Movie Chat: Red Beard

Red Beard

At the yearly list party my friends and I had in February, we not only exchanged the normal, annual "Favorite Movies" list but we put together a group "All-Time Favorites List". Each of the seven of us wrote up a personal "All-Time Top Ten" and I compiled them into a "master list" so we could see where we were all on the same page (The Godfather) and where we went our own ways (I had two Howard Hawks movies on my list - no one else had any). The biggest surprise, though, was that while Kurosawa showed up on a number of lists, the only movie of his that got more than one mention was Red Beard, with two "votes".

I thought this was a little weird: I had never seen Red Beard, but, though I knew it was generally well-regarded, I'd never seen it praised so highly.

After watching it last weekend, I don't think it was weird at all to put it on an All-Time Favorite list and, now, I'd be more apt to think that what's really strange is that the movie doesn't receive more praise.

Well, maybe not so strange: we're used to giving his movies credit for their action scenes (The Seven Samurai), their poetic spectacle (Ran), their narrative complexity (Rashomon), or their simple but deeply-felt humanism (Ikiru), but the most impressive element of Red Beard might just be its psychological insight. And even more impressive: this insight is grounded in a specifically-drawn and nuanced social milieu. In other words, the overall experience is a lot like reading a big novel, but, unlike most "big novel" movies (like, say, The Godfather, The Leopard, or the Apu Trilogy), Red Beard works less by an accumulation of detail - where each incident, image, line gains greater meaning as we see how it fits, bit by bit, into the overall structure - and more through the density of each of its episodes.

In this post, I suggested that Kurosawa took the overt structural device of Rashomon and integrated it, more subtly, into Ikiru. Red Beard has a similar feeling: there are lots of neat structural/formal touches, but Kurosawa doesn't go out of his way to call attention to them. Each sequence is seems to be an example of a different kind of narrative technique that Kurosawa has mastered.

For example, in the first half of the film, there are a number of scenes where a character tells his or her life story. The scene where a patient's daughter explains why she waited so long to visit her dying father is done as a (masterfully-directed) monologue: Kurosawa focusing not only on the actress as she recites the tale of woe, but also using the contrasting reactions of the two doctors to develop the movie's main story. But, the next "life story" sequence, is done as a flashback (which itself contains a flashback), and seems to exist almost as its own little movie (a small romantic tragedy) within the larger one.

Though the project may not have been modest (it was a huge, expensive, and elaborate shoot), the product certainly feels modest. I got a sense from the movie of a director working at the height of his powers, yet not trying to show off or to overreach (compare and contrast this to work by other world-class directors: Bertolucci, Spielberg, Lean). The movie's story deals with the importance of learning humility, and part of the movie's appeal is that it seems to approach the material with humility.

Movie Chat: Ikiru

Ikiru

Here's an experience I've had a number of times: I'll feel that I need to read a "classic" 19th Century/early 20th Century novel, I'll pick up a copy, get almost overwhelmed by how daunting I imagine reading it will be, jump in anyway, and end up being surprised at how non-daunting - how engaging, interesting, pleasurable, and, even, yes, fun - the book actually is. (The big example is The Magic Mountain). At this point, I should know better, but I may be suffering from a kind of intellectual hangover from my grad school days, where we all tried to keep concepts like engagement, interest, pleasure, and fun out of any arts and culture discussion.

Anyway, Ikiru was one of the few Kurosawa movies I had never seen and I think I was avoiding it for similar reasons to why I was initially wary of starting something like The Magic Mountain: I knew it was a serious classic, that it dealt - directly - with Big Themes (what does "living" really mean?), and that it was widely-praised by film critics and scholars who tended to write about it using a reverential tone.

I finally watched it this week and it was The Magic Mountain experience all over again. My expectations of a stuffy, fussy masterpiece were dashed within the first minute. This is a Big Theme movie, but Kurosawa's handling is sharp and specific, and the movie has an ironic tone that keeps the sentimentality inherent in the material at bay. It's like a more somber, more cynical, but, because of that, more spiritual version of a Frank Capra movie. Kurosawa isn't selling anything like Capra is in It's a Wonderful Life, although, as I was watching Ikiru, that was the movie I kept thinking of. (They're both, after all, about "little" men, facing death, looking for meaning in their life.)

A couple of other thoughts:

1. I've always felt that, while it's definitely a masterpiece, Rashomon is a little stuffy. (I've always described it to friends as the favorite movie of English Lit. Profs). What's so neat about Ikiru is how Kurosawa takes the overt, in your face device of Rashomon - differing perspectives on the same event - and brings it to bear much more subtly. I.e., the way that different characters - and, at times, the audience - aren't able to get a handle on Watanabe's motivations.


2. Shimura's performance is amazing. He has one of the most intense non-presences I've ever seen in a movie. I love that in the last act, once Watanabe has started taking action and giving meaning to the life he has left, Shimura does absolutely nothing physically to mark this change. Watanabe remains his small, unimpressive, cowering self. His drive, determination, and spiritual rebirth are almost completely conveyed through Kurosawa's use of close-ups.


3. There are so many great sequences in the film, but if I had to choose a favorite: the shot where Watanabe is walking out of the hospital in silence, seemingly all alone. He steps into the street, almost into the path of an oncoming truck, and the sound comes back in as the camera pulls out to reveal the busy city life all around him. It's a showy moment, but also one full of poignancy and real insight into how people deal with awful news.


4. I'm glad I waited to see this movie (even if some of my reasons for waiting were kind of silly). There was a time when I tried to see at least one movie a day (and sometimes managed to get through three or four), and I'd go through the film canon, checking off things that I "needed" to see. Nowadays, I kind of regret the rate at which I consumed Kurosawa, Altman, and Hawks movies, because, now, there are few left that will ever be new to me. Also, I think I have a greater capacity to appreciate a movie like Ikiru than I did seven years ago. (I'm not joking when I talk about saving Bergman for when I'm older.) And I like that I have a whole week to sit and think about this movie before I put the next classic into the DVD player.