The Center of the World is a Last Tango in Paris Kind of Movie;
There isn't much sex in mainstream American movies these days?and by sex I mean serious sex, sex that's about plot and characterization rather than giving teenagers a naughty eyeful. For that reason alone, The Center of the World deserves a certain amount of consideration. It's defiantly a Last Tango in Paris kind of movie, about a depressed millionaire dotcommer named Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) who hires a stripper named Florence (Molly Parker) to accompany him on a three-day vacation to Vegas. They spend the bulk of their time together in a fancy Las Vegas hotel room, talking about sex, having sex and sometimes not having sex and wishing they were. As long as they stick to the physical, they get along great. When they strive for something deeper?more boyfriend/girlfriend?all sorts of emotional complications bubble up.
Director Wayne Wang devised the story in collaboration with multimedia artist Miranda July and fiction writers Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster (Wang's collaborator on Smoke and Blue in the Face). Yet the film doesn't have a too-many-cooks feeling; it hangs together, and even when it overreaches, you sense the intelligence behind it. Which isn't to say that the central situation feels real. It doesn't?not always. The problem with Last Tango in Paris?one of the only problems, in my opinion, considering how much I love that movie?is that its central situation smacks too much of entertainment industry privilege. The plot finds an intellectual, middle-age widower (Marlon Brando) and a young single woman 30 years his junior (Maria Schneider) adventurously entering into an affair while promising never to reveal anything personal to each other, including names. But if you watch the film with the sound off, it looks like a jetset daydream in which well-off, glamorous people explore their sexuality and emotions while looking great, dressing beautifully and throwing lots of money around. The film's feelings connect with real life, but the context is pure movie fantasy.
Like Last Tango?and to a lesser extent, Leaving Las Vegas, which sometimes felt like Last Tango remade with a younger, impotent hero?Wang's film begins with a setup few of us can relate to (young millionaire pays a gorgeous stripper $10,000 to accompany him on a lavish trip to Vegas). The hero is younger, cuter and richer than most people (and definitely richer than most young dotcommers after the Nasdaq crash?an unfortunate fluke of financial history that the filmmaker could not have anticipated). The heroine is drop-dead gorgeous, and easily the smartest, most creative, most introspective and intellectually serious stripper around (she only strips to support her real love, rock drumming; we know she's a serious musician because she plays in a hard-edged, all-female thrash band, and she doesn't smile when she plays). None of this is as fantastic as Nicolas Cage's handsome young drunk with a huge severance package and Elisabeth Shue's carefully sculpted streetwalker in Vera Wang clothes. But it's in the same creative ballpark.
Fortunately, when the drama gets cooking, the star-flattering, audience-flattering, entertainment-industry-flattering surface melts away, and something like universal truth emerges. It's a quiet movie; it eschews big speeches for closeup reaction shots and fumbled attempts at cleverness. It's raw in many different ways. The sex is unvarnished and photographed without fanciness; the soundtrack allows for generous amounts of room noise. Wang's director of photography, Mauro Fiore, shoots the whole thing on various types of videotape, favoring higher-end equipment for the more dense and colorful early portions, then hauling out consumer model cameras for a flatter, paler, grainier look as the story unfolds and the emotions become more intense and dangerous.
This is the kind of movie where, if the actors aren't at the tops of their games, and if the director doesn't fully support them as they go places most of us wouldn't dare (actors are the crash test dummies of drama), the result can look lame and false. Most of the time, it doesn't. The Center of the World understands the central role negotiation plays in sex. Richard meets his dream woman at a strip club, where she gives him a lap dance that inspires a crazy idea: he'll invite Florence to Vegas and even offer to compensate her lost strip club wages to sweeten the deal. He doesn't say he wants a sexual adventure, but that's implied. Florence, no dummy, wrangles his price up to ten Gs, then lays down some ground rules: she gets her own room, she won't have to kiss him on the mouth, they won't talk about anything personal and they'll only get together for four hours each night.
But the psychological barriers the lovers erected crumble rather quickly. On their first night in Vegas, Florence makes a ferociously sensual entrance into Richard's room, dancing for him as a prelude to seduction, and is stunned to discover that she really digs the intense, almost childlike expression of awe on Richard's face. They have lots of sex, and later, Richard gets to indulge one of his most cherished fantasies (it's this film's equivalent of the butter scene in Last Tango). Once their relationship emerges from Richard's room, its illusory nature is exposed. Though they seem to be about the same age, Florence clearly has more experience (in sex and life) than Richard. When Richard tags along during a visit to see Florence's old friend Jerri (an alternately ripe, hard-bitten and damaged Carla Gugino, of Spin City and Miami Rhapsody), he flirts with her; then he appears to mistake Florence's intense interest for jealousy. Florence's reaction ultimately proves to be something closer to tactically camouflaged concern. She knows the newly emboldened Richard is doing a little sexual spelunking with Jerri, whose own life experience probably makes Florence's look tame?and he'd better be careful.
