Memoirs of a Geisha

Grade: D

Like a Haiku written by an American 3rd Grader, director Rob Marshall has taken something foreign, mysterious and exotic and transformed it into something lifeless, melodramatic, glossy, predictable and, worst of all things, excruciatingly dull.

If he wanted to make a film about something Japanese, why didn’t he try Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” instead? We know he can direct good movie musicals.

The book saved my life – anyone spending a week with their mother in a Floridian retirement community knows that a good book spells the difference between survival and suicide. American-born (we’re talking Chattanooga, Tennessee, folks) author Arthur Golden infused his novel with a passion borne of all things Japanese – a degree in Japanese art, a Master’s in Japanese history, and time actually spent in the Orient. The tale felt authentically Japanese, even if the author was not.

“Chicago” made Rob Marshall an overnight wunderkind who Hollywood was willing to give the pick of the litter to and throw mega million dollar financing at. But, not unlike a director named Michael Cimino who sank a studio, one lauded film and a keen visual eye does not an auteur make. Like this film, “Heavens Gate” looked beautiful too. It also starred an actress from another country (in that case, France) whose English was so dreadful no one but the director could understand her.

Somehow, Marshall was given carte blanche to cast actors (most of whom hail from places other than Japan) speaking garbled English by rote, who don’t seem to fully understand the (bad) dialogue they’re being asked to speak. The result is a series of distancing, deadpan and dreary deliveries lacking in any personality, depth or pathos. Michelle Yeoh brings grace and dignity to the role of a mentor Geisha, but the rest of the cast runs the gamut from bland to overwrought to indecipherable. Screenwriter Robin Swicord has turned a kimono into sack cloth, taking a sensual and sumptuous story and replacing it with a confused plotline, stilted scenes, embarrassingly affected voice-overs and vapid dialogue – one is sometimes relieved not to be able to understand pronouncements like “when one has already bitten into a plum, who else would want to taste it?” A score by John Williams is another heavy-handed Hollywood cliché, filled with shakuhachi flutes and koto harps but utterly lacking in organic or original flavor.

The film is an empty vessel, yet is indeed a beauty to behold. Dion Beebe’s cinematography is the single element that keeps the Hari Kari sword at bay, replete with Japanese villages, Jane Austen cliffs and colorful pageantry. Yet Marshall’s Geisha choreography is a bad Broadway version of a kabuki pantomime.

Truth be told, one doubts whether a film so steeped in a specific essence and tradition should have been attempted by anyone other than a Japanese director filmed in the country and language of its origin and presented with English subtitles. Then one remembers who wrote the transcendent book in the first place, and the blame crushes like a sumo wrestler on the shoulders of Rob Marshall.

too much all that jazz
Rob’s “Memoirs of a Geisha”
bomb dropped on Japan

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0397535/