25th
01 -
2012
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2 comments »
Director: Jack Cardiff
By Roderick Heath
Cinematography is a discipline that demands both technical and aesthetic skill, and seems to arm its practitioners with an understanding of all aspects of filmmaking. Yet the paucity of film photographers who start and sustain coherent directing careers has often been perplexing to cinema fans. Jack Cardiff, the legendary cinematographer of Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956) and Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958), moved into directing his own movies in the late ’50s. After an early hit with his prestige adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1960), Cardiff pursued one of the strangest oeuvres imaginable, including the inert My Geisha (1962); the high-camp historical action flick The Long Ships (1964); the flavourful Sean O’Casey biopic Young Cassidy (1965), which he finished after John Ford fell ill; the sub-Bond action thriller The Liquidator (1966); and the early body-horror genre entry The Mutations (1974).
Dark of the Sun was half of a 1968 Cardiff one-two punch, along with his deliriously trippy adaptation of the legendary, racy novel The Girl on the Motorcycle (1968). Dark of the Sun is the sort of perfervid pulp classic that fulfils a cinephile’s fantasies about what such a film should look and sound like, evoking Sam Fuller and Delmer Daves in their capacity to boil complex themes down to dynamic examples, and say, in this unrestrained quality, things rather deeper and darker than a more prestigious, sober film could manage. The air of frantic innovation and hyperventilating cultural catch-up the late ’60s zeitgeist stoked in even the most conservative filmmakers left behind an epoch that’s still something of a wonderland of semicharted oddities like this.
Dark of the Sun is a post-Conradian, post-colonial fantasia looking at the havoc wreaked by imperialism and its sudden, disingenuous withdrawal of responsibility, coupled with the eruptive forces of cultures left poised between ancient and modern worlds: it’s the directly engaged genre cinema riposte to the rhetorical remove of Week-End (1967). Or, as Ruffo (Jim Brown), one of the film’s heroes, puts it in a fascinating moment as he grills his friend Curry (Rod Taylor), “watching the natives in their colourful puberty rites.” Ruffo is a Congolese renaissance man and perpetual comrade in arms to the truculent, but fundamentally decent Curry who is called in at the movie’s outset to pull off a tricky, two-faced rescue mission deep in the Congo’s hinterland. Like Cy Endfield’s Zulu (1964) and Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey (1966), Dark of the Sun is an African-set adventure film that evokes the chaos and violence that has so often afflicted the continent and depicts overt warfare between black and white protagonists, but sustains a questioning approach to such conflict. White antiheroes find themselves paying the price for the blunders and cruelties of official policy, and African characters’ capacity for cruelty and humanity are merely versions of everybody else’s. The Simbas—marauding, crazed forces of destruction in the film—are not revolutionaries or nationalists, but drug-crazed loonies who represent the festering after the scab of colonialism has been torn off, whilst the wan claim to European moral authority is squarely represented by former Nazi Henlein (Peter Carsten). The film is hardly politically correct, and yet it is, in a funny way, fair-minded.
The setting is the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Curry and Ruffo are hired by the unnervingly smooth inheritor of the young country, President Ubi (Calvin Lockhart), who’s moved into the mansion he’s admired “since I was a boy.” To prop up his government and fight off the Simbas, Ubi has made a deal with a Belgian mining company to retrieve $50 million worth of diamonds still locked in a vault in Port Reprieve, a town cut off by UN peacekeepers. Curry and Ruffo are given three days and promised a $50,000 payday if they retrieve the diamond. They secure a train and begin putting together a team, relying squarely on Henlein, who commands a force of regular Congo army soldiers for whom he has general contempt; Henlein, menacingly, has not abandoned his fondness for blunt final solutions to complex humanitarian problems and still wearsa swastika badge from his WWII days. The team also takes on the local-born Surrier (Olivier Despax), the good-natured Kataki (Bloke Modisane, a South African writer and activist in real life), and alcoholic Dr. Wreid (Kenneth More). Early in the mission, Surrier’s loss of nerve contributes to the loss of life when the train is attacked by a UN fighter plane. Passing a large plantation house belonging to a company agent, they only rescue the panicky, dishevelled refugee Claire (Yvette Mimieux), who rambles on frantically about the agent’s fate at the hands of the Simbas and demands to know why the rescue took so long.
Later, when the train stops and Curry and Ruffo encounter two orphaned children, Henlein promptly shoots the pair because he thinks they might be spies for some unseen enemy. Lethally charged glares of rage intensify as Curry discourages Henlein’s attentiveness to Claire, and this enmity soon evolves into a balls-and-all fight. Henlein almost cuts Curry up with a chainsaw and Curry almost crushes Henlein’s head under the train engine’s wheels before Ruffo intervenes. When the train finally makes it to Port Reprieve, they learn from Bussier (André Morell), the local agent for the mining companies, that the diamonds are locked in a time vault. The team has to wait three nail-biting hours with the train packed to the brim with refugees for the lock to open, as the Simbas draw ever closer. The safe opens, and the diamonds are retrieved just as the Simbas pour into town. The train trundles laboriously away as the soldiers shoot their way through the marauders, only for a mortar bomb to sever the rear car from the train and send it rolling with its load of refugees, including Bussier and his wife (Monique Lucas), back into the hands of the Simbas.
What lends Dark of the Sun its genuine punch is the hysterical instability it radiates and the confrontational zest of its story, far superior to modern equivalents like Black Hawk Down (2001) and Blood Diamond (2006) in offering up characters who are avatars of such chaotic and cruel times. The title, as well as offering an obvious thematic inversion, invokes the film’s peculiar visual palate, filled with sunlight so bright that the landscape is drained of primary hues, and the frames fulminate with a scorched intensity. Dark of the Sun pulsates with stylistic intensity, from Jacques Loussier’s nervy score to the slash-and-burn editing style and salt-lick screenplay. The film’s opening captures a world in transit, refugees of all colours and states crowding the retaining fences as they wait for planes out of the country.
Curry and Ruffo disembark and immediately have a charged skirmish of wills with UN soldiers who know very well the corrosive effect foreign mercenaries are having in the country. Ruffo discounts himself from a share in Ubi’s paycheque because of his personal stake in the country’s affairs, but he’s treated like an interloper by Ubi and referred to as a “big ape” by a Western journalist, unaware Ubi is a former USC student who speaks four languages. The journalist attempts to reclaim the moral high ground in grilling Curry, answered with, “I don’t like fat hacks who sit on their butts in bars waiting for trouble to happen so they can get it wrong when they write about it.”
Dark of the Sun is an entry in a specifically late ’60s branch of the action film, the “dirty bastards on a dirty-bastard mission” tale, inaugurated by The Guns of Navarone (1961) and carried to extremes by the likes of Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965), and Brooks’ The Professionals (1967). One distinction of Cardiff’s film is that the then-contemporary sociopolitical milieu is engaged more specifically, and the meaning of the heroes’ stooping to obscene violence is pillaged with a genuine urgency. The film’s portrait of a violent epoch is all-encompassing, taking the essential theme of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—modern “civilisation” finding its primal antecedent in the Congo jungles and becoming poisoned by confronting the truth that hardly anything in the human soul has really changed—and twisting it to chronicle the violent evolution of the new nation as contrasted with the devolution of the old. “I was forced to come down from the tree,” Ruffo states bluntly, turning racist quips back on themselves, “and no force on earth is going to make me go up again.”
Several moments in the film resemble an obvious antecedent, Stagecoach (1939), only to deliberately desecrate them: Wreid, like Thomas Mitchell’s Doc Boone, is pressed into service in spite of being shickered to help with birthing a baby, only instead of heroic resurgence, he and the rest of the patients he takes on are massacred. Also, much like John Carradine’s Hatfield prepares to do the gentlemanly thing and shoot Louise Platt before capture by marauders, but is prevented from doing so by both his own death and the timely arrival of the cavalry, Bussier goes through with it, his own body later found sprawled amidst dozens of other massacred refugees like so much refuse.
Dark of the Sun’s overripe, still-potent nastiness is consistently bracing and surprising, and the action scenes, when they come, are brutal and thrilling. Cardiff’s terrific camera work, with an assist from Edward Scaife, is restless and urgent, rendered as a near-constant surge in physical movement. Pregnant scenes are charged with tension, like the interminable wait Curry, Claire, and Bussier maintain outside the diamond vault as the sound of battle begins to drum outside. Early in the film, Cardiff proffers a sequence of the mercenary team assembling their battle train that comprises a blend of silent film and ’30s and ’40s montage style, full of silhouetted shots and dizzying Dutch angles. The film’s central set piece, the massacre in Port Reprieve and Curry and Ruffo’s attempt to improvise an escape and retrieve the diamonds from the Simba leader Col. Moses (Danny Daniels), is a bloodcurdling survey of cruelty, pansexual abuse, and generally gleeful shredding of civilised norms; a woman is repeatedly hurled in the air on a sheet as if it’s a party as a prelude to gang rape, a captive is dragged behind a motorcycle, another has his face burnt off by a torch; one man tries to rape a nun from the hospital, only for her to drag him over a balcony to their death. Surrier, captured during the battle, is tortured by Moses and brutally beaten by men who know him as the personal representative of the colonialist experience, even though he’s the one white character in the film who expresses a genuine love for the country. Like the early village torture scene in The Naked Prey, it seems less a vision of tribal brutality than an attempt to invoke the absolute limits of rancid depravity and chaos within the limits of a mainstream feature film of its era, a moment of complete dissolution into anarchy caused by the complete incoherence of a society. Curry and Ruffo use an old ruse: Ruffo pretends to be one of the Simbas, carrying Curry into the hotel where Moses has set up headquarters, and they stage a brilliant coup of revenge as they rain death on the Simbas, and Surrier bear-hugs Moses and kills them both with a grenade.
Like most great melodramas, Dark of the Sun has, in between the chainsaws duels and mass rape scenes, a philosophical aspect to it that refuses reduction to window dressing, but instead becomes crucial to story and thrills. The constant flow of pulpy action, particularly in the fights between Curry and Henlein, predict the hard-charging, gritty style of the Indiana Jones films if the Jones films had embraced moral ambiguity and a far more alarming immediacy in terms of real-world violence. Curry and Ruffo have distinctive personal traits and perspectives that define them, and their conversations encapsulate their differing place in a violent world from which they both make their living. Curry’s affectation of professional disinterest masks a powerful, easily stoked fury when faced with immediate brutality and inhumanity, whereas Ruffo’s weightier conscientiousness regarding differing versions of tribal savagery (e.g., those of his parents and that of Henlein) is cooler in the long run. Soul-searching is an inevitable by-product of the human behaviour displayed throughout the film.
The film introduces Claire as a nominal love interest for Curry, but once she recovers from her initial hysteria, she retains a self-sufficient quality that stands apart from the bromance of Curry and Ruffo; of course, she brings out the potential bestial instinct in Henlein when the time comes. Mimieux, a pretty, colourless starlet early in her career who appeared with Taylor in The Time Machine (1960) probably gives her best performance, even if she somehow gets hold of some remarkably resilient white slacks during the course of the film. Cardiff worked three times with Taylor, and he, Brown, and Carsten practically ooze testosterone and physical vigour throughout, a vigour that is constantly tested with some demanding stunt work. Brown wasn’t the most expressive actor on the block, and yet he had, in addition to his rock-solid physicality, a thoughtful quality that is well utilised in this film. He often played in this phase of his career black martyr figures whose tinge of the revolutionary only serves to inspire white characters to action; to an extent his role’s the same here, except that, as Curry suspects early on, Ruffo, as the man who actually knows what’s going on in the country and what he’s doing there, has an ethical authority and solidity of purpose that is the linchpin of the enterprise.
When Henlein murders Ruffo, taking an opportunity to try and abscond with the diamonds when Curry is away, the film’s moral centrifuge flies apart, and so does Curry’s character. He chases down Henlein, and in a dizzyingly staged action sequence that broaches the limits of pathological rage, the pair wrestles whilst dangling from vines and struggling in river water, until, in an inspired perversion of traditional heroism, Curry first disables Henlein, breaking his arm and almost drowning him, before stabbing him to death. It’s the traditional action-revenge finale played as humanistic Passion Play, taking Curry right to the brink of madness and stripping his act of any nobility or even backwoods justice. He squats over the river water to wash his face, evoking the desolate state of Humphrey Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). This is witnessed by Kataki, who, utterly revolted, refuses to obey Curry, and berates him for surrendering so easily to the savagery they’re supposed to be trying to escape. The film’s very conclusion, with Curry, after a boding delay, handing himself over to Kataki’s custody to be tried for murder, is too neat a coda considering the rawness of what’s preceded it, but the crucial image of Kataki saluting Curry, as both men live up to Ruffo’s creed and reestablish the basis of civilisation on a level of equality nonetheless retains an unexpected pathos. Of course, Dark of the Sun is no essay or deep tract, but that’s its final strength: like its heroes, it bashes its way through and gets things done.
21st
01 -
2012
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4 comments »
Director: Mikio Naruse
By Marilyn Ferdinand
There is a fine line between love and obsession, and perhaps cultural norms are the deciding factor. Here in the West, ex-lovers who can’t let go have been given a fairly new label—stalkers. Back when Floating Clouds was new, steadfastness in love wasn’t seen as something so sinister in either the West or the East; in fact, unrequited love was the basis for many satisfying love stories, including such classics as Jezebel, Gone with the Wind, and the ultra-romantic Wuthering Heights. Mikio Naruse, a man who lived a desperately unhappy life and whose protracted estrangement from his actress wife Sachiko Chiba during the 1940s led to divorce, offers a mainly unsentimental, even jaundiced look at love. Yet, no love affair starts unhappily; Naruse’s wistful look at the beginning of the affair is the flower struggling for light in a crowded field of weeds.
A flashback to the first meeting of Yukiko Koda (Hideko Takamine, Naruse’s regular leading lady) and Kengo Tomioka (Masayuki Mori) in a rural area of Japanese-occupied Indochina during World War II follows shortly after Yukiko has shown up at Tomioka’s Tokyo house, which he shares with his aging, sickly wife Kuniko (Chieko Nakakita). Yukiko knew he was married from the first, but she believes he will welcome her return to Japan and fulfill his promise to divorce Kuniko and marry her. Tomioka agrees to walk with her, one of many walks the couple will take during the film, but he says that their passion died when they left Dalat. Tomioka’s behavior during the film—sending Kuniko away so he can sell their house out from under her and start one of several doomed business ventures, enticing the young wife (Mariko Okada) of a gracious host (Nobuo Kaneko) away from him, using and rejecting Yukiko—marks him as an opportunistic cad who does not, maybe cannot, return Yukiko’s affection.
In a defeated and battered Japan, however, Yukiko has nothing to cling to but her bliss with Tomioka, born in the heightened reality of wartime and displacement. Keeping alive memories and feelings in the face of bitter disappointment, subsistence living, and distasteful alliances, Yukiko is emblematic of a country trying to survive and go on after a devastating war that unleashed the full fury of the atomic bomb on a civilian population. This film came out in 1955, the same year that Akira Kurosawa’s disturbing meditation on the bomb, I Live in Fear, debuted, and it seems no coincidence that both films traffick in irrational emotion and denial, though Naruse’s is based in romanticism.
Unlike Kurosawa’s deeply depressing film, Floating Clouds could be considered almost trite in its focus on claustrophobic emotional entanglement. Indeed, Yukiko’s hectoring bitterness toward Tomioka gets exasperatingly repetitive. Yet, the squalor of the characters’ history and circumstances tends to elevate the tale in a peculiarly compelling way. Yukiko briefly prostitutes herself to an American G.I., yet seems to be doing so more to make Tomioka jealous than to survive—that she succeeds confirms that there may be more under his callous surface than meets the eye. She continues to punish his faithlessness by going into the employ of the brother-in-law (Isao Yamagata) who raped her, a fact known to Tomioka. She stands in constant reproach to his every failure, a hurt but loving presence he tries fruitlessly to deny.
Takamine is a luminous presence in a vérité film with few visual graces. She is as beautiful in her moments of anger and despair as she is in the full bloom of her affair with Tomioka. Yet Naruse manages to find the age in her face, making Tomioka’s defection to a younger woman—as Yukiko once was in comparison with Kuniko—all the more banal and expected. Her nagging, her jealousy, her assertions that she knows Tomioka better than he knows himself strike an ordinary note for her character and their affair, and it is hard to believe that she really does love him or that he could have loved her so much. The Japanese reticence toward displays of affection make this passionate romance one of suggestion that may be too subtle for our sex-drenched Western appetites. However, a scene in which Tomioka goes to the public baths with the young wife with the full knowledge of her husband and Yukiko is startling in its own right to Western sensibilities.
One of the striking motifs of Floating Clouds is movement. Naruse trains his camera on Yukiko and Tomioka taking walks everywhere they are. Yukiko favors platform shoes, and her dainty, unsteady steps over some of the uneven surfaces she treads with Tomioka heighten her vulnerability. The restlessness of these scenes keeps the relationship provisional, homeless, but Tomioka almost never tries to outpace Yukiko. Perhaps he knows that to do so would be futile—everywhere he has gone, she has found him.
Finally, when all impediments to their union are gone, Tomioka more or less surrenders to her. It is not just that Yukiko has waited out all of his wrong turns and romantic distractions; Tomioka himself has found a purpose again by landing a job as a forest ranger on a distant island, mimicking the work and remoteness of his time in Dalat. Yukiko, saying she cannot live without him, seems a natural companion for Tomioka as he prepares again to exile himself from mainstream Japan. Finally, his remembrance of their love breaks through just as it finally seems to have a chance to take root and grow. But life is too cruel to offer true happiness to counteract all the misery each of them has suffered, and so we are left to reflect on whether a life of romantic illusion is one worth living at all. The answer to that question may depend on how one views the alternative.
13th
01 -
2012
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2 comments »
Directors/Screenwriters: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
By Roderick Heath
Almost all of the famous films made by “The Archers” team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger came in a blinding whirl of creativity in the 1940s, including The Thief of Baghdad (1940), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1945), Black Narcissus (1946), and The Red Shoes (1948). By contrast, although the creative partnership continued until 1958 (and resumed again in 1966 for Powell’s Australian adventure They’re A Weird Mob), their output in the 1950s has little of the same reputation or visibility. Perhaps that was because of a shift in audience tastes and the narrowing of expressive options which characterised the period, and also perhaps because Powell and Pressburger’s partnership, which seemed in the earlier decade informed by an almost messianic passion for sustaining the spirit of individualism and creative zest in the face of the glummest of epochs, began to turn inward and distinctly darker. Some of their works, like the impressive but lumpy Tales of Hoffmann (1953), seem a drift toward the total stylisation and historical fantasy that parts of The Red Shoes presaged. The duo tried, wielding their characteristic eccentricity and playful discursiveness, in The Battle of the River Plate (1956) and Ill Met By Moonlight (1958), to cater to the appetite for retrograde wartime heroism. Gone to Earth, on the other hand, channels the darker fairytale notes of The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann and anticipates elements of the psychosexual neurosis of Michael Powell’s solo effort Peeping Tom (1960). Also apparent is Powell’s fascination with obscure regional settings and their peculiarities, a recurring quirk in his work since as far back as The Phantom Light (1935) and The Edge of the World (1937).
Gone to Earth’s status as a secret treasure was enforced by the film’s poor box office, and then by its being released in the U.S. in a badly mutilated form, thanks to coproducer David Selznick. Gone to Earth has striking similarities with another film by a great British director losing his previously steady grip on moviegoers, David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970), in depicting a wilful heroine caught up in an adulterous passion. The differences are as marked as you’d expect between The Archers and Lean, of course: Lean’s expansive pantheism and elemental expressionism is altogether distinct to Powell and Pressburger’s more overtly psycho-spiritual use of landscape. The rural Welsh borderlands of the later Victorian era that Powell creates is an ironic realm full of examples of human frailty and the limitations of reality. Yet it’s also a mystical world where the Green Man seems to lurk in the woodland shadows, fairies may hide in the leaves, and the mountains are primal temples reserved for mystic rites, whilst the valleys are the preserve of domesticated Christianity and stalked by the masculine Hunter who chases little foxes down. Jennifer Jones plays Hazel Woodus, a half-gypsy girl who lives with her father Abel (Esmond Knight, the Archers’ do-anything character actor) in a thatch-roofed yeoman house in a secluded corner of Shropshire. Hazel has a pet fox, Foxy, which she protects from the local hunters and keeps close to her so obsessively that it starts to resemble one of the animal daemons from Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and with a similar meaning. In the film’s peculiar, sparse, menacing opening, Hazel plucks Foxy out of the grass as the hunters’ horns echo about the hills, and she runs back home where she sits before the fire with her faintly unhinged father tuning the harp from which he makes part of his living, with Hazel as his singer. A sign on the front gate lists his roster of services as “Beeman, Harping For Every Occasion, Wreaths, Coffins.”
Hazel, with her old dress falling apart, travels into the nearby town of Much Wenlock and buys a new, fancy replacement. She tantalises her already smitten cousin Albert (George Cole), but also invites the sniffy disdain of her Aunt Prowde (Beatrice Varley). Angered, Hazel storms out of their house after Albert had invited her to stay, and, walking home in the dark, she is first frightened on the road and almost run over by the carriage of Jack Reddin (David Farrar), a local squire and one of the local hunters. Reddin takes her back to his house, a practically medieval abode studded with the trophies of thousands of hunts and as much a relic of another, different England as her own house, with a general isolation and dilapidation that is eloquent of exhausted treasuries and fetid devolution. Nonetheless Hazel and Reddin’s status as people who seem slightly out of time and place in the placid, smug atmosphere of Victorian rural England blends nimbly with their identity as icons of Freudian gender warfare, the masculine hunter and the little fox. Reddin aggressively tries to seduce Hazel, but she flees, aided by Reddin’s old, sarcastic, ineffectually moral caretaker Andrew Vessons (Hugh Griffith), who gives her a quiet place to sleep for the night and takes her back to her father in the morning. Reddin remains fixated on her and gallops all around the countryside in an attempt to track her down. When Hazel and her father perform at a church gathering, she is introduced to the local pastor, Rev. Edward Marston (Cyril Cusack), who, in his own seemingly serene, impassive fashion, is immediately besotted with her.
Mary Webb’s source novel, which was neglected on first release just after World War I but then became hugely popular in the late ’20s, reputedly inspired Stella Gibbons’ famous “something nasty in the woodshed” satire Cold Comfort Farm. Nonetheless, the story has obvious thematic parallels with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (which the Archers could have made a hell of a movie out of) and lying within the same effervescent strand of high Anglican romanticism. Unsurprisingly, Powell and Pressburger transform it into the sort of film only they seemed to be able to make, blending an almost neorealist sense of precision toward locale and behaviour—the supporting cast was made up of many Shropshire locals, and even Jones gives herself up to the peculiar syntax and slang of the region—with dashes of wilful fantasy, a heady psychosomatic fairy tale with a solid, grounded heart. It makes a corner of rural England as exotic as the Hindu Kush of Black Narcissus, a constant and recurring theme in the Archers’ work, in the way backwaters become distorted mirrors to the values of mainstream cultures. The film’s driving motif of two men pursuing a woman clearly echoes the gentle iteration in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and the fiercer variation in The Red Shoes, whilst the sustained note of sexuality bubbling beneath prim surfaces and drawn out by an aggressive male evokes Black Narcissus, but with a more emphatic sense of feminine desire. Hazel, unlike the mad Sister Ruth of that film, is swayed by desire but not destroyed by it, but rather by the hysterical response to that desire.
One of the most fascinating, tantalising, and often disquieting traits of the Powell and Pressburger oeuvre is their fascination with jarringly divergent impulses and systems of thought that grip characters and, by implication, sometimes whole cultures. Rather than try to resolve those tensions like more familiar kinds of drama do, the duo practically revelled in the breakdown of order, the surrender to wild impulse and glorious insanity. Gone to Earth is one of the more particularly infernal examples of this strand, as Hazel is caught between the varieties of masculinity, the milky Marston and the grasping Reddin. Yet within each man is more than a few shades of contradiction: when provoked, Marston reveals a surprisingly tough and sensually forceful man, whereas Reddin quickly collapses when faced with real resistance. Hazel’s bizarre father, in a fit of amused pique, goads her into promising to marry the first man who should ask her, and the first man proves to be Marston. Marston, gently courting Hazel in his peculiar yet equally unshakeable fashion, vows to God, whom he sees in the pastoral landscape about him as surely as Hazel sees spirits and elves, not to approach her sexually until she asks him to. This proves a major blunder, for the intuitive Hazel feels rather spurned and is unable to shake off the terrible, hypnotic force of Reddin and the constant thrumming of his horse on the roads, hunting her down inexorably. As usual, too, for the Archers, they skip with surprising skill around the limitations of censorship to get their point across.
The most immediate stumbling block of entering into Gone to Earth’s world is Jones’ constantly slipping accent, and yet soon enough one becomes infinitely more concerned with what she’s doing; her vulpine quality, let off the leash in Duel in the Sun (1947), is here exploited to the utmost in a marvellously intuitive performance. Whereas Farrar is fine in a less cagey, more entitled variation on his Black Narcissus role, Cusack is fascinatingly cast as Marston (perhaps the only time in his career he played a romantic lead), his visage and apparel calling to mind Robert Helpmann as the lover turned priest in the core ballet sequence of The Red Shoes. Indeed, the film as a whole has a quality of being an explication of that vignette. And yet the tone and method of Gone to Earth is far from the ebullient, supercharged artistry of the ’40s Archers films, being far more dominated by mysterious, intense quiet filled with unspoken tension and awareness, punctuated by strobing passages of extraordinary, yet restrained artistry: Hazel’s flight through the woods with eyes peering out from trees, or the moments when the sound of Reddin’s horse moving through the roads becomes a kind of demonic reminder of fate, and the sequence in which Hazel ascends to the top of a nearby mount to perform a piece of witchery and await the decision of the fairies about which of her men she will find her fate, silhouetted against the twilight sky with a blanket that provides a map of colour in an otherwise grey and unearthly space. As ever, the Archers’ sense of colour is like visual music (though Christopher Challis had taken over as the team’s cinematographer from Jack Cardiff), down to the inevitable emotive reds flooding the screen at intervals throughout, when Reddin is on the hunt, and in the climactic confrontation between the central trio.
The deeply concerted rhythm and quietly composing elements that give Gone to Earth its hypnotic intensity is visible in one of the mostly unobtrusively brilliant scenes, that of the church picnic, where congregants listen to her singing, rhythmically switching between the momentarily uplifted faces of the parishioners with Hazel framed against the sky, an angel doomed to fall. The collective then settle down to mundane activities, from Marston’s haughty, secretly jealous mother (Sybil Thorndyke) cautioning him against girls not of his class, to the fatuous senior deacon Mr. James (Edward Chapman), having been kept from hoarding all of the pastries, mumbling irritably during Marston’s saying Grace, “I have not received tartlets…I am not thankful!” This fillip of amusing blasphemy and several other small gestures in the scene pay off in later, more volcanic moments. Powell and Pressburger stretch their symbolic acuity here to new limits, especially in their handling of Foxy as the emblem of Hazel’s sexuality, encapsulating the sex-is-death motif in a mordant scene where Hazel helps her father carry one of his coffins from their house, placing Foxy within the casket for the trip, a motif prefigured when Hazel first enters her own home in the film, plunging through the door to be visually entrapped by the frame for a coffin her father is making. Later, when she marries Marston, she keeps Foxy on a leash at her side through the ceremony, a decision others object to but that Marston acquiesces to with a well-aimed Biblical quote. Freudian analysts could have a field day with this film, particularly the vaginal chasm of a mine shaft that Hazel nearly stumbles into on her way to that fateful church picnic, and, gazing down into unknowable depths, becomes aware that one day she will die.
The world that the different characters and the forces they represent and channel is the same zone of oft-idyllic pastoral beauties—the low, sharply rolling hills, the woods in the hollows, and the fresh grassy peaks—yet is filled with multitudinous perspectives on the same thing. Even the mountain that dominates the locale is called “God’s Mountain” and yet is crowned by the “Devil’s Chair.” Hazel and Reddin trail associations of a faded English landscape of entitled lords and saucy wenches, the sort that made for jolly good yarns in then-recent British films like The Wicked Lady (1945) and Blanche Fury (1947). When Reddin first takes Hazel back to his house, he tries to get her changed out of muddied clothes and into one of the low-cut Regency dresses jammed in a trunk. He then literally chases her around and then over the kitchen table, finally actually catching her atop it and kissing her. Each is subsequently unable or unwilling to break out of an almost primal, Lawrentian game where the conscious self is entirely in thrall to basic drives and timeless patterns of behaviour. The virginal Vessons channels his feelings into carefully clipping a tree into the shape of a swan and furiously shooting birds when he’s mad at his master. Marston seems a pillar of Victorian bourgeois establishmentarianism, and his sternly critical mother has hooks of emotional vampirism in her son. Soon, however, he reveals himself to be a deeply contradictory figure who plainly hungers for what Hazel offers—contact with the flipside of his own, spiritual sense of the landscape. The first time Reddin and Marston meet, it comes literally at a crossroads, and Marston deflects Reddin for a time from his relentless search for Hazel.
Class tension, of course percolates, along with psychosexual strain and gender schisms, in this clash of realms, but again Hazel and Reddin represent extremes that somehow lie distinct and therefore unified apart from the Victorian town. As the drama unfolds, Marston amusingly reveals the degree to which he actually hates his environment. Marston seems in fact closer kin to Sister Ruth, dedicating himself selflessly and purely to his wife but slowly driven to lose his upright composure when confronted with her eventual infidelity. whilst castigating himself for spurning Hazel, he also seems to take permission from her infidelity to unleash both his own sensuality and his contempt for his world, tossing a dish of jam at the wall when his mother tries to talk him out of his depression, and not spurning Hazel but rather confronting, if only momentarily, the tacit permission he feels to treat her as a purely sexual object: “Never mind,” he snarls, “I’m not particular!” His peculiar equanimity of outlook is signalled throughout with his indulgence of Foxy at the wedding and his unruffled fascination with Hazel’s maternal inheritance, a notebook filled with obscure spells that encapsulate potent metaphors of feminine and outsider lore, especially the warning about keeping clear of the “black hunter” unless you want to “drop down dead.” Such lore is filled with meaning for a sensible mind, but Hazel’s is not a sensible mind; she takes things literally and ascends in the night to perform her atavistic rites on the Devil’s Chair. She hears the revelatory music that signals she should go to Reddin, but in a blackly witty cutaway, it’s revealed this music is actually her father playing his harp in the moonlit solitude of the woods.
The film’s slow burn pays off in the climactic moments, when Marston goes to reclaim Hazel from Reddin, who has snatched Foxy from his cage at Marston’s house, and drops him writhing in a sack at Hazel’s feet, viciously smug with his triumph, as Hazel wrestles with him and Marston tries to untie the bag. The married couple return home, only for Marston to have to reject his mother in order to keep Hazel: his mother moves out, as does the housekeeper, segueing into the telling sight of Hazel the next morning trying to arrange the breakfast into a paragon of bourgeois decorum. But the deacons barge in to confront Marston, demanding he put Hazel out, and James claims to speaking for the Lord. Hazel berates them for persecuting him, and Marston retorts by stating he’s leaving the ministry and delivers a memorable harangue: “How do you know it was Hazel’s fault?…It was mine…I’d like to flog you off the Mountain, James…But you rule this world, little smug pot-bellied gods!” Marston deflects the challenge for a moment and the couple have a moment of triumph. But then Hazel goes looking for Foxy, and finds him on the mountain just as Reddin and the others hunters have gotten his scent. Hazel tries to flee back to Marston with Foxy in her arms, chased down by the hounds and by Reddin trying desperately to snatch the animal from her arms to lead the animals away. This genuinely hair-raising ending caps a film that isn’t just an underrated work by some major filmmakers, but a true capstone for one of the most amazing runs of cinematic brilliance in the medium’s history.
7th
01 -
2012
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4 comments »
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
By Roderick Heath
Alfred Hitchcock’s career, after a wane in the late ’40s, gathered new steam in 1951 with Strangers on a Train, and for the next decade or so, his creative zest and cinematic brilliance seemed practically limitless. His exploits came within his official brief as the “Master of Suspense” and yet often, both covertly and overtly, tested those limits, setting and overcoming challenges of form, tone, technique, and substance even before gaining a strange, but harmless and even encouraging boost from a new generation of young French critic-filmmakers. All that seemed to come to an abrupt halt in 1964 with Marnie, an awkwardly received work that became a battleground for auteurists and their enemies. All involved came out somewhat battered.
For Hitchcock himself, the experience seemed to cause a creative crisis, and except for the coldly beautiful, maliciously funny Frenzy (1972), his final works display the hit-and-miss tone and intent of effect that characterised his lesser, earlier work. Perhaps age and the uncertainties of the suddenly permissive, authenticity-craving zeitgeist began to catch up with him; or perhaps, as some have said, Hitchcock finally let his perpetual actress crushes get the best of him on the set of Marnie, where he fell out with leading lady Tippi Hedren, who had been carried over from The Birds (1963) after an abortive attempt to get Grace Kelly to return to filmmaking. His powerhouse technical crew also began to disintegrate after its release; he lost his editor George Tomasini and cinematographer Robert Burks, and composer Bernard Herrmann ended their epochal partnership after his score for Hitchcock’s next film, Torn Curtain (1966), was rejected as uncommercial.
Whatever truths pop psychology and industry rumour can extract from the situation can’t match the evidence of Marnie itself, that it is one of his most personal, intense, fervent films and one where he tried to finally bust out of the role of Master of Suspense. Marnie is essentially an expressionist romantic melodrama rather than a thriller, boiling down many of his basic themes to a basic dialogue of suspicion and passion, transgression and forgiveness. Hitchcock’s least generic film since The Trouble with Harry (1956), but also an antithesis of that film’s deceptively flip aesthetic, Marnie’s declarative style echoes through the contemporary cinema of Lynch, Almodovar, Argento, Scorsese, De Palma, and many others, and noncinematic visual artists, too, indicating the degree to which he succeeded in laying out his most electrified images in a purified visual language. That language is largely one of raw iconography, often imitated, even fetishized, yet rarely reproduced coherently: the yellow handbag with which Marnie (Tippi Hedren) spirits away her loot in the first shot, the enormous close-up of Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) searching for her bright red lips in a moment of electric fear and passion, the equally huge close-up of her hand clutching a revolver as she shoots her beloved horse Florio, the repeating motifs that combine basic Freudianism with the axiomatic power of images.
Adapted from Winston Graham’s novel by Jay Presson Allan with the customarily loose approach of the Hitchcock development phase, Marnie is in some ways a gender-switch remake of Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). Marnie is nonetheless also a deeply ironic film that sets out purposefully to pull apart multiple forms of institution—family, sex, marriage, business and social hierarchies, even the authoritarianism of psychiatry itself—and recompose them in new, distorted shapes.
Marnie Edgar herself seems both the chicest and the most dedicatedly duplicitous of Hitchcock blondes, but that is an illusion: she’s really from a poor Southern family, scion of hellfire religion and seamy rendezvous. Marnie is almost always the smartest person in the room and yet crippled by a powerful compulsion that sees her use up her talents and intelligence in repetitive, nominally profitable, but essentially pointless crimes. The audience, as so often in Hitchcock, is invited into complicity with her crimes, her satisfaction in ripping off the smug, bottom-pinching paternalists of the American business class and showing up their frauds, incompetence, and self-satisfaction. Who is her first and most troublesome victim in the film? A man named Strutt (Martin Gabel). She pays an early visit to her mother Bernice (Louise Latham) carrying the treasure from her latest assault, only to be driven insanely jealous by her mother’s affection for a young urchin, Jessie (Kimberly Beck), and Bernice’s dislike of being touched by her daughter, who begs her mother for any kind of physical affection with the exposed pathos of a child. Psycho’s silhouetted, looming maternal figure is here still alive and quietly torturing with inchoate love, standing over Marnie’s bed as she’s stricken with nightmares from a childhood incident she can’t remember yet obsesses over. Marnie is clearly a fractured mess contained by the trappings of the Hitchcock blonde, making it Hitchcock’s most overt deconstruction of his figure of obsession. Marnie’s misanthropy and frigidity, enacted through her gratifying raids, fascinates and entices Mark, knowing full well who and what she is, after her robbery of his business associate Strutt.
Hitchcock’s jokiness always had a peculiar habit of concealing notions of discomforting profundity, and here the narrative is sustained by a restlessly clever conflation of human behaviour with zoology, a pragmatic and amoral science that balances and rivals the medical psychotherapeutic conceits with its specifically human constructs and egocentric world view (and also inevitably invoking the animal motifs of Psycho and the avian apocalypse of The Birds). This idea is introduced as Rutland’s essential interest, a form of thought which codifies his worldview of the predatory, yet frustrated, alpha male. Mark himself is a contradictory figure, a nerd forced into the role of business tycoon to protect the prosperity of his American Brahmin family. The notion of Mark being as quietly entrapped in his own, specifically masculine way as the more overtly neurotic, yet hardly more perverse Marnie is a significant substrata to the film’s psychic drama: if Marnie is near-fatally afflicted not only with profound childhood trauma, but also corrosively retrograde concepts of morality, Mark Rutland seems to be an almost purified edition of the era’s version of playboy male—aggressive, darkly charming (played by James Bond himself), entitled, and conquering. Mark’s approach to Marnie, engaging in what is basically a form of sexual and emotional blackmail with Marnie in a desire to satisfy his taste for an exotic female specimen, blends confusedly with his actual affection and interest in her, an affection that becomes mediated and complicated through an interminable array of defence mechanisms and biological instincts.
Marnie’s credits announce a literary motif as the names are presented printed on turning pages, an almost satirical touch, as if Hitchcock was delving back into the era of the oppressively vulgar romanticism of former patron David Selznick and classic Hollywood. But the romanticism is also very real, if livid in its perversity, and the film’s opening moments—Marnie, seen from behind, stalking a railway concourse carrying that yellow bag, and then a jump-cut to Strutt’s angry exclamation of “Robbed!” immediately clarifying the strange importance of the bag and the mysterious figure—represent formally arranged cinema at its height, brusquely free of the literary. This segues into a ritualised shift of identities, with Marnie switching Social Security cards hidden in her compact in a marvelous conjunction of practical trick and metaphor for the immutable impersonality of femininity, washing the black dye from her hair, and dropping the first of the film’s many talismanic keys to the bus station locker where she abandons her most recent alternate guise. One major structural difference between Marnie and other Hitchcock films is in the final melding of the figure of the ice-cool woman of mystery and the fearful fugitive, usually a male character who at some stage becomes captor or captive to the female. Whereas early films in the canon like The 39 Steps (1935) mediate the notion of being at the mercy of a criminal with humour, here the notion is explored in disturbing ways through a situation where the relationship allows neither character unsullied dignity nor freedom from culpability.
After her robberies, Marnie always rides her beloved horse Florio (“If you must bite someone, Florio, bite me!”) with all its ripe suggestions of adolescent sublimation. Marnie’s guises enable her status as a subversive agent without a cause within the structure of contemporary society, but they soon prove ineffective armour against the world, and the relentless male gaze of Hitchcock and his protagonists: “Stare,” Marnie spits in response to a word-association game Mark plays with her, “And that’s what you do!” Such a tantalising surface must be shattered. Only the forces that compel that shattering largely come from within Marnie herself rather than Russian spies or harassing police, but still Rutland, like many (usually female, sometimes equally malevolent) Hitchcock protagonists before him, becomes accomplice and protector, persecutor and lover to the fugitive. Rutland’s half-protective, half-greedy entrapment of Marnie becomes then the overture for a perverted inversion of the rituals of marriage and social courtship laced with acidic import, as the narrative moves through a quickie wedding, a first honeymoon night that turns into an oppressive disaster, a sexual encounter that grazes rape and concludes with a suicide attempt (“The idea was to drown myself, not feed the damn fish!”), and finally a return home whereupon Rutland coaches Marnie sarcastically in the arts of respectable cohabitation and newlywed rituals: “This is the drill, dear—wife follows husband to front door, gives and/or gets a kiss, stands pensively as he drives away…”
Later, Marnie is inducted into the ritual of hosting a party, where she’s almost driven to flee by the sight of Strutt, invited with malicious intent by Mark’s sister-in-law Lil Mainwaring (Diane Baker). Rarely was Hitchcock’s sense of sarcastic humour and utter contempt for domestic institutions so sharp as in such scenes. This is the marriage role-playing stage of Rear Window’s (1954) many windows, replayed through a more immediate, torturous prism. Whilst the film thoroughly validates Freudianism, it proffers an intense distrust of official interventions and authority: the psychiatrist Marnie sees in the novel is conflated with Mark himself, whose amateur tilt at the art is blended in multifarious, dangerous, but also more personal and crucial ways. Marnie meets Mark’s attempts to tease psychoanalytic self-recognition out of her with equal contempt in a moment that recalls the similarly inquisitorial courtships of The Birds (1963): “You Freud – me Jane?” The old gag, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” here is rewritten as, just because Marnie knows that she’s criminally neurotic, doesn’t mean she’s wrong to want to invert the power relations backed up by ever-present hints of brute, vindictive force that surround her.
Marnie’s sequential set-pieces are far less expansive and spectacular than in the likes of North by Northwest (1959) or even Psycho (1960), and yet represent exercises in technique and symphonic emotion just as bravura and compelling for the attentive viewer. Mark and Marnie’s relationship, which bobs to the surface first when she is sent into an animalistic frenzy by the electric brightness and saturating red of a thunderstorm, retreating to writhe against the office door in proto-orgasmic panic, attracting Mark to embrace her in an intimate moment that resolves in that colossal kiss, a moment that seems to represent an absolute reduction of one aspect of the cinema just as surely as the shower murder of Psycho. The next climax, Marnie robbing the Rutland and Co. safe, builds from the moment Rutland steals away with Marnie into a corner of the family mansion’s stables to kiss her in a moment of supposedly illicit passion, with Marnie playing along whilst keeping her mind on her upcoming theft as the price she will exact. This moment of covert retreat jumps almost immediately to the image of Marnie hiding within a toilet cubicle, waiting in the semi-dark for the office women to retreat and leave her to her peculiar, solitary form of sexual release. The actual heist makes a Jules Dassin-esque use of silence, as a cleaning lady strays unperceived into Hitchcock’s coolly framed widescreen cage as Marnie does her deed, and she strips her shoes off to make a getaway, only for one to fall with calamitous volume to the floor.
Only the cleaning lady’s lousy hearing saves Marnie, but her seemingly clean getaway is abruptly ruined when Marnie’s customary post-heist fling on Florio is interrupted by Mark’s appearance, now the glowering force of male vindictiveness, or so it seems at first, before Mark’s actual, far stranger program becomes apparent. The image of Joan Fontaine’s repressed intellectual in Suspicion (1941) reading a book on child psychology whilst keeping one eye on the gorgeous threat of Cary Grant is soon inverted, as Mark peers over the edge of a book on seashore animals into Marnie’s bedroom, with sex on his mind. He releases his frustration on Marnie, tearing off her skirt, then bundling her guiltily with his bathrobe: the switchbacks here between desire and hate, protectiveness and lust, violation and embrace, nakedness and protective layering, are articulated with stunning rapidity. Marnie’s wide, dead eyes and Mark’s predatory gaze form a dialogue of primal sensation, completely at odds and yet locked in a dying fall onto the bed. It’s one of the most brilliant, disturbing, multifaceted moments in movie history, and one that has links to the much simpler and yet so similar moment in Hitchcock’s first mature film, The Lodger (1926), in which the frame is filled with Ivor Novello’s face looming upon the camera in the act of a kiss, an image of both love and fear, threat and affection.
Hitchcock’s style, which always seems so singular as to be sui generis, actually represents a weird and fascinating blend of the two basic approaches to cinema: he learned from Fritz Lang and the Munich filmmakers under whom he served an apprenticeship a form of expressionism and symbolism, one in which his interest in psychology readily found release, and yet he was also a fundamental realist in the British school, anticipating aspects of neorealism in work like Shadow of a Doubt (1943) in his way of observing specific detail and utilising milieu. His later films offer a violently eclectic technique, and that’s true enough in Marnie, a deeply stylised film, full of grandiose shots that show off their inauthenticity but only for the sake of enriching the film’s emotional palate and elemental drama. Such tricks range from the hugely looming, oppressive ship that sits moored at the end of Bernice’s street, to the thunder clouds that hang over the Rutland and Co. offices, presaging the storm that will soon break on both physical and psychological planes. The film resolves into overtly expressionistic alternations of drained colour and sudden, violent hues and the interplay of the present and past screaming faces of Marnie, beholding the horror of her accidental homicide, practically begging for Edvard Munch’s scream to be added to the montage. Whilst it’s tempting to admit Hitchcock’s effects get too bluntly, even cornily declarative in places, like the in-and-out zoom that punctuates Marnie’s final robbery and the rush of unlocked symbols in the finale, it’s still important to recognise their place in the film’s final idealisation of image not simply as a picture but as an expressive device.
It’s taken me a long time to come around to Hedren, but lately I can’t take my eyes off her on screen, as what Hitchcock saw in her seems plainer. In comparison to his great triumvirate of female stars, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly, Hedren was much less subtle, but also had both a febrile intensity under the simpering cool, and a precise type of aggression, a spiky hauteur the other three usually rounded off. This quality works especially well here, an edge that comes out in Marnie’s bitterly self-aware humour and her serpentine defensiveness when cornered: she could alternate between softness and hardness with precise timing. Although by logical standards oddly cast as an American Brahmin, Connery is simply marvelous in one of his best performances, capturing Mark’s natural imperiousness and delight in game hunting with eruptions of shame and tenderness. Herrmann’s score is one of his most lush, irradiating the images with a swooning sense of yielding desire and unfettered feeling, which the characters constantly stymie. It’s easy to see why Hitchcock’s style has had such a deep impact on queer aesthetics and artists, with his immediate sense of illicit passion, unease, and duplicitous surfaces. It’s tempting enough to read the tale of Marnie as that of a closeted lesbian, which would probably be the first reflex of a modern analysis, as, like the heroine of Rebecca (1940), she practically trembles with the constant threat/invitation of being recognised/outed.
Baker’s marvellously supine Lil evokes Suzanne Pleshette’s antipathetic brunette Annie Heyworth in The Birds as one who stands as a nominal rival for the affections of the hero. Whereas Pleshette was easier to read in her affectations as an embodiment of same-sex attraction, Lil is more a quietly murderous sprite, an example of a younger generation for whom the weaknesses of the older are invitation to cruel sport. The grand climactic scenes of Marnie come somewhat before the actual finale’s perfervid revelations, as Marnie, made nervous by Lil’s plot to spring Strutt on her, and with Mark trying to strike a bargain with him, joins a fox hunt. She registers the laughter of the hunters and the jollity of the blood sport as a specific psychic anticipation of her own destruction, and flees, chased by Lil until she tries to make Florio jump a brick wall, the horse smashing its rear legs and sending Marnie tumbling head over heels. The interplay of editing and shooting here, ranging from helicopter shots to close-ups that feel like comic book frames in their illustrative quality, is as amazing as any of Hitch’s vaunted scenes, and the pungent emotionalism of Marnie, bedraggled and hysterical, begging a farm woman for a pistol to shoot her beloved steed, and angrily shoving aside the pleading Lil (“Haven’t you killed enough today?”) to deliver the coup de grace.
Mercy killing of her most beloved creature segues into thievery as Marnie, almost entirely unhinged though back in her near-catatonic state, tries to rob the Rutland mansion’s safe, but with her paralysing psychological blocks now preventing her from taking the money. Mark determines to drive her to the showdown with her mother that will finally unveil the base trauma that has caused her compulsions and phobias. That finale tries to pack a little too much into one scene, but the completeness of Marnie’s devolution is remarkable, as she’s reduced to a childish state, whilst Mark finally achieves the authority he’s always sought, ripping away the bandage of forgetfulness Bernice had thankfully idealised as a gift from god, relieving not only Marnie from guilt but also herself from her past. Marnie escapes the total collapse and rot that finally cocoons Norman Bates, the death wish of Vertigo’s Madeleine/Vicky, and the collapse of The Birds’ Melanie Daniels, Marnie’s immediate psychic ancestors. And that, perhaps, is truly why Marnie feels like the end of something.
