Category Archives: Archived Movies

AT ANY PRICE

Grade: C

One supposes that a movie about an Iowa farm family needn’t—despite the usual crop—be corny. But Ramin Bahrani’s “At Any Price” doesn’t avoid the trap. An old-fashioned, fifties-style melodrama, it offers a host of plots and sub-plots, twists and turns that frankly never congeal—except to make a rather murky mess in the fields.

At its core the picture is a tale of father-son conflict. Henry Whipple (Dennis Quaid) presides over the family farm that he’s inherited from his stern, demanding father, Cliff (Red West). Henry has two sons, who he hopes will follow in his footsteps. But Grant (Patrick Stevens), the older of them, escapes as soon as he can—he barely appears at the start—and after graduating college goes off to climb mountains in South America rather than returning home. And the younger, Dean (Zac Efron), loathes the whole idea of taking over the place, as well as his father’s methods (Henry habitually tries to expand his holdings by approaching the bereaved at neighbors’ funerals and offering to buy them out). Instead Dean’s devoted to hitting the track in the county’s weekend stock car races, and nurtures the hope of getting on the professional circuit—and away from his father’s control.

Henry is not, in any event, a principled man. He’s having an affair with Meredith Crown (Heather Graham), a clerk in a local farm implement store who has a lusty sexual drive, betraying his long-suffering, supportive wife Irene (Kim Dickens) in the process. He’s always trying to best his smoother seed-selling competitor Jim Johnson (Clancy Brown), who’s stealing his customers—much to Cliff’s displeasure. (The inter-familial rivalry extends to the next generation, too, since Dean’s chief rival on the track is Johnson’s hot-tempered son Brad, played by Ben Marten.) And Henry is not only undercutting long-time renters like Dan Waller (Larry Brown) by buying farms out from under them, but is breaking his contract with the company that provides the genetically-modified seed he sells by illegally having leftovers from one year’s crop “scrubbed” by a neighbor (Chelcie Ross) in order to sell them a second time and pocket the proceeds.

And that’s not all going on here. Dean’s involved with sweet local lass Cadence (Maika Monroe) but Meredith has her eye on the boy, taking quick advantage of his depression after he loses a race that might have been his ticket to fame. Meanwhile Henry finds Cadence a help in his seed-selling business, even though her relationship with his son is under increasing strain. Henry also comes under investigation by his seed supplier for his scrubbing activities, and fears losing the farm as a result—something that his father reacts to with fury. Without going too far in the spoiler department, one character goes into a self-destructive spiral, and another is killed. By the end cover-ups have become the order of the day, and all the members of the Whipple family have to come to terms with what they’ve done and failed to do.

This is a pretty packed, lurid scenario, and while as director Bahrani generally underplays rather than opting for a broad approach, it still comes across as heavy-handed. And it leaves one with nagging questions, most notably what seems to be a complete absence of police when a store is robbed—its plate-glass window blown apart with a gun—or a resident disappears, becoming the focus of volunteer searches by large crowds.

Under the circumstances the performances are for the most part fairly subtle, though Bahrani and editor Affonso Goncalves tend to linger overmuch on the sequences in which a distraught Quaid worries over the problems he’s facing and Efron fumes over his unhappy lot. On the technical side, Michael Simmonds’ cinematography takes advantage of the locations in widescreen images that give a nice sense of place, and the other behind-the-camera contributions are solid.

One can admire “At Any Price” for addressing the issue of ethical lapses in contemporary culture by focusing on Middle America rather than the usual suspects—New York, Washington, California. But the narrative Bahrani and Hallie Elizabeth Newton have concocted simply proves too unwieldy and melodramatic to remain credible and moving.

BLANCANIEVES

Grade: B-

This isn’t your great-grandfather’s “Snow White,” but formally it certainly resembles the sort of movie he might have seen back in the day—a silent, black-and-white melodrama filled with heightened emotion and eye-catching use of light and shade. In that respect “Blancanieves” is essentially a cousin to “The Artist,” but it’s too strange and moody piece to replicate the success of that crowd-pleasing (and Oscar-winning) Parisian homage to early Hollywood filmmaking. Cinema buffs will find it an intriguing curio, though.

The setting is 1920s Spain, and the heroine a little girl named Carmencita (Sofia Oria), daughter of famed matador Antonio Villalta (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) and flamenco dancer Carmen de Triana (Inma Cuesta). When Antonio suffers a crippling injury at the horns of a bull in the ring, Carmen goes into labor and dies giving birth to the child, who’s turned over to her grandmother Dona Concha (Angela Molina) to raise. Meanwhile Antonio, confined to a wheelchair, foolishly weds Encarna (Maribel Verdu), the nurse who turns out to be more interested in his money than his companionship and fools around openly with the chauffeur Genaro (Pere Ponce).

Carmencita has a carefree childhood with her grandmother and her favorite pet, a scene-stealing rooster named Pepe, until Dona Concha dies and the girl falls under the control of her wicked stepmother, who becomes a Cinderella-like servant. But though she’s forbidden access to her invalid father, she sneaks into his room in one of the picture’s most entrancing scenes, and they develop a secret bond. No sooner does Antonio die, however, than Encarna directs Genaro to kill the girl (now played by Macarena Garcia). The sequence in which he attempts the deed is pretty terrifying, but she’s rescued by a travelling troupe of little people, who give comic shows as the Bullfighting Dwarves; and though she suffers amnesia as a result of her near-death experience, watching them leads her, now called Blancanieves, to remember the tips her father had given her, and she enters the ring herself, soon becoming a celebrity in her own right.

That attracts the notice of Encarna, now the very model of an ambitious pop-culture icon, and she plots to do away with the girl using a poisoned apple. She doesn’t quite succeed, however, and in a poignantly elegiac finale, the sleeping beauty is an attraction in a travelling carnival, lovingly tended by Jesusin (Emilio Gavira), the dwarf most devoted to her, while customers are invited to pay for the privilege of trying to awaken her with a kiss.

Obviously writer-director Pablo Berger has toyed with the element of the original tale, giving them a strongly Iberian cast and a tone very different from the Brothers Grimm. But most of the adjustments work well enough, juggling humor, pathos and menace to good effect, and Kiko de la Rica’s cinematography artfully employs the conventions of early twentieth-century filmmaking to give the film an entrancingly antique texture. The performances represent major contributions to the overall effect, with Oria and Garcia equally magnetic as the title character at different ages and Gavira nicely leading the colorful band of travelling players. Of course, as in a Disney cartoon, the quality of the villain is an important consideration, and Verdu’s extravagantly evil Encarna certainly fills the bill, with Ponce an able factotum in her malevolent plans.

As with “The Artist,” there’s a self-conscious artificiality to “Blancanieves” that keeps it from becoming a more than a cannily calculated stunt. But especially for those who appreciate actual silent films, it should prove an engaging one.