January 15-21, 2004

screen picks

by Sam Adams

Curb Your Enthusiasm In the first episode of the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, now airing on HBO, Mel Brooks calls the show's star, Larry David, into his office to talk to him about taking over the lead role in the Broadway production of The Producers. Despite the fact that he has no experience acting, let alone singing or dancing, onstage, Larry accepts, leaving Brooks' investors slack-jawed. But Brooks, who's seen Larry charm a karaoke audience, stands by his instincts. "I'm never wrong," he assures them. "There's something about that middle-aged bald guy that is thrilling!"

Longtime viewers -- or those, like me, who caught up with the first three seasons during their rebroadcast last summer -- would hardly disagree. Before Curb Your Enthusiasm, David's onscreen appearances were mainly limited to the credits of Seinfeld (of which he was co-creator), but there's no doubt now that he's a natural, if unlikely, star. In fact, it's his very unlikeliness that makes Curb so effective. Though it never pretends to be a documentary, the show is shot with handheld cameras and purports to follow the real Larry David around Los Angeles, where Larry, the quintessential New Yorker, is constantly, squirmingly out of place. The show's fake-doc style is essential to its entirely improvised scenes (based on David's thorough outlines), but it also subtly reinforces the idea that David would never do something so crass, so L.A., as act. When, in an episode from the show's third season, he's implausibly given a role in a Martin Scorsese movie (another of the series' great cameos), David is costumed in a comical wig and bulky moustache, as if to underline the absurdity of his even being in front of a camera. Though the new season's first four episodes (the second airs this week; the third premieres on Sunday), don't show Larry performing in front of an audience -- apart from his karaoke rendition of "Swanee" -- they do offer the delirious spectacle of him showing off his (nonexistent) tap dance skills, while Ben Stiller, cast as the Bloom to his Bialystock, looks on in aggrieved horror.

Stiller, like so many of the comic stars who've appeared as themselves on the show, plays the show-biz jerk version of himself, a short-tempered, humorless prima donna with no tolerance for Larry's second-gear work ethic. Their professional clashes soon turn personal, as Stiller's barely concealed contempt blossoms, coaxed by Larry's militant disregard for social niceties. When Stiller invites Larry to his birthday party as a conciliatory gesture, Larry responds by scolding him for throwing it two weeks late, and makes the mistake of taking Stiller seriously when he says "no gifts." Even Larry should know better, but he almost defiantly insists on taking people's words at face value, refusing to acknowledge a culture in which people say one thing while intending its opposite. (His misanthropy is a matter of principle.) Though his social ineptness is at the heart of the show's intoxicatingly uncomfortable situations, there's a sense in which it's liberating, not least for the denizens of Los Angeles, whom Larry's behavior tacitly gives permission to drop the cloak of genteel disagreement. It's as if every beaming desk clerk, every obsequious maitre d', is just waiting for a chance to bare his fangs.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the show is the extent to which it makes one of the most successful sitcoms in history look like a pencil sketch: Watch Seinfeld now, and it looks like watered-down Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's not just a matter of bypassing FCC standards -- the first season's "Beloved Aunt" would never have made it past the censors -- or artistic freedom, though it's impossible to imagine a network green-lighting an episode in which Larry pretends to be an incest survivor to supportively attend group therapy with an ex-girlfriend. It's a question of purity. Curb Your Enthusiasm isn't just shot like a documentary; at times, despite its carefully plotted absurdities, it feels like one. The show's most impressive performer isn't David, but Cheryl Hines, who play's Larry's wife. Given that David's misanthrope makes Seinfeld's George look like a Jimmy Stewart character, the fact that Hines has successfully created a woman who could conceivably stay married to him is nothing short of astonishing. The show's portrait of marriage as a perpetual contest of wills is barbed but affectionate, sharply funny and utterly recognizable; like the show's best jokes, it takes a common phenomenon -- for example, the difficulty of discarding wooden cocktail-party skewers -- and extrapolates it to an only slightly absurd conclusion. The discomfort Curb Your Enthusiasm produces is so intense, it's hard to watch more than one episode at once, but watch several at a go, and you'll find the show creeping into your psyche, uncannily synching up with your daily existence. It's the American Splendor of half-hour TV.

New Scenes from America (Thu., Jan. 15, noon, Fri., Jan. 16, 2:30 a.m. and Mon., Jan. 19, 1:30 p.m., Sundance Channel) With the studios restlessly shuffling movies out of January (See you in a few weeks, Fog of War and The Triplets of Belleville), Jørgen Leth's short documentary, airing three times this week and three more during January on Sundance Channel, may end up being the best new film I've seen all month. Following up (and, I believe, cribbing from) his own 66 Scenes from America (1982), the Danish documentarian stages his 35-minute film as a series of cinematic still-lifes, complete with titles like "Claude, Texas," or "Wild Turkey and glass." The effect is to see the country not just through foreign eyes, but as a foreign land, where diner countertops and crumbling movie marquees are found art, not visual detritus. Interspersed with these depopulated vistas are brief testimonials (no more than introductions) of Americans themselves, though they're slanted toward New York art world figures (John Cale, who also composed the sparse music, Robert Frank, Albert Maysles), which gives them a lopsided feel. Though it's been classified as "post-9/11," shots of the World Trade Center and the titles on movie marquees place the filming before 2001, but if calling Leth's images "elegiac" would be pushing it, there's a hushed quality to them that might at least evoke the calm before the storm.

North Korea: Beyond the DMZ (Fri., Jan. 16, 7 p.m., $10, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-567-9700) While it doesn't necessarily disprove Diane Sawyer's description of North Korea as "the strangest country now on Earth" (Look out, Albania!), J.T. Takagi and Hye-Jung Park's documentary provides a rare feet-on-the-ground look at a country where few Americans, with or without cameras, have been. Focused on the North Korean people rather than their government, Beyond the DMZ has its Mission to Moscow moments, as when it describes "eternal president" Kim Il-Sung being "continually re-elected" for four decades as proof of the populace's overwhelming dedication to him (a thesis that might better have been proved had he faced competition in those elections). But the film's desire to paint North Koreans as something other than slogan-spouting socialist robots brainwashed by the Dear Leader is certainly understandable, especially when squared off against the monolithic Western media coverage of the country, lightly excerpted here. Part of the "axis of evil" or no, many commentators have pointed out how caricatures of the country's current leader, Kim Jong-il, as an eccentric lunatic only sabotage chances of effective diplomatic relations, an observation that ought to hold equally true (at least) for the country's residents. The screening, a Scribe Producer's Forum, commemorates the 35th anniversary of Third World Newsreel, which produced Beyond the DMZ; Park, Takagi and 3WN's Dorothy Thigpen will attend, and screen several additional short works.

Alain Delon, Week Two (Thu.-Sun., Jan. 15-18, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) With Any Number Can Win/Mélodie en sous-sol (Thu., 8 p.m.), the gangster phase of I-House's Delon retrospective draws to a close, appropriately enough with a meeting between two generations of French film icons: Delon and Jean Gabin, who plan a complex casino heist that mostly gives the two plenty of time to bask in the Riviera sun. Lazy acting by both more or less torpedoes the picture, despite some nifty mechanics. Then, however, it's off to the races, with two landmarks of world cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni's The Eclipse (Fri., 8 p.m.) and Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (Sat., 8 p.m.). The conclusion of Antonioni's unofficial "alienation trilogy" (following L'Avventura and La Notte), Eclipse stars Delon as a soulless stockbroker, while in Rocco, the neorealist melodrama, he's a poor Italian country boy, on both sides of the cultural divide in postwar Italy, no more at home in either. In Joseph Losey's M. Klein (Sun., 7 p.m.), which closes the series, Delon is back in his native French, but playing an even more unusual role, that of an art dealer mistaken for a Jew in occupied France. Seeing so many of Delon's movies close to each other might not increase your appreciation of his range as an actor, but it cements his status as an icon, and his usefulness to a generation of directors who chose their leads based on visual qualities. It might be why he seems at his best in his nearly wordless roles in Jean-Pierre Melville's abstract gangster movies: It's satisfying just to watch Delon move, to be.

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