The handsome visual textures of the setting (in Portugal, actually, although the story presumably unfolds in America) provide sensuous underpinning as Auster revisits a favorite theme -- individuals going back to ground zero to grapple in surreal ways with questions of language, perception and identity. In the case of Thewlis's Martin Frost, grappling is the last thing on his mind as he settles into the handsome borrowed hideaway to just kick back after having completed his fourth novel. Instead, he finds himself literally, and serendipitously, embracing his muse.
As embodied by Irene Jacob, she's highly embraceable. And accessible. Frost wakes up one morning to find her asleep next to him. Startled and disconcerted, he's further unnerved by her self-possession and poise. Explaining that she's the niece of his house-owning friends, and without ever quite explaining how she made her way next to him in bed without awakening him, she assures him that she'll respect his need for quiet and solitude, proposes that they make the best of it while staying out of each other's way, then brightly utters the dreaded words of the intruder: "You'll never know I'm here."
A few meals later they're in bed. So energized is the hitherto drained Frost that he's impelled to begin a new story. It goes well. He spends each day typing. They spend their evenings over simple, elegant, civilized meals, accompanied by all the right wines and all the right lines. The only flaw in their idyll comes when her health begins failing as he draws close to the end of his new opus. In fact, there's a direct correlation between his creativity at the keyboard and between the sheets. Long after he has accepted her plea to just take her mysterious presence on faith and love her, he notices that the more his new work comes to life, the more her life force and energies seem depleted.
The film reaches a crisis point when he must decide whether to rejoice in the newly finished work and lose her, or destroy it and restore her. How far you will have borne with Auster's fable about the cost of art, and the erotic sources of its energies, will depend on your tolerance for whimsy. The trouble comes when Auster's fabulist hand falters along with his inventiveness, then fails as the story thins out past what you feel is its natural shorter-than-feature-length span, then seems to evaporate altogether in its Architectural Digest country vacation ambience.
Before long, Jacob's Eurocharm and Thewlis's unconvincing abandon seem stranded by Auster's inability to take them anywhere. As writer and director, he seems to have painted them, and himself, into a corner they can't get out of, as gossamer fantasy, depending on lightness and evanescent charm for its appeal, is replaced by mundane wheel-spinning. It takes the form of the local boiler repairman, Michael Imperioli, arriving and proclaiming that plumbing and heating is just his day job and that he's really a writer, bouncing relentlessly from genre to genre, blissfully unaware of his total lack of talent.
It's as if one of the bumpkins from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream has been plunked into a sort of Wings of Desire spinoff. Imperioli's would-be writer has also been assigned his own personal muse, and his lack of creativity is in direct proportion (or perhaps just another manifestation of) his total insensitivity to her. Lout that he is, he treats his muse (played by Auster's college-age daughter, Sophie) as if she's a moron. In response, she shambles around in a state of virtual catatonia, greasy-haired, shlumpy, looking down at the floor a lot, mumbling. Once Thewlis's appreciative author and Jacob's senior muse get hold of her, however, she brightens into an ethereal delight.
Take care of your muse, the film says, and she'll take care of you in ways you never imagined or in fact literally can't imagine without her. The sad thing about The Inner Life of Martin Frost is that it seems to think it's a tender tribute to the eternal feminine. In fact, it seems an undersupplied old man's fantasy projection of women as servitors, blissfully allaying male potency fears. There isn't enough inner life, or outer life, for that matter, just a sort of paternalistic misogyny softened by wistful intimations of morality. And there isn't a thing that Auster's inserts of typewriters spinning in black voids can do to give it the kiss of life.
For more information about The Inner Life of Martin Frost, visit New Yorker Films. To order The Inner Life of Martin Frost, go to TCM Shopping
by Jay Carr