5th
01 -
2012
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8 comments »
By Marilyn Ferdinand
I don’t make lists, though somehow one slipped out of me last year. More precisely, I posted a list of favorite movies I viewed in 2010 by any means at all as a way of giving them more exposure. I am assured that such opinions do matter to filmmakers and distributors of arthouse and independent films, as the media tornado swirling around the firing of Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman spits out a number of pronouncements about the causes and repercussions of this action.
This Is Not a Film
Of course, this “end of an era” at the Village Voice is only one front on which the world has changed—whether for the better or worse depends upon who is making the judgment. The year in film also had this valedictory quality to it, as many older filmmakers turned a nostalgic gaze on their own life’s work. Monte Hellman ended a 20+-year absence from feature films to present us with a skillful, entertaining look at his own career in Road to Nowhere. Claude Lelouch, long consigned to the ash heap by the French, made a similar survey of his own history, both personal and professional, in the criminally overlooked What Love May Bring. Martin Scorsese paid homage to the father of his industry, Georges Méliès, in Hugo. Sadly, two Iranian filmmakers said farewell to their vocation—Mohammad Rasoulof with his film Good Bye and Jafar Panahi with This Is Not a Film—as the iron fist of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime banned and imprisoned them both. Finally, the late Raúl Ruiz made, as Rod said, “a classic example of a grace-note film from an aging director,” with his final film Mysteries of Lisbon.
King of Devil’s Island
A number of films had a retro aspect to them. The extremely entertaining Madame X, a first feature from Indonesian director Lucky Kuswandi, wore its love of 60s pop action films on its sleeve. The new silent film The Artist not only paid its respects to the silent era literally, but also quoted from such classic films as Citizen Kane and A Star Is Born. King of Devil’s Island from Norwegian filmmaker Marius Holst was crafted with a classic style and care that reminded me of Howard Hawks. Even Terrence Malick’s much-lauded The Tree of Life made comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey all but inevitable.
Martha Marcy May Marlene
I watched many more current releases than I have in many a year thanks to the screeners sent “for your consideration.” Despite numerous fine performances from a bevy of talented actors, was it really necessary for Michelle Williams, Michael Fassbender, and Jessica Chastain to be in so many of them? I like and admire these artists, but their multiple appearances seem retro as well, as though the Hollywood dream factory were still pressing contract stars into assembly-line service. Certainly, the paucity of any really imaginative or mold-breaking films from Hollywood (aside from pop/fantasy films well covered by Rod here) and the continued use of the 3D gimmick to get butts in seats signal that the business of show hasn’t changed much in decades. I much preferred the American independent films I was able to find: Without and Monogamy were two relationship movies from first-time feature directors Mark Jackson and Dana Adam Shapiro that perfectly captured the seductive terror of aloneness the new generation faces. First-time feature director Sean Durkin echoed this unease in Martha Marcy May Marlene, a studio film with a credible indie feel that, in condemning cults, actually reinforced the conformity of mainline living Durkin said he was trying to critique.
My Week with Marilyn
Rod and I discussed whether this was “the year of” anything. For him, it was the year of the ensemble, and given how many of his favorite films were ensemble-driven, that is entirely reasonable. I saw many more chamber dramas, and for me, it was the year of the star turn. Albert Nobbs, Shame, Martha Marcy May Marlene, My Week with Marilyn, The Iron Lady, and to a lesser extent Jane Eyre, Drive, J. Edgar, and The Artist all contained dominant central characters that largely drove the films. Some of these films were complete successes, and some were a triumph of acting over incompletely realized material, some bordering on vanity project (e.g., Albert Nobbs).
South Side Projections’ Mike Phillips at the projector
The Chicago front saw some new players enter the scene, some established players retrench, and others break out and work wonders. My good friend Mike Phillips founded South Side Projections, which became an instant treasure to underserved audiences on Chicago’s working class and African-American South Side. Mike’s protégé Julian Antos and Becca Hall launched the Northwest Chicago Film Society, moving the popular Bank of America classics series from the now-demolished home it had for more than 40 years to the nearby Portage Theater. Fans of the series worried about the change of venue and day (from Saturday to Wednesday), but Julian and Becca’s valuable and eclectic programming has seen them through a very successful year and a strong opening in 2012. Roger Ebert relaunched At the Movies at WTTW, the public television station where he and Gene Siskel started their television careers; financial trouble has sent the series, hosted by Christie Lemire of the Associated Press and local critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, into a limbo from which it may not emerge.
Finally, Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren hosted the second For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, to benefit the Film Noir Foundation. We raised $5,700 to help restore the Cy Endfield film The Sound of Fury, just in time to learn that the major studios are abandoning celluloid forever. Future preservation efforts will need to take a new focus, but we intend to continue the battle to save our film heritage with a third blogathon.
31st
12 -
2011
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19 comments »
By Roderick Heath
“We’re going to need more holy water!” – Ron Perlman, Season of the Witch (2011)
It’s been a hell of a year. One of rage and anarchy, sloth and pathos, calamity and continuity. Our world reminds us every day now of both how close we are and yet also how far apart.
And our cinema—is our cinema keeping pace and reflecting our interesting times? Not if you’re looking for Godardian agitprop aesthetics, obviously. But perhaps, on another level, a psychological level, a mythopoeic level?
Regular readers of my end-of-year confessions will know I usually finish up feeling disappointed, cheated, frustrated, and generally bewildered by my cinema going, especially once awards season is in full swing. So many Oscar-hungry puff pieces, so many overstuffed fanboy epics, so much faux-auteurist pap clad in the new imperial clothes! Usually my frustration tends to stem from being denied a chance to see important movies, and this year there are, as ever, a few real nagging gaps in my viewing, and also quite a few that I refuse to care about. Amongst the year’s biggest movies are some I’ll probably never see, including Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, desperate franchise-wringers from people who barely know how to make movies, but know all about getting bums on seats.
Film itself, the actual physical medium, is dying, or at least bound to be valued only by niche obsessives, retronauts, and historians. Like many things, this stirs a debate between my practical yin and my romantic yang: for filmmakers it means both a liberation from the cost of the medium, helping level the playing fields a little more in the always-expensive world of movie production, and yet it threatens also a potential loss of craft, of care in shooting and assembling those fragments of arranged reality which we call films. Major, well-proven filmmakers like Spielberg and Scorsese have this year made large-budget films with personal themes that are intended for the broadest audiences possible, yet these have been characterised, and to a certain extent received, as some kind of retrograde, risky perversity. Does such fretting count as evidence of how deeply we have been brainwashed by the carefully niche-marketed, incessantly hip zeitgeist?
Paul
Yet there’s little doubt in my mind that this has been the best year for cinema since at least 2007, and possibly since 1999. Of course, “year” is always a problematic categorisation, given the channels of distribution that many films, particularly indie films and movies from non-English-speaking markets, have to flow though. In any event, any time frame that brings us cinema on the level of The Tree of Life, Uncle Boonmee, and Mysteries of Lisbon on their own would be a memorable window in movie history. Even some of this year’s outright disasters had at least a perverse ambition going for them. Whatever else you can say about the likes of Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet and David Gordon Green’s Your Highness, both ramshackle attempts to crossbreed geeky genre satire with slacker-stoner humour (with Greg Mottola’s Paul as a third, though far superior, entry), they had an eccentricity and, occasionally, a sheer sense of anarchy that made them far more engaging than such bathwater-flavoured square-deal fare as Captain America: The First Avenger or Contagion, if not, in the end, any better.
Submarine
Yet I’m surprised at how much bitching I’ve encountered about the year’s low quality of movies amongst mainstream moviegoers. Even there I’m at odds: the multiplexes have seen such lively fare as X-Men: First Class, Thor, Fast Five, Scream 4, Hanna, Super 8 (not a sequel!), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two, and Sucker Punch flitter across the screens in sprawls of pixels and pummelling. I’ve certainly had some powerful disappointments, many of which weren’t even bad, and yet which are bundled together in my mind for seeming to offer far more than they really give: the sophomoric insights of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, the aggressively, turgidly oddball angst of Richard Ayoade’s Submarine; the overwrought mustiness of Rowan Joffe’s Brighton Rock; the hollow, New Age parent-baiting of Lynne Ramsey’s We Need to Talk About Kevin; the shrill conscience-movies clichés of Robert Redford’s The Conspirator; the clogged and dreary Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; the blundering wastage of Cowboys & Aliens and Captain America: The First Avenger, etc., etc. But even in such disappointments, good moments hold the memory, like the scene in Submarine where the young hero is left alone at the dinner table whilst his girlfriend’s family have a crisis hug, a penetrating and all too tangible moment.
So, I’m really still impressed with the breadth of energy evident in cinema, both mainstream and tributary. I’m left with a patina of sensations and textures, visual and emotional and intellectual: the symphonic natural landscapes and macro- and microcosmic attentiveness of The Tree of Life, the dense jungle populated by id-welling monkey men, black caves, easeful waters, and starlight of Uncle Boonmee, the alien, rectilinear universe perforated by proofs of jagged humanity in Drive. The soaring visions of an alien Asgard where matter and dream hang on the edge of eternity in Thor. Hugo’s Belle Époque neverland. The Moses-as-sociopath vision of X-Men: First Class’s Erik Lensherr hauling a submarine from deep in the sea and hurling a sky full of rockets back at Pharaoh’s army for the sake of liberating his people from bondage. The dreamy thickets of nocturnal suburbia where protean teens venture out and evolve into new beings in The Myth of the American Sleepover and Super 8, the globe-trotting of Hanna, the snowy mountain fringes where the monks of Of Gods and Men are marched to meet their fate, already touched with the otherworldly and the purified.
Rampart
The sombre desert limbo and the nocturnal jazz of Passion Play and the stygian, drug-fuelled nightclub rampage of the anti-hero in Owen Moverman’s Rampart. The bleak forest halls and the eerie, totemic wind farms that guard the edge of the darkly enchanted village in Wake Wood, littered with corpses as nature is thrown fatally out of balance by human arrogance. The wistful chamber music of Mysteries of Lisbon where time and tales’ edges blur and congeal and reverse upon themselves. The wonder of the perfectly formed small baby’s limbs in The Tree of Life and Womb; the foggy, bleary oedipal plains of that second film. The ethereal, noir-soaked frames of Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere, where murder and muse coalesce into a fabric of both eroticised yearning and alienation. Rivers of gore spilled by the heroes of 13 Assassins and Drive in their divergent quests to defend the weak. The anticipated nightmarish blood-tide of the future permeating the uptight adventurers of A Dangerous Method. Endless armies of the psychic war in Sucker Punch warded off by its singular warrior amazons in landscapes that suggest a nerd’s busted hard drive in hell. Harry Potter and friends standing before the blazing ruins of their alma mater, releasing quietly relieved breaths of victory and survival.
The Ward
Last year, I waxed excessive about some linking themes I had noticed preoccupying the minds of filmmakers, as they offered a raft of variations on the theme of the maladapted survivor searching desperately for their humanity. This year, many films expanded upon such a motif to ask almost cosmic-scaled questions: What makes us what we are? Do the events that shape us truly make us, or do such things only give us tools and vices that enable our expression? Where are we going and what things we have learnt help us when trials come? Such questions permeate movies as seemingly different as The Tree of Life, X-Men: First Class, Hugo, A Dangerous Method, Womb, Sucker Punch, Hanna, Mysteries of Lisbon, Attenberg, Drive, The Ward, and Jane Eyre. I was fascinated by the powerful images of parents with children, and those of the hazy fringes of civilisation where there is a kind of spirituality even in the act of corporeal extermination, repeating throughout many. Several films evoked the trappings of psychotherapy and depicted adventures in the inner space. One of the more conscious, recurrent themes was that of generational torch passing, messy and fraught as it always is. Sex and violence are eternal presences in movieland, of course, but imbued so often of late with aspects of the genuinely primal, parsed through dream states, myth, and frantic hunger, from the Freudian fever-dreams of Womb, to the masochistic heroines of Leap Year and A Dangerous Method, needing physical shock to suture together sex and spirit. Heroes have come sometimes beaten, commonly bloodied, often falling with feet of shattered clay. Villains have often been hard to discern from heroes, with characters who bundle together what we love most and fear most within their frames. Hell, even the mysterious alien beast of Super 8 is both a terrible monster and a desperate, forlorn prisoner.
Margin Call
Children and adolescents have been peculiarly powerful protagonists throughout the year, fighting off alien invasions, saving cinema history from the rubbish heap, battling off superpowers and secret armies, even committing mass murder with admirable focus. Simultaneously, the older men are older and more tired, beaten about by life and watching hopes fade, from Ben Kingsley’s tragic Georges Méliès in Hugo to Kevin Spacey’s and Stanley Tucci’s bruised company men in Margin Call, Antonio Luz’s swashbuckling but haunted Father Dinis in Mysteries of Lisbon, Vangelis Mourikis’s dying idealist in Attenberg, and even the collapsing dignity of Kristen Wiig’s oddly tragicomic heroines in Paul and Bridesmaids. All perhaps could hope for an ounce of the dignity, even nobility, which the monks of Of Gods and Men and Uncle Boonmee himself can take to their respective graves. By contrast, many heroines have been frantically trying to hold together the shape of their world and give it meaning by sheer will, from the fantasy monster slayings by the girls of Sucker Punch to the atavistic rituals of Attenberg’s Marina, Keira Knightley’s Sabina Spielrein knitting neurosis into theory, and Jane Eyre’s rectitude in the face of degradation.
13 Assassins
Is there a keynote to any of this? Certainly not one that encompasses so many films, with their manifold aims and qualities. And yet, throughout such experiences as those of the adventuring youths of Hugo and Super 8, their more thoughtful kin across town in The Tree of Life, and their (spiritual) older siblings in The Myth of the American Sleepover and the survivalist fantasias of Hanna, Sucker Punch, 13 Assassins and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two, the old men on their final pilgrimages in Of Gods and Men, Attenberg, and Uncle Boonmee, and the Driver giving his lady one life-encompassing kiss just before stamping out another man’s life entirely: all see their protagonists unable to escape their limited selves, and yet all finding a kind of perfection in fellowship and moments of strange serenity remaking an often dull, sometimes cruel world into a place of raptures. Perhaps the figure who could encompass them all is the hapless filmmaker of Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere, the end product of evolution up from the magician Méliès is presented as in Hugo, hurrying his naïve dreams past the camera lens, where Hellman’s protagonist is constantly reaching towards the past, the present, to other people, to a story to be told, and always seeing them retreat into amorphous unknowns and unanswerable longings.
Snowtown
PS: I only saw two current Australian films this year. One was Snowtown, which started off well, with a compelling portrait of seedy hate mongers in a poverty-stricken environment, but devolved into “droning psychopath browbeats fearful youngster” shtick well-exhausted by The Boys (1997) and Animal Kingdom (2010). The second was A Heartbeat Away, a film that filled me with incoherent rage and made me turn it off less than 20 minutes in. This may be an unfair sample of the year’s local cinema.
Some Favourite Performances
Whilst I found it wore out its welcome pretty quickly, I will give Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip this: it captures something convincingly, even affectingly insufferable and doleful about actors thanks to Steve Coogan’s and Rob Brydon’s deft performances. They offered, in between Michael Caine impressions, authentic portraiture of the second-tier male celebrity as show-off, restless consumer, feckless egotist, and occasionally, very familiar figures of middle-aged pathos, angry and bewildered at the sometimes tiny quirks and infinitesimal vagaries of luck that can rule a career. Many actors and other creative people can, I suspect, discover of shiver of self-recognition. Similarly, although the film actively pissed me off, it’s hard to ignore how Tilda Swinton sustains We Need to Talk About Kevin purely and literally by the sweat of her brow. Other famous actors lose and gain weight and slap on the prosthetics to gain awards, but Swinton belongs to a small breed who really does seem to use her own strangely textured flesh as a palate for her artistry, even if directors keep casting her in the same part over and over. Indeed for me it’s been mostly a year of actresses. One of my favourite performances, Shannyn Sossamon’s in Road to Nowhere, was a meditation on the idea of the actress, mutable, inaccessible yet exposed, duplicitous yet laid bare, multitudinous and yet tethered to a single constant image. Sossamon, like Megan Fox, whose low-key, well-textured performance as the angel so bruised by the male gaze in Passion Play that she can barely meet anyone’s eyes, also represents the former It-girl as case study, foiled in the attempt to walk the line between teen-boy masturbation fodder and capital-A actress, diffused through a prism of punch-drunk fantasy.
Perhaps a claim for future It-girl status was Claire Sloma’s magical performance in The Myth of the American Sleepover, the pixie-haired, nose-studded individualist feeling her way through a night of epic debauchery, coming into focus for a jazz ballet routine which, like the film itself, manages to capture something glorious yet painfully transient about the changeling age. Elle Fanning, following up her performance in last year’s Somewhere, made a marvellous contribution to Super 8, standing out amongst a strong cast of youngsters as she shocks her young male friends with real acting talent, and in the scene of the young hero falling in love with her as she’s slathered in zombie make-up, a moment alive with layers of adolescent Eros and transformational strangeness. A couple of years older but no less protean, Saoirse Ronan’s star turn in Hanna possessed a singular grace in playing a character who’s both a casual killer and an utterly bewildered innocent. Polar opposite in temperament, if not homicidal capacity, was Emma Roberts’ delicious psychopathic teen narcissist in Scream 4, avatar of everything suspect about Gen Y, managing to be both hilarious and alarming as she shreds her own body to convincingly inhabit the role of media hero, and later walloping David Arquette to jelly with a bedpan. I’m not sure if I enjoyed a moment in 2011 cinema more. Similarly, memorably ballsy and occasionally unhinged, Amber Heard strode through her two-for-one trashterpiece year of Drive Angry and The Ward with the feral pride of a lioness who considers the cinema screen her private patch of veldt.
Words of praise for some Aussie girls who seem to move from strength to strength: Mia Wasikowska, who inhabits her role in Jane Eyre as if no one else has ever played the part before. Emily Browning, whose supple emotional register gave Sucker Punch both its grit and its emotional intensity. Rose Byrne, who made trying to spy in her underwear seem just another day on the job in X-Men: First Class and managed to make her bitch role in Bridesmaids convincing in her chichi pathos. Speaking of which, Kristen Wiig’s excellence in her self-penned vehicle was most apparent when the film kept to its true brief—portraying a woman in a flailing midlife crisis, riddled with class rage and emotional resentment—rather than the limp attempts to match the frat boy hijinks of Judd Apatow. Wiig was also a gas playing the lazy-eyed, foul-mouthed, new-minted atheist in Paul. Eva Green’s reptilian cool was beautifully exploited in Womb, as was Matt Smith’s rubbery intensity and Lesley Manville’s wizened brilliance. Brighton Rock at least had Andrea Riseborough’s engaging portrait of dim but dogged rebellion against the fetid drear of post-austerity England. Jodie Whittaker left Venus well behind with her similarly sleek impersonation of a put-upon yet heroic nurse in Attack the Block. Kathy Burke was almost my lone salvaging grace for the train wreck of a film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in playing her aged, exhausted she-geek with a still-bubbling edge of randy gaucheness. Robin Wright’s retention of dignity buoyed The Conspirator. Keira Knightley and Monica del Carmen shared, if little else, a taste for masochistic extremes in A Dangerous Method and Leap Year, and both lived up to playing difficult, intransigent, inchoate personalities whose very pain and fragmentation made them more powerful than anyone close to them. The year’s most genuine breakout star, insofar as a year ago no one had even heard of her, was Jessica Chastain, in her ethereal impersonation of Terrence Malick’s idea of earthbound grace, and her gutsy, emotionally well-shaded semi-lead role in The Debt.
Amongst the male of the species, Christoph Waltz might have been disappointed with his first follow-up to Inglourious Basterds, but, considering that he provided most of the few actual laughs in The Green Hornet (“I am ungassable!”), we can’t be disappointed in him. Attack the Block was similarly given some saving zest by the flip wigger cynicism of Alex Esmail, the drolly stoned college boy filled out by Luke Treadaway, and the posturing yet actually befuddled masculinity of Joe Boyega. Ryan Gosling’s thousand-yard-stare-of-the-sensitive-hunk acting has generated a wealth of amusing internet memes, but it’s a great part of the power of Drive, enticing and yet puzzling in his silent, seemingly open demeanour that hides a soul filled with great and terrible wrath. Similarly cunning was Albert Brooks’ justly acclaimed casting as the unlikely force of evil Gosling is fated to meet. Oscar Isaac contributed to the film’s peculiar textures with his evasive performance as Gosling’s foil, but his major part of the year was his alluring, villainous ham in Sucker Punch, shooting hapless ladies in the head and crooning Roxy Music with equal aplomb.
James McAvoy had an excellent year after a spell of eddying post-Atonement, playing conscientious, whip-smart young heroes in The Conspirator and X-Men: First Class: anyone who can make the line “I can’t feel my legs” sound halfway convincing deserves some sort of award. That film was also given some genuinely relishable villainy by unexpectedly dashing, sublimely sadistic Kevin Bacon, and, of course, the man who was everywhere this year, Michael Fassbender, slinked through his role as the proto-Magneto with dark wit and charm. Fassbender might get awards props for the one major role of his I haven’t caught yet, but considering that Fassbender also gave fine physical form to Rochester in Jane Eyre and inhabited Carl Jung with a smouldering brilliance in A Dangerous Method, he certainly has earned his pay. Viggo Mortensen was similarly stellar in Cronenberg’s film, wielding a crafty, authoritative intelligence in portraying Sigmund Freud that far transcended the usual look-at-me celebrity impersonations. Woody Harrelson’s excellence in Rampart sustains a meandering but occasionally ferocious journey into the dark heart of American manhood. Amongst the undoubtedly awe-endowing cast of the final Harry Potter chapter, Alan Rickman’s hyped grace note as the hapless Snape was fine indeed, but oddly enough, I came out having enjoyed Ralph Fiennes’ invocation of something pathetic in the monstrous Voldemort; in a year in which we’ve seen genuine fawned-over-but-actually-detested tyrants depart the earth, he summarised something about them, in his cringeworthy attempt to play the loving despot, not easily appended to news stories.
I’ll spare a kind word for two good actors in movies I hated, Tom Hardy, whose sullen aggression blended with irreducible pain in Warrior was genuinely rousing, and Matt Damon’s frazzled everyman mucking through disaster in Contagion. Along with costar Emily Blunt, Damon’s class also gave some solidity to the stupefyingly silly The Adjustment Bureau. Kevin Spacey, after a long spell of strange and hammy roles, finally snapped back into A-game mode in the generally well-acted Margin Call, and gave his best performance in a decade. Seasoned Hollywood leading men Sean Penn and Brad Pitt were similarly, uncannily immersed in the texture of The Tree of Life, though the film’s real star was young Hunter McCracken, voluble in his incarnation of nascent pubescent emotion and receptivity. Christopher Plummer’s lauded role as the dying gay father in Beginners is obviously an emeritus Oscar in the making, but he was also very good, giving one of his most intimate and convincing film performances in many years. But perhaps the real gem of that film was Goran Visnijc’s role as his peculiar, emotionally bewildered lover. Paul Giamatti, everyone’s pet thespian, sustained the schmaltzy duo of Win/Win and Barney’s Version, imbuing them with life their screenplays probably didn’t deserve, and meanwhile his despicable King John in the rowdy Ironclad was a nice change of pace: nobody has or ever will catapult Brian Cox into a brick wall with as much bravura. Eric Bana was incredibly good and rather underused in Hanna, which is pretty well the story of his career. Young Asa Butterfield in Hugo offered a peculiarly restrained and subtle adolescent performance, keeping pace with the ever-luminous Chloe Moretz playing perhaps her most normal character ever; standing over them literally, if not figuratively, were Ben Kingsley in a characteristically electric turn as the haunted Georges Méliès, Helen McCrory as his sadly ebullient wife, and Sacha Baron-Cohen lobbying hard to be the heir to Peter Sellers as Hugo’s tragicomic foil.
Jean Dujardin has snagged himself an almost certain Oscar nomination this year with his part in The Artist, a role that neatly sidesteps any language difficulties for a French actor in a French movie, an interesting corollary to a year filled with excellent performances in non-English-language films that will, by and large, be entirely ignored. These ranked from the entire cast of Of Gods and Men, including familiar old hands Michael Lonsdale and Lambert Wilson, to the daring of Monica del Carmen in Leap Year, and the hypnotic work of Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, and Clotilde Hesme in Mysteries of Lisbon, and Kseniya Rappoport as the antiheroine with a splintered psyche in the uneven The Double Hour. Sergey Puskepolis’ hulking, abusive, scary, yet strangely fatherly characterisation in How I Ended the Summer did a lot to give the film its sense of latent threat and grizzled, vodka-scented heartbreak. Ariane Labed in Attenberg provided a deliciously deadpan portrait of millennial angst and perversity and, finally, almost subliminal grief. Luis Tosar, in Even the Rain, gave a solid core to a thumpingly unsubtle piece of proselytising with his intelligent portrait of a professional jerk obeying humanitarian impulses within himself he wishes he could wish away. Kôji Yakusho gave 13 Assassins its unshakeable moral and physical core, opposite the most memorable villain of the year, the dead-eyed psychopathic princeling embodied by Gorô Inagaki.
Favourites Movies of 2011
A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
Cronenberg’s cool, intelligent dissection of not merely the human foibles of the great and brilliant, but of an era and different ways of conceiving the world is his best film in 20 years, and a refreshingly sober study of the trial and error demanded by both scientific method and rebelling against the world that cocoons and frustrates us.
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
Deeper and more genuinely affecting than its English-language equivalent, that collection of acting exercises entitled Beginners, and a worthy follow-up for the Dogtooth team, Attenberg was a notably astringent, yet penetrating study of an inchoate, quietly grief-stricken era where certainties slip away along with loved ones, and humans become strangers to themselves.
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
Refn’s second appearance on my best-of list in two years was a superficial departure from 2010’s Valhalla Rising, and yet maintained deep ties with the earlier film, as a portrait of the human capacity for psychotic rage and benevolent care cohabiting uneasily in one body, and repainting the world according to a mysterious and sometimes frightening moral and aesthetic force. A triumph for cinema craft and directorial vision.
Hanna (Joe Wright)
Joe Wright’s succinctly shaped, yet reflexively epic fairytale-cum-action flick skipped nimbly through genres and continents, evoking everyone from Orson Welles to Terry Southern to the Brothers Grimm on the way. Plus, love that Chemical Brothers score.
Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
A touch distended and ungainly, there is nonetheless a genuine sense of cinematic wonder and emotional iridescence in Martin Scorsese’s first tilt at making a film for all ages, as he finds a way to pull everyone closer to his life obsession and entertain at the same time. Hugo both celebrates the communal dream of cinema and embodies it, and evokes the painful joy of leaving behind childhood even in the midst of a neo-Technicolor fantasia.
Jane Eyre (Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa)
Brusquely handsome and flushed with real feeling, this surprising little gem manages to quietly ransack the settled conventions of the costumed literary adaptation and find a bleary realism in an old and settled template, without stooping to Lit Theory class gimmicks or chocolate box romanticism.
Leap Year (Michael Rowe)
A searing nugget of excellence revolving around cryptic suggestions of familial trauma and Latin American dislocation, vast realms of history and discourse channelled into the body of Laura (Monica del Carmen), trying to exculpate loneliness and crisis through inviting abuse to her body from the one guy who likes her enough to do it. Falls down right at the end, but a vital trumpet blast all the same.
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz)
The lamented Ruiz’s swan song had all the qualities one expects of both great cinema and also great literature, narratives and images flowing with perfervid beauty and rich melancholia in currents and cross-currents of cause and effect, personality, and sexuality, finally adding up to prove that history is a joke played on all of us.
The Myth of the American Sleepover (David Robert Mitchell)
So restrained and limpid in its rewriting of American Graffiti as a Prozac-infused odyssey through the mating rituals of contemporary teenagers that it begins to feel like a fever dream, this film turns its quietly poetic realism into one of the most unobtrusively authentic, yet also artistic and beguiling, portraits of being at that cusp of final adulthood I’ve ever seen.
Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman)
Hellman’s first film in 22 years has its share of longeurs, as if negotiating the strange new textures of modern digital indie cinema, and yet it carefully compounds into a deceptively skillful contemplation of the directorial craft itself and a genuinely clever deconstruction of the noir film and the femme fatale/muse figure. Fittingly for one of the true fathers of independent cinema, Road to Nowhere, like Hellman’s works did 40 or more years ago, impresses with the sense of sovereign artistry wrung from a low budget.
Scream 4 (Wes Craven)
Call it the year of the horror comeback: John Carpenter and John Landis both returned to movie screens after a decade’s absence with erratic films, the resurgence of Hammer Studios continued with the interesting, almost really good Wake Wood and the terrible The Resident, and Wes Craven returned to his famous postmodern slasher series. With original cast members obviously feeling their age and a slew of newbies of variable charm, nonetheless this, when it found its groove, became one of the most purely entertaining and refreshingly nasty mainstream films of the year, with Emma Roberts’ narcissistic psycho proving a far wittier, equally relevant rejoinder to the dolorous art-house exploitation of We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder)
The year’s most mistreated mainstream film (amongst several) that revealed a general cluelessness and neopuritanical streak underlying much critical mentality about the possible fusion of cinema with internet and gaming culture, as well as attempts to expand the lexicon of American blockbuster cinema, Sucker Punch is a wild, crazy, irresponsible ride through the id, and a celebration and deconstruction of the 20th century’s fantasy canon, a bleak satire on institutionalised, outsider-crushing “care”, and the relationship of both with the slow but irreversible liberation from many forms of psychic tyranny. There’s hot chicks with machine guns killing dragons, too.
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams)
J.J. Abrams’ nimble-bodied attempt to recreate the early Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment aesthetic also inspired a lot of surprising hostility, to the extent of crowding any serious contemplation of not only how well he recreates that aesthetic, but also how he offers a self-reflexive meditation on nostalgia, childhood awakenings, and the techniques of cinema. He considers again his recurring fascination with not only themes of familial longing and damage, but also with the act of mediating life through visual recording, and makes it work as its own piece of filmmaking to an extent very few such pieces of retro-cinema tribute ever manage. It also takes its young protagonists far more seriously and on their level than the patronising hipster snark of Attack the Block. Plus, that train wreck was the set-piece of the year.
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Whilst, on balance, I didn’t think it quite lived up to the more integral, if also more prosaic, greatness of Malick’s The New World, The Tree of Life earned all its gobsmacked plaudits through sheer nerve and vision: physically ravishing, spiritually probing, and genuinely complex and observationally acute beneath the potentially dizzying pretences, it’s the sort of film that gives ambitious art movies a good name.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) and Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois)
I’ll count these two together because they are, in a way, “last year,” and they each represent fascinating, moody meditations on how we approach a sense of the infinite in both human terms and through the natural world’s benign, embracing indifference: the explicit religious-cultural war in Of Gods and Men and the cryptic militarist repression in Uncle Boonmee each lend a background of human cruelty and irrationalism, whilst the foreground drama concentrates on the values, experiences, and binding ties of family and comrades that leaven the journey into the undiscovered country.
Womb (Benedek Fleigauf)
A caustic little Euro-sleeper with a powerhouse cast and a thorny plot, Womb is a Kubrickian scifi chamber piece with a streak of Polanski-esque psychological gamesmanship, that actually manages to investigate its singular basic idea through with nerveless logic and emotional depth, thus succeeding where many similar films pretend to try and still fail.
X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn) and Thor (Kenneth Branagh)
There were too many comic book superhero movies released this year, or at least so I’m told. But these two movies manage to take that dreary job description and do joyously different things with their respective material, pushed into different realms of Hollywood genre lore by two perpetually energetic British directors. In the case of Vaughn’s film, that meant offering a sleek, swashbuckling reinvention of the well-worn franchise that paid honourable tribute to ’60s Bond flicks and the broad neo-pulp pantheon, whereas Branagh turned the Umpteenth Avenger into the protagonist of a rousing Shakespearean power ballad, with a smart lead performance as a fairly thick hero by Chris Hemsworth and some genuinely soaring fantasy imagery. If you wanted colour and light this year—and god knows I did—then these were the ticket.
Honourable Mention
13 Assassins (Takashi Miike)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two (David Yates)
How I Ended This Summer (Aleksey Popogrebskiy)
Rampart (Owen Moverman)
Wake Wood (David Keating)
I Liked, With Reservations
The Double Hour (Giuseppe Capotondi)
Fast Five (Justin Lin)
Margin Call (J.C. Chandor)
Paul (Greg Mottola)
Source Code (Duncan Jones)
Passion Play (Mitch Glazer)
Point Blank (Fred Cavayé)
The Ward (John Carpenter)
Significantly Disappointing
Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)
Burke and Hare (John Landis)
Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston)
The Conspirator (Robert Redford)
The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry)
Submarine (Richard Ayoade)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson)
Your Highness (David Gordon Green)
Crap
Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffe)
Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)
The First Grader (Justin Chadwick)
A Heartbeat Away (Gale Edwards)
Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke)
The Resident (Antti Jokinen)
Warrior (Gavin O’Connor)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)
As Yet Unseen
50/50, Amigo, The Adventures of Tintin, The Artist, Bellflower, Carnage, Coriolanus, Eye of the Storm, The Ides of March, Immortals, The Iron Lady, Margaret, Martha Marcy May Marlene, My Week With Marilyn, Putty Hill, Red Dog, Shame, A Separation, The Skin I Live In, Sleeping Beauty, The Sleeping Beauty, Restless, Take Shelter, War Horse, Weekend
My Year of Retro Wonders: The Best Older Films I First Encountered in 2011
Arashi Ga Oka (Kiju Yoshida)
The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko)
Back Door to Hell / Ride the Whirlwind / Cockfighter (Monte Hellman)
The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh)
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra)
Blast of Silence (Alan Baron)
The Bride with White Hair (Ronnie Yu) / The Bride with White Hair II (David Wu)
Castle Keep (Sydney Pollack)
Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)
Contraband / A Matter of Life and Death / Gone to Earth (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
Dark of the Sun (Jack Cardiff)
El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
The Embryo Hunts in Secret (Koji Wakamatsu)
Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges)
Freud (John Huston)
A Generation (Andrzej Wajda)
The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino)
It’s a Gift (Norman Z. McLeod)
Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II (Sergei Eisenstein)
Land of the Pharaohs / El Dorado (Howard Hawks)
Letter from an Unknown Woman / Lola Montes (Max Ophüls)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman)
Mahler (Ken Russell)
Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner)
The Nanny (Seth Holt)
Night Train (Jerzy Kawalerowicz)
Paprika (Satoshi Kon)
The Quatermass Xperiment / Quatermass II / The Day The Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest)
Sebastiane (Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress)
Shivers (David Cronenberg)
The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Tess (Roman Polanski)
Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini)
The Wedding Party / Sisters (Brian de Palma)
Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti)
28th
12 -
2011
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2 comments »
Director: Joseph Ruben
By Marilyn Ferdinand
Who can turn the world on with her smile? As a fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and of its star, I must admit that in a head-to-head tooth-off, MTM would wither in the blaze of Julia Roberts’ pearly whites.
Julia Roberts has been dazzling movie goers with her mile-wide grin, infectious laugh, and Playmate-like naughty innocence since the late 80s. Can she act? Does it matter? As the first $20 million woman among a legion of limited-range actors commanding that sum or more, Julia Roberts is a rarity in today’s world—an old-fashioned Hollywood star in the Gene Tierney mold who can act if a director pushes her out of her comfort zone and forces her to, but whose main assets lie in her on-screen charisma and beauty. One look at her list of films and a flashback to the studio build-up to her nonwedding to Kiefer Sutherland show that the old boys of Tinsel Town understood what kind of a property they had in her.
Many of her films cast her as the fantasy trophy woman every man wants. She doesn’t need to come from the American aristocracy to ascend to it—as waitress Daisy Aruja in Mystic Pizza (1988), she is a self-confessed social climber who snags a hot-blooded blue blood with sex and the saucy insolence that such men seem to like. Of course, her breakout role as Vivian, the hooker who catches corporate raider Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990), is as nakedly honest about America’s then-definition of success as any out there; every young turk needs his BMW and his beautiful arm ornament who is, of course, a pistol in the sack, and every woman needs to be a mercenary sexpot who cleans up well to catch one. Vivian going on a shopping spree on Rodeo Drive became Roberts’ signature scene, a representation of the grasping, greedy climber made adorable by Roberts’ naive sweetness.
As Roberts matured, her roles tended to vary, but her iconic status worked most effectively in films that reflected on her persona—her commitment-phobiac Runaway Bride (1999), her superstar-marries-a-commoner character in Notting Hill (1999), the reverse-snob triumph of using sex and lies for good in Erin Brockovich (2000). Even Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) became more than a cultural blip because of the way her rich neoliberal character separated her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. In Eat Pray Love (2010), she played a success who throws it all away to find enlightenment, forming a dead-on critique of the characters she played at the start of her career on just another type of shopping spree.
Sleeping with the Enemy is a bit of an aberration in the Roberts canon, showing as it does the downside of being a trophy wife. The film capitalizes on all those things audiences love about Julia Roberts, but allows her to be a woman who uses her tenacity to survive and strive for authenticity. Although Sleeping with the Enemy is a Hollywood movie and a hack bit of filmmaking, it is interesting as perhaps the definitive anti-Julia Roberts vehicle.
Laura Burney (Roberts) has been married for 3½ years to Martin (Patrick Bergin), a filthy-rich investment counselor who calls her “princess,” but sees her more like the bust of Nefertiti he bought her on their honeymoon—his possession, a symbol of his status. They live part-time in a huge beachfront mansion on Cape Cod that appears to have been designed by Luigi Moretti, one of Mussolini’s chief architects. Martin tells Laura what to wear to a party, signals her with a look when it is time to leave, and grabs her for sex when they arrive home. Laura is very good at appearing to be happy when Martin is watching, but the film reveals rather quickly that she looks at sex with Martin as rape and stands in terror of a beating for everything from having her pantry items carelessly stacked to taking off to bury her dead mother without his permission.
Martin likes to sail, but Laura is deathly afraid of the water. Nonetheless, he prevails upon her to go out for an evening sail with their neighbor (Kyle Secor), whose casual remark that he has seen Laura looking out from their home garners her a beating from a jealous Martin. Although the weather report called for calm waters and clear skies, a sudden squall forces them to turn back. When the boat is nearly home, the jib comes loose, and the two men run to the bow to secure it. When they turn around, Laura is gone, and an intensive search for her only turns up her life vest.
Of course, Laura has faked her death. Conquering her fear of the water, she took swimming lessons, preparing for a moment when Martin wouldn’t be watching her. Swimming toward the gap in the boardwalk lighting she made by breaking the bulbs, she runs to their house, dons a wig, grabs a prepacked bundle, and rides a bus to Cedar Falls, Iowa. She rents a house next door to handsome drama teacher and future lover Ben Woodward (Kevin Anderson), gets a menial job at a library, and starts flashing her dazzling smile and naturally curly hair all over the place.
A call to Martin from one of Laura’s swim classmates, however, sets him and his considerable resources on her trail. He tracks down Laura’s mother (Elizabeth Lawrence), who did not die but rather was moved to a nursing home near Cedar Falls. When Laura goes to visit her disguised as a man, Martin is there. She narrowly misses running into him, but we know it is only a matter of time until he shows up on her doorstep.
Based on a book by Nancy Price, Hollywood has upscaled the story to Julia Roberts proportions, making the crummy beach house in the book into a monument to the money-no-taste 80s. The scene during which she fakes her death is the epitome of convenient scripting, and Martin never emerges as anything other than a male version of Glenn Close’s monster in Fatal Attraction (1987). In the final denouement, every horror film cliché gets trotted out as Laura goes to investigate strange noises in the house, looking at her disheveled cupboard with relief, only to return to it shortly and find everything lined up with terrifying regularity. Anyone as frightened of her husband as Laura would run at the first sound and ask questions later.
In addition, the producers at 20th Century Fox felt the need to throw in a Julia playing dress-up scene, using the costume room at Ben’s theatre as an appropriate substitute. I hated being manipulated this way, but I must admit that having Kevin Anderson in the scene improved on it considerably. He’s a wonderful actor who understands how to portray just a guy who comes to understand how he might be frightening Laura, and why. He’s rejected for sex during a heavy makeout session, and accepts no for an answer, but not entirely gracefully. With a lesser actor, Ben would have been a complete gentleman, too good for words. Sadly, Bergin, who is a good actor, was given a character with less opportunity for nuance. It is an unfortunate fact of Julia Roberts films that the script is often formed to create the cardboard theatrics the bean counters demand to ensure success. It happened at the end of Erin Brockovich, and it happens here, too.
Nonetheless, Laura is an interesting character. She would seem to have it all, except that she’s just like millions of women from all classes and walks of life who are abused physically and psychologically by men close to them. Laura acknowledges to a woman she meets on the bus that she stayed with her husband too long, and feels that she is a coward. This is an interesting statement—clearly she was strong enough to get some things for herself while under his thumb, such as a part-time library job, and to hatch an elaborate and risky plan to leave him. It seems clear that her cowardice may be tied to her desire for the luxurious lifestyle he offered, or perhaps just her lack of self-confidence. Laura is a very real woman in recognizing these feelings in herself.
Her romance with Ben is also too fast. As onlookers, we think two such good-looking, age-appropriate people should be together (and, after all, that’s what the Hollywood shell of this movie sets us up to expect), but in truth, Laura is revealing the depth of her lack of confidence by hooking up after only a short period of caution. This is a woman whose lack of skills, as evidenced by the minimum-wage job she lands shelving books, forces her to rely on men to take care of her. Laura is a sister under the skin to Francine Hughes, and was lucky to have held onto her sense of self so that her torment lasted under four years. Fran was put on trial for killing her husband, but Sleeping with the Enemy makes sure there’s a witness to Laura’s attack to ensure that her murder of Martin will be deemed self-defense. So it looks like we have our Julia Roberts happy ending after all, but for once, she gave us a woman who punctured her gassy image.
25th
12 -
2011
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2 comments »
Director: Martin Ritt
By Marilyn Ferdinand
Today is Christmas, an increasingly secular holiday that has come to mean gift giving, decorations, big meals with family and friends, favorite movies and music, and leisure for most of the workforce. Those who keep the religious traditions of the holiday go to church to celebrate the birth of the messiah, Jesus Christ, and think about peace and good will among all people. In my capacity as professional killjoy (as evidenced by my reviews of Midnight in Paris and The Artist), I am now going to remind you about the end of the story that began on this date 2,011 years ago—the king of the Jews was crucified, and his message of peace and love repeatedly ignored by generations of warring, racist people the world over.
Which brings me to The Front, which tells the true story of how the American entertainment industry collaborated with the federal government to deprive film and television creatives—many of them Jews—of their livelihood through the use of a blacklist. The blacklist was unacknowledged by studio and television executives; directors, writers, and actors simply were told their work had somehow gone downhill or that they were not a good fit for the material going into production. Why? Because they were Communists or had become “controversialities” by coming to the attention of Commie hunters at the studios or being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Everything from being a full-fledged member of the Communist Party to signing one petition could be grounds for blacklisting, investigation, and imprisonment.
The Front is a tragicomic look at how the blacklist worked and how some people sank and swam in its wake. The film gains all the more energy and poignancy from being told by several blacklisted artists—director Ritt, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, and actors Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Lloyd Gough, and Joshua Shelley—and including the slightly fictionalized story of blacklisted television star Philip Loeb.
The film focuses right from the start on Howard Prince (Woody Allen), a cashier and bookie in New York City who owes money all over town and has tried the patience and pocketbook of his brother Myer (Marvin Lichterman) for the last time. He has lunch one day with his boyhood friend, writer Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy), who tells him that the television studios have stopped buying his scripts. Miller has been blacklisted, and desperate to keep working to support his wife and three children, he asks Howard if he will act as Miller’s front—the person who will put his name on Miller’s scripts and be a physical presence with the network executives and producers. Offering him 10 percent of whatever he gets for the scripts cements the deal with the willing Howard. Howard brings a script to the show Miller used to write for and becomes the new darling of producer Phil Sussman (Bernardi), as well as the idol and boyfriend of WASP script editor Florence Barrett (Andrea Marcovicci).
Naturally, this overnight sensation must be checked out by the network’s anti-Communist investigator (Remak Ramsay). Soon, his ties not only to Miller, but also to two other blacklisted writers (Gough and David Margulies) for whom he fronts, are discovered, and Howard must agree to a token appearance before HUAC. As the network is desperate to keep using him, Howard is assured that if he gives up just one name to the committee, he can keep riding the gravy train.
The Front largely eschews an overtly political angle by focusing on the real-life consequences of the blacklist and the various kinds of people who got caught up in the maelstrom. Howard does what he does initially out of friendship and then to make some real money. He moves into a nice apartment and buys tailor-made suits, but he does the right thing by squaring his debts with his brother and the gamblers whose bets he took. He’s thrilled to be dating a beautiful shiksa and horrified when she quits her lucrative job rather than fire a blacklisted actor, but he calls her out for romanticizing the struggle against the blacklist and loving his talent instead of him when he confesses that he can barely write a grocery list. Woody Allen indulges a lot of his own relationship shtik in the film, and this aspect of The Front is the weakest.
By contrast, the plot line involving Hecky Brown (Mostel), the television star who suddenly doesn’t seem right for his hit show, is easily the most affecting. He and Howard become friendly during the short time their paths cross at the television studio, and it’s easy to see why. The flamboyantly funny Hecky isn’t so different from Howard—he’s basically apolitical and in need of money to support his family. His “Communist past” can be put down to trying to get laid and supporting the Soviet Union during World War II when they were allies of the United States. He’s willing to write letters, even spy for HUAC to keep working, but to no avail. He has to bum a ride with Howard to a Catskills resort to perform for many times less than his normal fee; the resort owner (Shelley) is only too happy to take advantage of Hecky’s misfortune by cutting the meager fee even further.
Hecky’s humiliation makes life unbearable for him, and one night, he makes a visit to Howard to apologize for his tantrum at the resort, checks into a hotel, and takes delivery on a bottle of champagne from room service. He toasts himself in a mirror, goes into the next room, and moves out of the frame. Moments later, a sheer curtain blows into the frame, and the camera moves to reveal the bottle of champagne sitting on the sill of an open window. The film craft in this scene is superb, with its understated image of Hecky seeing himself only in terms of how he is mirrored back to himself by his adoring audience, and an off-camera suicide that offers a beautiful, diaphanous image of horror waving angelically at the audience. Mostel, a personal friend of Philip Loeb, infuses his performance with all the love he had for the man whom he personifies as Hecky Brown; there wasn’t a dry eye in my house after this scene played.
Writer Bernstein captures the collusion between the entertainment moguls and HUAC in a scene of nauseating obsequiousness. Network head Harry Stone (MacIntyre Dixon) all but gives the committee members blow jobs for their selflessly patriot service to the country, and they gobble it up like greedy lapdogs. The exchange is a good reminder not only to Howard, but also to the audience that such egos demand tribute and obedience and that naming names pays them tribute and builds their appetite for power. When prompted to give up a name, for example, Hecky Brown, who can no longer be hurt by these sharks, Howard realizes that to do so would be to confirm the committee’s verdict on the harmless entertainer and give his employer and government an out for their shameful behavior. His parting words, shocking coming out of the mouth of Woody Allen, are “Fellas… I don’t recognize the right of this committee to ask me these kind of questions. And furthermore, you can all go fuck yourselves.”
Allen handles the comedy in the film well, particularly the daily travails he has to negotiate when the studio asks for last-minute rewrites and he has to find a way to get them from Miller. Ritt directs these panicked scenes with verve, and film editor Sidney Levin maintains a rhythm for this scene—indeed, for the entire film—that shows the precarious roller coaster all of the characters are riding, exhilarating for Howard at first, then getting increasingly burdensome. The slow stammering Allen engages in when stonewalling the committee is one of his best scenes on camera in any film and builds a tense exasperation in the committee members that is a wickedly pleasurable experience.
