The Write Stuff

The Australian art-house entry Lantana was another foreign film that boasted a superbly sophisticated script. Adaptations of stage plays are often static and claustrophobic on-screen, but writer Andrew Bovell transformed his play into a densely cinematic mosaic that interweaves the stories of four couples all connected to the mysterious disappearance of a woman. Bovell got at the deception that poisons so many marriages by having each of his couples turn out to be hiding secrets, but there is nothing schematic about the script. Bovell managed the difficult challenge of juggling lots of characters and story lines without sacrificing depth or compromising the vibrant individuality of each character.

Lukas Moodysson, the writer/director of the Swedish film Together, executed an equally deft juggling act by etching a full-blooded gallery of fascinating characters on a commune in Stockholm in 1975. Moodysson brought to life an abusive husband, his long-suffering wife, her passive brother and his unfaithful girlfriend, plus a number of politically correct firebrands and some confused adolescents, all the while infusing the proceedings with bursts of ebullient humor. On top of that, he captured the poignant predicament of the children trying to survive their parents' selfish pursuit of their own carnal satisfaction.

The interweaving of multiple characters and subplots reached a dazzling peak in Julian Fellowes's brilliantly written script for the year-end hit Gosford Park. The film was masterfully directed by Robert Altman, but it might be remembered that several of Altman's recent pictures have been far less satisfying. Fellowes's contribution to Gosford Park shouldn't be underestimated. His witty repartee provided plenty of urbane delight, and he artfully surveyed some two dozen characters in this upstairs-downstairs universe, capturing the intricacies of their twisted, tormented relationships. Most movies with large casts flatten out all the characters to make them instantly comprehensible. Fellowes took the opposite approach--even characters who had only small amounts of time onscreen, like Alan Bates's alcoholic butler, retained their mystery.

While Fellowes and Altman skewered a gaggle of English lords and ladies, Wes Anderson and cowriter Owen Wilson took a sardonic look at a cockeyed family of American aristocrats, The Royal Tenenbaums, and came up with a script that lent sharpness to the task. Anderson has admitted he I was inspired by writers like J.D. Salinger and Tames Thurber, as well as by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's screwball comedy play about an eccentric family (later turned into a Capra film), You Can't Take It With You, and the result is an unapologetically literary movie, populated with gleefully articulate characters. Anderson and Wilson demonstrated a knack for quirky comedy, and yet the humor didn't get in the way of a number of serious themes--the challenge of surviving success that comes too early and the even more formidable challenge of forgiving family members guilty of unconscionable cruelty. Their script struck a neat balance between satire and pathos.

Another American saga peppered with dark humor, Ghost World stood out in a year of so many mindless teen romps by introducing brainy, subversive teenage characters. Daniel Clowes created this unique adolescent universe in his comic book and then adapted the script with director Terry Zwigoff. The two heroines, played by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, scorn the popular kids at school and revel in their own outsider status. They gravitate to loners and oddballs, in particular a geeky older man played by Steve Buscemi, with whom Birch develops a relationship that defies categorization. Clowes and Zwigoff trusted us to come to our own conclusions about this complicated, unlikely liaison, and took real risks in confronting all the uncomfortable implications of this cross-generational communion.

No discussion about original screenwriting of recent films can fail to mention the groundbreaking thriller Memento, which introduced an almost revolutionary approach to storytelling. Christopher Nolan, working from an unpublished short story (later printed in Esquire) by his brother Jonathan, had the tantalizing idea of telling the story backwards in staccato flashes that aim to suggest how a man with amnesia might try to reconstruct his lost memories. Nolan built a fresh notion of suspense as the hero pushes back in time toward the traumatic murder that deranged him in the first place. To my mind, Memento collapsed at the climax because the pieces ultimately didn't fit together (I saw the movie twice and found it more confusing on a second viewing), but it was fun to see a film that required a viewer to pay so much attention. Studios are terrified of making that sort of intellectual demand on moviegoers. Newmarket, the company that financed Memento, released the movie itself because all the other distributors shied away. The film turned a nice profit, so maybe there is a smidgen of justice, even in Hollywood.

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