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      Remembering James Caan and His Potent Mix of Swagger and Delicacy

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      “The Godfather” helped open up a range of roles for the actor that allowed him to play against type and expectation in wonderful ways.I’m not sure who owned the book, but eventually it ended up in my sweaty young hands. Someone at school had told me about the scene in Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” the one in which Sonny Corleone, the reckless eldest son with a Cupid face and a massive endowment, steals off with one of his sister’s bridesmaids. I remember racing through the passage (“her legs were wrapped around his thighs”). It’s no wonder that when I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s film, I was more than ready for James Caan.He was unforgettably perfect — carnal, wild, exciting. Caan may not be the actor you first think of in relation to “The Godfather,” with its astonishment of legends, but the film is impossible to imagine without his volatile, kinetic performance. Quick to anger, quick to fight, Sonny embodies his family’s terrifying violence in its purest, most unpredictable form, the kind that churns from inside, boiling up like magma. Sonny’s anger will be the death of him; it’s preordained: He must die so that his youngest brother, the deliberate, mercilessly disciplined Michael, can take over the family’s murder business.Not every star finds as perfect a vessel as “The Godfather.” Talent counts, yes, and as an actor, Caan was more gifted and nuanced than suggested by his tough-guy persona. But the vagaries of both life and the movie business mean that few actors and fewer stars have long, creatively unimpeachable runs. Timing also matters as does taste, greed, grit and representation. Caan, who died on Wednesday at 82, has two supreme masterpieces in his filmography: “The Godfather” (1972) and Michael Mann’s “Thief” (1981). We can argue about the sweep of his career, but there’s no debating the greatness that he brought to it.As Sonny, opposite Al Pacino’s more coolheaded Michael, Caan embodied the mob family’s most unpredictable violence.Paramount Pictures, via Associated PressCaan’s career emerged from the ashes of the old studio system. Following what was then a familiar career trajectory, he started in TV before moving into film, and was soon terrifying Olivia de Havilland in the schlocky 1964 thriller “Lady in a Cage.” Looking at the film now (don’t bother), their roles are almost comically emblematic of the era’s upheavals. De Havilland was classical Hollywood personified, an elegant emissary of the old studio system, while Caan would soon be among the upstarts who helped create and define that short-lived, creatively intoxicating miracle known as New Hollywood.“Lady in a Cage” is ridiculous, but it helped set Caan’s career in motion. It would take a while for him to find material worthy of his gift, and the performance is less memorable than his outfit, which includes sandals, a tropical shirt that he later loses, exposing the rug that carpets his torso, and villainy’s de rigueur accessory: a women’s stocking pulled over his face. Notably, he’s also wearing snug-fitting jeans, which, like the sandals, were probably meant to signal his thug’s menacing nonconformity but mostly just draw attention to his body. Tight jeans, as attentive fans know, were a staple of Caan’s onscreen closet.It was Howard Hawks, one of the geniuses of the old studio system, who shortly thereafter set Caan on his way by casting him first in “Red Line 7000” (1965) and then, more important, in “El Dorado,” a western headlined by John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. “I was this little punk working with Wayne and Mitchum,” Caan said later, recalling how, during the shoot, he and Wayne almost got into it on set. Mitchum brokered the peace, and the stars and the film came together beautifully. It opened in 1967, the same year that “Bonnie and Clyde” shook up the industry and audiences, and swept aside old Hollywood with its violence, daring and bad attitude.By the time Caan made “The Godfather,” he had established his range in movies as different as Coppola’s directing debut, “The Rain People” (1969), and the 1971 made-for-TV movie “Brian’s Song,” a wildly popular melodrama in which he played the N.F.L. halfback Brian Piccolo, who died young of cancer. Caan also played a tragic football player in “The Rain People,” about a woman (Shirley Knight) who embarks on one of the era’s existential road trips. En route to self-discovery, she picks up Caan’s Kilgannon, a sweet, guileless, brain-damaged former player whose tragically inapt nickname is Killer.Playing a brain-addled football player opposite Shirley Knight in “The Rain People.”Warner Bros., via AlamyWith his thick neck and trapezoidal torso, Caan looked like the athlete he plays, but little about the performance in “The Rain People” is obvious. It’s a heavy role — Killer is the story’s sacrificial lamb — yet Caan, working with Coppola, imbues the part with a subtle, persuasive innocence that doesn’t patronize the character or sanctify his disability. As an actor, Caan certainly could go big and externalize a character’s inner workings (he does a lot around the eyebrows), and Kilgannon has his outsize moments. Yet what makes the character work is the poignant impassiveness that conveys just how brutally life has hollowed him out.Caan’s ability to convey delicacies of feeling wasn’t a singular gift, but, in his finest roles, it worked contrapuntally with his swaggering physicality and the implied roughness telegraphed by his Bronx-and-Queens-cultivated accent. He sounded like a tough, a delinquent, a bad, potentially dangerous guy, even if his better characters were sometimes more complicated. As Caan’s reputation grew (he was a longtime favorite of this paper’s film critics) and a range of roles opened up to him, he played to and against type and expectation, becoming one of the defining faces of New Hollywood.It may come as a surprise just how big Caan was in the 1970s, particularly if you’re really only familiar with “The Godfather.” Two years after Coppola’s film blew up, in an essay on “The Last Detail” that consecrated Jack Nicholson as a major star, The Times’s Vincent Canby also named Caan as one of the era’s other young notables alongside Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Caan’s frequent co-star, Robert Duvall. There are different reasons Caan’s reputation dimmed in the ensuing decades; for one thing, while Nicholson was solidifying his fame as a sailor in “The Last Detail,” Caan was repping the Navy in “Cinderella Liberty” (1973).I love “Cinderella Liberty,” but it hasn’t been canonized like “The Last Detail,” written by Robert Towne and directed by Hal Ashby. But “Cinderella” deserves love, partly because Caan is terrific in it as a sailor who, during an unplanned leave, suddenly becomes involved with a good-time broad (a glorious Marsha Mason). They’re loose and funny and sexy, and together create a raw, unpredictable, memorable romance. Given how aggressively male-dominated so many 1970s classics were, it’s worth remembering that Caan was good with women in more ways than were hinted at in “The Godfather.”MGM, via AlamyThere are all sorts of reasons the decades that followed were not always kind to Caan, including the end of New Hollywood. He made good and forgettable movies, disappeared, re-emerged and matured into avuncular roles. He was discovered by newcomers like Wes Anderson (“Bottle Rocket”) and Christopher McQuarrie (“The Way of the Gun”). For me, though, the second half of Caan’s career is demarcated by “Thief,” the 1981 thriller in which he plays a master burglar. It’s an action film with guns and violence, blowtorches and lots of tough guys, but because this is quintessential Michael Mann, it’s also a romance.When the film was released, some critics objected to what was seen as its softer, mushier side, which feels like critic-speak for the fact that it features a woman. When Caan’s character isn’t cracking safes or skulls, he is having a tender affair with Tuesday Weld’s skittish restaurant hostess. The two fall in love, have one of Mann’s signature soul-baring conversations across a table and adopt a (stolen) baby. It’s complicated. It’s also beautiful and it gets me every time I watch it. And while the film doesn’t end happily — though maybe it does — it ends happily for any viewer who’s open to it, its deep humanity and to Caan’s transcendent performance. More

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      Zawe Ashton Isn’t Here to Be a Victim of Your Projections

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      The actress was never offered a period piece until “Mr. Malcolm’s List.” She was given 24 hours to decide whether to do it. Now she’s earning raves.“I haven’t necessarily had the privilege of being cast as the hero,” Zawe Ashton said. “And that’s OK.”This was on a recent steamy afternoon, and Ashton, 37, a star of the Regency-era romantic comedy “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” had cast herself in the role of a woman eating a hurried lunch at the New York office of a film company before heading to the airport. Low-key glamorous in bare feet, a black slip dress and a sweatshirt that read, “There Are Artists Among Us,” she radiated a particular mix of seriousness, playfulness and a questing intelligence.While the more gossipy corners of the internet know the London-born Ashton as the fiancée of the actor Tom Hiddleston — they met during a benefit reading of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” which they later performed on Broadway — she has been a professional actor since elementary school and a playwright since her 20s. She has devoted most of her career to playing and writing about outsiders. Julia, a Regency belle, wouldn’t seem to be one of them. Ashton disagrees.“I think she is,” she said. “There’s something she’s not settling for.”This probably explains why Ashton infuses Julia with a kind of wildness, a hint of waywardness under and around the sparkle. While the reviews for “Mr. Malcolm’s List” have been mixed, Ashton has earned raves. She dominates, a critic for The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “with her razor-sharp comedic timing ensuring thrilling delivery of her tart lines.”Ashton may be better known for her engagement to Tom Hiddleston, but as a woman in the entertainment industry, she’s learned that “people will project onto you in the most intense way.”Heather Sten for The New York TimesNext summer she will appear in the Nia DaCosta-directed “The Marvels,” the follow-up to “Captain Marvel.” Reportedly, she will play the villain. And — after Ashton revealed her pregnancy during a recent screening of “Mr. Malcolm’s List” — at least one more debut is anticipated. Sensibly, she does not talk much about her personal life.Over salad, she discussed period dramas, playing women on the edge and finding truth underneath the corsetry. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You look like you’re having so much fun in this movie. Are you?I really am. We all really are. We filmed it in a very intense wave of lockdown in Dublin. Our only bonding time was on site, doing the work. We weren’t even allowed to go to a pub. So there was this really rewarding element of coming together in group scenes and working off each other and understanding each person’s unique rhythm. That’s where some of the comedy is coming from, certainly where a lot of the flirtatious energy is coming from.You haven’t done many period pieces. Why this one?The big conversation that’s happening now around representation in period drama is very, very real. The reality is you can be acting for a long time and not be called to that table. There’s a sort of indifference that turns into mystification that turns into sadness around that. This was the first period piece I’ve ever been offered. I had 24 hours to decide, and then it was sweatpants to corsets.What can you tell me about Julia?What I really loved straight off the bat is where we find her, which is coming out into her fifth season in society without having made a match. It has a little tinge of a woman on the edge. She doesn’t want to be a victim of that society, so she rages against the machine. She does some questionable things. But I hope by the end, she has this humbling redemptive moment where she does find a love match with someone who loves her for her flaws, rather than despite her flaws.Opposite Freida Pinto, left, in “Mr. Malcolm’s List.” Ashton has been getting raves for her performance in the film.Bleecker StreetWhat unlocked her character?One of the first things I had to do was tap into something very truthful and authentic. Freida [Pinto, her co-star] and I had conversations about picking up something that felt more culturally specific to us. That was a real breakthrough. That you can leave the Austenification behind and find something that chimes with your experience. Then we had an amazing historian. She was really helpful with stuff like how you would drink tea, how you would walk through the streets of London with a man that you’re related to or not related to. That led to the physical life and then costume, hair and makeup, stepping into a corset, stuffing into a bonnet.Over the last decade you haven’t done many comedies. Why do a comedy now?I joined a very intense movie club during the lockdown. We watched a movie every night and fed back to each other at the end of every Saturday with Sundays off. We went really high and deliberately quite obnoxious — Bergman, Tarkovsky, Rohmer, Bresson. There was a catharsis there, but I definitely have been looking to escape much more through the work I’ve been doing, the people I want to inhabit.Your next project is “The Marvels.” Was a superhero project another escape?I was moving away from acting for a lot of the past five years or so. I did “Betrayal” here in New York without representation [an agent], and, at the end of that, I signed up with some people and I said, I don’t necessarily want to start feeding the machine. I would like to just meet with first-time female directors, or fledgling female directors, specifically directors who are coming from underrepresented backgrounds in our industry. Emma Holly Jones, who directed “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” being one of them. I got set up on a call with Nia DaCosta where we really connected. It was just a seeing of souls. And on the other side of it was a phone call asking me to be part of her new job.In a career devoted to outsiders, her “Malcolm” character wouldn’t seem to be one of them, but Ashton disagreed: “There’s something she’s not settling for.”Heather Sten for The New York TimesRumor has it you’re playing a villain in that film. Or maybe you’ve complicated the idea of a villain?I don’t really know any other way of going about it, to be honest. I have to start with something real and emotional and authentic and build out from there. I have to understand the deeper meaning in my head.I read about your engagement to Tom Hiddleston. Is it true you met doing “Betrayal”? Because the marriage in that play is not a good marriage!Oftentimes, the most distressing, deep work has the happiest companies. The play was called “Betrayal.” But the play behind the scenes was absolute trust.Well, I’m still hoping that your marriage works out better. It’s funny, you’ve been in this business for nearly 30 years, but when I Googled you, the top results all had to do with your personal life. What’s it like to experience this kind of scrutiny?As a woman in this industry, you become quite attuned to your identity as an artist shifting in proximity to different people. That’s not specific to dating someone. If there’s a conversation I would have off the back of this question, it’s really about letting women in this industry know that whatever point of career that you’re in, shore up your identity and reason for being, because people will project onto you in the most intense way. When that happens, you have to have an internal anchor. You have to be delighted and joyful in the work that you do. I’m not here to be a victim of projection. I’m here to continually grow as an artist. More

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      ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ Review: The Epistolary Novel as Instagram Feed

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      A new film adaptation brings Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 book to the halls of a high school in modern-day France.First published in 1782, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s wicked romp of a novel, “Dangerous Liaisons,” requires only a light airbrush to be convincingly transplanted to the halls of a modern-day high school where teenagers wield sex, power and status like weapons. Nevertheless, the director Rachel Suissa runs Laclos’s story through a heavy Instagram filter in this outlandish, flimsy adaptation.Tristan (Simon Rérolle) and Vanessa (Ella Pellegrini) are a clout-seeking power couple at Victor Hugo High School in Biarritz, a coastal town in Southern France. He’s a rapper and a champion surfer; she’s a fading child star. Together, these performative lovebirds share 10 million social media followers — and a pact to seduce and destroy a new student, Célène (Paola Locatelli), a tech celibate who lords her Luddite superiority over her shallow classmates by bringing a Proust hardback to a pool party. Not that they care. “You can be noble or rich and still be a loser,” Tristan says, declaring the thesis of this update. “Today, it’s all about fame.”Suissa flaunts a fair amount of the directorial moxie needed to pull off her ecstasy-pill-fueled screenplay, which she wrote with the collaboration of Slimane-Baptiste Berhoun. The film’s energy is most colorful in its corners, where minor characters dance in blue mohawks and romp around make-out parties dressed like mermaids and nuns. The hilarious Héloïse Janjaud, playing a gawky student who longs to transform into a leather-clad vamp, nearly powers it all by herself. However, if this movie wants to compete with the erotic palpitations and moral decay of “Cruel Intentions,” the 1999 teen-drama adaptation of Laclos’s novel, it really needs more sleaze from Rérolle: Instead of transforming from cad to honest lover, his character merely shifts from chill to cool, throwing cold water on the lust triangle as its emotional turbulence starts to roil.Playing off the novel’s epistolary structure, Suissa has the high schoolers spout their agonies in livestreamed monologues. It’s a clever idea, but in execution the film’s focus on app-fueled drama reduces key moments to people staring at their phones.Dangerous LiaisonsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Best James Caan Movies to Stream

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      Drama, comedy, suspense, action, kids’ movies — there was truly nothing he couldn’t do. Who else could star in both “The Godfather” and “Elf”?When James Caan’s family announced his death on Thursday, it sent shock waves through cinematic circles — not because his passing was particularly premature (he was 82), but because he seemed such a vibrant and outsize personality, you figured he just might live forever.He hadn’t retired, or even slowed down much, in old age. He co-starred (with Ellen Burstyn, Jane Curtin and Ann-Margret) in “Queen Bees” last year and has another film still due out. More than that, he had maintained an active presence on Twitter, frequently sharing images from his films and memories of his collaborators and always concluding his messages with the phrase “End of tweet.”Yet Caan was a series of contradictions: a Jewish actor best known for playing an Italian, a leading man who never quite became a movie star, an actor equally adept at playing strength and weakness, rage and vulnerability. His attack on his abusive brother-in-law in “The Godfather” is one of the most visceral scenes of violence in movie history. But just the year before, he had starred in a film still remembered for its ability to make men cry. We’ll begin our look at his long, varied career there.1971‘Brian’s Song’Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan had already banked several years of television work and a handful of juicy film roles (including memorable appearances in Howard Hawks’s “El Dorado” and “Red Line 7000” and Robert Altman’s “Countdown”) when he starred in this “ABC Movie of the Week.” Caan and Billy Dee Williams starred as the real-life Chicago Bears teammates Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers, the first interracial roommates in the history of the N.F.L. and best friends until Piccolo’s untimely death from cancer in 1970. Caan and Williams’s easy rapport sells the relationship, and Caan is truly heartbreaking in the closing scenes, which prove a too-rare showcase for his tenderness and warmth.1972‘The Godfather’Stream it on Paramount+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan’s breakthrough role came the following year in Francis Ford Coppola’s sensational adaptation of the best seller by Mario Puzo. The director — who had used Caan to great effect, in a much gentler role, in “The Rain People” (1969) — cast the actor as Sonny, the hot-tempered oldest brother in the Corleone clan. The studio wanted Caan to play Michael (executives didn’t care at all for this Pacino kid Coppola was stuck on), but the filmmaker knew Caan had the mixture of ladies’ man charisma and brute force so essential to Sonny. It was a scene-stealing role, and Caan took advantage of it, playing the character’s many memorable moments to the hilt: his memorable in flagrante delicto entrance, his mocking “bada bing!” moment with Michael, that street-fight humiliation of his brother-in-law and, most of all, his shocking, bullet-ridden last gasps on the Jones Beach Causeway.1974‘The Gambler’Rent or buy it onAmazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.As with most of the actors associated with “The Godfather,” Caan was quickly elevated to leading roles in the wake of its astonishing success. The best of that bunch may well have been this spiky tale of a privileged English professor who finds that his high-society pedigree and formidable intellect are no match for a spiraling gambling addiction. Caan’s duality — his ability to seem to move between worlds, ethnicities and classes — was rarely more effective than here, as his Axel Freed must seem at home both in the classroom, lecturing about the works of Dostoyevsky, and in the back rooms of New York’s seedy gambling underbelly, trying to buy more time from his bookie.1975‘Rollerball’Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.In our current cinematic landscape, an actor who fronts critical successes like “The Godfather” and “The Gambler” is usually ripe for picking by the Superhero Industrial Complex, handed a nice payday and an easy shoot in exchange for lending class and gravitas to a popcorn movie. Caan’s taking the lead in Norman Jewison’s big-budget sports movie could have looked like the same move, downshifting his considerable onscreen intelligence into something a bit brawnier. But “Rollerball” is no typical sports movie. Set in the then-distant future of 2018, it’s a prescient warning of the dangers of corporate overreach, overt violence and class warfare in sports entertainment — and society in general — and Caan conveys both the character’s fierce physicality and his intellect with ease.1981‘Thief’Stream it on Tubi. Rent or buy it on Vudu.Caan turned in arguably his finest performance — and certainly his most soulful — in this astonishing combination of crime movie and middle-age melodrama from the writer-director Michael Mann (“Heat”). Mann specializes in working-class criminals, guys who see their work as a job and nothing more, a way to make a living without punching a clock. Few actors understood that character like Caan, who plays the safecracker, jewel thief and ex-con Frank as a man who will break the law but not his moral code, and who so longs for the fruits of his labor that he carries around a collage of his imagined perfect, suburban life like a mobile vision board. Caan wears the heaviness of the character like a winter coat; he does what he has to do to get by, forever grasping for the last big score that always seems just out of reach.1990‘Misery’Stream it on Showtime. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Caan spent much of the ’80s in a self-imposed exile, burned out from his busy ’70s, battling addictions and caring for his children. He stepped back into the industry with this Rob Reiner adaptation of Stephen King’s best seller, but did so with a generosity of spirit: Rather than choosing a solo vehicle that would show off his gifts, he took the decidedly secondary role of bedridden novelist Paul Sheldon and ceded the spotlight to the relative newcomer Kathy Bates, who had the much showier role of his obsessed superfan Annie Wilkes. She won an Oscar, and thanked him profusely in her acceptance speech: “I really am your No. 1 fan, Jimmy.”1992‘Honeymoon in Vegas’Rent or buy it on Apple TV+; buy it on Amazon.Caan spent the ’90s easing into his new position as a respected character actor, with copious supporting roles both in film and on television. The remnants of Sonny Corleone made him a no-brainer for villain roles, and he played them well, but some of his most memorable work inverted and confounded those expectations. One of the best examples was this romantic comedy from the writer-director Andrew Bergman, starring Nicolas Cage as a newlywed who gambles away a weekend with his wife (Sarah Jessica Parker) to Caan’s high roller. On paper, the character is reprehensible — but Caan invests him with a lovelorn sweetness that lends the picture, and its central conflict, some unexpected ripples.1996‘Bottle Rocket’Stream it on HBO Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan may have had visions of John Travolta’s “Pulp Fiction” comeback when he accepted a supporting role in the up-and-coming Wes Anderson’s debut feature, a cockeyed caper picture about a crew of incompetent criminals. It didn’t have the same result — the film didn’t find its audience until years later, after Anderson had established himself — but Caan’s unsung comic side shines in the role of Mr. Henry, an imposing criminal mastermind (and the proprietor of a successful landscaping firm). It was one of his finest late-career performances, deploying his still-potent tough-guy demeanor and undercutting it with unexpected, self-aware wit.2003‘Elf’Stream it on HBO Max. Rent or buy on most major platforms.When you live and work for as long as Caan did, you become beloved by each generation for a different role, and if boomers loved him for “The Godfather” and Gen Xers for “Bottle Rocket,” this smash family comedy endeared him to Generation Z. A lesser actor, cast in the role of the father to the North Pole elf Buddy (Will Ferrell), might’ve winked or mugged and ruined the whole thing; Caan wisely played this harried dad close to the bone, keenly aware that the straighter his face, the funnier his scenes. Drama, comedy, suspense, action, kids’ movies — there was truly nothing James Caan couldn’t do. More

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      ‘Fair Play’ Review: Casting a Floodlight on Invisible Labor

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      This documentary, a lucid look at household tasks based on Eve Rodsky’s best seller, pairs actionable guidance with testimony from real families.The advice included within Eve Rodsky’s book “Fair Play,” a guide to sharing domestic labor and achieving harmony in the home, won’t blow your mind. A woman’s time is as valuable as a man’s? Who knew! But there is a fortifying effect to arranging these axioms in sequence.The documentary “Fair Play,” directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom (“The Great American Lie”) and based on Rodsky’s book, reproduces its lucidity by positioning interviews with real families alongside Rodsky’s directives. While its stylings, including perky music and cutesy graphics, can sometimes verge on trite, its insights and guidance are encouraging, actionable and necessary.As our talking-head guide, Rodsky is amiable cinematic company. She describes growing up as the latchkey kid of a single mother, and how the strains she faced in her youth informed her values as a wife and mom. An admirable frankness guides her testimony: Rodsky recounts instances of feeling angry at her husband, and describes the specific ways that she coached him in the art of taking ownership over household tasks.The film’s arguments hit harder in the wake of the pandemic’s lockdowns, which the documentary suggests found moms bearing the brunt of the stress. But most vital is the film’s look at where the United States falls short in its support of parents, particularly its limited access to subsidized child care. The burden of invisible labor can be mitigated on a case-by-case basis, but at the end of the day, it is the system that needs to change.Fair PlayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      In ‘Living Wine’ Documentary, Natural Wine Transcends the Clichés

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      Forget funkiness. The focus here is farming, culture, the environment, climate change and, yes, great-tasting wine.When the polarizing subject of natural wine arises, the discussion generally spirals to the stereotypes: flawed and funky wines, hippie producers and the debate over definitions. But a new documentary film, “Living Wine,” hopes to change that trite discussion.The film, which opens in selected theaters July 15, focuses on a small group of natural wine producers in California. It examines, with far more nuance than is typical, the myriad reasons they choose to work in natural wine, along with the many rationales for consumers to drink it.In this context, natural wine is presented neither as a trend nor a generational emblem. Involvement is a conscious choice. Though their reasons may overlap, each of the producers in the film has a different point of emphasis.Gideon Beinstock and Saron Rice of Clos Saron in the Sierra Foothills make wine without additives because they believe that method makes the best wines and offers the best expression of their vineyard.“The fact that we don’t add anything is not because it’s natural,” Mr. Beinstock said. “It’s because, why would I add anything? It will not improve the wine.”In the film, all of the producers must deal with the serious consequences of climate change.AbramoramaDarek Trowbridge of Old World Winery in the Russian River Valley believes in the traditional methods embodied by his ancestors, who planted a vineyard in the area almost 100 years ago, before chemical farming became the norm. He wants to express the distinctive terroirs of his vineyards, but he sees himself as a custodian of nature, too, a role that he holds sacred.“I try to work to do good on my farm for the land, for the ecosystem,” he said. “Where I reside spiritually is where I want to reside as a farmer and not separate the two.”For Megan Bell of Margins Wines, who shares a production facility outside of Santa Cruz with James Jelks of Florèz Wines, the reasons are more political, born of her demeaning experiences as a young woman in a male-dominated winery in Napa Valley.“I hated my job,” she said. “I loved what I physically did, but the culture and the way that I was treated, I dreaded going to work every day. Nobody wants to be at work when their abilities are doubted constantly.”She is a minimalist, trying to work efficiently rather than trying to make art, and has chosen to work primarily with grapes and areas that she believes are ignored by the corporate wine world, which she might not have left if she hadn’t felt driven out.“If I worked in a nicer industry, I never would have started my own company,” she said.Megan Bell felt demeaned as a woman in the mainstream industry, so she started Margins Wines.AbramoramaThe reasons to make natural wines are primarily cultural for Dani Rozman of La Onda, in the Sierra Foothills. He wants to wean Americans from the notion that the American wine industry traces directly to modern Europe. Instead, he wants to focus on North and South America, and their centuries of shared grape-growing and winemaking history that began when Spanish missionaries planted the listán prieto, or mission, grape in the Americas.Having worked with farmers in Chile gave him insight into alternatives to mainstream winemaking. “All the equipment is developed to make winemaking easier, but that doesn’t make it better,” he said.Following their personal muses, these producers have all ended up outside conventional winemaking, and have gravitated to styles of farming without chemical fertilizers and sprays, while employing traditional, preindustrial production methods.Looming over all is the climate crisis, which in California has caused intense heat waves, drought and repeated threats of deadly, destructive fires. Over the course of filming, each of these producers was directly affected by the fires.While these winemakers do not say they work specifically to combat climate change, the film addresses the vast harm that conventional agriculture has exacted on ecosystems and the climate. It also holds out hope that, if the world could step away from chemical farming and focus on building soil health and other regenerative methods, agriculture could be an important part of the solution.Lori Miller, the producer and director of “Living Wine,” is now devoted to natural wines.AbramoramaLori Miller, the producer and director of “Living Wine,” said she was drawn to these subjects because they work on the fringe.“I love telling stories about people outside the normal corporate world, people who are not playing the game but are inspired from within,” she said in a phone interview. “This story fell within the mold.”Though Ms. Miller, whose producer credits include “They Came to Play” and “Shakespeare High,” counts herself as a food and wine lover, she knew little about natural wine before beginning this project.Her brother, Ben Miller, and his family had moved into a new home outside of Santa Rosa, which came with a vineyard. They were dismayed to learn that the vineyard had been regularly sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate, which could have seeped into the well that supplied their household water. He was introduced to Mr. Trowbridge, who began the process of weaning the vineyard from chemical treatments.“That was the impetus for learning more about this,” Ms. Miller said. “I started looking into the wines I was buying, and I had no idea.”She said she tries to buy and cook only organic foods, and was shocked to learn that most of the wines she was drinking bore no relation to the foods she was buying.“I had always assumed wine was a natural beverage,” she said. “But if you go to the grocery store and pull something off the shelf, the likelihood is it was farmed with chemical inputs or farmed in a way that was terrible for the environment.”Darek Trowbridge of Old World Winery sees himself as a guardian of nature and tradition.AbramoramaMs. Miller imagines that those who watch the film might be very much like her, hyperconscious about where their food comes from but giving little thought to the wine. The first words in “Living Wine” come from Mr. Trowbridge:“The natural wine movement is about 20 years behind the organic food movement,” he said. “You can’t see the processing, but typically wine is a manufactured, machine-driven product. That means adjuncts to make it work in a timely manner.“People just don’t understand that,” he continued. “I didn’t know that until I got a master’s degree in winemaking.”With the help of two proponents of regenerative agriculture, Elizabeth Candelario and Dr. Timothy LaSalle, the film traces the rise of chemical agriculture to the repurposing of closed munitions factories after World War II. Nitrogen that went into bombs was instead used to make fertilizer, while nerve gas became an ingredient in pesticides.With the support of the government and Big Agriculture, students and farmers were taught an industrialized form of agriculture to increase production. The industrial methods resulted in far more specialized farming rather than in the more natural, complex ecosystems of preindustrial farming, and built a dependency on Big Ag corporations.“Nature only works in whole systems,” Dr. LaSalle said. “She can’t work separated out. When you bring something in, it changes and causes unexpected consequences.”The film never loses the thread between agriculture and wine, which in many people’s minds is simply a product on a supermarket shelf.“Why would I add anything?” said Gideon Beinstock of Clos Saron. “It will not improve the wine.”Abramorama“Every form of agriculture is detrimental to the environment, on any scale, even a garden, but we try to minimize the footprint,” Mr. Beinstock said.Their winemaking facilities are rustic, far from the wealthy tourist outposts in the popular imagination. They are designed for work, and the labor is difficult. The motivation is more personal expression than profit, yet choosing to work outside the mainstream is stressful in its own ways.“I’m at a spot still where I’ve been on food stamps for a year and I still have other jobs,” said Ms. Bell, of Margins Wines. “Because I’m putting all my money into my business.”She and Mr. Jelks, of Florèz Wines, outfitted their utilitarian facility with secondhand equipment and castoffs. It’s not ideal, and not easy, but it’s liberating.“We just stay scrappy and resilient, and we never stop,” Mr. Jelks said.As for natural wines themselves, the film acknowledges that consumers may require time to adjust to them because of expectations that arise from years of drinking commonplace examples, just as a farm-raised tomato might prove shocking to one accustomed to glossy supermarket tomatoes.At a tasting contrasting conventional and natural chardonnays, one consumer described the conventional bottle as “all the things you’re programmed to expect in a chardonnay.” The natural example was different, she said, but was “probably a more true expression of what the actual grape is.”Like a good natural wine, the film is not without some minor blemishes. It’s too black-and-white in its portrait of conventional wine, for one, which offers far more of a spectrum of approaches.Mr. Beinstock is dedicated, he said, to expressing the distinctive character of his vineyard. AbramoramaBut the idealism, selflessness and commitment of the growers and producers is inspiring. Though, as the film states, natural wine accounts for less than one percent of the wine produced in California, they have chosen to act on principle rather than resign themselves in despair.What the film offers in the end is not a formula for the good life, a cliché of California wine country, but a way of living well and reflectively, as Tahnee Shields, a harvest intern at Clos Saron, says about Mr. Beinstock:“His philosophy is, thinking about what a life can look like when you’re in constant cultivation and paying constant attention to something that you’re growing.”Climate chaos can be overwhelming, but Ms. Miller hopes that the film will be motivational.“You can make a difference even if you’re only farming a few acres, or composting in your yard or have a small colony of bees,” she said. “I hope showcasing people who aren’t giving up will be inspiring.”Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. 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      James Caan, Actor Who Won Fame in ‘The Godfather,’ Dies at 82

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      A Bronx native, he starred in countless movies and TV shows, but was most closely identified with the volatile character Sonny Corleone.James Caan, who built a durable film career in varied roles across six decades but was forever identified most closely with one of his earliest characters, the quick-tempered, skirt-chasing Sonny Corleone in the original “Godfather” movie, died on Wednesday. He was 82. His death was announced by his family on Twitter and confirmed by his manager, Matt DelPiano. Both his family and his manager declined to say where he died or cite a cause.By the time “The Godfather” was released in 1972, Mr. Caan had established himself as a young actor worth keeping an eye on. He had a meaty role in “El Dorado,” a 1966 western that starred John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. (Wayne, Mr. Caan said, cheated at chess games during breaks in the filming.)In “The Rain People,” a 1969 movie that was his first collaboration with the director Francis Ford Coppola, he earned critical praise playing a simple-minded former football player.“Brian’s Song” (1971), an early made-for-television movie, brought him to the attention of a wider audience. Based on a true story, it focused on the friendship between a Black football star, Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears (played by Billy Dee Williams), and a white teammate, Brian Piccolo. Piccolo died of cancer in 1970 at 26, and Mr. Caan played him with verve and humor in an unabashedly three-hanky film.Then came Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather.” Initially cast as the central figure, Michael Corleone — the role ultimately played by Al Pacino — Mr. Caan ended up playing Sonny, quick to anger and ultimately gunned down on a causeway. He threw himself into the role so fully that for years, he said, strangers would say things to him like “Hey, don’t go through that tollbooth again.”Some even mistook him for a real mobster. “I’ve been accused so many times,” he told Vanity Fair in 2004. “I won ‘Italian of the Year’ twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.”He was in fact Jewish, reared in Sunnyside, Queens, by German-born parents. “I was denied in a country club once,” he said. “Oh, yeah, the guy sat in front of the board and he says, ‘No, no, he’s a wiseguy, been downtown. He’s a made guy.’ I thought, ‘What, are you out of your mind?’ ”Mr. Caan received an Emmy nomination for best actor for “Brian’s Song” and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for “The Godfather.” His Oscar competition included Mr. Pacino and another “Godfather” actor, Robert Duvall. The three canceled one another out, and the award went to Joel Grey for “Cabaret.”Mr. Caan’s performance as the pro football player Brian Piccolo in the 1971 television movie “Brian’s Song” earned him an Emmy nomination.ABCBy then, Mr. Caan’s career had kicked into high gear. The decade that followed was especially fertile. Among his roles were a love-struck sailor in “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), a self-destructive professor in “The Gambler” (1974), an anti-authority athlete in “Rollerball” (1975), a fierce World War II sergeant in “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and a not-too-bright ex-con in “Thief” (1981), a favorite movie of his.Not all his films received favorable notices, but with his rugged good looks and obvious smarts, his acting usually did. Reviewing “Cinderella Liberty” for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Mr. Caan seems to be shaping up as the Paul Newman of the nineteen-seventies. An intelligent, versatile actor with a low-key but unmistakable public personality.”Like Paul Newman, Mr. Caan tried his hand at directing. But he did so only once, with “Hide in Plain Sight” (1980), in which he also acted, playing a man searching for his children after they and their mother are brought into the government’s witness-protection program. The film fared poorly at the box office and left him disenchanted.“Everybody wants to do ‘Rocky 9’ and ‘Airport 96’ and ‘Jaws 7,’ ” he said in 1981. “And you look and you listen, and what little idealism you have left slowly dwindles.”Mr. Caan with the actress Lilyan Chauvin, left, and his wife at the time, the actress Sheila Ryan, at a movie preview in 1975.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his prime, Mr. Caan had a man’s-man reputation that he savored. In interviews, he strewed four-letter words like birdseed. He earned a sixth-degree black belt in karate. He roped steers on the rodeo circuit and managed a boxer — pursuits, especially rodeo, that left him with so many stitches and screws in his shoulders and arms that the sportswriter Jim Murray once said, “Jimmy Caan was not born, he was embroidered.”Mr. Caan also had a bad-boy reputation. He was married and divorced four times. He appeared as a character witness for an old friend from Queens who was on trial as a mobster because, he said, stand-up guys stay loyal to their pals. And he had his own brushes with the law.The police questioned him at length in 1993 after a man fell to his death from the fire escape of a Los Angeles apartment where Mr. Caan was staying. The authorities concluded that the death was accidental, and Mr. Caan said he was asleep when it occurred.The next year the North Hollywood police arrested him after he flashed a loaded pistol in public. He said he had done it only to break up a fight. The charges were dropped.Along the way, he checked into a rehab center for an addiction to cocaine that began after his sister, Barbara Licker, died of leukemia in 1981. The two of them had been close — she was president of a movie production company that included James and their brother, Ronald — and her death hit him hard.He barely worked for the next six years and wound up deep in debt. “I got into the whole lifestyle of girls and drugs and partying,” he told Entertainment Weekly, adding that “you really do get caught up in it, and it’s very destructive.”Mr. Caan in a scene from another of his best-known films, “Misery” (1990), in which he played a writer held captive by a crazed fan.Columbia Pictures/Getty ImagesBut he bounced back, starting in 1987 with the Vietnam War drama “Gardens of Stone,” another collaboration with Mr. Coppola, in which he played a tough sergeant. He then took on roles including a writer held captive by a crazed fan (played by Kathy Bates) in the box-office hit “Misery” (1990), directed by Rob Reiner and based on a novel by Stephen King; a tough but romantic mob guy in “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992); yet another mobster in