Memoirs Of A Geisha (Blu-ray)

 

Picture: B+     Sound: B+     Extras: C-     Film: C-

 

 

In its long preproduction time, Arthur Golden’s book Memoirs Of A Geisha was one of the hottest unproduced properties in Hollywood.  For the longest time, the film was to be one of the next projects of Steven Spielberg and it was put on hold for him for quite a while.  To everyone’s surprise, Spielberg eventually passed on the project and that left Columbia/Sony seeking a new director.  When they landed Chicago director Rob Marshall, the production finally kicked in and high hopes were in the air.  So why was the resulting 2005 film not a huge critical and commercial smash?

 

For one thing, the film intended for Spielberg suddenly lost him and the production could never shake his touch.  John Williams still created the music score, the film still had its painful arc of a story and though Spielberg stayed on as producer, Marshall’s sense of staging never gelled with Spielberg’s original intent and the result was a disappointment across the board despite the best efforts of all.

 

Ziyi Zhang plays the young lady (Chiyo and Sayuri) who may become the prized title lady if thing go the way she wants them to go, set across a China in the changing times of the 1920s and 1930s.  At a long 145 minutes, the film takes the long way in telling the sometimes compelling tale of society on a subtle, epic scale.  She faces ugliness, humiliation, glory, sadness, pain and maybe some triumph, though not in any particular order.  Zhang takes her time in an ambitious performance, yet the Robin Swicord screenplay adaptation never adds up and the film is too muddled too often throughout.

 

The cast is even good, including Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li, Mako, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Ted Levine.  The costume design and production design are top notch.  Dion Beebe, A.C.S., A.S.C., delivers cinematography that can be compelling and is visually more complex than it would seem, with one of the best uses of color that year.  The money was put into this production to match the efforts ands ambitions of all.  There was likely no way to shorten the film to tell the tale either.

 

So here’s the rub.  As compared to Spielberg’s grossly underrated Munich, this film never manages to be realistic enough to have the impact it needed to have.  It feels overproduced as compared to similar films in its genre and portraying its era, but only because the scripting and pace undermine it.  Then there is the most important problem, white males trying to tell the tale of a young, fragile Asian woman and missing the boat on many levels.

 

The result feels more like Oliver Stone’s Heaven & Earth, another long, muddled, failed work where the female lead’s pain is a series of melodramatic “oh no, not again” moments that are run-on, dull and cannot make up for the lack of more character development or any kind of vial, internal exposition or expression of the character, no mater how good the acting skills of Miss Zhong.  Trying the Gone With The Wind/Dr. Zhivago approach of a romance (however limited here, which often rings false when it happens) against the backdrop of history cannot save it from these fundamental errors either.

 

This is not to say more female and/or Asian filmmakers behind the camera would have made this better, but it would have increased the chances of coherence.  As it stands, this “memoir” is more of a pretty set of covers and pictures than deep text and that is where it ultimate fails.  If you are going to do an epic of any kind, make sure you can make the big statement instead of settling for melodrama.

 

The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image is good for the format, but Director of Photography Beebe’s work is so good here that even this prime format has problems capturing the 35mm work.  Maybe if there were less extras and uncompressed PCM was substituted with Dolby TrueHD or DTS MA, the picture would not have some of the Video Black problems it has here, but in real life, it is proof that even 1080p and the HD master used are showing their limits as they simply cannot capture a more complex 35mm image.  This is not even with a more complex color format like dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor and the Video Red limits (and red is so important here) all HD to date has shows.  Though it is not great, it is much better than any other presentation you’ll see of the film outside of 35mm and an important visual study disc for anyone serious about studying HD limits versus film and transfer issues thereof.

 

The PCM 16/48 5.1 mix that is also good, with utilization of all the channels, even and especially in subtle ways throughout that gives the mix some character.  William’s delivers one of his more unique scores and it has become a fan favorite.  However, as compared to another recent recording like that for Spielberg’s A.I., you can hear the PCM’s sound limits versus the better MLP (Meridian Lossless Packing) 5.1 96/24 tracks of the sole music score in the DVD-Audio release version of that film’s score, so serious audiophiles should not have hopes that high of the sound being that good.  Some will even wonder why this did not get Dolby TrueHD like Sony’s Immortal Beloved Blu-ray (reviewed elsewhere on this site) or DTS MA as on the best Sony/MGM Blu-rays.  However, this is far better than the duller Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes supplied and will more than suffice.

 

Extras include a behind the scenes photo gallery, costume illustration photo gallery, special navigation abilities exclusive to this disc, twelve featurettes covering the many aspects of production and two audio commentary tracks: one with Marshall, the other with Coleen Atwood, John Myhre and Pietro Scalia on the production.  They all prove how sincerely hard everyone tried to make this work.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo