Eyes on the Critics' Prize: Safe

During the latter half of the 1990s, when my movie habit was really entering its mainlining stage, the Boston Society of Film Critics was the most excitingly off-consensus of the major American critics' groups, which was a particular pleasure to me because Boston is where I was living at the time. I have written before about my love for this group and their invigorating choices during this period, made all the more interesting by the lists of people who almost won during those years (like Katrin Cartlidge and Tilda Swinton in 1997, running close behind Helena Bonham Carter for very offbeat projects, and way out in front of Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Julie Christie).

The first Boston citation that really made me sit up and take notice of the group, during the first year I was attending school and absorbing cinema in that city, was the Best Cinematography prize for Alex Nepomniaschy's lensing of Safe in 1995. That season, the bulk of the prizes were being posted to Shanghai Triad, a typically dazzling light-show from the Zhang Yimou factory. The Oscar eventually went to the emerald greens, flying dirtclots, and battlefield immersions of Braveheart. At a stage in my movie education where "best cinematography" still meant "prettiest pictures," the Boston crowd's recognition of Safe's intimidating symmetries, its freezing pastels, and its wide-angle hyperbolizing of banal Valley interiors was a real wake-up call. Clearly, I would need to rent the movie as soon as the VHS bowed (!), motivated not just by a plotline that sounded so nervy and elliptical but by a panel-certified promise of visual imagination.

Granted, the indelible visuals of Safe have a great deal to do with the director's labors of framing the shot and placing the camera. How much this prize ought to have been shared between Nepomniaschy and Haynes is up for debate, yet it's notable that no other Haynes film has really looked like Safe, not even in the moments of Velvet Goldmine (shot by Maryse Alberti) or of Far from Heaven, I'm Not There, or Mildred Pierce (all shot by Ed Lachman) that evoke the antiseptic domesticities or the deoxygenated atmospheres that are so crucial to the earlier film. Those tropes get a very particular and brilliantly effective workout in Safe, and all the more so since the film was made for almost nothing, inside relatives' houses and a lot of other existing, creatively marshaled locations. Beyond the 2001/Clockwork Orange-style vertical lines, flat planes, and rectilinear severity of so many shots, and beyond the Fassbinder-ish way that Nepomiaschy and Haynes frame characters within nested boxes and under flat light (such that even casual encounters feel depersonalized and stagy), look how often the air just hangs there in Safe. Julianne Moore's line readings constantly suggest that Carol is being asphyxiated, but for reasons that make sense if you've seen the film, we have to feel that Carol is definitely getting air, and that something weird might be in that air.

There's a subtly frizzy quality to the light in Safe—making sunrays and pools of color diffuse a bit even in brightly lit rooms and sharply lensed shots. This lighting casts a slight blur in the women's locker room, the hair salon, the living room with the wrong-color couch, the sitting room with its DNA-shaped staircase, and even the "restorative" ceramic igloo where Carol eventually winds up. This quality of the light, not dry but not damp, not gaseous so much as atomically dense, makes the airspace in Safe matter in an almost literal sense, holding its own against the man-made structures and objects that are made so conspicuous in Haynes's shots. Carol moves through a vacuous, plastic universe, and later proceeds to an ostensibly cleansing, fresh-air retreat, but in all of them, she is constantly and unnervingly touched by vaguely visible, vaguely palpable molecules. What are those molecules? What do they bear within them or convey between them? Is there something inside them that makes Carol sick? (All the white noise in the sound design immeasurably assists this quietly creepy dimension of the lighting schemes.)

