The Exploding Girl represents an admirable cinematic pursuit: It’s a movie predicated on finding meaning in silence and what’s left unsaid. Writer-director Bradley Rust Gray works to draw out the impact of a pause in conversation, or a furtive glance, to find the drama in the image of a character thinking, or feeling. It’s a rare and welcome attempt to stand apart from an overheated, frenetic film culture. Zoe Kazan, his star, excels at the sort of sly understatement required — any “exploding” done by her character Ivy is fully internalized.

She’s a college student at home on spring break, undergoing that standard, strange interruption of “normal” life. Her boyfriend Greg and most of her other friends have dispersed to their own places of residence, leaving her with no one to hang out with but her good buddy Al (Mark Rendall). Ivy suffers from epilepsy but seems to be a normal, well-adjusted young adult living a healthy, productive life. Yet, slowly, cracks emerge, beginning with the missed calls and long, awkward pauses that define her onscreen interactions with Greg — or more accurately, Greg’s voice.

Gray shuts out extraneous details and zeroes in on Ivy, tailoring his aesthetic to eye-level views of her daily routine, which involves a lot of walking through the city and/or hanging out in various parks and on rooftops, in classic NYC tradition. It is, at once, as convincingly specific and broad as such a depiction could be, with the purposelessness of long days with nothing to do set against the warm glow of the bustling springtime city entwined with the particular details of a young woman coming apart at the seams.

The writer-director scripted the picture for Kazan (Revolutionary Road, Me and Orson Welles), the up and coming actress threatening to break out in a big way in 2010. She proves herself worthy of what was a notable gamble, conveying the doe-eyed sadness that heretofore was the sole forte of Zooey Deschanel. It’s thoughtful work, communicative and open without the usual crutches screenwriters give their actors. It takes a special talent to inspire audience interest in a character crossing a street, or organizing a kitchen. Kazan — who, as Ivy, makes such great use of the suggestive powers of her pixie, vulnerable features that she always seems to be thinking and processing much more than she’s saying — sustains that investment. As Ivy listens to Greg haltingly explain, over the phone, why they should start seeing other people Kazan shows us her character’s heart breaking with no more than a slight shift in expression and the subtle slowing of her walking pace.

It’s a rare and wonderful thing to see a movie so attuned to the rhythms of daily life, to the ways a trauma builds and expands over time, rather than sinking in during a single moment of discovery. When individuals suffer a breakdown of sorts, when they find their most ingrained preconceptions called into question, the unfolding of the drama therein often closely resembles the vérité slow burn of The Exploding Girl.

Gray has a tough time shepherding Ivy through the movie’s final third, losing sight of the precise approach that’s sustained it and incorporating one lazy, overextended visual motif. The picture meanders purposefully, expecting that its collection of mundane moments inflected with a serious soul will collectively create a character worth caring about. For that reason, it’s not the most viscerally involving of movies, but Kazan rewards Gray’s patience with a quiet, self-contained performance imbued with barely concealed pain. She makes Ivy’s journey one worth taking.

The Upside: Zoe Kazan gives a perfectly calibrated, subtle performance and writer-director Bradley Rust Gray’s script is well attuned to ways of the real world.

The Downside: The movie, so reliant on the collective power of a series of superficially mundane moments is, at times, less than riveting.

On the Side: For her work, Kazan won the Best Actress Award at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

Departures took most prognosticators by surprise when it beat out the already released, much hyped competition of Waltz with Bashir and The Class to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars. After seeing the movie, however, it’s not hard to fathom how the upset happened.

As directed by Yôjirô Takita, this is a sumptuous, richly composed drama that considers big, broad emotional issues with a sweeping cinematic canvas. It is, in other words, exactly the sort of movie Academy voters tend to love. The same cannot be said for an abstractly animated, psychological depiction of the burdens of war or a verité rendering of life in a French classroom over the course of a school year.

That’s not to take anything away from the high levels of craft Takita pours into every frame of his film. Had the movie been more widely seen prior to the awards it could conceivably have received attention in the cinematography category as well. From sweeping pans around the main character playing his cello atop a hill to a long shot taken from a high angle of characters leaving a public bath as blankets of snow gingerly cover the ground, the movie evokes the fluid, cyclical rhythms of life and death.

The film stars Masahiro Motoki as Daigo Kobayashi, a professional cellist living in Tokyo. As the story begins he finds himself at a personal crossroads. His cash strapped orchestra is shuttered, and he’s left without a job or a clear direction. He and his wife Mika (Ryoko Hiruse) decide to take the opportunity to return to his seaside village hometown. There Daigo finds work with Ikue Sasaki (Tsutomo Yamazaki), an undertaker of sorts, hired to perform traditional funeral rites on the recently deceased and prepare them for a dignified burial. As the narrative progresses, Daigo’s initial skepticism gives way to a deep appreciation of the sacredness of Ikue’s work.

Takita has made a clearheaded evocation of the various transmutations of death that permeate everyday existence. Daigo, Ikue and the other characters struggle to cope with the profound specter of sudden, profound emotional loss, which powerfully shapes their daily lives. Daigo returns to his hometown in no small part to confront the painful memories of the childhood abandonment of his father, while Ikue runs his company in tribute to his beloved late wife. They differ, however, in a fundamental way: Ikue has found inner peace by helping families make the profound emotional transition to the stark, sudden jolt of life without a loved one. Daigo still must find his.

The movie is so tastefully rendered that it almost comes across as too safe, confronting challenging material in such a straightforward manner that one longs for some element to go against type, through the addition of humor or other subtle, unsuspected stylistic touches. The full orchestral performance of the “Ode to Joy” chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that serves as the picture’s second scene sets the tone for what is a stately, high art endeavor that is occasionally a bit too earnestly heartfelt. The filmmaker does, however, get from his actors the quiet human touch the film needs to best complement the symphonic style.

Motoki takes the picture in a surprising direction with his performance as Daigo, in which a kindly subservient exterior masks the character’s strongly constituted sense of self. He’s mastered the art of saying something, or nothing, while using his sincere eyes and tenuous physical demeanor to communicate everything. Similarly, Hiruse and Yamazaki create fully-rounded characters while making the most of their own deeply felt emotional moments. Kundo Koyama’s screenplay gives them both a tangible arc and convincing motivations, treating them with the same degree of care bestowed on the lead.

Yet Departures is, ultimately, a film of beautiful landscapes, exquisite metaphoric visual compositions and luxurious montages. It’s moviemaking on an operatic scale that, through big, broad strokes, evokes the fundamental facets of human existence. It’s a grand piece of work and a pleasure to observe, but it stimulates the heart and never the brain.

Kirby Dick imbues his movies with sheer populist rage. He turned that anger on the Motion Picture Association of America and their arbitrary, bean counting ratings system in This Film is Not Yet Rated, giving voice to an issue long championed by many of us film critics. Now, in Outrage, he turns to the hypocritical spectacle of closeted gay politicians coping with their buried homosexuality by developing rigidly anti-gay voting records. It’s a worthy subject for a screed, the impact of which is enhanced by Dick’s crucial decision to keep off-camera, thereby rejecting the flawed solipsistic notion of the filmmaker as a crusader for injustice promulgated by Michael Moore.

Instead, the director shines his spotlight squarely on the real men and women combating the discriminatory legislation that so frequently pours out of Washington. Among the more compelling figures profiled are Mike Rogers, a D.C. blogger devoted to dishing about closeted politicos, Sirius radio host Michelangelo Signorile and more obvious figures like U.S. Rep. Barney Frank and Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey. Collectively, the talking head subjects paint a picture of a federal government awash in a culture that prefers hypocrisy to honesty. It’s a place in which the requirements of pollsters and parties, as well as the perception, fostered by the right wing of the electorate, of pervasive anti-gay sentiment force the creation of a manufactured family values identity that best serves no one.

That perceptive exploration of the deep-rooted, fundamental problems of culture preoccupied with the perfect “American” brand provides the heart of Outrage, but it won’t account for most of the ticket sales. Rather, the picture has become a news sensation this week thanks primarily to the speculation over which conservatives the filmmaker has pulled forth from the closet and how strong of a case he’s made against them. Generally, he compiles convincing evidence of, at the very least, strong strains of bisexuality. Also, the venture never feels as icky as it might initially seem because of the strong case made that homophobic voting records can actually destroy lives.

