Review of America America (2012) by Richard D — 17 Sep 2018

Elia Kazan adapts his own book about his uncle, a Greek man living in Turkey who's fortunes rise and fall as he pursues his single minded devotion to moving to America. This is clearly a very personal and heartfelt project for Kazan.

I don't think it's a very good movie. It's an extremely long film that still manages to spend almost no time letting us inside the head of it's main character. I know he wants to go to America because he says it almost constantly, but I don't understand why he does most of the things he does in this film.

That's a fairly major problem since he's prone to making very dumb and callous decisions, and it's difficult to empathize with a man who makes seemingly inexplicable damaging decisions. It does not help that the star of the film, Stathis Giallelis, is not much of an actor.

He seems to have been hired for his quiet Dean/Brando brooding demeanor, but he passes quiet and brooding at arrives at dense and impenetrable. As if to compensate for his non-performance, most of his co-stars give HUGE performances.

Some of them ... John Marley in particular ... are quite good, but it gives the movie a strange, unsettling tone. Haskell Wexler's cinematography is quite beautiful, but oddly out of sync with the somewhat realistic tone of much of the film.