Nepomniaschy frequently has to help us locate Carol within very long and wide-angled shots, particularly by the standard of most interior shooting. Yet at the same time, Carol White is the last person in the world who should attract a spotlight, or a key light, or a backlit halo, which would feel all wrong for this profoundly recessive woman. Nepomniaschy is really ingenious, then, at helping us pinpoint Carol without violating the invisibility and insubstantiality that are fundamental to Haynes's and Moore's conception of her, using geometries within the frame or the softest caress of color or glow to highlight her when necessary, just the littlest bit. In other scenes where the camera is closer, as when Carol attends the allergist's office, the ugly, fluorescent lighting of the space is somehow just soft enough around Carol that we feel some compassion for her, some human weight and latent loveliness in her body. In this way, lighting itself extends an invitation to empathize, counteracting the institutional chill that encases her (including, for some viewers, the chill of the script itself, though Haynes's writing doesn't register that way with me). Something impalpable in these shots provokes us to worry and hurt for Carol, not mock her as a Barbie doll, or reject her as a zombie, or think of her only as a rhetorical stand-in for ourselves. Nor do we just sit there, helplessly perplexed as we might well have been by this soft-spoken San Fernando cypher. The light warms Carol as much as possible, even as it refrigerates her. I love, by the way, how Nepomniaschy allows Moore her freckles in scenes like these, more so than a lot of D.P.'s have done, and he doesn't adopt the easy strategy of making Moore's natural pallor register melodramatically as a signal of dangerous anemia.

Equally marvelous are Safe's shots in daringly low light: the overhead sex scene between Carol and her husband, the late-night prowl in the garden, the testy marital exchange across a mile-wide bed, the final straight-to-camera shot. In these moments, little except the crest of a cheekbone, the angle of a brow, or the copper sheen of her badly permed curls stands between Carol and a kind of Stygian oblivion. That such details communicate from within such broad, wide, grayed-out canvases, and that Carol's last, indelible lines ("I love you... I love you...") resonate as both encouraging and harrowing from within this world of shadow, have a lot to do with Moore's and Haynes's genius. But again, some of the credit is due to the precise calibrations of pessimism and hopeful sympathy that the cinematography invests in Carol's anxious days and in her waning, bruise-colored nights.

Safe's micro-budget miracles and nifty visual tricks don't stop here. Maybe that disastrous baby shower gets a little too pink/orange toward the end of the sequence, but there's a nice against-the-grain kick to any LA sunset that's allowed to look like lox that's been sitting too long at the buffet. I also love how the potted palms in the corners of those baby-shower shots don't remotely suggest a cute, predictable oasis of greenery and fresh air. If anything, they look brackish and black-leafed, as though the plants have got environmental illness, too, but like so much else in Nepomniaschy's shots, the effect isn't so strong that you notice right away. In general, Nepomniaschy cooperates well with the movie's smart production design, delicately highlighting props, shapes, and other visual triggers that make a suburban kitchen look subliminally close to a therapeutic center, or that foster a rhyme between a living room and a hospital room. The images guide our eyes in these and other ways, despite an overall aesthetic and a thematic framework that absolutely require the austere dehumanization of the film. The camera can't look like it's guiding us, or gratifying us at all, or even speaking our language.

Nepomniaschy hasn't had nearly the career one would project for the guy who made Safe look like a million bucks, despite having nothing but nickels to work with. He gave Joe Carnahan's Narc a nicely enervated texture and tint, but there's not much in it you haven't seen in other policiers. He filmed Julia Stiles falling in love with a prince, Drew Barrymore with a teacher, and a multi-culti group of high-school students with Antonio Banderas's dancing. He was the second-unit photographer on Country Strong and on most of D.J. Caruso's movies. I have no idea what to make of this successful but undistinguished résumé, but clearly, the most important signs of Safe's legacy fall elsewhere than the D.P.'s own filmography. I have thought a lot about Nepomniaschy's work in Safe while noting the rise of recent indie phenom Jody Lee Lipes, whose lensing of the apartment in Tiny Furniture recalled the deadening homespaces of Safe, but just a bit more preciously. His low-lighting of Martha Marcy May Marlene is often clever or evocative, and a few times, as in the swimming/diving scene, extremely resourceful, yet his images don't "stick" with me in the same way, and his visual strategies for coaxing inchoate, internalized trouble out of Elizabeth Olsen's remarkable face seem just a shade coarser and more obvious than how Nepomniaschy's camera interacts with Moore's equally remarkable face. Even the images I think I know best in Safe continue to pay new dividends the longer I dwell on them. I'll never know why Nepomniaschy doesn't have more filmmakers begging to work with him, but I'm glad he has one critics' prize to call his own, in recognition of one of the best and best-lensed American movies of its decade.

