVIE REVIEWS
`Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin'
Not rated 1:25 HHH H
Iconic filmmaker Werner Herzog offers a globe-trotting tribute to an inspiring friendship with his heartfelt and thoughtprovoking new documentary “Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin.”
Herzog, an Oscar-nominated German writer, director, actor and documentarian, and Chatwin, a renowned British travel writer, were kindred spirits, sharing passions for histories and mysteries, walking and exploring, storytelling and myth-making.
When Chatwin died in 1989 at age 49 of AIDS complications, Herzog's “Herdsman of the Sun,” a documentary of the Wodaabe people of Africa's Sahel region, was one of the last things the writer ever saw. In turn, Chatwin on his deathbed gifted the filmmaker his beloved leather rucksack, which Herzog not only took with him on his own adventures around the world but also used as a prominent prop in his 1991 drama “Scream of Stone,” which featured a character based on his late friend.
More than 30 years after Chatwin's untimely death, Herzog memorializes him again in documentary form. However, since this is Werner Herzog we're talking about, it's less a straightforward biography than a planet-spanning homage to Chatwin's skill at turning “mythical tales into voyages of the mind.”
Using Chatwin's heralded books and obsession with nomadic cultures as a guide, Herzog and his crew journey from the rugged wilds of South America's southern tip to the lushly verdant Black Mountains of Wales to the harshly beautiful Australian outback, interviewing fellow explorers, Chatwin biographers and his widow along the way.
Dividing his documentary into chapters — and often featuring himself and others reading from Chatwin's books — Herzog describes his kinship with the acclaimed travel writer, with whom he shared a driving interest in “the search for strangeness” and “the nature of human existence.”
In addition to making abundant use of archival photos and footage, the filmmaker also chronicles his present-day travels in his friend's footsteps, from a cave in Patagonia where the discovery of the skin and bone of a prehistoric giant sloth first captured the Englishman's imagination as a child to Chatwin's exploration of Australian Aborigines' navigational “songlines,” which leads to an intriguing discussion about what knowledge should be universally available and what should be regarded as sacred secret.
Herzog's wandering documentary sometimes goes pretty far afield. But the stunning landscapes are lovingly captured by cinematographers Louis Caulfield and Mike Paterson, and composer Ernst Reijseger ensures that the film sounds as fascinating as it looks with his tantalizing score melding symphonic sounds and tribal chants.
“Nomad” is playing at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. For tickets and information, go to www.okcmoa.com/films. — Brandy McDonnell, The Oklahoman
`Tenet'
PG-13 2:30 HHH H
I went in fresh to “Tenet.” I didn't have any real sense of the plot, yes, but it's more that it had been some five months since I was last in a movie theater.
It's complicated, in a way, to
parse the experience. There's the feeling of being back in a movie theater, and then there's the sensations particular to “Tenet.” For Christopher Nolan, whose films build their conceptual architecture around the metaphysics of movies themselves, it's kind of one and the same. His movies are designed, from a molecular level, to unlock innate cinematic powers and glorify the almighty Big Screen — a lonely god these last few months.
For better and worse, “Tenet” is just a movie. It won't beat the virus and it won't single-handedly save movie theaters. It won't even really blow your mind. But for much of its 150-minute running time, Nolan's globe-trotting sci-fi riff on the spy thriller will provide a dazzling escape, one dense with singular imagery and intellectual puzzles. And, perhaps most vitally, it will give a cool, brutalist refresher of the movies' capacity for awe, for imagination, and, yes, for tiresome grandiosity. For the palindromic “Tenet,” it cuts both ways.
Naturally, “Tenet” opens on a crowded auditorium. At an opera house in Kyiv, just as the conductor is raising his baton, a barrage of bullets rings out and masked men take the stage. Outside, a squadron of covert American agents are stirred. They pick a local police patch for their shoulders, and one among them (John David Washington, known only as “the Protagonist” in the credits) maneuvers to rescue a man who sits in a closed balcony. He greets him with the coded phrase “We live in a twilight world.”
As he's trying to stop bombs from going off in the theater, an odd thing happens. Tussling with one of the terrorists, a bullet seems to fly backward into the gun. After being taken hostage and tortured, he blacks out. When he wakes up much later, he's told that he's been released from the CIA and been enlisted in a shadowy organization known as Tenet. The mission goes beyond borders, he's told. A Cold War — “ice cold” — is brewing. He's to try to prevent World War III and an apocalypse worse than nuclear holocaust.
The details of this secret war — who's on what side, what's at stake — take a while to unspool. But just as Nolan's last film, the gorgeously synchronized WWII survival tale “Dunkirk,” was arranged elementally by land, sea and air, “Tenet” is spliced between past, present and future. A heady genre movie that puts James Bond-like tropes through a collider, it's very much a companion piece to “Inception” (a heist movie with a sci-fi spin) and just as laden with continual explanation.
The central conceit here is that a rare mineral can reverse the entropy of objects. That means time travel, inverted weapons, car chases that speed both ways and the biggest blockbuster to ever look a little like the backward-running Pharcyde music video “Drop,” by Spike Jonze. These weapons are the “detritus of a coming war,” we're told; the future is attacking the past.
The Protagonist's journey brings him in touch with a British fixer named Neil (a delightfully knowing and especially dashing Robert Pattinson; you want him always to say more than he does), a Mumbai arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia) and ultimately a Ukrainian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). To reach the insulated Sator, the Protagonist finds an entry through his wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki, the film's most suave and affecting performer), an art dealer who has come to detest her husband.
“Tenet” lacks the elegant mastery of “Dunkirk” or the cosmic soulfulness of “Interstellar,” but it has a darkly grand geometry. As instruments in an abstraction, most of Nolan's protagonists verge on the hollow. Washington glides through the film with charisma and preternatural smoothness but his character's inner life goes unexplored. Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb in “Inception” wasn't so different, but the mission plunged directly into his subconscious. Nolan, a visionary filmmaker, can sometimes be too busy conjuring visions to build a character.
Time is Nolan's real protagonist, anyway. Its loss was the agony of “Interstellar.” A ticking clock, on three different temporal tracks, measured “Dunkirk.” In “Tenet,” it moves in circles: backward and forward like waves in the ocean. It's a distinctive characteristic of the movies, and it's one you can feel Nolan investigating and experimenting with. It's easy to imagine “Tenet” was born in an editing suite, while a shot was rewound and epiphany struck.
Time has grown strangely elastic during the pandemic (as have movie release schedules). Today, yesterday and tomorrow blur together. So it's some comfort that even still, Nolan's clock keeps ticking. — Jake Coyle, Associated Press
`Rebuilding Paradise'
PG-13 1:31 Not reviewed