DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Depression and anxiety forced Peter Sellers to spend much of his career trying to prove that he was more than just a funny guy. Even his most critically acclaimed roles, in Dr. Strangelove, or I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, didn’t give him the sense that he was proving himself as a great dramatic actor. As a result, he spent a great deal of time in the 70’s, when his career was flagging badly, working to get a film version of Jerzy Kosiński’s novel Being There on screen with himself in the lead role. The project eventually came together, with Kosiński penning the screenplay and cult director Hal Ashby behind the camera.
The result was a brilliant social and political satire, with a stunning performance by Sellers as Chance the Gardener that may have come as a shock even to those who already believed him to be in a class by himself based solely on his comedic work. Chance is a man with a simple mind who has lived his whole life working for a wealthy man here in D.C., never leaving the grounds of the house and filling his days with a steady diet of television when he’s not working in the garden. When his employer and guardian dies, Chance is suddenly homeless on the rough late-70s streets of D.C. Through an odd series of coincidences (his name is “Chance” after all), he is mistaken for an understated businessman, and unwittingly becomes an advisor to the powerful Washington elite, who search his odd mannerisms and homespun aphorisms for the economic and political metaphors they want to find in him. He becomes a national celebrity and is given an audience with the President, none of which appears to faze or impress him, furthering his mystique. Sellers’ performance is as subtle and sensitive as his Dr. Strangelove was wild-eyed and over-the-top, while Ashby hits a career peak even higher than Harold and Maude.
View the trailer.
Washington Film Institute screening tomorrow night at Napoleon in Adams Morgan. 8 p.m. (Happy Hour starts at 6:30), $10.
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Something must be in the water, as we’re being inundated with oddball metafictional films in which people are playing caricatures or thinly-veiled stand-ins of themselves or the filmmakers. There was Bruce Campbell‘s My Name is Bruce last week. Next month, Mickey Rourke stars as a wrestler whose self-destructive approach to his life and career may strike some as uncomfortably close to Rourke’s own personal trajectory. In Synecdoche, New York, it’s difficult not to view Charlie Kaufman’s protagonist, an anxiety-ridden playwright, as an analog for himself. And this week, it’s Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Muscles from Brussels himself, playing “JCVD”, an action hero (like Van Damme) who is getting older and in a clear career decline like Van Damme). What’s remarkable is that Van Damme is receiving some of the best reviews of his career (which isn’t saying much) for his work here, critics praising the actor for having the good humor to be more vicious to his own persona than critics ever have been (which is saying quite a lot). French director Mabrouk El Mechri keeps his palette grim and practically monochromatic, making the world look nearly as dingy and worn out as Van Damme himself, who finds himself losing custody of his kids, ATM cards getting turned down, and then accidentally mixed up in a bank robbery. How strange that Van Damme’s best shot at getting his career back on track is by portraying himself hitting rock bottom.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema.