Previously in this series: Dead Ringers ('88)

My Lunch with the Boston Film Critics

Fourth only to the oil still geysering out of BP's well, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and the retirement of Amanda Bynes, the ranking crisis in the world today is that the website for the Boston Society of Film Critics currently has "incomplete" winner information listed for both 1988 and 1989. Normally I would find a way to clench my jaw and power through this kind of setback, but as you know, I recently had the movies of these two particular years on the brain, and more than that, the BSFC is one of my absolute favorite film bodies anywhere.

Boston was the breeding ground for everything I came to know about cinema, during four collegiate years in which I haunted all the great theaters of that city: the Brattle, the Coolidge Corner, the Harvard Film Archive, the dearly departed Chéri with its huge single screen, and especially the Landmark Kendall Square, where I regularly stayed for longer spans of time than the paid workers did. During these years of discovering movies, the BSFC made gorgeously unexpected and catholic choices in their awards: they Best Picture'd Out of Sight before the NSFC thought of it, they thought gloriously outside the commercial box on Best Foreign Film selections like Taste of Cherry (which I had seen on the big screen at Coolidge Corner, and then again at the Harvard Film Archive), and showed great discernment and prescience in giving their 1998 Best Actress prize to then-unknown Samantha Morton for her lacerating work in Carine Adler's Under the Skin, also cited as the year's best debut feature. Nathaniel recently reminded us that 1998 wasn't the easiest year to find stellar Best Actress candidates, and the BSFC always came through in a clutch. The year before, Helena Bonham Carter very deservingly won for The Wings of the Dove, but even though runner-up information isn't as easy to find on the Web as it once was, I remember that she barely pipped Katrin Cartlidge in Career Girls and Tilda Swinton in my beloved Female Perversions (screened at the Landmark Kendall Square). Those are the sorts of gutsy choices that can win me over in perpetuity, and that's why the BSFC joins the New York, Los Angeles, and National Film Critics societies as the only film critics' organizations whose annual citations I archive on my website.

So, during my lunch break, since I was already in the library hunting down Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption, et al., I popped over to the microfiche room to get to the bottom of the missing BSFC winners' lists in 1988 and 1989. I realize that precisely no one is waiting for this info, but since IMDb currently isn't accepting updates to their Awards pages, I figure there is some sad Googler out there who will want this info, which I have already passed along to the BSFC itself. Maybe one of you kids can set the record straight over at Wikipedia. Forthwith:

Boston Society of Film Critics, 1988

Picture: Bull Durham
(see how smart they are?)

Director: Stephen Frears, Dangerous Liaisons
(snubbed by the Academy, but fêted here)

Actress: Melanie Griffith, Working Girl
(disappointing, since all sites erroneously list the superior Susan Sarandon in BD)

Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(extremely well-played, BSFC!)

Supporting Actress: Joan Cusack, Married to the Mob, Stars and Bars, and Working Girl
(just the kind of body of work one likes to see recognized)

Supporting Actor: Dean Stockwell, Married to the Mob and Tucker: The Man and His Dream
(lots of critics' prizes that year for Stockwell)

Screenplay: Ron Shelton, Bull Durham
(couldn't have done better than that)

Cinematography: Sven Nykvist, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(again, well-played)

Foreign Film: Salaam Bombay!, Mira Nair
(an important film to recognize, and trounces Oscar's choice)

Documentary Feature: The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris
(virtually everyone's choice, and understandably so)

Special Awards: Liane Brandon (Boston-based independent filmmaker) and Richard Williams (animation director, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

I love the BSFC for those kinds of broad-minded Special Awards. Even better, they honored five of the year's best revival series at Boston movie theaters, and the five best movies that were either unearthed, restored, or re-released during the calendar year, which in this case included the long-hidden Manchurian Candidate, the LGBT festival screening The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart and Louis Malle's important film Lacombe, Lucien. Could a critics' body do more important work than shining a light on revivals and restorations, alongside the big-tent pictures?