the comedy “Mickey Blue Eyes” (1999); and a cantankerous book editor in “Elf” (2003).He also turned to television, notably the series “Las Vegas,” on which he was seen from 2003 to 2007 as the president of operations and security chief for a casino. Still, though he worked steadily, his later career lacked the incandescence of his earlier years.Born on March 26, 1940, in the Bronx, James Edmund Caan grew up in Queens, the son of Arthur Caan, a wholesale dealer of kosher meat, and Sophie (Falkenstein) Caan, a homemaker.Street life held his interest more than classrooms did. He dropped out of several schools before settling down at Rhodes Preparatory School in Manhattan, where he graduated in 1956 at age 16.At Michigan State University, he hoped to make the football team but failed. He switched to Hofstra University on Long Island — Mr. Coppola was a classmate — but dropped out before long. Nonetheless, his interest in acting was kindled there. He went on to study for five years at the well-regarded Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in Manhattan.Mr. Caan at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2010.Hugh Hamilton for The New York TimesAt around that time he met an actress named Dee Jay Mathis, who became the first of his four wives (the lengths of his marriages ranged from 12 years to barely a year). He is survived by his brother, Ronald; five children, the actor Scott Caan and Tara, Alexander, James and Jacob Caan; and four grandchildren. Mr. Caan’s early work included roles in 1960s television series like “Route 66,” “Dr. Kildare” and “Wagon Train.” Movies soon loomed, with “The Godfather” dominant.In that film, he said, he had improvised some of his lines and actions, including two words that he did not invent but that he ushered into the vernacular. Sonny tells Michael how hard it will be to kill the family’s enemies: “You gotta get up like this and — bada bing! — you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.”“Bada bing? Bada boom? I said that, didn’t I?” Mr. Caan said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “Or did I just say bada bing? It just came out of my mouth. I don’t know from where.” More

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      ‘Murina’ Review: Hunting for Independence on Her Terms

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      In this coming-of-age tale set off the rugged Croatian coast, a teenage girl strives to catch elusive eels, one of the movie’s hardworking metaphors.The 17-year-old heroine of “Murina” never seems freer than when she’s swimming. Wearing a snorkeling mask, and with a spear gun in one hand, she glides through the water, her strong body propelling her forward. As she descends into the ethereal depths, expertly weaving among the undulating plants and scattering fish, her one-piece suit gleams like a beacon.Julija (Gracija Filipovic), though, is rarely alone, even underwater, and “Murina” isn’t a story of freedom, but about the struggle to achieve it. Along with her parents, Julija lives on a starkly beautiful island off the coast of Croatia. It’s a hard, rugged, sun-blasted speck many hours from Zagreb, but it might as well be the moon. Other people live there, too, but few visitors drop by and then only briefly (you soon learn why). The other inhabitants are the region’s cawing, cooing, slithering animals, including the elusive moray eels Julija hunts.The eels give the movie its title and, like the inviting, enveloping Adriatic Sea, one of its hardworking metaphors. Long, speckled and distinctly phallic, the animals dart in and out of dark holes in the reefs and craggy rock formations, inadvertently playing a losing game of hide-and-seek with predators like Julija and her gruff, domineering father, Ante (Leon Lučev). When they go fishing, she and her father seem perfectly as one, with coordinated cunning and skill, and hypnotically choreographed moves. Underwater there are few signs of the violent emotions that otherwise define their relationship, investing it with jagged tension.A visually striking if overly diffuse tale of an unruly daughter, “Murina” takes place during a visit from an old family friend, Javier (Cliff Curtis). An entrepreneur, Javier arrives by yacht with open arms, a megawatt smile and a crowd of hangers-on. He’s visiting for pleasure and maybe for business; it’s not altogether clear. The writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic uses dialogue prudently, keeping exposition to a minimum and letting details trickle in through naturalistic conversations and in the feelings that tremble in every exchange. Why is everyone angry? Patriarchy? Teenagers? Take your pick.Kusijanovic, making her feature directing debut, plots the family’s dynamic through a roundelay of gazes and with near-geometric precision. By the time Javier arrives, it’s evident that Ante and his daughter are furiously at odds — he yells, she sulks — and that Julija’s greatest, most sympathetic alliance is with her mother, Nela (Danica Curcic). A willowy, haunted beauty who looks far younger than Ante and could pass as Julija’s older sister, Nela serves as a bridge between her husband and daughter. Whether she’s a peacemaker or a collaborationist, a martyr or a patsy, remains one of the story’s provocative questions.A silky, seductive flirt, Javier helps shatter the family’s fragile peace, largely through the promises — real or imagined — he embodies. Each family member has a stake in him. While Nela basks in his attention (and he in hers), Ante tries to negotiate a land deal with Javier that would allow the family to move. Julija greets their glamorous visitor warmly when he arrives, but as her father’s temper erupts into evermore violent rages — his desperation to make the deal fuels his ire, including at his daughter — she draws closer to Javier. Like one of the eels she fishes, she slithers around him, leaving you guessing about who here is the prey.Kusijanovic sticks close to Julija, making canny use of the girl’s limited point of view. You see what she sees, how she looks at a world she doesn’t always understand and how she peers at a horizon that’s at once seductively open and impossibly out of reach. You’re Julija’s ally or that seems to be the idea, though Kusijanovic leans too heavily on your assumed sympathies, including for her young heroine. For the most part, the director cuts loose her characters and lets them and the story’s vague ideas — about gender, sexuality, money and power — swirl and drift, leaving you to decide how and whether they all fit together, or don’t.MurinaNot rated. In Croatian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More