Milwaukee, Minnesota
According to MILWAKEE, MINNESOTA’S director Alan Mindel in the exclusive director interview on this DVD, this film would have been left on the shelf were it not for Tartan’s Hamish Mcalpine. It is a low budget American independent film that focuses on a small town that is full of the stereotypical trailer park trash and surreal characters that seem to dominate this type of film. We are also....
According to MILWAKEE, MINNESOTA’S director Alan Mindel in the exclusive director interview on this DVD, this film would have been left on the shelf were it not for Tartan’s Hamish Mcalpine. It is a low budget American independent film that focuses on a small town that is full of the stereotypical trailer park trash and surreal characters that seem to dominate this type of film. We are also fully informed about the numerous problems that the film went through before it was finally completed, most amazingly that two thirds of the film was completed in only 8 days the winter after shooting had initially begun. We are further informed by the director, on a number of separate occasions, that he was also looking to follow his instincts during shooting, which basically seems to mean that he was making it up as he was going along, even though the script had undergone over 15 rewrites. These two factors combined, a quick shoot and Mindel’s instinctive film making, have both combined to produce a film that on one level is tediously complex, yet on the other seems like bad television as opposed to a film, that is only saved by some fantastic cinematography.
The film starts with the films central character Albert, a retarded individual who is being dominated and controlled by his mother, providing us with a voice over that informs us that he is a great ice lake fisherman because he can listen to the fishes. Continuing on from this, Albert’s mother is killed in a deliberate car crash, which results in him inheriting her substantial stack of money. Running concurrently to this is a girl, posing as a reporter, who is befriending Albert at the beginning for no obvious reason. Seeds are planted and a number of potential suspects are offered forwards as potential murderers of Albert’s mum. The ever excellent and always underused Bruce Dern is one of them, Randy Quaid another and the reporter Tuey as well. After her death, we follow a few of the characters around until we fully understand the motives behind all the characters actions. Albert, seems to move from a position of retard, to one of retard that starts to understand what is happening around him. If you manage to get this far with the film then you will want to discover the rest of the action for yourself.
One of the most annoying things about this film is not the film itself, even though it appears to be rushed and totally unsatisfying, but the films director on the extras. The more he was explaining his process and the films evolution, the more I could feel myself being wound up to the point of explosion. Is there anything more tedious that someone telling us every single detail about what they did, especially when 90% of the time the words we here seem to fit the situation and the results, not the reality. On one hand he was telling us that this film was mainly improvised and instinctive, yet on the other he is telling us many definites about the story and character arcs, situations he himself admits mainly came together in the edit. The more he tells us about what he did here and how great he is with actors, the more the film itself unravels and falls apart. In fact, to the point where we seem to be left with little but a patchwork of a film about nothing.
We are though exposed to some fantastic cinematography, which I am pleased to announce has been done justice on this DVD. Considering the fact that two thirds was filmed in 8 days, the camera work is nothing short or remarkable. However the director once again informs us that he is “a complete nut with the frame”, tinkering about with all the details we see on the screen. Rarely does he acknowledge that film is a collaborative art form, but consistently we are made aware of Mindel’s involvement in every thing we see. There is a word for this type of personality and when we are aware of that type of person as a general rule they are usually disowned by everyone around them. Rarely do you here Ken Loach talking about himself with such a relaxed turn of phrase and glee. In fact he only ever answers such a question about working methods if he is asked, and it is pretty much acknowledged globally that he is a master of the type of social naturalism that he films. Anyway, although we cannot see Mr Mindel during his commentary with main actor Troy Garity, it very much sounds like he is talking with his trousers firmly round his ankles, and one hand firmly on his….
COMMENTARY BY ALAN MINDEL AND TROY GARITY
Unfortunately, Mindel is unknowingly dominating this commentary, consistently cutting off Garity from elaborating on his own personal experience of such a strange shoot as this one. Instead Mindel cuts him off to state that “I trimmed his moustache myself”, when referring to Randy Quaids beard. Or when he is on a verbal role, that “I like anything cheesy and out of date”, a quote his mentor Paul Morrisey (director of Warhole’s films) must feel like puking when he heard. Mindel also tediously tells us how heroically he recruited the actors, facts so mind numbingly boring that they bare no resemblance to anything of interest, other than the fact that they are probably keeping his …. hard, continuously retreading his own experiences, god forgive him he ever forgets any. He also informs us of all the film references in the film as well. It appears that they are so frequent that there is little of originality here at all. A fact backed up by the fact that he forgets to tell us that he wanted the music to sound like that from AMERICAN BEAUTY, which it so obviously does.
