Last Thursday, the Music Box opened its latest 70-millimeter film series with Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, a 1930 Fox release made in the short-lived Grandeur process, an early iteration of 70-millimeter filmmaking. There are no surviving 70-millimeter prints of The Big Trail, so the Music Box screened it from 35-millimeter instead, but this more than sufficed in conveying the spectacle of Walsh’s production. The film’s high-definition imagery still impresses after 90 years; Walsh fills the widescreen frames brilliantly, often dividing one’s attention between highly populated backgrounds and naturalistic, low-stakes drama in the foreground. The bifurcated imagery finds its complement in the storytelling, which is divided between grand-scale recreations of life on the Oregon Trail and intimate scenes played out by spirited, Walshian performers. The Big Trail is above all a human-scale entertainment (complete with the considerations of frailty and mortality that term would imply) and that’s what makes it all the more satisfying. One genuinely experiences the characters’ sense of triumph when they ford a river or make their way down a cliffside—we understand the sense of life that’s at stake.
A few nights after seeing Invisible Life, I checked out another recent release with “Invisible” in the title, the Blumhouse horror picture The Invisible Man. I thought the films had a surprising amount in common; both are especially interested in the suffering of women, and both feature impressive lead performances that grant dignity and psychological complexity to women who suffer. Where Invisible Life is driven by the acting of Julia Stockler and Carol Duarte as Euridice and Guida, Invisible Man centers on just one actress, Elisabeth Moss, who delivers what may be the richest performance to date in a Blumhouse production. And where Aïnouz’s film offsets its portrait of unhappiness with operatic flights of style, Leigh Whannell’s is so fixated on the heroine’s suffering that it resembles at times a genre cinema variation on such Lars von Trier movies as Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Yet both Invisibles exhibit sympathy and sensitivity in their characterizations, making them the most humane genre films around right now.
