Tim Blake Nelson
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Connections, in both directions
In the ensemble style of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts or Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth or Paul Haggis’s recent Third Person, Anesthesia examines how a tragic event can, for better or worse, be a jolt that throws aftershocks into the lives that it touches.
It’s a copycat formula that was perfected in radically superior films like Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel and Altman’s Short Cuts.
I excitedly flocked to Tim Blake Nelson's O and Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You , high school movies paying tribute to "Othello" and "The Taming of the Shrew", respectively.
The uniformly strong cast (which also, for some reason, includes Glenn Close in a nothing role as the professor’s wife) does its best to put some flesh on the thematic skeleton, and they collectively manage to avoid the laughable histrionics that plague Paul Haggis’ Crash (still the nadir of this quasi-genre).
A noble semi-failure in an ignoble sub-genre, Tim Blake Nelson’s “Anesthesia” is one of those dreaded everyone-is-connected daisy chains a la “Crash.”
But other directors, like Mike Figgis with Timecode and Paul Haggis with Crash , saw only the possibility to configure their statuses as contemplative artists by using the narrative model to trite and gimmicky effects, with coincidence and manipulation as the template's new raison d'etre.
Anesthesia is an upscale Crash centering on the allegedly profound interconnectedness among a group of seemingly disparate individuals and random events.
Writer-director-actor Tim Blake Nelson is a smart, savvy, veteran filmmaking presence, and he’s to be commended for shooting for the intellectual and philosophical stars in “Anesthesia,” but this ensemble piece plays like “Crash” in a minor note, with one heavy-handed scene after another, all leading up to an ambivalent, unsatisfying ending.
Like a tonier East Coast response to Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” the film effortfully pushes its characters together only to observe the ways in which they largely resist contact.
Margo reads Leaves of Grass and shares some of Holden Caulfield’s world-weary detachment: she looks down on her town as flimsy and artificial, hence the title.
In searching for the point at which survival turns into complicity, it may have the most in common with Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone.
Goulding seems confident and pleasant enough on the surface, but underneath smolders a passionate jealous rage towards his friends Odin James (played by Mekhi Phifer of "Shaft"), Michael Casio (Andrew Keegan of "10 Things I Hate About You") and Odin's girlfriend, Desi Brable (Julia Stiles of "Save the Last Dance").
As was the case with other such teen-based adaptations of Shakespeare's work such as "10 Things I Hate About You," "Romeo + Juliet" and "Hamlet," the story feels, looks and sounds different, yet is nevertheless pretty much the same.
And, regrettably, this new paintjob on a reliable warhorse doesn't have the verve or vivacity of Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet or 10 Things I Hate About You.
Tim Blake Nelson's controversial version of Othello is a belated entry in the pre-millennial wave of literary classics rendered with teenage casts -- Jane Austen's Emma as Clueless, Baz Luhrmann's overamped Romeo + Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew as 10 Things I Hate About You.
Aug. 31, 2001 | After Julia Stiles starred in "10 Things I Hate About You," the 1999 high school comedy update of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," the celeb profiles that followed announced she would be playing two more Shakespeare heroines: First, Desdemona in "O," a high school update of "Othello," and then Ophelia in "Hamlet."
But the very fact that "10 Things I Hate About You" ("The Taming of the Shrew") and "Get Over It" ( "A Midsummer Night's Dream" ) were comedies gave them some leeway from literary scrutiny.
Of the spate of classics-transposed-to-high-school movies that have been released over the last few years, some (Ten Things I Hate About You, Hamlet 2000, Clueless) have been much more successful than others (She's All That, Cruel Intentions, Crime and Punishment In Suburbia).
In this respect Tim Blake Nelson's " The Grey Zone " (2001) is tougher and more honest, by showing Jews trapped within a Nazi system that removed the possibility of moral choice.
Polanski photographs death in the Warsaw ghetto with a remarkable distance that immediately separates the film from showier Holocaust films like Schindler’s List and The Grey Zone.
Stanley Kubrick is his idol, and the final shot pans over a giant poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey .