Capital Projections: Time the avenger edition
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting arthouse and repertory screenings in the coming week.
THE IRISHMAN
From Mean Streets to Goodfellas to The Wolf of Wall Street, some of the best, most visually thrilling movies by prolific director Martin Scorsese delve into matters of crime and punishment. So it makes perfect sense that Scorsese would be attracted to the story of high-ranking labor official and organized crime figure Frank Sheeran, who died in 2003. Based on attorney Charles Brandt’s 2004 nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses, the film features the kind of gruesome violence and pop oldies soundtrack that characterize previous Scorsese pictures. Yet the dominant tone is not of an angry young man but of a melancholy elder looking back with regret on a checkered life.
The film is framed with Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) in a nursing home, waiting out the end of his life. His body is failing him, his peers are all dead, and his surviving family members don’t want anything to do with him. He tells an unseen interviewer about a road trip decades earlier with mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). Before embarking on what would be a pivotal journey, he took out a map and traced the route from Philadelphia to Detroit, marking the major roads much like anyone in the days before GPS would do. That kind of mundane observance is a lot of what makes The Irishman so effective. Free of the hyperkinetic editing that Scorsese favored 20 or 30 years ago, this film spends its 209-minute running time establishing characters, relationships and locations.
Flashing back and forth in time over a span of several decades — with actors’ faces de-aged using computer effects, which can be a little distracting — the movie charts Sheeran’s friendship with Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and matter-of-factly portrays the mob violence used extensively by the union leader and his circle of powerful friends, primarily on the East Coast. The Irishman begins as a look at the corruption of the American dream by organized crime. But it becomes more personal as we see Sheeran lose sight of his family, especially his daughter Peggy (Anna Paquin), who is silently horrified by her father’s viciousness. It’s a long film, and courtroom scenes that depict then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s battles with Hoffa drag slightly. But the final hour, in which Sheeran is forced to decide the fate of his best friend, raises this genre picture to the level of great tragedy.
One might well ask: Is any of this true? Sheeran made a startling (and widely discredited) claim about Hoffa’s never-solved 1975 disappearance. But much like Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, The Irishman deals with themes Orson Welles tapped in his 1958 masterpiece Touch of Evil: that in order to get at some profound truth — about the meaning of life or the passage of time — sometimes an artist has to tell a few lies. The film premieres on Netflix on Nov. 27, but it will be easier to focus on its majestic drama in a theater, so make sure to catch its brief commercial run.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Nov. 8, at Landmark E Street Cinema.and Landmark Bethesda Row. $12.75.
PUNK THE CAPITAL: BUILDING A SOUND MOVEMENT
In this deftly edited 2019 documentary, directors Paul Bishow and James June Schneider chronicle the punk scene that emerged in Washington in the late ’70s. Anybody who was there will find plenty to reminisce about, which makes this rock ‘n’ roll movie an oddly kindred spirit to The Irishman. While Scorsese’s latest tells the story of an elderly criminal looking back on his life with regret, here, aging punks recall harDCore’s impossibly fast tempos, now replaced by the patient, shuffling gait of middle age.
Bishow and Schneider of course spend time with well-known figures such as Bad Brains frontman H.R., S.O.A. singer Henry Rollins and Dischord Records co-founder Ian MacKaye. But Punk the Capital is particularly valuable for its focus on musicians who never broke out on a national level — for example, Slickee Boys frontman Kim Kane, who leaned into punk from a garage-band, monster-movie aesthetic; and bassist John Gibson, whose band The Enzymes never made a record but was nevertheless a crucial influence on the early scene.
Vintage 8-mm footage of DC streets reveal a city long gone, and the punk spirit that drove these bands may be gone as well. Rollins and MacKaye lament that the scene simply got too big; early punk shows would draw maybe 50 people, which represented everyone involved in the music at that time. Musicians recall a peaceful, supportive community that fostered a Positive Mental Attitude, a concept from a 1937 book inspired by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Unfortunately, as the film explains, mass media spoiled things when news reports and cultural milestones like the punk episode of the television show Quincy depicted band members and concertgoers as aggressive, nihilistic thugs. DC punks blame such representation for bringing larger and more unruly crowds that behaved the way they thought punks were supposed to behave. Punk the Capital celebrates a thriving creative force and mourns its inevitable undoing.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Nov. 9, through Monday, Nov. 11, at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13. The filmmakers will be available after each screening for a Q&A, accompanied by different guest musicians every night; see the AFI website for details.
SEND ME TO THE CLOUDS
This year’s DC Chinese Film Festival — which runs through Sunday, Nov. 10, mostly at the Landmark E Street Cinema — celebrates women on both sides of the camera. The screenings begin tonight with director Teng Congcong’s debut feature. The movie tells the story of investigative journalist Sheng Nan (Yao Chen), whose diagnosis of ovarian cancer forces her to re-examine her life. While she’s promised that surgery will lead to a good prognosis, the procedure will make it difficult for her to experience sexual pleasure. Her bad-boy co-worker encourages her to have sex before the operation, but she doesn’t want to sleep with just anybody. Meanwhile, she’s assigned to ghostwrite the autobiography of an elderly businessman: Will his wisdom inspire the young woman?
Congcong was born in the ’80s during the time that China established its notorious one-child-per-family policy, which oppressed women in a society that historically favored sons. Thus she names her protagonist “Sheng Nan,” (“Surpass Men”), a common name given to daughters in this era. Such cultural details will be lost on many American viewers, but the journalist’s struggle to balance her career and her personal life will resonate with everyone. Send Me to the Clouds will screen only once as part of the festival, but the director will participate on Saturday, Nov. 9, at 2 p.m. on a panel (free, no tickets required) about the “Changing Image of Women in Film” at the Landmark West End Cinema.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, Nov. 7, at 7:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema. $15.
COMMITMENT
From Nov. 8 through 16, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery are hosting the DC Turkish Film Festival. The series begins this weekend with the U.S. premiere of this drama from director Semih Kaplanoğlu. Kübra Kip stars as Asli, a new mother who hires a babysitter (Ece Yüksel) so she can return to her job as a bank executive. As the Freer writes, Asli sees “her emotional dilemmas play out mainly in the lush yet claustrophobic confines of her luxury Istanbul apartment, where the presence of the young child care provider she hires forces her to confront her own privilege and prejudices.” Kaplanoğlu, known for the Egg, Milk, and Honey trilogy, will appear in person for a Q&A after the screening.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, Nov. 8, at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art in the Meyer Auditorium. Free.
I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS
The National Gallery of Art’s series “Welcome to Absurdistan: Eastern European Cinema 1950 to 1989,” which runs through Nov. 24, continues with this 1971 Polish satire that blends the sentiments of Garfield the Cat with the struggles of Socialist Warsaw. According to the gallery’s program notes, which compare the work to Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece Playtime, “the film’s peculiar magic turns a dysfunctional Warsaw into a slapstick playground, with a physical humor and episodic structure” that exposes “heroic workers who booze and snooze through the day, interminable construction, shortages, and the uncivil public services that populated socialist perfection.“ The film will be introduced Sunday by film scholar Gabriel M. Paletz.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Nov. 10, at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art in the West Building Lecture Hall. Free.
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