The Front begins and ends with Frank Sinatra singing “Young at Heart,” a hit song in 1953-54, the time period during which the film takes place. The lyrics, “Fairy tales can come true/It can happen to you/If you’re young at heart,” give way to the bitter irony of the second verse “You can go to extremes with impossible schemes/You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams/And life gets more exciting with each passing day.” Perhaps in shame for helping to take down Philip Loeb, Columbia Pictures coproduced this film. For blacklisted artists who had been living the fairy tale of the American Dream until their youthful activities brought down the wrath of a paranoid nation, The Front offers them public redemption—and the paycheck many of them were denied during this dark time.
21st
12 -
2011
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23 comments »
Director/Screenwriter: Michel Hazanavicius
By Marilyn Ferdinand
They’re back again. The creative team behind the successful OSS 117 spy parodies—filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, his wife and leading lady Bérénice Bejo, and his leading man Jean Dujardin—have turned their talents not only to another subgenre, but to film history itself. The Artist is a backstage Hollywood story made as a black-and-white silent film, complete with title cards and music score. Modern silent films are more numerous than many people think, though The Artist will be a novelty to the majority of people who go to see it. Unfortunately, as a silent-film fan, I found myself quite confused by this film and feel it distorts the record on the transition from silent to sound pictures in a way that further offends John Gilbert, a silents legend who ended up unjustly on Hollywood’s ash heap.
The film begins unlike any real silent film: a spy is shown in extreme close-up being tortured with electroshock treatments by some Russians who want him to spill his secrets. He refuses to talk and is tortured to unconsciousness. Fortunately, the spy’s faithful dog comes to the rescue, the baddies are beaten, and the spy returns to the arms of his lady love. This sequence, the climax of the new George Valentin (Dujardin) film “A Russian Affair,” is intercut with an audience in a large theatre and George and his costar Constance (Missi Pyle) sitting behind the screen waiting to take their bows at this, the film’s premiere. This clever opening signals the modernist sensibilities that will be brought to bear on a film era spanning from 1927 to 1931, from the Roaring Twenties through the 1929 stock market crash and into the Great Depression and the rise of the movie musical.
Following the (silently) thunderous applause of his appreciative audience, George mugs with Dog (Uggi) on stage like the old vaudevillians they must have been, as Constance fumes about not being introduced until the very last moment. George exits the theatre, and one of his fans, while trying to retrieve the autograph book she drops, stumbles into George. He forgives the intrusion, and the young lady, Peppy Miller (Bejo), makes herself an overnight sensation by posing for the newspaper photographers and giving George a kiss that makes it to the front page of Variety. George’s disaffected wife Doris (Penelope Ann Miller) refuses to believe the innocence of the encounter, particularly when she sees George with Peppy at the studio, where the aspiring starlet has wormed her way into a nonspeaking cameo on George’s new picture. The pair signals their attraction by repeatedly flubbing their brief moment together on camera; studio boss Al Zimmer (John Goodman) wants to fire her, but George uses his clout to keep her on.
In a classic reversal of fortune, Hazanavicius produces credits for several films showing Peppy moving from the bottom of the list, through the common variant billings of the time (“Pepi”), to top-billed star as the studio switches to all-sound pictures and new faces to usher the new era in. At the same time, George, scoffing at talking pictures, heads toward ruin. He loses his fortune in the stock market crash, his wife leaves him, and the studio drops him like a hot potato. He and Dog move into a small apartment, along with his loyal chauffeur Clifton (James Cromwell), who works without pay until George fires him for his own good. After George has pawned everything of value and become a full-fledged alcoholic, Peppy rescues him after he has nearly died in a fire of his own making and resurrects his career by turning him into a musical comedy star alongside her. Their final number, a tap dance routine reminiscent of Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s “Begin the Beguine” turn in Broadway Melody of 1940, is the only nondream sequence with sound, as the stubborn silent “artist” embraces light entertainment in all-sound pictures.
The character of George is a compilation of classic silents stars, including Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, but he seems most modeled on Greta Garbo’s regular costar John Gilbert. Dujardin’s appearance mimicks Gilbert’s, and George’s reason for refusing to make talkies, “Nobody wants to hear me speak,” alludes to the myth that Gilbert did not make the transition to sound because he had a poor speaking voice. Gilbert also got an assist out of obscurity from Garbo, who insisted that he was the only man she’d play with in Queen Christina (1933), and Gilbert was an alcoholic. However, making George an egoist who declared his own film artistry as the reason to reject sound, not to mention a laughable voice test by Constance a la Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, undercuts the real reasons behind Gilbert’s problems and those of other silents stars—high salaries and more power than the studio bosses cared for them to have. George is reduced to an actor whose pride is his only impediment, and that includes having the hubris to declare himself an artist when Hollywood insists that it will support only happy campers who churn out light entertainment for a downtrodden nation.
Filming The Artist without sound seems a very confused choice to me. The big reveal at the end that George has a French accent would seem to confirm his fear of sound due to his voice, but what exactly does the choice do for the rest of the film? I’m afraid I don’t really see the point as anything other than some high-concept conceit that seems a particular attraction of The Weinstein Company, which picked this film up for American distribution. Is it fun to see modern acting styles done without sound or color, or to pick through the film references placed like Easter eggs throughout the film (e.g., the breakfast table scene between Charles Foster Kane and his wife in Citizen Kane or the verbatim score for Vertigo in the fire sequence)? Honestly, I felt these were cheap attempts to engage my cinephilia instead of giving me a film that was well conceived with a strong point of view.
The area where this film shines is in the incredible talent and likability of Dujardin and Uggi. The pair works very well together, particularly in the gripping scene when George is overcome by smoke in his apartment and Dog barks desperately at him to get up and leave, finally exiting the scene and racing down the street to attract a policeman (Joel Murray) to the conflagration. This scene plays remarkably true to silent film conventions and maintains its own integrity, with the exception of a comic moment when an older woman (Annie O’Donnell) waiting for a bus tells the cop he probably should see what all the fuss is about.
The extremely crisp look of the film gives a hint of what a new nitrate film might have looked like to audiences in the silent era, though even restored films from nitrate we see today don’t look quite this good. In general, the costumes were a treat, but I was a bit disconcerted to see Peppy in full flapper regalia for a 1930s film she was starring in. The Artist was also surprisingly chaste by both 1920s and pre-Code standards; George and Peppy never act on their attraction, making the relationship one of mentor-protégé despite plot developments that assert it should have been more, for example, Peppy buying all of George’s personal effects at auction and saving them in her mansion for a time when he could be reunited with them.
I enjoyed various components of this film and thought the performances were generally quite good, but perhaps I am too much of a silent-film buff to really give it my full endorsement. And if I’m not the target audience for this film, then who is? This talented team should have thought this one through a little further, as I feel there’s a first-rate film in here somewhere straining to come out.
18th
12 -
2011
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6 comments »
Director: David Cronenberg
By Roderick Heath
I tend to blow hot and cold on David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, filled as it is with works such as Videodrome (1982), Naked Lunch (1991), and A History of Violence (2004) that strike me more as catalogues of interesting moments and ideas rather than completely coherent films. But it’s impossible to deny that the Canadian auteur has been one of modern mainstream cinema’s most consistently visceral, intelligent, and original fountainheads, and at his best, can be a fearsome artist of psychological straits and the overflowing id. Cronenberg’s reputation is still often immediately associated with his early, overtly horrifying essays in body distortion and corruption; thus, A Dangerous Method, his latest and one of his most subtle films, seems, in abstract, like an outlier. But A Dangerous Method’s guardedly realistic approach to character and historical setting revolves around some very Cronenbergian motifs, not the least of which is the strange and often perverse manner the inner self and the outer self relate.
The film’s early scenes are fixated on Keira Knightley’s unhinged performance as Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian Jewish woman who suffers from an overwhelming, physically manifest neurosis. Sabina, dragged out of the carriage that brings her to the Burghölzli Clinic in Switzerland in 1904, is placed into the care of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), a young, brilliant doctor at the clinic. He decides to employ Dr. Sigmund Freud’s theoretical and almost untested “talking cure” on her. Sabina, in the extremes of her disease, contorts and buckles and twists, her jaw elongating as things push about inside her, looking as if she’s about to explode like a character out of Scanners (1980) or undergo a transformation similar to Jeff Goldblum’s in The Fly (1986).
Sabina’s pathological pain and rage prove to have two sources: her hatred for her father, the kind of authoritarian who’d make her and her siblings kiss his hand after he struck them, and her powerful masochistic urges, partly imbued by that cruelty, that she can’t assimilate in any form other than as a kind demonic aberration. As Jung works with her, she slowly begins to return to a functioning state, and as part of her therapy, is encouraged to pursue her interest in studying medicine. Two male figures overtly and covertly influence her fate: Jung and his medical field’s unchallenged leader and guru, Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Not long after Sabina becomes Jung’s patient, the peculiarities of her case and Jung’s success in putting Freud’s method into practice becomes a catalyst for the two men to meet, form an initially powerful accord, and then slowly but surely break apart.
Freud, proud and fully aware of his virtually imperial position in a nascent realm of medicine, is actively searching for heirs apparent, and he soon declares Jung one. He entrusts to Jung’s care another of his potential heirs, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassell), a cocaine-sniffing libertine who begins to preach total liberation from traditional familial and social forms, and who is considered insane by his own authoritarian father. His egocentric arguments coincide with a time in Jung’s life when his rich wife Emma (Sarah Gadon) is pregnant, and their marriage is strained, leading Jung to capitulate to his attraction to Sabina.
We live in a world where the catchphrases and oversimplified versions of psychoanalytic theory have gone through phases of utter disdain, near-religious acceptance, and back again. A Dangerous Method sets out to portray a window in not-so-distant history when ideas of the self and society seemed set for a radical change, and the consequences of that change were still potentially inexhaustible, but the people offering the change were still irrevocably tethered to the world as it was. Freud and Jung are portrayed as men caged by their worldly concerns. It’s not the first film to look at the formative years of psychiatry and its figures: John Huston’s amazingly undervalued Freud (1962) pitched the tale of Freud’s speculative development as an expressionist detective story where the younger hero fights through his own neuroses to uncover experiences and epiphanies that he converts into his classic theories. Cronenberg’s film takes a calmer tack and comments wryly on the way Freud, Jung, and Spielrein each in their way turn a fierce personal intelligence in on itself with analytical daring, and yet still constantly give in to bad judgment and behaviours they would reject and criticise in others. Freud proves a fascinating mixture of wisdom, moral rectitude, and a powerful circumspection, even timidity, in the face of disrupting social assumptions and straying beyond immediate scientific rationales.
Many directors become long-winded, not always unfruitfully, but often indulgently, in their late-period films, but Cronenberg here has honed his style to a succinct, discretely impressive economy. He wastes no more frames and words than necessary in a series of interpersonal exchanges, like the way he shoots Jung’s sessions with Sabina constantly from in front her, her alarming visage dominating the foreground whilst the calmly listening doctor hovers behind. The stage origin of Hampton’s work is detectable in the essentially limited range of characters—only five of the actors really matter—and the largely conversational drive of the tale. Cronenberg’s approach to such material is cunning, breaking his film up in a fashion that makes us aware of leaps of time whilst maintaining unity in the flow of vignettes and talk reminiscent of epistolary novels, accumulating over a nine-year period and coalescing into a narrative. Cronenberg does this through a purposeful use of cuts between episodes that lack the usual passage-of-time film grammar, watching relationships evolve and devolve. Simultaneously, Christopher Hampton’s screenplay, adapted from his own play and a book by John Kerr, accumulates detail in an unforced but clear-minded and literate fashion: for Hampton, the story has clear affinities with his script for Agnieszka Holland’s Total Eclipse (1995), which similarly delved into the sordid affairs of fin de siècle antiheroes.
If A History of Violence and Eastern Promises (2007) saw Cronenberg leveraging flashes of personal inspiration out of essentially impersonal material, A Dangerous Method sees him thoroughly submerged in his chosen story, which has echoes as far back in his oeuvre as The Brood (1979). Rather than placing into a dramatic context the imagery of the id, here he peers with quiet wit at the forceful, often violent meeting of minds and bodies that gave life to modern psychological theory. Cronenberg, at any rate, steadfastly refuses to go in to standard biopic histrionics and structures the film backwards, with Sabina’s neurotic explosions all at the start; the finale sees the protagonists all diverging on solitary adventures. The mesh of cultural, political, and personal values that bind and define the characters is laid out in concise terms, especially when Freud draws Jung’s attention to the difficulties of their profession and that fact his theories are gaining credibility as being bound up in the overwhelming Jewish membership of the Viennese psychiatric circle. When Jung asks, “What’s that got to do with anything?” Freud replies, “That, if I may say so, is an exquisitely Protestant remark.” Freud is well aware that such irrational, yet potent prejudices as anti-Semitism can only give fuel to the aggression of his detractors, who will not stomach the implicit condemnation of all Victorian ideals of child-raising, and aspects of the social structure itself, that will inevitably flow out of psychotherapy’s new wisdom.
This is, after all, early 20th century Europe, with its uneasy blend of the liberal and untold lodes of hypocrisy and buried frustration that will soon be released in its orgiastic moment. Sabina seems a by-product of the peculiarly bestial undercurrents and power-favouring assumptions of the era, which the starched collars and trim skirts cocoon. Jung and Freud present less frenetic yet identifiable versions of the same thing, particularly well invested in Fassbender’s expert acting, as he squirms both within the assurances of his professional and actual garb and the tools of his mind to control his impulses, and yet he requires only slight encouragement to give into them. Nonetheless, in the first half of A Dangerous Method, Jung’s use of Freud’s talking cure pulls Sabina back from the brink of self-destruction and helps form a partnership between the two doctors, and the scene fulminates with creative and intellectual potential, as their first meeting goes on for hours before Freud first notices. Taking lunch in Freud’s apartment, Jung yammers away on sexual theory until Freud casually encourages him to not observe any conversational niceties, causing Jung to remember that Freud’s family are listening with beguiled fascination.
Cassell’s Gross is the serpent in this particular Eden, in which Freud is initially high priest and lawgiver who puts Jung and Gross together like the experimenter he is, hoping for another catalytic reaction, and then getting chagrined at some of the results. Gross proffers a blend of entitled addict’s reasoning and unapologetically rebellious attitude, which persuasively preaches a total freedom whilst seeming at the same time to be deeply disturbed. He penetrates Jung’s head with temptation exactly when he’s vulnerable to it, attracted to Sabina on several levels and alienated from his wife and her bourgeois rituals of family-rearing—rituals Gross mocks mercilessly. Perhaps the most revealing, biting, and propulsive aspect of A Dangerous Method is the way it identifies the porous boundaries of the psychoanalytical field, with characters stepping over borderlines between doctor and patient according to the necessity of the moment, and the implicit theory that it takes a neurotic to know a neurotic. “You’re exactly the sort of person we need,” Jung tells Sabina when she asks him if he thinks she can ever be a psychiatrist: “Insane, you mean?” she deadpans.
Jung’s actual affair with Sabina is undoubtedly sexual—Cronenberg casually zeroes in on the stain of blood left when he takes her virginity—but is punctuated by his indulging her masochistic desires. He’s glimpsed methodically smacking her backside as she writhes in erotic frenzy with the air of man simply extending therapy into the bedroom. Sabina sets out to seduce Jung out of romantic interest, but also to satisfy her growing awareness that a good psychoanalyst with an interest in sex like her ought to know something of what she’s talking about. Gross is glimpsed fornicating in the garden with a clinic nurse whose bored expression suggests it’s an equivalent to emptying bedpans and giving out medication, and Gross with an expression redolent of the junkie getting his daily fix. Gross commences as at least a tacitly functioning intellectual but soon enough flees like a man chased by ghosts, asking Jung to tell his father he’s dead. Sabina, on the other hand, travels from barely functioning wretch to a professional. Jung, after deciding early on to steer Sabina toward the medical ambitions she’s already harboured, makes her an assistant in experiments, including one in which he has his wife perform a word association test where the quiet discord in the Jungs’ marriage is made apparent to Sabina.
Jung’s privileged position is underlined when his wife buys him a huge house and a yacht whilst acquiescing coolly to the possibility of his having an affair, and just as coolly reclaiming him with the certainty that for all his percolating temptations to break with his fastidiously bourgeois upbringing and outlook, he’s effectively held within those limits by his own conscientious thinking. These factors do lead him to break with Sabina and even to try to obfuscate the nature of their relationship in his dealings with Freud, obfuscation Freud later claims as one reason for his severing his ties with Jung. But that split already began when Freud tried to block Jung’s desire to move beyond strict adherence to Freud’s purely sexual model, itself challenging enough that Freud predicts that people will still be resisting aspects of it for a century, and starts adopting theories the older man dismisses as unscientific nonsense. In one scene, Jung, having absorbed a criticism from the older man, suddenly begins interpreting a clicking sound emerging from a heating system that coincides with a twinging in his stomach as proof of the possibility of psychic anticipation. Of course, all what’s really manifesting is his anguish at Freud’s determination to remain the guardian at the bridge of legitimacy.
As with the word association scene, close to the film’s end, there’s a clever use of theory to introduce a new idea: in 1913, Jung recounts a dream we know contains a dread portent for the world he lives in, filled with images of waves of blood and piled corpses. Freud’s own spurts of unease when confronted by Jung’s wealth is drolly handled and gives a telling weight to Freud’s discomfort and determination to retain his intellectual leadership. Freud’s understanding of the perilous position he’s in, reminding Sabina of their shared Jewish responsibility, gains a chilling clarity in the coda where we’re reminded that Freud died as a refugee from the Nazis and that Sabina perished at the hands of an SS murder squad in 1942.
One quality of A Dangerous Method that distinguishes it from Cronenberg’s earlier films in a similar key—my favourite of his works, Dead Ringers (1988), and my least favourite, Crash (1996)—is that where he might have adopted an air of chilly archness when dealing with such characters and situations, the tone of this film also has a strong grasp on the hothouse feeling underneath. As with his uneven yet occasionally remarkable Eastern Promises, there’s a deep ocean of feeling and a quiet beauty to the film, as if Cronenberg has grasped at last a way to articulate passion as well as pathology without stooping to bathos. Fassbender’s characterisation of Jung is very much the centrepiece of the film, though he doesn’t dominate. Of the startling amount of work he’s ploughed through in the past 18 months, Fassbender gives one of his very best and most subtle performances here, capturing the finite play of guilt, frustration, attraction, and professional zeal in Jung, a man who doesn’t quite seem to find his sense of mission until after his break with Freud and his last goodbye to Sabina.
Undoubtedly when the time comes to estimate awards, the early scenes of the deeply disturbed Sabina will count most both for and against Knightley’s performance; but the quality of her acting is best noted by how she modulates the characterisation in the later stages, her overt symptoms dissipating, yet maintaining something freakishly odd about Sabina, who operates on a level of feverish strength beyond anything Jung and Freud can contemplate releasing in themselves. That strange intensity is most apparent in such moments as when she’s taking notes on a roomful of Jung’s patients listening to Wagner, hovering with a blend of geeky enthusiasm and hawkish intent. Mortensen is however perhaps the film’s quietest coup, incarnating his Freud as an icon of pipe-smoking sang froid and cagey authority. It’s as restrained a piece of star acting as you’ll ever see, and one of the most effective. Like the film itself, he’s so measured, smart, and effective, you almost don’t realise it.
11th
12 -
2011
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8 comments »
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
By Roderick Heath
The Driver, like many of the western and noir characters he counts amongst his cinematic ancestry, seems a product of evolution customised for surviving in a hostile milieu. But whether he’s anything more than that is difficult to discern. Cruising the nocturnal labyrinth of L.A.’s streets, he handles his car as an extension of his body, not caring to what use he puts it as long as something, anything, is testing his skill and reflexes and giving him a reason to move. Starting out as solitary as the hero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) in a similarly nondescript, low-rent room, the Driver speeds two armed robbers away from a crime scene, eluding police cars and helicopters with preternatural cool and matchless ability, gliding through the inhuman geometries and eternally provisional architecture of L.A.’s backstreets and the sulphurous-hued lanes of freeways. He gives his clients a few minutes of his life, making their risks his, their lives his own, and then walks away as if it is nothing to do with him. An incidental conversation buried in the movie explicates the nature of the Driver’s existence: he’s a shark, moving to live, relying not on private motives or emotional impulses to guide him through any given day, for he has none that can be seen, but on any command, job, or cause he’s handed. Playing the Driver, Ryan Gosling, normally one of contemporary movie acting’s most confident portrayers of emotional expression, reduces himself for most of the first half of the film to a bare slate of a man whom many take for decent and personable chiefly because he maintains an equitably blank façade.
The Driver’s illegal escapades come as interludes in his career as a motor mechanic and part-time stunt driver for movie productions. All of these jobs are arranged by Shannon (Bryan Cranston), who confesses cheerfully to having been “exploiting” his quiet, pliable employee since he first walked in asking for a job five years earlier. Driver seems to regard Shannon as a fatherly figure. But Shannon has links to criminal entrepreneurs Bernie (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman), and he borrows money from the pair to buy a stock car that Driver will race. At the same time, Driver is drawn into the lives of Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos) when they move into an apartment down the hall from his. As his path repeatedly crosses with theirs, Driver steps into the role of paternal pal for the boy and beneficent helpmate for Irene, even as he learns she’s still married to Benicio’s father Standard (Oscar Isaac), who’s serving a prison term. When Standard gets unexpectedly released, the Driver continues to stick close to the family in uneasy amity until, not surprisingly, Standard proves to have trailed a threat with him from prison, owing money to heavies who helped protect him in prison: Standard is beaten up by thugs, and Benicio is presented with a bullet. Driver confronts the battered father and finds he’s being pressured into taking part in a pawn shop robbery, so Driver decides to volunteer his services as the getaway driver for the job. He meets with Cook (James Biberi), the nominal planner of the heist, and Blanche (Christina Hendricks), who will accompany Standard on the actual robbery. But when the job goes down, Standard is shot dead, Blanche comes out with a sack of a million dollars, and Driver has to do what he does best in eluding a pursuing black car.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s first Hollywood film comes hard on the heels of his near-brilliant, semi-abstract portrait of harsh violence, existential panic, and spiritual yearning, Valhalla Rising (2009). The Driver could be a distant descendent of Mads Mikkelsen’s One-Eye from that previous film as an equally taciturn, self-sufficient package of potent violence and existential alienation, barely kept tethered to the earth by the finite threads of emotional gratitude. Drive is nominally a more functional kind of thriller. Not at all surprisingly, many commentaries on Drive have discussed its internalisation of the aesthetic rules and themes of a distinctive strand of American cinema from the ’70s and early ‘80s—early Michael Mann, Sam Peckinpah, Walter Hill, John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin, and, importantly though less obviously, John Boorman and Monte Hellman. But such comparisons come at the cost of obscuring the degree to which Drive is an aesthetic and thematic unit with Refn’s other works in its denser webs of references and underpinnings, and the way Refn steadily but subtly subverts aspects of such models. The way Refn uses songs over scenes occasionally takes on the flavour of satire of such models in a fashion faintly reminiscent of the more overt ridicule of song-storytelling in so many ’80s films in Team America: World Police (2004); lyrics about being “a real human being” and “a real hero” are heard throughout, even as nothing so clear-cut emerges from the actual movie, because by the end, the notion that Driver is a “real hero” is rendered moot.
Most neo-noir antiheroes were assailed loners and misfits who often tended to be decent even if forced to live outside of society, angry, or resentful, or cheated by the world about them. Whilst the Driver retains aspects of such figures, he’s more like Hellman’s antiheroes in Two-Lane Blacktop, practically a philosophical distillation, a floating islet of consciousness detached from humanity, even, perhaps, a merciless avenging spirit, like Walker in Boorman’s Point Blank (1967). There are hints as to Driver’s background—his very specific rage at people who leave a young boy without a father—but Refn refuses to psychologise Driver, rendering him stoic and enigmatic, reduced to a purified, elemental study in the duality of man. Hints of Driver’s depth of emotional longing and attachment to the few things that matter to him are dropped in his real affection for Shannon and for the family for which he appoints himself guardian angel, and yet his past and internal life remain basic mysteries.