At risk of giving away all of the film’s “surprises,” it should be noted that the central figure therein is Charlie Crist, currently the married governor of Florida but long dogged by rumors of his homosexuality. Dick systematically reveals the denials and cover-ups that accompanied an investigation into Crist’s relationship with a young male staffer of Katherine Harris while he emphatically explores the litany of anti-gay offenses in the governor’s record, including his support for Florida’s only state in the nation ban on gay adoption. His depiction serves as a template for the treatment the filmmaker bestows on his other subjects. Alternately enraged and sympathetic, he shows us men closeted by their own specific failings and the collective ones endemic to society at large.

The movie works best when it forgoes the simplistically delineated us vs. them modus operandi to focus on its deeper exploration of the very complex, timely subject at hand. The filmmaker benefits no one when he engages in his tawdrier inclinations. The telling of the story of former Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, he of the famous bathroom stall foot tapping incident, best exemplifies the twinned approach Dick employs. After commencing things with the audio tapes of Craig’s arrest played over the opening credits, the filmmaker quickly segues into a very detailed, front and center on-camera recollection shared by a former liaison, describing their hookup in brutally frank detail. Later, a reporter from Craig’s hometown of Boise describes the profound history of anti-gay rhetoric and imagery in the Idaho popular press, showing an editorial from the senator’s boyhood that decried the sinfulness of homosexual leanings. He uses it to openly consider the severe repression that must be intrinsic to the cognitive makeup of a gay man reared in that world, and to, without forgiving Craig’s legislative misdeeds, empathize with the challenge of such a struggle.

The latter approach applies thoughtful introspection to the material and refuses to view it as a cut and dry case of big, bad villains picking on the little people. The former technique trades in uncomfortably sensationalized muckraking. When Dick mines the rich psychological minefield of the deep, dark contradictory world of behind the scenes Washington D.C., he successfully evokes the universal truths of the importance of living an honest, open life. Despite its fulfillment of the important principle underwriting the film, that those who make the law be exposed to it, the act of watching the filmmaker expose politicians leaves a far less substantive impact once the lights come up.

I’m sure that some of you have heard of this film festival that has been going on up in New York City this past week — also known as the Tribeca Film Festival — and while we didn’t take the entire crew up there for the event, we did send our favorite New Yorker Robert Levin to see a few films and send back some reports. And while he’s got a few written reviews coming in the next few days, he also sent over this video, which was put together by Katey Rich over at Cinema Blend. Robert and Katey have been braving the gorgeous spring weather and seeing all sorts of interesting films, and we think its nice that they would take a moment to record a little update for us.

Check out the video below and stay tuned to our Tribeca 2009 page for more of Robert’s updates, including one more video update to come.

A few days ago I saw this trailer pop up over at CHUD and today the fine publicists working on the Tribeca Film Festival run of Dan Fogler‘s directorial debut Hysterical Psycho were kind enough to send us over a copy of the trailer that fits nicely into our own video player. The trailer is admittedly wild and crazy and all sorts of seizure inducing psychosis, but it also appears to be a lot of fun. I’m interested to see what comes out of Dan Fogler — yes, Tony award-winning Balls of Fury and Fanboys star Dan Fogler — will do in his first work as a director.

Before you check out the trailer (or after, your choice), here is the film’s official synopsis: In this side-splitting horror send-up, a theater troupe takes a trip up state to the Moonlake Inn Motel, but its nearby lake is full of mind altering lunar radiation, and one of the troupe members is already on the path to insanity. Put them together and you get one hysterical psycho! Full of bloody, fun-filled kills, and inventive animation, Hysterical Psycho is a wild trip.

And now, the trailer:

If you are headed to the Tribeca Film Festival later this week, here are the dates and times for screenings of Hysterical Psycho:

• Premiere – Friday, April 24th at 8:00pm – School of Visual Arts, Theater 2
• Public Screening 2 – Saturday, April 25th at 11:59pm – School of Visual Arts, Theater 1
• Public Screening 3 – Tuesday, April 28th at 11:00pm – AMC Village 7, Theater 6
• Public Screening 4 – Friday, May 1st at 11:59pm – AMC Village 7, Theater 1
• Public Screening 5 – Saturday, May 2nd at 11:45pm – AMC Village 7- theater 5