One thing that needs to be stated is that he obviously is very proud of the film, and this is backed up by his truly ridiculous explanation of the final shot of the film itself. Another classic comes when Mindel discusses the choice of Alison Folland, who plays the supposed reporter Tuey and his directorial instructions to her. Firstly you need to understand that her performance is truly bad, a privileged kid trying to play a confused battered about piece of trailer park trash. Mindel says that he wanted her to act bad, as though her character is herself acting bad, due to the fact that she is herself performing for all the other characters in the film. Nothing wrong so far. He then goes on to state that we will notice that as she starts to become guilty and morph in to ‘herself’ then we can see how great an actress she really is. The problem here is that her acting is nothing special, in fact it is really poor and one of the main hang-ups in this film. Sofia Coppola acts like Meryl Streep at her best in THE GODFATHER PART 3, when compared to this particular performance. However, Mindel is adamant that she is truly phenomenal in this film. As a matter of fact I hope that you readers aren’t as bored reading this as I was watching and now writing about it.
TARTAN EXCLUSIVE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW (43 Mins)
Or should it be called THE ALAN MINDEL SHOW. Here he has the camera for 43 minutes. In fact some of this section is very interesting. He firstly outlines how his film career began. This lengthy retelling of his CV, seems to be not the first time he has needed or been required to outline his credentials. In fact it sounds like Jude Laws retelling of the tuna joke in I HEART HUCKABEES. Initially he started out as “an academic”, his words, on the way to medical school, before dropping out and starting a casting agency that discovered Uma Thurman, Isabella Rossellini, Kelly Lynch and Vincent Gallo, among others. He then proudly tells us that it was down to him that MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO got funded, due to his persistence. As a producer he got disillusioned and through one way or another ended up with this script for MILWAKEE, MINNESOTA, a script he himself had put down years before because he hated the script but “liked the soul of the film”. He then spent 18 months on the script before spending 25 days over another 18 months making the film. He tells us how he learnt a lot from clay, stating that he learnt a lot from the accidents that occur that then lead to the next part. Something very obvious in this film, with one accident clearly leading to the next one.
He tells us that the point of this film was to move the audience because as we live in a desensitised world, he wanted to open our senses and heart up to ‘feel’ by the end of the film…Jesus! As you can probably imagine it was quite hard to get to the end of this section. However he had even more gems hidden up his sleeve. Like the one where he says he wanted this film to be a multigenre coming of age tale that included romance, drama, thriller and dark comedy genres, before in the next breath telling us that he didn’t do it on purpose because he only realised this after he had finished the film. Another gem and one that left me wanting to destroy my own TV was at the end when he states that he felt really confident with his actors, as 90% of the film is down to casting and that “actors are my number one thing”. I just felt that this guy needs a serious reality check. It is different when a proven actor’s director like Sydney Lumet says such a thing, which he did virtually word for word, but coming out of Mindel’s mouth, it was nothing less than laughable. On par in fact with the other classic where he says he felt at home as a director, something as worrying as Gary Glitter suggesting he would like to work in an orphanage, run by Arthur C. Clarke and owned by Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.
So then, the film itself is pretty silly, far away from the classic recent American character studies like THE STATION AGENT, GEORGE WASHINGTON and ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS. It has fantastic cinematography and staunch enough performances by the older actors, but it is let down by the younger actors and some clueless ‘improvised directing’. The film suffers from a poor narrative which under a more skilled and experienced director could have been turned into a little classic like the above mentioned films. Mindel suggests that most of the time his incessant tampering with everything in front of the camera was of great concern for the rest of the technicians, as they only had 8 days to film the majority of the film, a fact that suggests that he sees himself as a Shinya Tsukamoto (TETSUO 1and 2 etc) kind of independent artist. The problem is that it is clear that he is nothing of the sort. The DVD comes with Tartans traditionally solid extras and were he interesting would be invaluable. As he is not, maybe I am the only person in the world, outside of the film, who has watched and listened to all of his words. With his one film, he already has more spoken time on camera that Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, Terrence Mallick and Akira Kurosawa combined. I am not sure what this means but it means something. The picture and sound quality are excellent but as the film is a shocker, this is nothing more than an affirmation that Tartan really are up there with the best of the big DVD producers. Avoid this film like the plague, then hopefully no one will offer the self gratifying Alan Mindel another job to direct again. Maybe then he will continue the good work and find funding for some more real artists stuck on the fringes of the establishment, just like he did for Gus Van Sant and arguably his best film to date MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO.
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