UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Two Heavyweights, A Lightweight And Two Early Almodóvars

A Courtroom Drama, Not Anatomy of a Murder, But Anatomy of a…Fall.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023. Written by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari. 151 minutes)

Agatha Christie, one of the most famous mystery writers, was often criticized for her lack of interesting characterization. She was a whiz at tricky plotting, with lots of surprises. When Billy Wilder and Harry Kurnitz started adapting Christie’s stage hit Witness for the Prosecution into their 1957 film, they had to work extra hard to make the characters believable. Get a copy of the stage play, read it, and then look at the film and you will see what I mean.

Triet (who also directed, beautifully) and Harari are determined to avoid the mistakes that Christie and other writers of courtroom dramas make. They do. They brilliantly balance the mystery story and the story of a marriage.

In the opening scene Sandra Voyter, a novelist, is being interviewed by a young woman about being a successful woman novelist. Sandra is bright, witty, and charming. She is being flirtatious with the younger woman. Triet as a director shoots nearly this entire scene in close-ups. Sandra is played by Sandra Hüller, who as you will see in the next item is not used as well by its director Jonathan Glazer.

One of the items that is discussed in the interview is Sandra’s marriage to Samuel, who is a less successful writer. As the interview continues the music Samuel is playing upstairs gets louder and louder and Sandra suggests to the interviewer they continue the interview at another time in another place. The story can go in one or more directions from that start. A restart of the interview is not one of them.

We pick up on Sandra and Samuel’s young teenage son Daniel. He is blind from an accident when he was four, but he has a dog called (yes) Snoop who looks after him. When they come back from their walk they find the body of Samuel outside the house. Did he fall? Was he pushed? What has Sandra done or not done?

Sounds like a murder mystery/courtroom drama to me. But as very different people investigate, different sides of the Sandra/Samuel relationship come out. The more that comes out, we seem to be getting further and further away from whatever the truth might be about what happened and closer to truth of the marriage, which is a much more complicated issue.

A word here on the many courtroom scenes. If you are used to the courtrooms of British and American films, you will be surprised at how casual the French courts are. The British and American trials are very carefully structured as if they were designed for theatre and film. The French, at least going by this film, hardly seem to be structured at all. People can speak out whenever they want to. They can behave in ways that would get them thrown out of American courts.

Triet and Harari take full advantage of the French legal system, so surprises can come up in all different ways and from very different people. At one point it is discovered that Samuel had been secretly tape-recording his life. One tape, recorded shortly before his death, gives us a full scene with Sandra and Samuel in an intense marital argument. In an Agatha Christie story that would solve the case. Here it does not, but only makes it more complex, as marriages tend to be.

No, of course I am not going to tell you the outcome of the case. The best I can tell is that it involves a witness or two you would not expect to help the case.

Well, The First Hour is Terrific…

The Zone of Interest (2023. Screenplay by Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis. 105 minutes)

This is one of those films that is probably better than the novel it is based on. The novel is inspired, although I am not sure that is the right word for it, by Rudolf Höss, who was the commandant of Auschwitz. In Amis’s story, his wife has an affair with another officer and Höss arranges to have her killed. The assassination attempt fails. I have not read the novel, but it sounds more melodramatic than the film.

Glazer is working at a higher degree of difficulty. Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig and their children are living in a nice big house with a garden Hedwig loves. Over the garden wall, we can see some large buildings, as if they live in a city. We get to know the family, and only over a period of time do we get hints that reveal that it is Auschwitz on the other side of the wall. We realize Rudolf works there and only later do we learn he is the commandant. We get that in a scene where is talking over plans for a new crematorium. A large crematorium. That can deal with more… people.

In his writing and especially in his direction Glazer does not let us get too close to the characters. He has no close-ups in the picture, so we do not get the nuances of expression that would connect us to the characters as people. I think his idea is to make them seem like ordinary people living what seems to them as ordinary lives. At one point Hedwig’s mother comes for a visit and we get Hedwig giving her mother a long and detailed tour of the garden, naming and describing all, and I mean all, the flowers in the garden.

About an hour into the film, Rudolf learns he is being given a new command and he is going to have to leave Auschwitz. He avoids telling Hedwig as long as he can. When he does Glazer keeps the scene in medium shots. We do get the dialogue and not to our surprise we learn Hedwig does not want to leave. She loves her house and her garden. The scene is not played for the emotions you might expect from either Rudolf or Hedwig. The distance that Glazer has kept us from the characters becomes very frustrating to us. Now we want to get closer to the characters, as appalled as we may be by them.

Rudolf somehow manages to get permission so that Hedwig and the children can stay in their wonderful house in Auschwitz. Unless I missed it completely, not an impossibility but not likely, since I was listening for it, we do not learn how Rudolf managed it. Glazer’s keeping us at a distance from the characters, which worked in the first hour of the movie, becomes frustrating in the extreme in the second half.

We see Rudolf in his new job, supervising all the commandants of all the concentration camps. He is just as unemotional as he was running one camp.

Then there is a large party with all the officers in attendance. Rudolf is standing on a balcony overlooking the crowd. He mentions to one of the guests that he could kill all the people in the room, although it would be difficult to do in this room because the high ceilings would let the gas float away.

