Maidentrip
Runs Fri., Feb. 28–Thurs., March 6 at SIFF Film Center. Not rated. 75 minutes.
Sailing solo around the world is a pursuit for loners and obsessives, most of them men. Yet there’s a subset of such mariners: those trying to set records not for speed but youth. Dutch teenager Laura Dekker gained fame for her attempt at circumnavigation before she even left port; family-court hearings were held, to great European interest, to determine if she had the right—even with the permission of her divorced parents—to undertake such a risky voyage. American director Jillian Schlesinger skips most of the hoopla and courtroom proceedings, and her documentary mainly relies on Dekker’s own video footage. The effect is like a 75-minute-long selfie, as Dekker cheerfully narrates her voyage in diary form, showing us ravioli mishaps, resting birds, visiting dolphins, and new hairstyles. (Her soliloquies are half English, half subtitled.) Yet never do we see any dangerous storms or menacing sharks; the hazards here are entirely downplayed.
For viewers with a sailing background, Maindentrip is the like the anti-All Is Lost : Everything that can go right does go right. Schlesinger is vague about the sponsors of Dekker’s adventure, though her 40-foot ketch is festooned with various corporate logos. Also, Dekker’s obsessive-seeming father, who raised her on the water, clearly has some control issues with his daughter; one also has to wonder if he had some commercial interests at stake.
Should you take your daughters to see the movie? Sure—Dekker emerges as a thoroughly likable and self-reliant young woman (age 16 at journey’s end in 2012). She covets her independence, telling us “I don’t like it when people tell me what to do.” In Schlesinger’s careful editing, we see the preternaturally poised young Dekker grow into herself and her autonomy. I don’t think many parents would send their girls out to sea to follow her, but she seems an excellent role model in all other respects. Except for the ravioli. Brian Miller
Omar
Runs Fri., Feb. 28–Thurs., March 6 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 96 minutes.
Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad pulled off a tricky balancing act with his 2005 Paradise Now. In profiling the everyday lives of a couple of would-be suicide bombers, the movie created an eerie sense of authenticity (and occasional absurdity) while not grinding a heavy political ax. It picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film in the process.
Abu-Assad’s new film, also Oscar-nominated, tries something similar: to humanize people stuck in the cycle of violence in the Palestinian community of the occupied West Bank. The central figure here is a none-too-bright young man, Omar (Adam Bakri), who’s a kind of budding revolutionary. He’s not affiliated with a known terrorist group; it’s more like he’s hanging out with friends who’ve gradually become more radical of late. Led by the serious Tarek (Eyad Hourani), these amateurs will end up murdering an Israeli soldier one night, an act that brings them to the attention of an Israeli investigator (Waleed Zuaiter, a deft actor). As though to emphasize Omar’s hapless miscasting as a freedom fighter/terrorist, his actions are guided largely by his crush on Tarek’s sister Nadia (Leem Lubany) and his own jealous mind.
You can see the Oscar appeal here: global issue, human approach, dramatic punch. Abu-Assad is a skilled filmmaker, but Omar is significantly less daring than Paradise Now—really just a middlebrow treatment of an automatically invigorating subject. The final action is a “shocker” meant to be open-ended and thought-provoking, but it leaves behind a faint taste of smugness. (The absence of The Past, Gloria, and especially Wadjda—all officially submitted by their countries—among the nominees is particularly galling in the light of Omar getting a nod.
The film does have one powerful image: the wall, meant to contain and separate Palestinians from Israelis. Omar begins with the wall, as our protagonist scales it with a rope. This is the first of many such ascents and descents, travels that are a part of Omar’s life but which—so commonplace has the presence of the wall become—are never remarked upon. This gray, graffitied boundary is the mute co-star of the movie, and its sheer presence is more troubling than the standard-issue melodrama that boils around it. Robert Horton
PWinter in the Blood
Runs THurs., Feb. 27–Thurs., March 6 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated. 98 minutes.
With Sherman Alexie among its producers (and its cast, in a small role), this Montana-set ’70s drama shows nothing but fidelity to its source novel. The late Native American writer James Welch published Winter in the Blood in 1974, and it can’t have been easy to adapt to the screen. Filmmakers Andrew and Alex Smith have given a name to Welch’s protagonist—Virgil, played by Chaske Spencer—that suggests his quest, though his voyage is mostly internal. A vision of his long-dead father, drunk in the snow, jars Virgil into a somewhat surreal bender, interlaced with flashbacks to his youth. Figures from memory (or fantasy) are presented as plausible characters to us; though they also have a cockeyed trickster gleam. David Morse shows up as the rowdy, free-spending “Airplane Man,” who’d be right at home in a Hunter S. Thompson novel. Virgil helps him, doesn’t trust him, and may in fact have invented him—but such distinctions swiftly fall away during this picaresque vision quest.
Alcoholism and broken families being among its themes, this movie might’ve been one of those grim, miserable Sundance studies of life on the rez. But as in Alexie’s best work (I haven’t read Welch), there’s instead a comic aversion to self-pity. Virgil gets beaten and knocked down, but he’s a resilient sort of fatalist—rubbery, no wooden Indian. “My dream always ends badly,” says our self-aware hero. “I don’t know what it means, but it has something to do with pain.”
The Smiths are from Montana, like Welch, and shows. This is a movie lovingly shot on location in that state’s Hi-Line region, with authentic textures and faces that greatly enhance the slim, lyrical story. The cast is mostly Native, and you may recognize Spencer from the Twilight movies (he was Sam, one of the werewolf clan). Also true to the novel is a dreamy-poetic collapsing of time, though the film is a little too foggy on the particulars of Virgil’s present-day family. But sometimes clarity is overrated. If Virgil may fret that he’s traveling in “a four-day circle,” Winter in the Blood finally lands him in a place that feels exactly right. (Note: Alexie and the Smiths will introduce Thursday’s screening, with the Smiths also attending Friday and Saturday.) Brian Miller
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