Home Video Picks & Passes 02.22.15

The Overnighters (2014) — PICK
Porco Rosso (1992) — PICK
Tales From Earthsea (2006) — PASS

 

One of the best films of last year, Jesse Moss’ The Overnighters is an existentially probing documentary with more layers than a twisty Hollywood thriller, at turns inspiring, challenging, sobering and finally devastating.

Partly, this is due to the compelling subject matter: A Lutheran pastor in a booming North Dakota oil town is committed to showing Christian hospitality to an influx of out-of-state laborers, many rough around the edges, and to mediating between them and the tense, sometimes testy, local community.

Partly, it’s a matter of circumstance, as the situation spirals in unexpected directions. And, partly, it’s the sheer filmmaking craft on display, particularly in editing.

What starts as a seemingly straightforward celebration of Christian virtue becomes a complex chronicle of a community in conflict — before finally revealing itself as an excruciating meditation on the contradictions people live with, on the tension between one’s public and private self and the extent to which heroic virtue and service can coexist with deep moral compromise.

As such, The Overnighters ends on a troubling, divisive note, one that will be alienating to viewers only interested in uplift. (You’ve been warned!) Yet the film’s challenging, provocative insights, right to the end, reward thoughtful contemplation.

New on Blu-ray: a number of lesser-known Studio Ghibli animated fantasies, including one that my family loves and one that we don’t love.

The first is Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, a Depression-era European adventure set in and around the Adriatic Sea, where a former World War I ace in the Italian air force, alienated from his motherland by Italy’s turn toward Fascism, now makes his living as a mercenary battling seaplane pilots.

The fantasy catch: Our hero has fallen under a “curse,” transforming him into an anthropomorphic pig who calls himself Porco Rosso (“Red Pig”). (An anti-fascist pig? When pigs fly! Ha!) This curse is never explained, but a remark about all middle-aged men being pigs links Porco’s appearance to his lost faith in humanity.

Loosely based on Miyazaki’s own manga (Japanese comic book), Porco Rosso combines the director’s love of early aviation and Golden Age Hollywood with a quintessentially Old World send-up of American bumptiousness.

The other is Tales From Earthsea, the debut effort of Hayao’s son Goro Miyazaki, loosely based on Ursula K. LeGuin’s fantasy series, set in a rather generic world of dragons and wizards.

I’m calling it a pass, though the film’s flaws — generic characters, a murky narrative with a disappointing finale and a troubling mythology at odds with Christian anthropology and eschatology — don’t prevent me from appreciating its potent mythic images and typically Japanese sense of loss and nostalgia.

 

Caveat Spectator: The Overnighters: Mature themes, including references to disturbing crimes, homosexuality, drug use, etc. Adults. Porco Rosso: An extended cartoony-but-brutal fistfight; a few mature references. Tweens and up.