Inside ‘Arthur Miller’
There’s an eloquent handmade quality to “Arthur Miller: Writer,” filmmaker Rebecca Miller’s engagingly intimate portrait of her famous father. It’s a sense of pieces being fitted together, not unlike the furniture parts that the late playwright is seen shaping and finessing in his workshop — clearly one of his favorite places to be.
Gathered over a period of 20-odd years, the elements of the lovingly crafted documentary include home movies, archival photographs and illuminating interviews. There may be nothing new in the connections the film draws between “The Crucible” and Miller’s clash with McCarthyism, or between “Death of a Salesman” and the effects of the Depression on his family, but with its combination of kitchen-table informality and serious inquiry, it traces a compelling trajectory: a public intellectual’s inner life. Though it addresses Miller’s troubled relationship with Marilyn Monroe strictly from his perspective, the film doesn’t look away from the controversial way he turned their story into art.
The once-lionized author suffered a string of professional disappointments during Rebecca’s childhood, his landmark approach to socially conscious melodrama having fallen out of fashion.
However critics’ dismissiveness might have pained him, Miller proves to be endearingly philosophical about it on-screen. The writerly insights he shares are as penetrating as they are devoid of pretension.
Above all, it’s the warm, searching conversations between father and daughter, whether they’re seated side by side or she’s questioning him from behind the camera, that give the documentary its strong sense of poignant immediacy. — Sheri Linden
“Arthur Miller: Writer.” Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino.
Rich sheiks find love of falconry
It’s hard to single out just one image from Yuri Ancarani’s beautifully photographed experimental documentary “The Challenge” that stands out above the others, but one of the film’s first shots is especially memorable. On a journey to the desert for a falconry competition, one of the avian athletes is seen wearing an elegant hood and sitting on a fancy perch, while staring out the window of its owner’s private plane — a very different kind of “bird in flight.”
At no point in “The Challenge” does Ancarani attempt to explain anything about the falcon-obsessed Qatari sheiks he’s following for this film, or to describe their contests. The movie eschews narration and captions, and instead just strings together one stunning scene after another of inconceivably wealthy oil men indulging their exotic passions.
Footage of luxury SUVs driving through desolate landscapes — and opulently robed men sitting in tents watching big-screen TVs — makes it seem like “The Challenge” was filmed not just in another country but on another planet. When Ancarani cuts to POV shots of falcons in flight, the effect is magical.
Some more journalistically minded viewers may wish this movie had more to say about the politics and economics that allows Ancarani’s subjects to live so extravagantly, with animals they undoubtedly treat better than their underlings. But that’s the wrong way to think of “The Challenge.” This movie is more like a gallery exhibition of moving portraits — each more astonishing than the last. — Noel Murray
“The Challenge.” Not rated. In Arabic with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 7 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills, beginning on Friday, and at selected Laemmle theaters on Monday and Tuesday.