In spite of the pop songs used like a Greek chorus, the aptly Tangerine Dream-esque music score by Cliff Martinez, and squiggly hot pink Miami Vice-esque titles, Drive is, on closer examination, no mere retro-cool tribute. Drive isn’t really an action movie, avoiding a big climax or major action scene, almost to the point of feeling anticlimactic and too self-conscious about its elevated ambitions. Vicious and thrilling moments certainly arrive, yet Refn, whilst certainly fascinated by and talented at describing carnage, is always trying to capture its awfulness, the jarring horror of lives ending in the blink of an eye. He deliberately upsets the usual moral impetus of such films by making the Driver’s acts of retaliation as ugly and repulsive as those of the villains. At one point, Driver deliberately depersonalises himself, donning a latex mask he wears on movie shoots for a very real piece of deadly stunt driving. Drive is closer in spirit to serious noir and the adult Westerns of the ’50s, with their emphasis on moral meanings and social contexts for such violence rather than the gratification of lesser genre films. Refn also evokes the Euro-American mythologising of Sergio Leone: a painting reminiscent of the one that was Morton’s icon of aspiration in Once Upon A Time in the West (1968) hangs in the hallway outside Irene’s and Driver’s rooms. Gosling’s pared-back, impassive performance of an almost supernatural cool concealing brilliance and ferocity evokes Charles Bronson’s in the Leone film too (and, of course, Refn had made Bronson [2008] based on the life of a famous criminal whose personality became blurred with that of the star).
Whilst Refn certainly seems to have his mind on deeper things than the usual car chase and gunfight movie, he composes Drive with a classical control that’s as daunting as it is clean and direct, avoiding the CGI augmentation and trickery so often apparent in the Fast and the Furious films, rather evoking The French Connection’s chase in the rhythmic dialogue of bumper-cam rushing motion and the speeding driver’s face. Driver tunes in on the police band so he knows what the cops are saying to each other, but when on the home stretch, he changes over to a commentary on a football game, the play calls seeming to blend aptly with the Driver’s peregrinations, end of game and end of chase dovetailing purposefully as he takes the car into the car-park of the stadium to be immediately lost amongst the outpouring spectators. Drive is a director’s movie in almost the purist sense, for it’s the way Refn renders his scenes, full of elastic time, fluxes of mood and meaning, that renders the relatively familiar material compelling, strange, and enriched. Reminiscent of the unique scene in Valhalla Rising depicting men going mad in the face of an alien newness, drowned in droning music, Refn here presents a similarly striking moment in which Driver peers through the window of Nino’s pizzeria, masked and transformed into a murderous homunculus, whilst his unsuspecting target laughs and cajoles inside with friends and flunkies, all with an operatic level of music and distorted reality.
Refn tries to dispense with dialogue as much as possible as he depicts the Driver in the course of events, flowing through the placid homeyness of domesticity with Irene and Benecio to bloodcurdling eruptions of violence and chaos in his hitherto controlled, withdrawn life. The similarity to Michael Mann’s early films is clearest here, as Refn uses music and scenes filled with silent meditations on behaviour to communicate a sense of things occurring on subliminal levels for characters who are reticent by nature and necessity. Like Mann and some of his American and European brethren, Refn seems to be trying to rebuild pulp melodrama into something like preverbal myth. Many shots aim for and achieve something of the desolate urban solitude of Edward Hopper’s paintings. The angelic aura that hovers around Irene, which Refn pushes in the light that shines about her in many shots, is disturbed when Standard returns. A dark, slightly cowered, certainly guilty inflection to his attempts to reclaim a place in his family blends with a quality of devilish charm and pulverised pathos, reminiscing happily about his and Irene’s first meeting whilst feeling the tug of responsibilities and ugly truths he can never erase.
The opening scene of Driver ferrying the two burglars from the scene of their heist to their drop-off point, where he leaves them cold without any further interest or concern even as they’ll probably be picked up by the cops who have pursued them, strikes notes that resonate as the story unfolds. Driver’s sense of professional involvement has specific parameters, promising and delivering dedication and protection only within those parameters. When one of his former clients comes up to him in a diner and starts yapping away about his subsequent life, Driver interrupts him and threatens physical violence if he doesn’t go away. On the job, however, he tries to shepherd the burglars away from cop cars and helicopters with diligence and intelligence, even though the unexplained lag of one of them delays them and nearly wrecks the getaway. Similarly, he takes on the responsibility of protecting Irene and her family, but this time, without limits: he sticks with the job until the end, remorseless and uncaring about the lives he has to take or even his own in the process. When the pawnshop heist goes kaput, with Standard dead, Driver flees, taking Blanche and the sack of mysterious cash with him and eluding the black car in a blur of stunning motion that exemplifies his pure survival instinct. In the subsequent motel room confrontation between him and Blanche, he extracts the truth of the situation from her with a powerful threat before Cook and goons arrive not to aid but to shut down the anomalous duo.
Refn reveals a ruthlessly black sense of humour in casting iconic Mad Men sexpot Hendricks as the trashy femme fatale forced on Driver, only to have her head blown off by a shotgun blast after a few minutes, drawing attention more to the way her life ends in an astounding moment than to whatever good and bad things she’s done in her life; only Driver’s instinctual speed, not mediated by any moral or sporting considerations, saves his life. Driver’s survival capacity proves to be, in fact, the undoing of him and those close to him: the final point of the heist was to see all the operatives involved in it killed and the money circled back to Nino, the mastermind looking to chop off a potential Mafia rival at the ankles by seizing his capital and then burying the links. By surviving and, worse, finding his way to Nino via Cook, whom he wallops with a hammer in the midst of an almost blasé collective of topless dancers, Driver brings down heat not only on himself but on Shannon and Irene. The most frightening member of the Nino-Barney duo is, in fact, the more avuncular-seeming Bernie, who takes on cleaning up Nino’s problems with brutal directness, releasing his frustration on Cook by jamming a fork in his eye and beating him to death, and coolly, unexpectedly slicing a gigantic gash in Shannon’s arm during a similarly reassuring conversation. His glum solitude in his fancy apartment, with his collection of knives kept in a pristine collection, suggests the kind of man Driver himself could be if he gave in to the same impulses.
Driver certainly seems to trail the old “man with a violent past” aspect of many a reformed gunslinger given up to almost zenlike self-abnegation in his current life. His subsequent campaign of preemptive rampaging reminds me of how an acquaintance once described himself as the sort of pacifist who goes apeshit when his family are threatened. Here’s the real keynote of Drive, as Refn studies the strange nexus of violence and love, and how whilst the ability to wield the former has always been seen as a necessity to ensure the security of the latter, it can so easily turn corrosive and self-propagating. This comes to a head in the film’s most aesthetically and technically bravura core, as Nino and Bernie send a hood to the apartment building. Driver, recognising the man as a danger, turns around, kisses Irene in moment of lingering, slow-motion beatification, then turns back and smashes the hitman into a bloodied pulp, stamping on his skull with the lunatic fury of a caveman. Irene backs out of the elevator with an utterly horrified gaze, and Driver’s look back at her is charged with fury and necessity, yet also chagrined like a young boy caught doing something shameful. Refn’s ambivalence, then, is more than skin deep, and the dynamic he creates here in the dizzying swing between romantic tenderness and primal, gut-churning violence demands soul-searching on the audience’s part as to how one should finally view the Driver and his place in the scheme of things.
The funny thing is that after all is said and done, Drive is, like Valhalla Rising, a curiously spiritual, almost otherworldly film, replete with moments of woozy magic-realist beauty, as when Driver, tracking down Cook, stalks down a long, dark corridor lined with tinsel and a white-garbed stripper idly poking away at her mobile phone, or, in counterpoint, a moment as patently eerie and stygian as Driver’s revenge killing of Nino, stalking down onto a beach wearing that latex mask and drowning him in the surf. Whilst Driver’s final confrontation with Bernie is a little flat and strangely weightless, the very end, when Driver leaves behind everything and heads off into the night, bleeding and possibly dying, inevitably invokes Shane (1953): Driver, like his earlier brethren, has to leave behind both domesticity and ill-gotten power, and yet, perhaps, Driver has finally found his own sense of direction.
7th
12 -
2011
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9 comments »
Director: Ken Russell
By Roderick Heath
Ken Russell’s death last week at age 84 felt like the last in an endless series of cheats the director had suffered in his lifetime. The eternally puckish Russell had been until quite recently continuing to amuse and instruct in newspaper columns, belying his advanced years with a still-guttering mental fire, and thus his death cheated him, and us, of hope of a last good film. Also, it comes at a time when something like Russell’s due was finally coming to him. Lately, Russell has begun to be celebrated as the great British rebel he was, and like many great British rebels, ended up exemplifying something about the society he fell into struggle with. In that regard he resembled D. H. Lawrence, the writer Russell adapted for his third, and first truly, personally definitive feature film, Women in Love. Purely by living long enough, Russell became an elder statesman of British film, an unlikely end as there was a time not so long ago when Russell’s audacious, rampantly energetic, entirely wilful cinema was a byword for something nasty and crazy and degraded. Indeed, some of Russell’s essential aesthetic beliefs – that creative passion was superior to refined style, that interpretative vibrancy was more important than fidelity, that the erotic and the vulgar had a deeper and more vital place in art than they had been allowed – were red rags to the bulls of cultural guardianship, especially as one of Russell’s favourite creative guerrilla tactics was to remind us of the compost out of which much great art grows. During the 1970s, when most of his generational fellows tried to carve out places for themselves in Hollywood and British cinema almost died from a lack of passion and confidence, Russell didn’t always stay home, but he did try to stay true to his creed, and continued to shake things up until his career began to stall in the late 1980s.
Women in Love came after Russell had reentered cinema with Billion Dollar Brain (1968), the third of Michael Caine’s delicious series of Harry Palmer spy flicks, but also after he had excited audiences and attentive minds with a series of electrifying TV movies and shorts in the previous few years. Women in Love came amidst a steady flow of highbrow literary classics tackled by the young heathens of British cinema in the ’60s, some flagrantly modernist and playful, like Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), some elegiac and expansive, like John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). Russell’s take on Lawrence’s novel was something else again. Russell doesn’t seem to be filming Lawrence’s book so much as trying to live it out page by page. The superficially uncouth yet poetic, symbolic writer who tried to find the comprehensibility in things normally thought of as primal and vice versa, has been digested and defecated, reshaped into the literality of images and of feeling by Russell, who also poured his own emotional reflexes into it, and extracted in turn the potential in Lawrence’s material, true as he saw it when he wrote the book in the 1910s, to capture things nascent in the late ‘60s zeitgeist. Feminism in the form of Glenda Jackson’s ground-breaking performance and her character’s arc from frustrated parochial nonconformist to self-actualising femme du monde; frank homoeroticism in the infamous nude wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates; and sundry other fragments replete with satire, social observation, and philosophical yammering, which capture and distil that sense of import in the moment which distinguished the era. Would certain great cultural institutions survive as their foundations seemed now rotten? What was the future of human relations, between classes, between genders, when so much had gone wrong with them? Lawrence had tried to make the questions palpable, and Russell tried to capture with authenticity the way the questions had found new momentum.
In terms of actual story, of course, there’s an element of soap opera to Women in Love, depicting as it does two concurrent love affairs, one of which involves shattering social classes and ends in near-murder and then suicide. The soapy element is however what gives the intellectualism flesh. Some criticism was levelled at Women in Love for, however, keeping intact Lawrence’s loopy anti-realistic dialogue, but to adapt such a novel without trying to capture its depth of thought would have reduced it to a sex farce. Russell for the most part keeps them ably counterpointed with his animated, dynamic camera, a visual entity that reproduces the thrashing sense of life found in the characters. One of Russell and screenwriter-producer Larry Kramer’s more contentious touches was to relocate the novel to after the First World War, whereas Lawrence had been writing about the fin-de-siecle mood of bohemian boundary-stretching of the Edwardian era, and which the war had been used as a justification for repressing, a cultural war which Lawrence and his novel had been caught up in. But Russell makes this work for him, using the official pieties of dedicating war memorials and visions of mangled, poverty-stricken and begging veterans, to give immediacy and mordant pep to Rupert Birkin’s (Bates) oft-satirical, always frantic attempts to synthesise a modern kind of living, and the inevitable translation of this into terms of the film’s Vietnam-era anti-war mood. Russell also depicts flapper styles and jazz-age rags beginning to infest the hidebound British landscape, as its heroines in their wilfully colourful garb strut through grey and grimy streets and filth-clad working-class men, like Birds of Paradise nesting in Mordor.
These exotic birds are Gudrun (Jackson) and Ursula Brangwen (Jennie Linden), daughters of a schoolteacher who are themselves now teachers. Except that as members of their mining town’s small intelligentsia, they become intimate with some of its flashier figures, including Gerald Crich (Reed), son of the mine’s owner (Alan Webb), his friend Rupert, who works as a school inspector, through which capacity he first meets Ursula, and his pretentious aristocratic lover Hermione Roddice (Eleanor Bron). Rupert and Hermione’s relationship is foundering as he becomes increasingly cold and sarcastic about her affectations and greed for attention, coming to a head when he breaks up a self-indulgent dance she performs whilst trying to overshadow Gudrun and Ursula, by getting the accompanist to start bashing out a Charleston rag. Hermione, enraged by his scorn and her offended pretence to cultural imperium, tries to beat his head in with a paperweight, but he survives and runs away. Gerald, intrigued by the sisters, invites them to an annual party the Criches throw for their workers and other townsfolk, but during the party his younger sister Laura (Sharon Gurney) and her newlywed husband Tibby Lupton (Christopher Gable) drown whilst swimming naked in the estate lake. This tragedy catalyses both Ursula and Rupert’s and Gudrun and Gerald’s affairs, and also deepens Rupert and Gerald’s bond. But these relationships are fated to run very different courses, as Ursula’s conventional concept of love slowly reins in Rupert’s yearnings for multifarious relationships, whilst Gerald pours grief and anger into his partnering with Gudrun, who in turn drifts into an intellectual bond with a gay German artist, Loerke (Vladek Sheybal), when the quartet head off for a holiday in the Alps. In a nihilistic rage, Gerald strangles Gudrun almost to death, but then wanders off to freeze to death in the mountains.
Like Lawrence’s novel, most of the captivating, invigorating illustrative vignettes in Russell’s film are loaded into the first half: Tibby and Laura racing each other to the church on their wedding day; Gudrun dancing before bulls like a Cretan priestess, oblivious to danger and given up to art as life in the moment; Hermione’s assault on Rupert and his ritual-like stripping and self-cleansing afterwards in the forest; the fatal drowning of the couple and Rupert and Ursula’s frantic copulation in the bushes, transmuting death-angst into life-spark as the lake is drained to reveal the drowned bodies, the living and dead couples wrapped around each other identically; Gerald wielding the same controlling instinct he pushes on his workers on his horse, in forcing it to remain close to a speeding train; his crazed mother releasing guard dogs on workmen coming to the family mansion. It helps that Lawrence provided such episodes that stick like burrs in the imagination and gave a filmmaker such naturally intense images. Women in Love presents a panoply of tropes and visual motifs Russell would play about with in increasingly effusive and unique terms. As such it does seem to hover in a kind of no-man’s-land, far too volatile to count as a nominally pleasant literary adaptation like so many superficially successful yet numbingly literal Merchant/Ivory style films, and yet also a definite prototypical work for Russell, who would achieve his most personal and intense extremes in the likes of Ken Russell’s Film of Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers (1970), The Devils (1971), Savage Messiah (1972), and Mahler (1974).
Russell did his best work when he was fighting against limitations of not only censorship and cultural expectations but also assumptions of technical competence and traditions of quality – the tension between the formal beauty his traditionally trained cinematographers, editors, and studio hands could give his films and his own anarchic impulses was in fine balance in his ‘70s works. Here Russell’s filmmaking, with the incomparable aid of the great cinematographer Billy Williams, attacks with physical force. They often employ hand-held camerawork, not affected like so much modern wobble-cam stuff, but charged with sweeping energy, to give the film a hungry, compulsive feel. Russell did some of the hand-held work himself in trying to upset the classic delicacies of movie photography. The sense of production detail is impeccable in recreating the ‘20s, with much of the costuming authentic stuff picked up in op shops and thrift stores. Despite this, or maybe because of this, there’s a resistance to the sort of precious, muted air that afflicts most such historical movies, an effect deepened by the material, which in part subverts our stereotypes of the era’s behaviour and personal world-views, whilst also offering up shots like the Crichs’ golden car knifing its way through knots of filthy mine workers, a concise visual nugget that reminds us what all the bohemian cavorting is being supported by. There’s Russell’s own satirical jab back at Lawrence, who, trying to wrestle his way out of the usual class presumptions and rhetoric of his time, seemed to yearn to belong to the upper class bohemians of the Bloomsbury group he nonetheless satirised mercilessly in the novel.
One irony of Women in Love is of course that it could as easily have been called Men in Love, for Rupert and Gerald dominate as much as the two sisters, and Rupert’s channelling of Lawrence’s philosophical articulateness especially, in the first half. Rupert hopes overtly for a kind of deep platonic partnership to counterbalance the familiar man-woman marriage, wanting to establish a kind of blutbrüderschaft with Gerald, expressed after the pair beat hell out of each other in a bout of Japanese-style wrestling as Rupert encourages Gerald to release his emotions following his sister’s death. The nude wrestling scene is famous for some obvious reasons – it was the first time a mainstream English-language feature allowed frontal male nudity, and two big-name actors to boot. But what makes it still a riveting scene is how unabashedly the men carry it out, and how Russell shoots it, even given that he’d worked closely with the censor chief to carefully tweak light levels and framings, nonetheless the scene doesn’t feel especially self-conscious when British cinema had been notoriously clumsy with erotic themes and nudity. Instead Russell here does some of his most vivid editing, ending with the two men entwined like lovers even in inflicting violence on each-other, and indeed the violence takes the place of sexual and emotional release. Russell in fact ratchets up the flicker of homosexual bonding between the pair, apparent in Rupert’s glitter-eyed attempts to get the stiff-necked Gerald to understand his offer of a kind of love. The male romance counterpoints the two more traditional romances, and also the crack-up of Rupert and Hermione’s affair, which mirrors what later happens with Gerald and Gudrun, but with the gender roles reversed.
Although it’s certainly a film with a director’s powerful imprint on it, much of the force and beauty of Women in Love comes from the cast, an almost perfect confluence of talent. Jackson won the Oscar, but the film offers ensemble work of a high character, although I feel Linden’s Ursula is more distinctly whiny and petty than she should be. Amongst the supporting cast, comprising many of Russell’s stock company of actors, Bron is a stand-out, who inhabits Hermione with a mixture of gruesome egotism and defined pathos, particularly excellent in the lengthy dance scene where she both displays physical deftness, but also puts across the peculiar form of violence she’s inflicting on her so-called friends and lover, before her own exclamation of aggrieved disbelief when Rupert tells her he didn’t mean to spoil her dance, “My arse!” Bates, whom Russell reported identified deeply with Lawrence, is fantastic as Rupert, a difficult part to play at the best of times, bringing out the emotional charge, hints of drunkenness, desperation, and bisexual longing throbbing beneath his airy pronouncements: whereas Jackson’s Gudrun communicates the thrill of wilful self-liberation, Rupert suffers from a darker knowledge, of knowing new human paradigms have to be invented to survive. Bates might be at his keenest in the moment when he expounds a lengthy comparison of the fig with femininity, a scene charged with multiple levels of character revelation and tension, as the metaphor means different things to each of the people listening to it and encapsulating indirectly the shift of Rupert’s affections from Hermione to Ursula, being honest, witty, and caddish all at the same time.
Similarly riveting are Russell’s two signal muses, Jackson and Reed, whom he would later often try to replace but usually unsuccessfully. A more different pair in terms of personal outlook is hard to imagine, but both had gusto, fearlessness, and a confrontational style, that well matched Russell’s own. Reed, whom Russell had cast before in several of his telemovies including The Debussy Film (1966) and Dante’s Inferno (1965), and would use again in The Devils (1971) and other films, became an ideal vessel for his self-projection for, as well as bearing a certain resemblance to Russell, could exude a similar air of poeticism filtered through a primitiveness. This is exactly correct for portraying Gerald, who in spite of his upper class background and machine-age ambitions, retains a kind of savage volatility in him which first seeks relief in Gudrun’s arms and then begins to metaphorically and then literally throttle her. One of the film’s most riveting scenes comes when, after his father dies and his mad mother has humiliated him, he stalks through the night, dressed as a working man, squeezing the mud from his father’s grave between his fingers and then sneaking into the Brangwen house, where he finds his oblivion in her bed, except the next morning, in a marvellous volte face of point of view, she awakens with his bulk upon her, trapping her in bed.
Gudrun takes on Gerald as the only man fearsome enough to take her on, and she the only woman filled with enough energy for both creation and destruction to engage his innermost impulses. Early in the film as he parades about with hookers in one of town’s working class pubs, he encounters her slumming, taunting and despising the working men, one of whom she easily rattles by answering his come-ons with a stated desire to “drown in flesh.” Jackson, who would give another galvanising performance for Russell in The Music Lovers, seems to condense all of the other characters within herself, as well as a total intelligence that refuses to be pinned down, even as she chafes and occasionally shrinks before a world largely hostile to her, which she answers with prickly arrogance. Gudrun’s dance before the cattle, and her gestures throughout, channels the style of Isadora Duncan, about whom Russell had made a telemovie in in 1966: Russell almost always included a dance or mime sequence in his films, be it diagetic or fantasy, reflecting Russell’s own adolescent training as a ballet dancer, and it’s often through such sequeces that his truest, more elegiac impulses, and sometimes also his most humorous and surreal ideas, are communicated. A certain amount of homosexual panic, which underlies Gerald’s simultaneous closeness with and rejection of Rupert, erupts in him as Gudrun, who already tempts something destructive in him, drifts closer to Loerke. But Gerald’s world-view and private madness also can only finally find a sense of conclusion in a totally nihilistic gesture, leaving the film poised in an aspect of depletion and incompleteness, true to the novel, even as the characters all, in a way, find what they’ve been looking for. Of course, in Gerald’s case it’s a tragic end, but one that satisfies and takes to a limit his own impulses, and for the others there is a sense of cost and longing still inflecting their happily ever afters. Women in Love doesn’t so much end as stop, questions still in the air, the unease of the times still heavy upon characters, artists, and audience.
4th
12 -
2011
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5 comments »
Director: Göran Olsson
By Marilyn Ferdinand
As the hubby and I made our way to International House at the University of Chicago to attend a free showing of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, he said to me, “But you know, Angela Davis did shoot a man.” “Did he die?” I asked. “I don’t think so,” the hubby answered. This conversation alone justifies the existence of this film. Not only did we learn that Angela Davis never shot anyone—her legally owned and registered gun was used in an attack without her knowledge—but that she did 18 months in jail awaiting a trial that could have sent her to the gas chamber; she was subsequently acquitted.
Misinformation about the civil rights/black power movements in the United States is rampant among both opponents and supporters. That’s why Mixtape is an unusual and valuable look from an outside source—Sweden. During the years mentioned in the title, Swedish television journalists covered aspects of the movements both in the United States and abroad, providing a more in-depth and generally sympathetic look at the Black Panther Party and its allies than could ever have been found within the States, then or now. Indeed, the continued neglect of this important time in American and African-American history—the film opened on exactly two screens on September 11, 2011 and has not played on more than 13 screens during any week since—shows how frightened people still are of black power, even as a black-identifying president occupies the White House.
Rediscovery of this footage gave the film’s producers (including actor/director/political activist Danny Glover) and director Göran Olsson the very bright idea to offer today’s audiences a window on the past, as well as give contemporary African Americans a chance to reflect on the effect of this legacy on their lives and careers. During the panel discussion that followed the film, a number of Black Panthers reaffirmed the continued existence and activity of the Panthers, and young audience members showed their eagerness to commit to continuous transformation of society.
The film begins with a look at impoverished African Americans and segues into extensive footage of Stokely Carmichael, a handsome, educated, articulate spokesperson for black power. Carmichael is shown meeting with foreign dignitaries, including the king of Sweden, but his most affecting moment is in his mother’s apartment in Chicago. He grabs the microphone from the Swedes and interviews her about the cramped living conditions in which the Carmichael family struggled, teasing out with question after question the reasons for their poverty. Finally, his mother asserts that her husband was always the first laid off because he was “colored.” Carmichael was a separatist who broke with the Black Panthers over their decision to collaborate with white activists. In various interviews, he asserts his respect for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while disagreeing with his belief in nonviolence.
In voiceover, hip-hop artist and poet Talib Kweli ruminates on the legacy of Stokely Carmichael. While confessing that he was not that aware of Carmichael, when reviewing the authors Carmichael read, Kweli sees they are more than brothers of the skin, learning as they did at the knee of many of the same people, including Richard Wright and Malcolm X. The extension of the black power movement through the artistry of hip-hop and rap artists is more inferred than stated in this film, but it is clear that the legacy has been carried forward and made relevant to young African Americans in a new way.
Panelist Dr. Charles Payne pointed out that the film takes a top-down view of the black power movement, focusing on such leaders as Carmichael, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale, and making some unfortunate factual errors, such as giving the incorrect dates for the murders of Medgar Evers (1963, not 1967) and Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (1969, not 1968). All of the panelists complained that the film gives little time to the “survival programs”—the free breakfast program, self-defense classes, free medical clinics and first-aid training, political and economic education, and other services—that made the Panthers a bulwark in the African-American community. Following up with contemporary commentary from the likes of Melvin Van Peebles, Erykah Badu, and Harry Belafonte continues this high-profile approach, though their faces are never seen and their comments are worth listening to.
Further, in the sensationalist style we’ve come to expect of modern journalism, the film shows a Panthers’ class in which the youngsters chant “take up the gun” repeatedly. Further questioning of Angela Davis in her prison cell by the journalists results in a takedown of epic proportions. Davis, angered by the continued focus on violence, recalls in harrowing detail the day the four little girls she knew during her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama were blown to bits by a racist bombing, an incident made most famous by Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls. The horror that invades her eyes is memorable and fully explicates the need for the armed neighborhood watch that resulted to prevent further violence against African Americans. Indeed, a misunderstanding of the notion of nonviolence—not passivity in the face of attack, but rather a freeing of oneself from a desire to commit violence to further a cause—was elucidated by the post-screening panel. One of the panelists, Black Panther member Stanley McKinney, teaches martial arts to this day in accordance with the party’s 10-point program.
The film digresses rather humorously to a TV Guide article of the period that branded Sweden as the most anti-American country in the world because it shot and aired the footage we see in Mixtape, as well as of demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. Again, the bromide that the bad is not balanced with the good is trotted out to quell criticism by Swedes, but one criticism of their coverage does have some validity. It is rather hard to make sense of anything happening in the United States, then or now, without a thorough understanding of the country, and of the various factions of the civil rights/black power movements. While the footage provides a different perspective on well-known figures, it remains near the surface.
J. Edgar Hoover, founder of the dirty tricks infiltration of perceived subversive organizations known as Cointelpro (Covert Intelligence Programs) said, “The Breakfast for Children Program represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” The film repeats assertions that drugs were introduced into the African-American community as a way to destroy the momentum of the black power movement. Many Vietnam veterans, both black and white, came back to the States addicted to heroin; whether it was by design is beyond my powers to discern. That drugs created problems for community organizers is a given, and reinvigorating an effective movement was on the minds of everyone attending the screening. As the panelists said, there is no way to achieve unity in a country as diverse as the United States, and that it is better for the various groups to work toward converging goals to form a powerful coalition for change.
Despite its shortcomings, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 gives contemporary audiences back a piece of their history, not only setting some records straight but also offering the passion of past activists as inspiration to a new generation. A Harlem bookstore owner in the film mentions how some young people came into his store one day talking about black power. He told them, “Black is beautiful, but knowledge is power.” Applause erupted in the audience at that line.
30th
11 -
2011
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4 comments »
Director/Coscreenwriter: Gavin O’Connor
By Roderick Heath
Certain movies seem to ride the currents of the zeitgeist with a blend of fortuitous spiritual accord and opportunistic calculation. Gavin O’Connor, who, after making a mark with Tumbleweeds (1999), has constructed an oeuvre resting solidly on the power of clichéd words—Miracle! Pride! Glory! Warrior!—to communicate their essence instantly to even the most thickly unibrowed of viewers. With Warrior, he channels Great Recession and War on Terror-era angst and the spreading popularity of the haute-macho histrionics of Ultimate Fighting; as such, in 50 years’ time, when cinema and cultural historians want a window into the cultural mood of our time, they may reasonably deduce that the inchoate impulses and desperate straits of the early 2000s led us to beat the living shit out of our brothers rather than figure out who was more worth hitting.
Warrior is the sort of film that leaves me with a nearly physical sense of confusion in trying to reckon with its impact, which is perhaps giving it far more credit than it deserves. Warrior is at once so dizzyingly, gobsmackingly bad that it outrages the critical faculties, and yet it still works on a level of primal melodrama to an extent that it rouses the blood. In fact, I’m not sure if a better, more tasteful movie could summarise the peculiar insanities of our era better. It’s a film that’s not afraid to recycle every fight cliché under the sun or milk every drop of macho gravitas for the sake of trying to keep its presumed audience involved. Warrior could easily have been made in the 1930s and cast, oh, I dunno, James Cagney and Clark Gable as the goofus and gallant pair of tough brothers forced by various crises to battle each other in the ring, minus the bone-cracking detail and pseudo-realistic swathes of angst over histories of familial crack-up, spousal abuse, and posttraumatic stress fall-out.
Instead of Cagney and Gable, we have Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as Tommy and Brendan Conlon, two brothers with an alcoholic, abusive father named Paddy (Nick Nolte) whose lives have taken disparate paths and yet lead back to the same place. Both were trained in the disciplines of wrestling and martial arts, but Tommy eventually fled the house as a teenager with his mother, whilst the older Brendan stayed at home: both now harbour powerful antipathy for their father, who, when the film opens, is newly, if fragilely, on the wagon. Paddy finds Tommy sitting on his doorstop after years away, sipping liquor from a bottle in a brown bag and overflowing with sullen aggression, repeatedly baiting his old man with lines about how he preferred him as a drunk whilst reminding him of the poverty and agony his ex-wife died in. Tommy nonetheless enlists his father to be his trainer: as a teen Tommy had once wanted to best the record of the storied ancient Greek fighter Theogenes.
On a visit to a local gym, Tommy volunteers as a sparring partner for Pete “Mad Dog” Grimes (Erik Apple), a current champ, and promptly beats the hell out of him. This is captured by a bystander on his cell phone, and the footage becomes a You Tube sensation, eventually witnessed by a far-off soldier in Iraq who recognises Tommy as the man who saved his life by pulling him from a shattered tank on the battlefield. At the same time, Brendan, who has retired from the UFC after a near-fatal defeat, has become a high school physics teacher. With a wife, Tess, and children, Brendan has been left heavily in debt in after paying one of his daughters’ medical bills. Threatened with foreclosure, Brendan decides to return to fighting. After winning a bout in the parking lot of a strip joint, Brendan is suspended by his school. Thus he commits to a full return to the sport, talking his old trainer Frank Campana (Frank Grillo) into helping him. The brothers’ fateful paths lead them both to enter Sparta, “the Superbowl of mixed martial arts,” held in Atlantic City.
It feels, as per sporting movie rules, a bit unfair to kick Warrior when it’s down at the box office, but it’s a work that has scored big with those who did see it and many critics, too, and seems destined for a long life on DVD and cable TV like another initially failed and yet seemingly immortal epic of masculine self-pity and triumphalism, The Shawshank Redemption (1994). If Warrior had been made in the ’50s, Marlon Brando would almost certainly have played Tommy, and Hardy, with a hulking physical strength accompanied by a mouth belonging to a Rossetti angel and violently expressive eyes, is definitely a movie star in the mould that produced Brando, Newman, and Dean. Also, if it had been a Brando film made by the cinema artisans of that era, they might have had the good sense to clear the decks of superfluous drama and distraction and work up some depth in portraying Tommy’s conflicted, near-neurotic rage and sadomasochistic impulses. Instead, Warrior tries to sustain two similar, yet distinctive protagonists, which allows the film to stretch out to an ungodly 140 minutes, climax with about a half-dozen fight scenes where two would do, and amass story elements and dramatic tropes as if O’Connor and his fellow screenwriters Anthony Tambakis and Cliff Dorfman bought them up at a fire sale. Unlike David O. Russell’s likeable The Fighter (2009), which retained a seriocomic approach that leavened its well-worn tropes and at least some claim to authenticity, O’Connor’s film is as dourly, joylessly self-serious as any tattooed obsessive UFC heavy, and seems pitched to the types of people who will, when watching it, chime in every five minutes with statements like, “That’s right, yo, ‘cos it’s about respect, you know what I mean, bro?”
In spite of the ancient Greek references and the practically mythical theme of the two brothers doomed to clash in battle, Warrior has no pretensions to Greek tragic style, or, if it does, it hopelessly smothers them. Warrior is rather a Rocky variant where the brothers play Rocky and Apollo, and like those characters, seem to summarise a contemporary schism in the American mindset. The major difficulty O’Connor sets himself is setting up a situation where two characters who might rightfully expect to be the heroes of the piece duke it out. Tommy is a war hero and plans to donate whatever he can win fighting to the widow of his former brother in arms Pilar Fernandez (Vanessa Martinez). Brendan, a beleaguered underdog, is of course fighting to save his middle-class status. Their fighting styles are as polarised as their personalities: Tommy is a lethal pugilist who tries to bash all opponents into the ground immediately, whereas Brendan is a slippery wrestler who absorbs heavy blows before contorting his opponents into agonising knots they can’t escape. A sequel might reasonably see them taking on Godzilla and Mothra.
O’Connor, whose foolish enthusiasm and utter cynicism blend indecipherably, throws in everything but the kitchen sink for the sake of emotionally involving his audience. His dramatic style is much like Tommy’s fighting technique: he hits and keeps on hitting until resistance is shattered. I’d be lying if I said by the end I hadn’t been affected by the film on its most basic level—wanting to see how the film could satisfyingly resolve its thorny moral and emotional quandaries, and see our heroes beat their seemingly indomitable opponents. But afterwards I felt greasy and quite genuinely used: the film pushes buttons, which I’m sure many of us have these days, of latent rage at fiscal institutions and corrupted authority figures, of fears about how to keep roofs over heads in tough times, and anxieties over the psychological and social damage of the wars that have both defined and yet also remained oddly alien from the everyday landscape of our era. And yet Warrior squirms out of making any real investigations into the nature of these crises, because at the same time it attempts to exploit such issues, it also gives a moral and emotional hand job to a presumed audience of conservatives and young men aching for manly validation.
It’s heavily suggested that Paddy’s domestic violence was caused by PTSD after his own military service, and Tommy makes many of the same mistakes, acting with surly, unforgiving aggression towards both father and brother. Yet the film gets off on the sight of soldiers coming to serenade Tommy at his bouts with the Marine hymn. The film outlines the good cause Tommy and Brendan have to be angry with their father, and yet O’Connor spares no effort in wringing our empathy with the pathetic, shambolic old man, as when he’s rebuffed by Brendan outside his house like a poor, panting, lost dog as he tells his kids, who don’t know Paddy at all. Later, the film builds this up to a note that’s both ludicrous and yet kind of affecting when Paddy, exhausted by Tommy’s cruelty, falls off the wagon and screams lines from the talking book version of Moby Dick he’s been toting throughout the film in Tommy’s face, stirring something like filial pity from Tommy at last. O’Connor wants to depict catharsis here, but he fails to gain it precisely because he’s copped out of any actual reckoning with the emotional damage both men have suffered and inflicted. The lack of any essential irony or even genuine consequentiality to this background detail finally hurries up a process I’ve noticed in other recent films, like Jim Sheridan’s dreadful Brothers (2009), of turning the familial and spousal abuse of PTSD-afflicted soldiers into an equivalent of a battle scar—ugly, but part of the job of the good loyal God-fearin’ mom-and-apple-pie-lovin’ soldier.
O’Connor and Co. set up a fascinating set of standards that determine the outcome of the film, leavening Tommy’s lustre of patriotism and military heroism by making him a deserter (that’s bad), but one who deserted because he was angry at the friendly fire incident that killed his buddy (that’s good), who doesn’t care who he hurts on the way to his desired goal (that’s bad), but his desired end is helping out his pal’s cutely ethnic family (that’s good). O’Connor goes for the money every time, whether it’s on a relatively casual level, framing Pilar and her child after a weepy phone conversation with Tommy with a photo of him with her late husband, to the most overt, like the aforementioned singing Marines bit. Truth be told, the main source of tension in the narrative of Warrior comes from waiting to see which cliché and manipulative trope O’Connor will employ next. We’ve got Brendan’s wife—O’Connor makes sure to give us a view of Morrison’s magnificent ass during a supposedly serious bathroom confrontation between these two hard-pressed average folks—acting out the compulsory role of whining concernedly about her husband’s health and safety when he wants to get back in the ring but eventually coming around to stand by her man at ringside. We’ve got Brendan’s school principal Zito (Kevin Dunn, of course) chewing him out, suspending him, and fending off the appeals of his students to watch Brendan’s fights, but cheering Brendan when watching him on television, and finally joining the kids to view the climactic bout. O’Connor doesn’t so much deploy information as wallop you over the head with it, resolutely failing the “show, don’t tell” test with a constant stream of backstory-dropping conversations and the incessant yammering of the fight callers Bryan Callen and Sam Sheridan, playing themselves, aptly, as the kinds of ESPN-ish commentators you want to strangle with their own entrails after five minutes.
Hollywood formula depends, of course, on the relative memory of an audience, which might remember one of two variations on a theme but often won’t recall the 2,000 or more before that. But Warrior is something new: a film where just about every scene, line, theme, motif, and visual cue seems to have been clipped out of some preexisting source, with a meretricious veneer of grainy steadicam realism and the gratuitous use of the “Ode to Joy” to make the audience feel just so fucking cultured, you know? The film’s attitude to the sport and the people who engage it in is curious: giving our two triumphant white heroes (Irish, of course, ever a safe niche identity) a small army of stock punks and ethnic foes, reminding us that most of those who fight the sport are “animals” amongst whom a teacher with a Beethoven theme tune is an incongruous stand-out, whilst getting off on the steroid-pumped physiques and blood-spattering action with unremitting gall. Warrior builds to apogees of absurd hooray-for-us hype by the time Brendan has to battle the hulking Russian champion Koba (Kurt Angle), who struts onto stage clad, I shit you not, in a jumpsuit emblazoned with hammer and sickle. O’Connell, who with Miracle (2004) revisited an iconic moment of Reaganite resurgence, makes it clear here that he’s trying to tap into a fantasy on the American Right of revisiting the Cold War battles in the fraught hope it will return coherence to its worldview and mettle to its ranks. Sadly, we don’t even get to hear Koba say “I must breaaak yooou.”
This film does seem, with all due respect to my U.S. friends and readers, to capture something almost pathological in aspects of the current American mindset. Warrior finally presents its two brothers locked in mortal combat where one breaks the arm of the other and bashes him into submission for the sake of pure financial desperation, with the side-effect of providing some decidedly nonfruity psychotherapy about turning rage that might be better expended on other targets on each other. Thus, the mistakes of the past cannot teach: they can only be recommitted with ever more hysterical, blunt force until you’re literally on your last legs, broken and bloodied, still commanding the allegiance of the uniformed ranks you nominally betrayed. In short, it’s hard to get away from the feeling that Warrior is pitching to be the Tea Party’s manifesto movie.
That the film holds together at all, and even develops a charge of emotional involvement that isn’t pure flimflam, is because of Hardy and Edgerton, and, to a lesser extent, Nolte. Edgerton, up until recently a fairly bland Aussie pretty boy kicking about in international cinema looking for a place to land, has, in his too-brief contribution to Animal Kingdom (2010) and this film, begun to age interestingly. His believably minimalist playing of Brendan’s mix of assailed intelligence, anxiety, and fighting gumption nicely contrasts Hardy’s glowering mass of oedipal anger. Thanks to them, a confrontation between the brothers on the Atlantic City beachfront delivers the right charge of lingering resentment curdling with grief to produce a hostility that will drive them to nearly tear each other apart in the ring. Nolte’s climactic moment, shouting Melville in Hardy’s face, is the sort of moment that can easily defeat an actor; I’m not sure even Nolte survives it, but he gives it a herculean try. Now bring on Godzilla and Mothra.
28th
11 -
2011
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14 comments »
Director/Coscreenwriter: Steve McQueen
By Marilyn Ferdinand
British director Steve McQueen seems drawn to examine human beings in extremis. His debut film Hunger (2008) deals with a subject about as out there as they come—the hunger strike unto death of Bobby Sands of the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Maze Prison, Belfast. The deep commitment of Sands and his fellow hunger strikers to protest their treatment as criminals instead of as political prisoners and keep alive the question of Irish independence and reclamation of the counties of Northern Ireland into the whole of Ireland offers an extreme reaction to an intolerable situation for them.
With his second feature, Shame, McQueen turns his focus to another Irishman, Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender, who played Bobby Sands in Hunger), whose extreme reaction to an internal pain the film never reveals is a severe sex addiction. Brandon, who lives in New York City, works for a company, perhaps an ad agency, where high-concept talk, client-landing, and young-turk partying are daily occurrences. However, it appears that he spends a lot of his work day consuming Internet porn and masturbating in a bathroom stall. He continues with same at home and adds visits from prostitutes, barroom pick-ups, and street cruising to the mix. Aside from listening to vinyl records or running, we don’t observe him doing much of anything not related to his obsession.
Two potential problems arise. Brandon’s company has detected Internet porn use at his IP address and confiscates his computer to wipe the filth and investigate how it got there, and Brandon’s sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a needy, suicidal cabaret singer whom Brandon has been avoiding for years, shows up looking for a place to stay. We overhear Sissy pleading with a lover on the phone; she hasn’t divorced emotional from physical intimacy the way Brandon has, and in fact, makes more of it than it is. So, it seems that Sissy’s role is to challenge her brother’s numbness with her neediness. That she’s willing to slit her wrists to get it doesn’t really offer a positive incentive, but nonetheless, Brandon makes a bid to change his ways, tossing out his entire porn collection and even his laptop. Given the enormity of Brandon’s addiction—almost the entire film comprises his sexual activities—it isn’t likely that either bump in the road will set him on a new course, but there is always a chance. He tries and quickly fails to start a relationship with coworker Marianne (Nicole Beharie), the only woman he can’t seem to have sex with, and a second chance at a sexual encounter he ran after near the beginning of the film is the cliffhanger with which McQueen ends his film.
With no real plot and no big reveal about Brandon and Sissy’s past, what Shame offers is a portrait of a sex addict. The very first image of the film is startlingly brilliant—Fassbender lying naked on his back, a blue sheet covering his pelvis, his hand resting low on his stomach as though he either just finished or is getting ready to masturbate. But he lays there in utter stillness, his eyes wide open and blank. I questioned out loud whether he might be dead until a small eye movement broke the spell. The image is as erotic and frightening as anything Caravaggio might have painted, and it perfectly sets the tone for a film in which the “little death” of orgasm seems a longing for true annihilation.
I found the rituals of anonymous sex interesting, though certainly not unique in my film-going experience. A prostitute (MariAnge Ramirez) comes to Brandon’s apartment and counts out the cash he gives her, ending with a satisfied “OK.” When she starts to undress, he tells her to go slow as he watches. We see the same almost expression-free face in this encounter as we do when he is looking at porn on his computer. It’s just something he does, like checking his Facebook page or e-mail. I was also fascinated by Brandon the quiet predator. Early in the film, he locks eyes with a married woman (Lucy Walters) on the subway; she is clearly turned on by his gaze. She flirts wordlessly with him and gets him to pursue her off the train, disappearing before he can clear the crowd to reach her. Sexual longing is in her face, but his remains inscrutable, almost sociopathic and dangerous—a clear sexual turn-on for some women. In another example, Brandon is out with his married-but-flexible boss David (James Badge Dale) at a high-end bar. David tries to pick up a beautiful blonde (Elizabeth Masucci) who is out with two of her girlfriends, but he’s all bluster and blunder. He goes home blind drunk, and Brandon, who has said almost nothing all night, is propositioned by the blonde out on the street and screws her in an alley.
Shame is loaded with nudity and sex of nearly every stripe, but it is joyless sex, anti-erotic, in fact. Fassbender is handsome, inviting, but a complete puzzle. He tries to pick up a woman whose boyfriend is a mean-looking biker; he knows he’s going to get his ass kicked, and it’s pretty clear that’s what he’s looking for. During a threesome, McQueen isolates Brandon’s face when a look of anguish is plastered across it—virtually the only true emotion Fassbender allows to escape. His performance is courageous, committed, and will prove frustrating for viewers who want to know why he is how he is. Of course, if we knew that about sex addicts, then perhaps there would be many fewer of them.
Carey Mulligan’s casting in this film is rather baffling. She plays the kind of mess Jennifer Jason Leigh patented in her career, but the veneer does not sit comfortably on Mulligan’s kewpie-doll face. McQueen had to shoot her in harsh lighting to bring some tired lines to the surface, but in almost an apology for making her look puffy, he offers caressing close-ups of her singing a very slowed-down version of “New York, New York” at a downtown nightclub. This scene is clearly an attempt to make her into some kind of tragic Judy Garlandesque icon rather than reveal character, since that’s the only song she sings in a show Brandon and David make a special trip to see. Basically, I didn’t see any need for the character of Sissy to be in this film other than to provide a bit of plot.
Shame is a terrific-looking film, one I would expect from a talented film school graduate like McQueen. McQueen seems to be a fan of Italian cinema, evoking the documentary style of the Neorealists and the alienation of Antonioni’s oeuvre with his modernist cityscapes and portentously lit night scenes. But he didn’t quite figure out how to make his closely observed film add up. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the reason for Brandon’s addiction unexplained, leaving the title to stand for the emotion of the film, just as Melancholia stood for the atmosphere of depression in Lars von Trier’s 2011 film. Unlike von Trier, McQueen distances us from Brandon’s pain, choosing to show us the symptoms without allowing us to empathize. If it were not for Fassbender’s spellbinding portrayal of this tormented man, there would be nothing to hold onto at all. As much as I admire the craft of this film and acknowledge the talent it took to bring it to life on the screen, I’m not sure I took anything important away from it. And because I think McQueen meant me to, I have to count this as a near miss.
26th
11 -
2011
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4 comments »
Director: Steven Soderbergh
By Roderick Heath
Time advances, aesthetics shift, technologies update, morals and social maxims evolve, but some things remain constant. Especially movie clichés. The disaster movie, for instance, has hardly changed in form in more than six decades. You take a threat to a slice of, or all of, humanity, and pit against it characters from all walks of life who try to survive and/or nullify the threat. It’s a nifty generic conceit that allows storytellers to work at once on panoramic and microcosmic levels and tap into common anxieties and fantasies about what might happen when things go to hell. One subgenre located at the nexus of the disaster and science fiction movies is bi-fi, where a biological threat is the agent of destruction.
Bi-fi nominally exploits the wonder and terror in quite real and immediate concerns about potential pandemics, perceiving how the porous boundaries in our global village render us ever less insulated against such shocks. But it often tends to exploit other, less specific anxieties as well: that doctors, those virtual new priests of the modern world, might suddenly stop being able to offer us absolution from fear; that governments might gleefully let slip their most authoritarian impulses given half the chance and muster us all into neat rows to die; or that our neighbours, friends and we ourselves might, with the provocations of impending chaos, suddenly turn into marauding looters and killers when society starts crumbling. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, from a script by Scott Z. Burns, is immediately identifiable as belonging to the genre, and yet it possesses a veneer of the dispassionate analytical cinema Soderbergh turned on the likes of Traffic (2001) and Che (2008).
There’s no kind way to say that Contagion is one of the worst major recent films I’ve seen, so…that’ll have to do. The only wonder and terror Contagion generates is at the profligate expenditure of talent and the dizzying shapelessness of the filmmaking that can’t even rise to the level of the cheesiest ’70s all-star disaster flick or the average mid-’90s telemovie. I’ve confessed before my long-running distrust of Soderbergh’s oeuvre, and whereas Che made me consider laying down my arms, Contagion has me all guns blazing again. There’s something threatening about this terminally bland, unfocused, stake-free collage of reputable thespians achieving poses of mild concern in a procession of offices and labs, as if it presages an era in which, freed from the necessity engendered by shooting on real film, Hollywood’s technocrats can just slap together a project over the weekend and pass it off as a movie. Soderbergh directs with a pretence to docudrama spareness, and yet, as ever, I wonder if he’s ever watched a good one, so completely does he forget to include the “drama” half of the equation and so badly does he fumble the “docu” part. In Contagion, near-apocalyptic forces are unleashed, and yet even the few glimpses we get of chaos and dissolution are so neat and tritely staged that I seriously started to wonder if anyone in Hollywood knows what the rest of the world looks like, beyond the confines of select hotels and institutions.