Glazer does not give us either a close-up or dialogue to tell us what he now realizes. He shows us, in his subtle way, which has not worked for a while in the film. Rudolf is walking down a flight of stairs. He stops and he throws up. He goes down another flight and throws up again. I suppose you could say this is pure cinema, like Hitchcock.

Glazer then cuts to a team of women cleaning up the insides of the gas ovens. Are we back in Auschwitz? Well, yes, but as the scene progresses and we see the cleaning team in other spaces, we realize we are in the Auschwitz Museum in the present. I am not sure that has the impact that Glazer wants.

It may have for many viewers. The Zone of Interest has drawn much critical praise. It won the Grand Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and has five nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, including Best International Picture of the Year and Best Picture of the Year.

I wrote in last month’s column that I thought May December had been nominated because of the idea of the film, not its achievement. I think the same thing is true of The Zone of Interest - that and the first hour.

And now for the lighweight.

Lisa Frankenstein (2024. Written by Diablo Cody. 101 minutes)

How many Frankenstein movies have there been? IMDB stopped counting at 52, and that did not include Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966), one of Elvira’s favorites.

One of the latest variations on the themes of the Frankenstein story showed up in last year’s Poor Things, which I reviewed here. It is spectacularly good. It is a misfortune for the makers of Lisa Frankenstein that it has been released while Poor Things is still in theatres.

I had high, well, semi-high, hopes for Lisa Frankenstein. It is written by one of my favorite younger screenwriters, Diablo Cody. Cody won an Oscar for her first screenplay, Juno (2007). Like a lot of writers, she had something of a sophomore slump with her next film Jennifer’s Body (2009). It was not a critical or commercial success, but over the years it has become a cult classic. In it, Jennifer, a beautiful high school cheerleader develops a taste for human blood. Her best friend Needy has to figure out how to stop her. It is not simply a horror comedy, but a high school horror comedy. As the ad line for the film went, “She’s evil…not just high school evil.” I think it became a cult classic because it created that new genre.

It is obviously a genre Cody loves, and she is returning to it in Lisa Frankenstein. Lisa, a high school student whose widowed father has recently married what can only be called a wicked stepmother, spends her free time mooning over a statue of a handsome man in a “bachelor’s cemetery” (that’s explained in the film). One night during a storm lightning strikes the statue, bringing it back to life. Lisa finds it, brings it back to her house, and slowly continues reanimating it. However, it is missing a few parts, and Lisa ends up helping him get them back, which involves killing other people. Well, the wicked stepmother does not need her ears, given where she is going.

One problem for the film, particularly because it comes so close on the heels of Poor Things, is that the creature never speaks. Well, traditionally Frankenstein’s monster does not speak, although of course he sings in Young Frankenstein (1974). But the writer of Poor Things has made a running element of Bella struggling to learn language, which gives us a lot to listen for and in some cases laugh at.

In Lisa, it is Lisa who does all the talking. And it is not Diablo Cody at her best. Some of it is funny, some not. And the audience I saw the picture with did not seem to laugh at what I thought were funny lines. I don’t think the problem is with the women playing Lisa, Kathryn Newton. I have only seen her in the miniseries Big Little Lies (2017---), where she was a bit overpowered by her all-star co-stars. Here she is very compelling and carries the picture. Her line readings are good.

I do not think the problem is with the director, Zelda Williams. She has directed music videos and one other feature. Growing up with Robin Williams as her father and working as an actress, her directing here could have been sharper.

Part of the problem with the film is the writing, directing and acting of The Creature, as he is listed in the credits. Cody has given him no lines, so that means that Cole Sprouse has to act as if he were in a silent film, which he in a sense is. Cody has not given him that much to do it terms of visual reactions and he does not seem to have the instincts that the great silent comedy actors did. Imagine a young Buster Keaton in the role. Williams might have been able to do more with Sprouse, but keep in mind the Williams family humor is mostly verbal.

Look at the acting of the mostly verbal comedians in Silent Movie (1976), who had no idea how to play silent comedy, with the exception of Marty Feldman, who had done pantomime on television.

So, this one is a misfire. But never give up on people of talent. I am looking forward to future films by Cody and Newton, and maybe even Williams. As for Sprouse, he’s on his own.

Two early ones.

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980. Written by Pedro Almodóvar. 102 minutes) and Labyrinth of Passion (1982. Written by Pedro Almodóvar, Terry Lennox. 100 minutes)

Almodóvar wrote and directed short films in the 1970s and made his first feature in 1978. His second film Pepi et al brought him his first critical attention. It is not very good. It is an ensemble piece, like a lot of his films, but the various characters and their storylines do not connect. There is a lot of freewheeling humor and a lot of sex. Sounds like a typical Almodóvar film, doesn’t it? Well, yes, but not only do the characters and storylines not connect, but neither do the themes about the growing freedom in Spain after the death of Franco. It also looks like a student film, especially the cinematography.

Two years later Almodóvar made Labyrinth and suddenly, after the short films and the first two features, everything falls into place. The ensemble works together, as does the script. In Pepi the elements charge off in all directions, but here the various elements connect. You should learn how to do this.

So. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice.