Gia Blu-ray delivers stunning video and great audio in this fan-pleasing Blu-ray release
Fact-based story of top fashion model Gia Marie Carangi follows her life from a rebel working in her father's diner at age 17 to her death in 1986 at age 26 from AIDS, one of the first women in the U.S. whose death was attributed to the disease. In between, she followed a downward spiral of drug abuse and failed relationships.
For more about Gia and the Gia Blu-ray release, see the Gia Blu-ray Review published by Michael Reuben on November 6, 2011 where this Blu-ray release scored 3.5 out of 5.
Gia, the 1998 made-for-HBO biography of doomed model Gia Marie Carangi, is usually
remembered for its breakthrough performance by Angelina Jolie in the title role. Winning a
Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe for her portrayal of a volatile personality who
blazed through the fashion world like a shooting star, and burned out just as quickly, Jolie leapt
off the screen (and still does). She hadn't yet acquired the baggage of multiple celebrity
marriages, high-profile adoptions and a life with which tabloids and celebrity gossip rags seem
endlessly fascinated. She still had the freedom to give a performance that surprised the audience,
which was exactly what the wildly unpredictable Gia had done before drug addiction, erratic
behavior and AIDS took their toll.
Today, Jolie is a more familiar presence, and it's possible to look past the accomplishment of the
performance to the essential emptiness of the film surrounding it. As brilliant as Jolie is, one of
the essential qualities of Gia Carangi -- one that's stressed in the film -- is that no one really knew
her. Everyone saw her differently, and the accounts are wildly at odds. This is hardly surprising,
given that an individual who doesn't live past age 26 has barely finished exploring who she is
and deciding what she wants to be, a task made all the more difficult in an industry (fashion) that
trades in surfaces, superficialities and "lies" (as one angry member of Gia's rehab group puts it).
Late in the film, when Gia knows she's dying, she gives all her journals and stories to her
sometime lover, Linda, and tells her to read them. "Maybe you can make some sense out of it",
she says. "I never could."
A well-realized bio-pic can make the viewer experience what it was like to be
the person who is the film's subject. The ways to achieve this are limited only by filmmakers'
imaginations, but they can be as varied as Olivier Dahan's fracturing of chronology and erasure
of the boundary between subjective and objective points of view in La Vie en Rose (La môme),
and Tom Hooper's viewing of English politics and history through the prism of George VI's
speech impediment in The King's Speech. But Gia isn't really a bio-pic. The woman at the center
of the story remains a cipher. When the camera and an unseen interviewer listen to the
recollections of key people in her life, especially Gia's mother (played by Mercedes Ruehl in a
remarkable portrait of guilt and denial), it's not Gia these people are illuminating; it's
themselves.
What, then, is Gia really about? A clue comes from the choice of screenwriters. One of them, Jay
McInerney, became rich and famous for his depiction in Bright Lights, Big City of urban Eighties
culture as a cocaine-fueled spiritual wasteland of empty pleasures. The other, Michael Cristofer,
who also directed, is a playwright and actor whose most successful work, The Shadow Box, was
about three people dying in a hospice. Together McInerney and Cristofer crafted a traditional
morality tale in which self-expression and indulgence in pleasure (especially of the lesbian
variety) lead to an initial flush of success -- because the devil always gives you that first rush to
tempt you further -- but then suck you down into a quagmire of loss, degradation, chaos and
eventual physical decay and death. Especially in the last thirty minutes of the film, where
Cristofer seems to delight in dwelling on every detail of how first drugs, then AIDS, destroyed
Gia's looks and the animal vitality that made her such a novelty, the film plays like a medieval
Christian canvas by Hieronymus Bosch, where all manner of lusts and perversion may be
depicted -- as long as there are demons nearby preparing to flay the flesh off the sinners' backs.
Note: The version of the film on Blu-ray is unrated and runs about five minutes longer than the
version originally shown on HBO. Gia opens with a text screen indicating that the story is being told in Gia's own words and those
of people who knew her. The statement is somewhat misleading, since the closing credits
indicate that elements of the story have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes. Nevertheless,
the film begins with a series of mock interviews, shot in a different style from the main feature,
in which various figures from Gia's life reflect on who she was. Portions of these interviews will
recur through the film, especially with Gia's mother, Kathleen Karangi (Ruehl).
We meet Gia as a little girl in Sixties Philadelphia, the daughter of Kathleen and Joe (Louis
Giambalvo), a restaurant owner. The young Gia is played by an equally young Mila Kunis.
Having already borne two sons, Kathleen was delighted to have a daughter, on whom she doted,
but her marriage to Joe was troubled, and she left when Gia was eleven. At least according to the
film, Gia never recovered from Kathleen's departure. Fear of abandonment became one of the
great terrors that drove her.
At seventeen, Gia is working in her father's restaurant, all spiky hair and attitude, when she
impulsively runs off to New York City with a gay male friend, T.J. (Eric Michael Cole), who, for
a brief time, serves as her roommate, confidante and companion as she explores new territory.
She quickly finds her way to the famed modeling agency run by Wilhelmina Cooper (a very fine
Faye Dunaway), who immediately spots the potential in this wild child and becomes her
surrogate mother (whether for sentiment or profit is impossible to say). Cooper's sudden death in
1980 from lung cancer will ultimately send Gia into a downward spiral from which she never
recovers.
During a photo shoot with a photographer called "Chris von Wagenheim" in the film (Alexander
Enberg), the photographer invites the models to stay for a nude shoot, and Gia is the only one
who accepts, on one condition: that her make-up woman, Linda (Elizabeth Mitchell), remain as
well. Sensing the attraction, Chris includes Linda in the photographs shot against a chain link
fence, and a relationship is born, even though Linda has a boyfriend. This is the closest Gia will
ever come to true love, but its course never runs smooth. The entire future of Linda's and Gia's
relationship is foretold the next morning in the hallway outside Gia's apartment, when Linda tries
to leave and Gia runs out into the hallway after her, wearing nothing. As Gia stands there begging
Linda to stay, there's something remarkable about her ability to use public nudity both for its
abject exposure and, simultaneously, as a threat. (It's difficult to imagine an actress other than
Jolie who could have pulled off this scene and many others in the film.)
Except for montages of magazine covers and the occasional fashion show, Gia doesn't really
show us what made Gia Carangi such an overnight success, and even those briskly edited
sequences can't convey much, because context is everything. Far more is conveyed by an Anna
Wintour-like Vogue editor (Tricia O'Neil) haranguing her assistants as she dismisses slide after
slide of faces for the next cover, because she's seen the model (or the type) before. When she
gets to Gia, she pauses, because the face is unlike anything she's seen up till then.
Even at the height of her fame and earning power, Gia is unhappy, because it's a standard theme
in show business biographies that wealth, fame and applause cannot fill the hole left by
emotional abandonment. ("People are always leaving me", Gia says.) During a break in one
photo shoot, the photographer, Francesco (Edmund Genest), advises Gia to focus on work and let
life unfold in its own time. But patience isn't in Gia's repertoire; she does everything at top
speed, whether it's pursuing Linda (and breaking up her straight relationship in the process) or
moving from cocaine to snorting heroin to mainlining.
Nowhere is the filmmakers' moralistic reproach of both Gia and the audience more evident than
in their ghoulish depiction of how AIDS ravaged her. These were the early days of the disease,
when it had just been named and medical science could barely keep pace with the opportunistic
infections. Having already dwelt on track marks and infected injection sites, the degradation of
junkie hangouts, beatings and sexual exploitation by dealers and the horrors of cold turkey
withdrawal, director Cristofer now takes his leading lady (and us) through the minutia of skin
lesions, hair loss and, ultimately, the complete disintegration of Gia's body. It's as if, having
been voyeuristic participants in Gia's animal enjoyment of the flesh, we must now do penance by
witnessing its mortification. As a coda, the writers slap on an excerpt from Gia's journal attesting
that "it was worth it", and director Cristofer (who comes from the theater) allows Angelina Jolie
to take a curtain call by rising from Gia's death bed attired in and surrounded by white, like a
risen angel. And why not? We've all been purified by suffering.
Gia was shot by Rodrigo Garcia in one of his last outings as a cinematographer before he moved
permanently into the director's chair. Except for the stylized interview inserts and historical
montage sequences of Gia's career, the film's look is clean, simple and not intended to call
attention to itself. HBO's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray looks very nice indeed, with plenty of
fine detail, good black levels, vivid colors (especially important for some of the more outré
outfits) and finely visible, natural grain patterns. With no extras and only one soundtrack, the
film fits comfortably on a BD-25 without compression issues or artifacts, and I saw no indication
that detail had been stripped or filtered to simplify the compressionist's job. Since Gia was only
ever shown on HBO, there is no theatrical experience against which to compare it, but the
presentation on this Blu-ray is as good as any theatrical presentation one might wish.
Note: The framing on the Blu-ray is 1.78:1, whereas the framing on the previous DVD and HBO's initial broadcast was 1.33:1.
Comparison between DVD and Blu-ray indicates that the latter contains significantly more image information at the left and right,
and slightly less at the top and bottom. It appears that the film is one of those troublesome hybrids that was composed and "protected" for
both aspect ratios, either of which could be considered "correct". Having looked at both, I would say that 1.78:1 seems better balanced and
more effectively situates the characters in their scenes. On all other points, the Blu-ray's visual superiority is beyond question.
The credits indicate that Gia was originally shown in Dolby Surround, which is consistent with
HBO's broadcast format in January 1998, when the film first aired. The soundtrack was
subsequently remixed for 5.1, and that mix is presented on Blu-ray in DTS-HD MA. Dialogue is
clear and remains firmly centered. Only a few effects can be said to spread emphatically into the
surrounds; the popping of flashbulbs is a notable example. As is often the case with two-channel
surround tracks remixed for 5.1, the chief beneficiary is the score, which in this case happens to
be well worth the improvement. The coolly understated score by jazz great Terence Blanchard
provides the ideal counterpoint to the film's lurid subject matter (and the word "lurid" applies
equally to Gia's tempestuous life and director Cristofer's sotto voce moralizing). The Blu-ray's
track places Blanchard's score all around the room so that it seems to suspend itself above the
sound and fury, which is where it belongs. The occasional period-specific pop tunes (e.g., "Brass
in Pocket" by The Pretenders; "Dancing with Myself" by Billy Idol) have been mixed toward the
front, so that these remain separate and apart from the score.
Jolie's performance as Gia remains worth seeing as a one-of-a-kind (re)creation of a personality
who remains a mystery. But the film itself is a preachy, finger-wagging tract that basically tells
girls to stay home, be good and be normal -- or else! My rating for the film reflects this mixture
of good and bad. As for the Blu-ray, it's technically superior and, on that score, recommended.
HBO has announced the Blu-ray release of the 1998 television movie Gia. The film stars Angelina Jolie as Gia Marie Carangi, an American model who died from HIV at the age of 26. A release date of November 8th and a SRP of $14.98 has been set.