Boston Society of Film Critics, 1989

Picture: Crimes and Misdemeanors
(sure knocks Oscar's choice into the shade)

Director: Woody Allen, Crimes and Misdemeanors
(at least he held on for an Oscar nod)

Actress: Jessica Tandy, Driving Miss Daisy
(uh-oh! breaks Pfeiffer's sweep of all the other critics' organizations)

Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot
(a well-earned repeat for Daniel)

Supporting Actress: Brenda Fricker, My Left Foot
(did her awards heat begin here?)

Supporting Actor: Danny Aiello, Do the Right Thing
(confoundingly, one of very few critics' laurels for this film)

Screenplay: Woody Allen, Crimes and Misdemeanors
(they sure did love this one)

Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus, The Fabulous Baker Boys
(another unimpeachable choice)

Foreign Film: Story of Women, Claude Chabrol
(way tougher choice than Cinema Paradiso)

Documentary Feature: Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber
(against the strong critical tide for Roger & Me)

Special Awards: To the Brattle Theatre, on its 100th anniversary, and to the restoration efforts of the Coolidge Corner Theater and the Somerville Theater

Again, the BSFC goes out of its way to honor local film culture, specifically on behalf of some of the very moviehouses that, less than a decade later, would be so central to my informal education. And again, five more film series were honored by the group, including a very important retrospective at Harvard of the work of John Cassavetes, and five more citations for major rediscoveries and restorations, including those for Carnival of Souls, Lawrence of Arabia, the controversial animated film Coonskin, and the Yiddish-language film The Dybbuk from 1937.

I hope everyone is now resting easier with this crucial information. But if you take a few rental suggestions away from this post, I assure you that you can hardly go wrong! And while you're at it, if this inspires you to keep up with the regular reviews filed by Wesley Morris and Ty Burr over at the Boston Globe—two of the country's best weekly reviewers, employed by a paper that is still supporting the role of the serious film critic—then I'll be even happier that I spent my lunch break on this. Carry on!

P.S. The BSFC winners from 1992 are not listed as "Incomplete," but I know there was no way that listing was a full one, so (I can't stop!):



Boston Society of Film Critics, 1992

Picture: Unforgiven
(no stunner)

Director: Robert Altman, The Player
(nice splitting of the prizes)

Actress: Emma Thompson, Howards End
(all of the extant sites erroneously promote Judy Davis to this category)

Actor: Denzel Washington, Malcolm X
(a consensus choice, but who could argue?)

Supporting Actress: Judy Davis, Husbands and Wives and Where Angels Fear to Tread
(I think this was the only group to list both of these turns)

Supporting Actor: Gene Hackman, Unforgiven
(again, not a surprise but you can't blame them)

Screenplay: Neil Jordan, The Crying Game
(Hooray!)

Cinematography: Jack Green, Unforgiven
(once again, a well-earned prize for an Academy runner-up)

Foreign Film: Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou
(eclipses his early 00s work, if that's all you know)

Documentary Feature: Brother's Keeper, Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky
(another personal favorite)

Special Awards: To David Kleiler for his comitment to diverse, alternative programming at the Coolidge Corner Theater, and to Frank Avruch of WCVB-TV for hosting The Great Entertainment for 18 years

Recognized film series included "Classic Arkoff: At the Drive-In with American International Pictures" and "Marvelous Méliès" at Harvard Film Archive; "The Films of Mike Leigh" at the Museum of Fine Arts; "The Films of Robert Altman" at the Brattle; and "Yiddish Film: Between Two Worlds," jointly screened at the MFA, Coolidge Corner, and Brandeis University. Discoveries and rediscoveries included De Palma's Blowout, Altman's California Split, Renoir's The Golden Coach, Leigh's Meantime, and Welles's Othello.