Sankara, or inner city jazz

Rating: Null/10 (10 September 2015)

Hollywood just loves views of itself; and when coupled with aging actors having to cope with fame in histrionic performance and some obvious wizardry in the camera it gets everyone up from their seats to festoon with awards. That's fine. Funny however, Welles was once upon time ostracized for much the same thing in Kane.
But that's half the story. The other half is that this is much more cinematic and layered than several winners of late. I like this. Whereas Argo and King's Speech were competent at best, this aspires to mastery. To go deep into the stuff that keep us awake.
This is about one such man kept awake at nights by where he fits in the narratives of life, rendered as an aging actor wandering in and out of a performance he struggles to bring to life over the course of a few days, one that caps off a lifetime and leaves behind something worth recalling. The place is a theater but more broadly the stage of dreams.
This layer of the film yields the obvious; satire about the business of having to live with and up to an image, Caine playing himself as the man who used to be Batman, snarling and throwing things. Some more commentary about the mechanisms that control a fickle culture; the journalist who controls the fate of a show by what story she writes, people stuck with the familiar image in mind (Batman).
That's all readily available, simple essaying. There's something more important to glean further inside however, more deeply about our place in the midst of images.
We're all actors like him (or so we think), going out on stage every day to wring truth out of role. We're all like him constantly wading through inner narratives we sustain around us, with desires and aversions that summon things to us or push them back. (Mental formations)
(Now we see the difference with films like Batman and others, that show us a flawed hero who crisply walks through some dramatic arc. Oh he may look pained or confused in spots, but the overarching gaze is always solid, we're in full control as viewers. In actual life, we fully undergo the pain or loss of control ourselves, have our narratives shuffled in surreal ways)
The place is a theater as said. Some of the most marvelous occasions are when we walk onto that stage and find ourselves slipping from real to fiction, or in the middle of a performance a spontaneous fire makes the narrative rattle. Norton's fiery interruption about his gin being replaced.
That's all fine, great in other hands. But even further inside I encounter the specific maker who made this, who can't help coloring everything else, creating it in his image. See, I was surprised to read near universal acclaim for this, knowing it comes by a filmmaker associated with histrionics in previous films.
A contrast forms. The best account I can give is this.
With a "soft" eye that doesn't dwell in particulars and feels the deeper undercurrents as they rise and subside, I sense the pull of oceanic power. The shifts from real to fiction to real that show truth to be a matter of illusory context. The improvised truth intruding into fiction and slippery ground it creates. The rhythm of the cuts and the shift of views, the whole instrumentation is often marvelous to see.
But the froth that ripples the surface, the tumult these currents create when they reach the narrative surface closer to us, the emotional splashing of inner conflict from the mouths of actors, these show a histrionic sensibility. The life we get that has to face age and loss becomes tantrum, actorly splashing around in the shallow instead of swimming out to sea.
These are two different modes of conveyance. One soft, wants to evoke and float. The other hard, thrashes about and fights to come up for air. The first evokes some of Altman's improvised jazz. The other PT Anderson's attempts to play much the same music but laboring and hitting the notes too stridently.
I want to say that Lubezcki had a lot to do with the former (who practiced next to Mann, Malick, and Cuaron, all preeminently visual makers) but it may just be Innaritu has both intuition and the urge to overstate.