The central performances by Sarsgaard, Parker and Gugino are the movie, when you think about it: everything that's going on is happening in their faces, behind their eyes. Much of the movie's effectiveness stems from your willingness to open up to them as fully as they have opened up to the camera. Sarsgaard, so chilling as one of Brandon Teena's tormentors in Boys Don't Cry, does a startling 180 here. If you'd never seen him anywhere else, this film might have caused you to mentally typecast him as a lost, vulnerable, slightly damaged young nerd; taken together, the two roles suggest he can do just about anything. Parker's emotional intelligence raises Florence above the prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold cliche; she succeeds in making you think of Florence's profession as incidental to her predicament in this movie, when it's actually central. Gugino only has a few scenes but makes a powerful impression; she suggests a whole history for Jerri, an entire movie happening outside the margins of the one we're watching?a movie about a still-young woman who is desperately straining for respectability but can't get all those years of hard living out of her system.
Like the rest of the cast, Sarsgaard, Parker and Gugino operated mostly without prewritten dialogue, working out scenes with Wang in extensive rehearsals and improvising during shooting. I suspect this approach is largely responsible for what's good and memorable about the picture. Like the superb, largely improvised British realist drama Last Resort?which is still playing if you want to see it, and you should?The Center of the World proves that filmmakers who hire good actors and give them room to stretch can transcend contrivance and capture the pulse of life.
Framed
Rich girl gone bad: If you can't get enough of Andy Warhol and his Factory, you won't want to miss Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story, filmmakers Shelly Dunn Fremont and Vincent Fremont's biographical romp through the life of the title character, who was born to moneyed parents Richard and Honey Berlin, attended an elite Catholic school and went on to distinguish herself as the most famous naked socialite in America. Rejecting her appearance-conscious mom's concerns about looking thin and acting respectable, Berlin appeared nude in numerous Warhol photos and movies?including the endless (and endlessly involving) 16-mm split-screen epic Chelsea Girls, in which she shot speed through the leg of her jeans.
Berlin, now 60, held onto tapes of phone conversations with Warhol and continued to pursue an artist's life (her works include a collection of penis sketches). In interviews, she seems delightfully unrepentant about her adventures, though she still carries a huge load of unresolved anger about her controlling parents. Among the witnesses providing testimony and amusing anecdotes: John Waters, painter Larry Rivers and another great tabloid fixture, Patty Hearst.
Say what? Wall Street Journal film columnist Tom King had an interesting piece April 13 about actor Russell Crowe's bad behavior, and the effect it might or might not have had on his career ascent. But it danced around the question of whether Crowe is a star despite his hot temper, sexual appetite and working-class surliness rather than because of it. (I think it's the latter.) King compared Crowe (unflatteringly) to other top-salaried Hollywood "good guys," including Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson, whom King describes as "generally likable stars with a deft touch for the Hollywood game." Say what? Cruise is notoriously cagey about dealing with the press and the fans, and chooses publicists the way the Corleones picked footsoldiers?with an eye toward maximum defensive ruthlessness. Roberts never misses an opportunity to chide journalists for asking dumb or intrusive questions (always with a sweet smile, of course). And Mel Gibson was, for a long period, the proto-Crowe. Has King forgotten the 1985 "Sexiest Man Alive" interview in People, which found the star drunk and hostile in the desert? Or Gibson's countless antigay remarks over the years? Or his drunk-driving arrest?
Anybody who's read entertainment coverage in the last 15 years or checked in on Entertainment Tonight might have wondered why King didn't bring them up. This strikes me as yet another case of what I call Entertainment Weekly argumentation?formulating a sexy, promising thesis for an entertainment think piece in order to convince editors it's worth doing, then conveniently ignoring examples that disprove or complicate that thesis. Too many entertainment journalist (and critics) think assertions are the same thing as evidence. This isn't as embarrassing as David Denby's New Yorker column a few weeks ago in which the normally sensible critic described his first-ever trip to a new Manhattan megaplex in the half-horrified, half-awed tones of Humbert Humbert pondering the awful spectacle of suburban America. But it's close. These kinds of articles further the notion that critics and entertainment journalists inhabit a separate reality from the general public. A quick perusal of Lexis-Nexis or a once-a-month trip to see a film with paying customers should be enough to nip this tendency in the bud. Let's see if anybody's willing to try it.