Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

The Red Balloon/White Mane
Directed by Albert Lamorisse
B+/A-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Dec. 14

History, it seems, was not kind to The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorissey's legendary, near-wordless 1956 children's film about an adorable moppet and the sentient bag of helium that follows him around Paris.

Some may recall sitting through it in kindergarten, or at least recognize it from parodies on Mr. Show, or in animator Don Hertzfeldt's Billy's Balloon, which finds a troupe of rebellious balloons beating, strangling and dropping from cataclysmic heights onto button-cute, rattle-shaking tykes. (For the record, it also inspired The Flight of the Red Balloon, the latest from Taiwanese minimalist master Hou Hsiao-hsien.)

And though it's reissued (along with another Larmorisse short White Mane) for the X-mas season, it's entirely possible the true target audience is grumpy adults whose memory or preconception may require some updating.

Indeed, even before the grisly Christ overtones kick in, it's hard to imagine any contemporary children's film being so grim. Though tapping into the innocence and wonder of the child mind, The Red Balloon is anything but cloying. Only in his 30s at the time, Lamorisse--who later invented the game Risk (no, really)--shoots his young actors (all clearly nonpros, including his own son) from afar, nixing the chance for Our Gang-style mugging. (Fran�ois Truffaut was obviously taking notes.) The film's Paris is quiet, near-empty and limited to blue and gray colors. The balloon's mere redness is an invigorating invasion, and its destruction by a group of bullies--in a lengthy silent shot that seems to last forever--is a tragedy that feels like more than a mere rite of passage.

White Mane, from three years earlier, is even grimmer and more mysterious. The arc is similar: A boy befriends a white stallion pursued by a group of ranchers. The narration (written by James Agee) lends it a storybook feel, but Lamorisse films it live-action, feeding off the disparity between the tale and the elemental, documentary-like footage of an actual equine, who's allowed to be an animal and not a human with hooves, � la Disney.

Lamorisse's experiment hits pay-dirt at the end when the boy and his horse, fleeing their pursuers, jump into the ocean. As they disappear behind waves, Agee's narration remarks, "White Mane, with his great strength, carried his friend who trusted him to a wonderful place where men and horses live as friends."

You can read it as a fantastical ascent or a simple death. That both are equally correct is what makes the film so haunting.

Juno
Directed by Jason Reitman
B-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Dec. 14

According to interviews, stripper-turned-blogger-turned-screenwriter Diablo Cody's sole form of screenwriterly tutelage before penning the teen pregnancy romp Juno was reading the script for Ghost World. That makes sense: Both films start off questionable, even off-putting, before heading off in an unexpectedly decent direction.

But where Ghost World shifted from cruelty to existential despair, Juno merely goes from insufferably quirky to genuinely sweet. And I do mean insufferably: Everybody, even Rainn Wilson's convenience store clerk, is a bottomless fount of clever dialogue. Just try not to wince when the title character, a suburban 16-year-old who's inseminated by meek running fanatic pal Michael Cera, responds to a dire turn of events during the film's second half with, "Just do me this one solid."

Fortunately such patter, which relies a touch too heavily on cute slang, is delivered by Ellen Page. Cashing in on her turn as the eerily opaque pederast-stalker in Hard Candy, Page suggests the generation after Ghost World's Enid Coleslaw. She's tart-tongued but rarely mean like Enid, and she's wickedly self-assured but also warm, fragile and good-hearted--a decent person you root for without feeling dirty afterward.

Juno herself is quite a lot like Cody's script (directed by Jason Reitman, calming down considerably after the barndoor-broad Thank You for Smoking). Both are desperate to prove themselves and can be a touch shrill at first encounter, but given time they grow and deepen. It's a relief, for instance, that the couple to whom Juno decides to donate her spawn (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) become more than just an easy yuppie parody.

Imagine my surprise when it turns out that Bateman, who's revealed to nurse dreams of rock stardom and digs Sonic Youth and Herschell Gordon Lewis, is eventually wrist-slapped for his immaturity, while Garner, initially a standard type-A hausfrau, becomes the movie's most sympathetic character. A scene where Page catches her doting on a friend's child in a mall, trying to feed her maternal longing, is as moving for us as it is for Page.

Cody makes scores of rookie mistakes, from superfluous fits of narration to giving each character a wacky quirk, like Cera's affinity for Tic-Tacs--a textbook case of writerly insecurity. But the script's basic foundation is strong, and along with the superficially similar Knocked Up, it continues a strange trend: films that espouse what are typically (and cynically) considered conservative family values but that no conservative family value type would touch with a 10-foot pole.

Starting out in the Evening
Directed by Andrew Wagner
C
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Dec. 14