Soderbergh, to his credit, kicks things off with some fast-paced montage work, as he introduces a Patient Zero, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), from whom a ripple of unintentional calamity spreads outwards. People she met in a Hong Kong casino, including a Ukrainian model (Daria Strokous) and a young local waiter (Chui Tien You), begin folding up and dying all around the world. After a stopover in Chicago for a quickie with a former boyfriend, Beth returns home to Minneapolis to her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), and her kids. She collapses in a fit in the kitchen and is rushed to hospital, where a postmortem reveals signs of a contagion so terrifying the pathologist tells his assistant to “call everyone!” The A-Team of medical science springs into action, as various health organisations rush to identify and find a solution to the disease, which begins to prove untreatable and fatal to a staggering number of the population. Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), a bigwig at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, contends first with the problem of arranging a response whilst worrying it might all prove to be another over-hyped menace.
Cheever sets Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) on the task of tracking the disease’s landfall in America and then arranging treatment and containment strategies. WHO official Dr. Leila Orontes (Marion Cotillard) tries to zero in on the source of infection, contending with obstructive Chinese officials, before finally being kidnapped by her liaison, Sun Feng (Chin Han), who feels obliged to try to use her as barter for a supposed secret cure the American and French governments are sitting on to save the remnants of his village. As the crisis worsens, Mitch, who’s immune, tries to weather the storms in the Minnesota suburbs as mass hysteria and mortality set in: after his stepson dies from the disease, he tries to keep his daughter Jory (Anna Jacoby-Heron) safe, fending off visits from her boyfriend Andrew (Brian J. O’Donnell). Meanwhile some plucky researchers, including CDC research wizards Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) and David Eisenberg (Demetri Martin), and Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould), a grizzled outsider who plays by his own rules, become the first to grow the microbes successfully and lay the groundwork for finding a vaccine.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a less convincing and compelling portrait of an international crisis than in this movie. Whilst Soderbergh is obviously trying to avoid the trashy hype of the likes of Outbreak (1995), he doesn’t succeed in filling his work with anything else that’s persuasive. The pretensions to realism are constantly undercut by the proliferation of famous movie actors playing characters with romance novel names, glimpsed in stodgy vignettes (some, like Martin and Gould, wasted to an astonishing degree). Any intended commitment to procedural integrity and continuity is quickly jettisoned as major plot elements, like Sussman’s and Hextall’s labours, are reduced to glib throwaways, in contrast with a ’30s biopic like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) that was able to develop not only a sense of process but also of drama in the process of trying to combat a microbe, not to mention a real classic of bi-fi like The Andromeda Strain (1970). There’s a far too cute piece of insta-exposition when the researchers manage to obtain security recordings that show Beth meeting several of the other infected people in pristine clarity and perfect situated detail.
In failing to deal interestingly with the disease itself, therefore, one might expect the real weight of Contagion’s interests to fall on another area, but instead it spreads itself so thinly that it communicates absolutely nothing with depth. There’s no continuity of mood or even detail from scene to scene: whilst there are occasional cutaways to shots of soldiers amassing to impose and maintain blockades, the film fails utterly to evolve a proper visual and thematic pattern of deepening crisis and desperate straits, as it doesn’t even seem able to decide on what level we should take the impact of the disease. Even in the brief vignettes of lawlessness and chaos glimpsed through Mitch’s eyes, there’s something stilted and antiseptic about the whole affair, with barely any sense of contiguity between the various story and character strands. Soderbergh’s idea of upsetting audience expectations is to give a shot of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head being peeled open in an autopsy. Any five minutes of George Romero’s The Crazies (1972) have more existential angst, ruthlessness, and bitter irony than the entirety of this addled slop.
Soderbergh can’t even decide how serious the problem he’s depicting is. While in one frame we’re seeing desperation and danger in the suburbs, as things around Mitch start to resemble The Omega Man (1972) or something, and rows of corpses are buried in mass graves a la The Devils (1971), in another we have our doctor heroes in their still perfectly functional labs looking like they just stepped out of the pages of a Vogue Oscar preview spread. Characters come and go with rapidity and jarring disconnection that borders on contempt for storytelling, for example, when Hextall’s doctor father (Dan Flannery), who falls sick after weeks of labouring with disease victims, is trucked in three-quarters of the way through the film in a rather limp stab at stirring emotional involvement for Hextall, who has taken an experimental vaccine to test its effectiveness. Even Irwin Allen’s terrible The Swarm (1978) manages to extract more drama out of such an act than this film does, failing as it does to shake Ehle’s Mona Lisa smile a fraction of a millimetre. For a film that seems to propose itself as being about detail and studying chains of cause and effect, Contagion looks and feels so segmented and disconnected that it ends up operating a bit like a terrorist organisation full of cells who have no idea what each other are up to. Soderbergh has long had pretences to being a politically conscious filmmaker, and yet his politics and methods of relaying them are hackneyed, and here they are so sketchy and silly as to beggar belief. In the cheesiest attempt to raise a sort of everything-is-connected consciousness I can possibly imagine, the very last scene is the worst in this regard, as Soderbergh returns to the actual process of the first contamination of a pig Beth eats as having resulted from the bulldozing of forest by the corporation for which Beth was an executive.
Along the way, there are portraits of the untrustworthiness of Asians on both the official and personal level, with the latter supposedly leavened by Leila’s eventual empathy and collusion with her kidnappers, as she is seen tutoring kids in Sun Feng’s village—maybe more third world villages should shanghai brilliant white women—and rushing back to them when she learns they’ve been given a placebo in exchange for her. Like many other things in the movie, but perhaps most representative, this subplot is so weakly developed and offhandedly treated that it results in head-scratching bewilderment as to what Soderbergh and Burns thought they were accomplishing. Jude Law contributes the film’s most hilariously awful element, playing blogger and freelance Aussie journalist Adam Krumwiedler, the first of what will undoubtedly be many gross caricatures of Julian Assange in movies, who spreads whipped-up stories about corruption, secret cures, and malfeasance via the internet—because the internet and especially bloggers are evil, don’t you know—and turns out to be trying to make money by flogging a product called Forsythia that falsely claims to be a cure for the disease. Soderbergh gives us repeated scenes of Krumwiedler, complete with crooked front teeth, meeting with a hedge fund rep, billed in the credits as “Hedge Fund Man in Park” (Randy Lowell) to give you an idea of the precision screenwriting that went into this aspect, selling him on helping him flog Forsythia to a populace whom Krumwielder manipulates with rumours and conspiracy theories. It’s the partnership of the hypocritical scare-mongering left and the greedy, feckless right we’ve all not been waiting to see in a movie. Speaking of scene progressions that fail to make sense: in one scene Krumwiedler’s wearing a full-body suit to avoid being infected, and yet soon after he’s back chatting to the Hedge Fund guy in a public place without any protection at all, making it utterly apparent Soderbergh shot these scenes contiguously without pausing to think about the psychological or practical considerations of these characters in the flow of such a situation.
Krumwiedler’s wickedness continues when he attempts to disgrace Cheever by uncovering how Cheever tried to get his wife (Sanaa Lathan) to leave Chicago, and, of course she, like all foolish wives, lets it slip to friends, and so on and so forth—not that this plot element has actual consequences apart from causing Fishburne’s affect of stony decency to become slightly stiffer during press conferences. That Cheever’s actually a decent bloke is illustrated through his conversations with cleaning man Roger (John Hawkes, who might have reasonably expected his Winter’s Bone work might elevate out of parts like this), to whose son he gives his own dose of the vaccine once it arrives, because, well, he’s just good that way. Krumwiedler and taciturn Asians are not the limits of the film’s shallow villains, for Mears also has to deal with a ludicrously nasty Minnesota Department of Health official (Tara Mallen) on the way. One of the film’s few moments of any incipient menace and tragedy comes when Mears awakens in a hotel room to find herself infected, and hurries to track down the hotel employees she may have passed it on to. She is later glimpsed lying with other victims in the disease centre she helped set up, but Soderbergh can’t wring any irony out of that, chiefly because he segues into another cheap piece of pseudo-irony, as Cheever learns he can’t extract her to bring her to the CDC’s better facilities because the plane used for this has commandeered for a sick congressman.
Damon’s part as the lone assailed Everyman in this scenario has rightly been regarded as the best element of the film: certainly Damon plays Mitch, who staves off grief and anger at the sudden loss of wife and stepson and discovery of her infidelity to get down to the hard necessities of survival, with his usual cagey skill. He’s particularly good in the moment when he’s told his wife has died, the reporting medicos stating it in such a dispassionate fashion he doesn’t register the fact and goes on to ask to see her. But even in his subplot, the only real street-level vignette of the movie, Contagion displays a woeful lack of challenging darkness or skill in staging. Mitch glimpses riots in supermarkets—one infected woman comes up to him and gives a stage cough that sets him shepherding Jory away again—and signs of murder and pillage in neighbouring houses. But the biggest problem he has to deal with is keeping Andrew away from his daughter, who pouts and pounds out her frustrations on her iPhone, thus reminding us that, as bloggers are evil, so, too, all modern teens are self-involved and tech-addled to the point where even a major modern disaster all around them won’t inspire them to get their heads out of their asses. The profundity just keeps on a-comin’, folks. Even some of the smaller bits of business are clichéd, like an early moment where an infected man wanders dazedly in front of a truck, this being the second recent movie in a row I saw with this scene in it.
Not very long into Contagion I began to think about Fernando Mireilles’s popularly dismissed Blindness (2008), which, whilst overlong and excessively self-conscious, nonetheless employed and explored much of the same imagery and situational dynamics as Soderbergh’s film, whilst actually managing to invest them with personal and philosophical weight, as well as a grinding corporeal effect. Contagion, whilst a nominally more “believable” and parable-free approach to such a calamitous story, actually startled me with the lack of substance, the lack of immediacy, the lack of any genuine thought-provocation, invested in it. One aspect that particularly struck me was the fashion in which Contagion recycles a motif from one of the earliest bi-fi movies, Val Guest’s 80,000 Suspects (1963), in which Yolande Donlan’s unfaithful wife is a Typhoid Mary spreading disease throughout London. The fascinating repetition of the association of adultery and female sexual transgression reveals that, under all the new-age hype and facile realism, very little has changed in the (probably unconscious) minds of many mainstream filmmakers. Contagion finally limps through to a final narrative phase where the threat dissipates and yet the movie steadfastly refuses to end until we get some unearned emotional milking (Mitch weeping for Beth at last, and Jory getting to dance with Andrew in a makeshift living room Prom Night). All that said, there are one or two scenes, as when Mears chases down one of Beth’s infected coworkers on a bus and particularly that in which Mears reports her own illness to Cheever, in which the strength of this high-caliber cast wasn’t wasted entirely—but not for want of trying. Soderbergh has reportedly been kicking about the idea of retiring. He should have done it sooner, because if this is what the end of the world looks like, we’ll go out with not a bang, but with a whimper of boredom.
23rd
11 -
2011
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2 comments »
Director: Rodrigo García
By Marilyn Ferdinand
“It’s lumpy.”
Those are the words hotel waiter Albert Nobbs (Glenn Close) uses to lie to his employer, Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins), about the condition of his mattress so he won’t have to share it with a temporary worker and risk revealing his secret—that Nobbs is actually a woman. Those are also the words that I would use to describe Albert Nobbs: there are a lot of great things about this film, but viewers can expect to roll over a few lumps while watching it.
Albert Nobbs, a passion project for Glenn Close, who did a stage version of the story in 1982 and not only stars in the film but also coproduced and cowrote it, is based on a short story by the great Irish writer George Moore. These days, Moore is not as famous a member of the Irish Literary Revival movement of the latter 19th and early 20th century as Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats, but he was a highly influential and controversial one. He brought English literature into the modern age by offering realism and sex, including homosexuality, in place of romanticism. “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs,” published in 1927, displays all of these elements in spades, offering an exploration of gender and social class roles and the more Irish-centered concerns of delayed adulthood and idealized motherhood.
Albert is a very buttoned-up, 40ish person, careful and economical in both word and deed. He remembers little touches, like putting roses on the dinner table of a particular hotel guest, and these actions garner him the steady tips he records carefully in a ledger and squirrels under a floorboard in his room. His hope is to leave the employ of others and open his own shop. He has even located the property he wants to buy in a rundown part of Dublin.
Albert’s modest plan gets a major kickstart when he discovers the temporary worker he failed to avoid sleeping with shares Albert’s secret: Hubert Page (Janet McTeer) is also a woman. The pair exchanges stories. Page left an abusive husband who gave her a broken nose as a permanent scar, donned his clothes, and made a good living as a house painter, work that would not have been available to a woman. Page moved in with Kathleen (Bronagh Gallagher), a milliner, to share living expenses, and when the neighbors started to talk, they got married. Albert believes he is the unacknowledged bastard of a gentleman and well-born mother who died when Albert was an infant. She was cared for by a Mrs. Nobbs, who gave her her treasured picture of her mother, but nothing more in the way of information. Mrs. Nobbs died when Albert was 14, and she was gang-raped by some young men. Determined to get out of the miserable conditions in which she lived, she bought a second-hand suit and was hired on as a waiter at a short-staffed restaurant. And that was it—Albert’s life as a man and a waiter began.
Meeting Hubert sets the repressed Albert’s imagination on fire. When he learns Hubert has a wife, he is desperate to find out how Hubert did it—did he tell Kathleen before or after they were married, innocent of the notion that such a thing as a lesbian could exist. He tracks them down, and they invite him in for tea and conversation. He decides he wants to sell tobacco when they question what his intentions for his shop will be, but Albert has never even rolled a cigarette, much less smoked one. Albert wonders if a woman could sell tobacco; Hubert says yes and suggests that Helen (Mia Wasikowska), a pretty, young maid in the hotel, would be great for the job.
That idea planted like a weed in manure, Albert decides that he will court and marry Helen; he imagines the façade of the shop, “A. Nobbs, Tobacconist” hovering over the entryway, and a door leading to a sitting room where Helen sits knitting before a hearth fire. However, Helen is carrying on a sexual affair with Joe (Aaron Johnson), another employee whose only wish is to go to America and leave behind his troubled past. It’s hard to know how a middle-aged, chaste, peculiar cross-dresser will win Helen, but therein lies some of the intrigue of Albert Nobbs.
Glenn Close inhabits Albert like the closely tailored suit and bowler he wears. Subtle make-up provides her with a dessicated look appropriate to someone whose emotional life has all but dried up. When Albert’s carefully circumscribed life starts to unravel, Close offers jewels of uncontrollable emotional release that are quite touching. For example, in one scene, Albert and Hubert each don dresses Kathleen made and take a walk. The initial comedy of seeing two women acting believably like awkward men in drag gives way to a burst of feeling as Close opens her arms and runs as the wind skims under her skirt and blows her shawl loosely around her, the tight corset concealing Albert’s breasts and close-fitting suit and tie abandoned for a time. In another scene, Dr. Holloran (Brendan Gleeson), the sympathetic house doctor, ruminates with Albert at a fancy dress ball for which only the hotel guests are costumed, “We are disguised as ourselves.” But who really is Albert? He barely makes a start at finding out and growing up before fate intervenes.
Still, Albert Nobbs has some problems. First, and less critically, the pacing is uneven. Director Rodrigo García’s background includes both episodic television and episodic films, and Albert Nobbs feels episodic as well. A typhoid epidemic that hits in the middle of the film puts in place one important plot point. One of the hotel’s maids and Albert become infected, and Mrs. Baker’s self-pity at being abandoned by her patrons and closed down is a good capsule of her character. But the incident is so rushed through that the scope of the devastation barely registers. Helen and Joe’s affair has some lyrical moments, such as when Helen goes into a yard hung with drying sheets looking for Joe, but the relationship is a bit clichéd and rather uninteresting. Johnson doesn’t make Joe a very compelling character; though we feel drawn to take his side when he is dismissed from a previous job for daring to knock snow on the feet of some rich guests, he never puts the mix of vulnerable and callous together into a combustible brew.
Wasikowska is better as a young woman who is doomed to scrape after a living in the same way that forced Hubert and Albert into disguise, and she shows a conscience about using Albert, a strange but likable colleague at the hotel. Her confusion about leaving with the sexually entrancing Joe or opting for the security of Albert is real, and her attempt to make Albert into a more palatable mate by trying to teach him to kiss passionately is more sad than humorous.
The failure to find enough humor in Albert Nobbs is the film’s greatest weakness. If any ethnic group exemplifies the twin masks of comedy and tragedy, it is the Irish. I hate to say it, but I don’t think the Colombian director really understood the comedy underlying this superficially tragic story. His social critique of male/female and upper/lower class relations is almost nonexistent, relying on exposition (e.g., Hubert and Albert telling their stories) rather than any blackly comic exchanges to make the point. Albert’s sexual naivete could have had more humorous consequences than Close flailing on a park bench when Wasikowska kisses her. Could there not have been some curiosity or naïve questioning of Hubert and Kathleen? After all, Albert is emotionally and experientially stuck in prepubescence, and such questioning would be funny, poignant, and appropriate.
The very end of the film, when Hubert sees a photo in Albert’s room and turns it over to find the word “Mother” written on the back, was very funny for me, but I honestly don’t think that was the intention. The film seemed determined to make Albert a tragic and pitiable figure who was robbed of an authentic life, and possibly wished to make points as a gay-friendly film as well. The truth is that Albert is a bit dim and fell into a masquerade that pokes great fun at the marriage-shy, mommy-fixated Irish lad of yesteryear. While I recommend this film unreservedly for its fine performances and period detail, it falls just a bit short of what it could have been.
21st
11 -
2011
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7 comments »
Director/Coscreenwriter: André Øvredal
By Marilyn Ferdinand
Like many other “pennyheads” from “The Land of Lincoln,” when I want to get away from the urban bustle of Chicago, I look to the north. Wisconsin holds many delights for urbanites looking for an uncluttered landscape that still offers high-quality creature comforts—the North Woods for outdoor activities like fishing, cross-country skiing, and snowmobiling; artisan cheeses and beers, including one beer so desirable that a New York City bar owner lost his license and was fined $250,000 for selling it; and charming towns that cater to the tourist trade by peddling their heritage for fun and profit.
One such hamlet is Mount Horeb, home to about 7,000 people of mostly German and Norwegian ancestry. Until it moved to the Madison suburb of Middleton in 2009, the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum—in reality a shop where I used to stop to buy some of the hundreds of unusual mustards they stock—was the town’s big claim to fame. However, even before it lost the museum, in fear that the US 18/151 bypass would kill the downtown retail district, the town decided to market itself in a new way. Playing up the Norwegian part of its ancestry, Mount Horeb became the self-professed Troll Capital of the World. A number of businesses have put “troll” in their names, and Schubert’s Diner and Bakery, the most popular breakfast place in town and a must for visitors, is liberally decorated with trolls of every size and type.
The trolls are amusing and a bit nostalgic for anyone who received, as I did, a troll doll to play with when they were young. But following a viewing of Trollhunter, some might think twice about visiting Mount Horeb. Despite the mordant, self-deprecating humor on display, director André Øvredal manages to find a Cloverfield kind of horror movie inside this Norwegian mockumentary that offers audiences some real moments of dread.
Farmers near the Norwegian town of Volda have been plagued with livestock killings, and Finn Haugen (Hans Morten Hansen) from the Nature Management ministry has been sent to investigate. Amateur documentarians from the local university in Volda, Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen), are on the case, too. After pursuing Haugen, the trio notices a craggy man who seems to be everywhere Haugen is. After the discovery of the corpse of a bear blamed for the attacks—not killed on the spot, as Haugen tells the media, but obviously dumped there—the filmmakers smell a rat and begin following the man as he drives his beat-up Range Rover hauling an even more beat-up trailer to his encampment.
Despite his repeated brush-offs, they follow him into a wooded area, see some bright flashes of light among the trees, and then find themselves running for their lives after Hans screams “TROLL!!!” Their quarry, Hans (Otto Jespersen), finally decides to open up about his activities by introducing them to his quarry—trolls. Warning them that following him is dangerous, he agrees to talk about his work in order to expose the scorched-earth policy the Norwegian government, and specifically the TSS (Troll Security Service), has towards trolls. The rest of the film follows Hans and the film crew as they scour the countryside in search of trolls that have broken out of their territories and pose a threat to human populations.
Trollhunter is a dead-on mockumentary that creates its own relatively believable universe within the confines of troll and hero mythology. The film crew is initially skeptical about the existence of trolls, even after Thomas is bitten by one, and, incidentally, patched up with the universally useful duct tape. They greet the sight of a huge three-headed troll that is felling trees with a mere push of its hand with jubilant amazement, while Hans tells them that two of the heads are actually growths the troll uses to attract females and scare other trolls fighting for territory; the trolls, the film tells us, are animals, not oddly shaped people, and that they have territories just like wolves or bears. They can be killed by exposure to sunlight, which turns the older ones to stone and causes younger trolls to explode. Amusingly, a forensic scientist (Urmila Berg-Domaas) explains this reaction by asserting how intolerance to Vitamin D causes the two different molecular reactions in the troll’s body. Unlike the often-preposterous science in many horror/scifi films, this explanation sounds plausible, which shows the care with which Øvredal constructed his universe, and forms one of the links in a carefully forged chain that sucks us into believing the story.
Another part of troll mythology that gets a humorous workout is their supposed connection with dark paganism. Hans asks the students if they are Christian or believe in God—if so, the trolls will be able to smell them, even if they are cloaked in the putrid “troll scent” Hans gives them to rub all over themselves. When we see one of the crew members rubbing himself furiously with scent while hiding in a cave from some mountain trolls, his terrible secret (“I’m Christian!”) is revealed. He doesn’t fare well among the mountain trolls; his replacement is a Muslim, about which the mythology makes no mention. Hans says cavalierly, “I don’t know. Let’s give it a try!” It’s a funny send-up of belief systems, but also makes us nervous about what will happen to the replacement, thus ratcheting up the suspense.
The film also makes clever use of the physical landscape to advance its story. For example, the filmmakers make note of the power grid, which Hans explains is electrified fencing for the trolls—a hilarious assertion that could feed the mind of a conspiracy theorist for weeks. Trees that have been blown down by storms become convenient props to show that a troll was in the area. After Hans turns a troll to stone with one last blast of light from his “light saber,” he blasts it to bits with some land mines; thereafter, scattered rocks take on the aura of being troll remains.
Jespersen is excellent as Norway’s only trollhunter, a solitary ex-serviceman with no real life outside of his work (perhaps because he and his trailer stink of troll from the skins he has hung inside for camouflage?). In one scene in which he tries to extract blood from a rabid troll, he wears a jerry-rigged suit of armor, looking like low-rent version of a medieval knight of myth and legend. He goes after errant trolls in workmanlike fashion, deploring one government-ordered massacre within troll territory like a worn-out, disillusioned Indian fighter in an American Western. In a brief glimpse, the crew members see Hans without his shirt, his back cross-hatched with scar tissue. Again, the story is ridiculous, but Øvredal knows how to build suspense for the horror half of his film that keeps us with him all the way.
The film crew members seem like believable college kids, excited by their adventure at the same time as they are taking their role as reporters oh so seriously. Thomas doggedly pursues Hans after he has told them to get lost, and Kalle says from behind the camera that maybe they should give up. Thomas retorts, “Would Michael Moore give up if he didn’t get the story on the first try?” Almost simultaneously, the hubby and I had the same thought: No, he’d just make up something and call it a movie. It was a funny joke for us, but I’m not sure Øvredal was going for that punchline.
The camerawork of Hallvard Bræin is absolutely brilliant. Norway’s breathtaking scenery, cascading waterfalls, atmospheric snow fields are pure eye candy in front of his steady, albeit handheld, lens. He switches to the green haze of a night-vision camera for many of the great troll effects. Every scene that contains a troll is exciting, a little funny, and seemingly real. I genuinely bought into the reality of these creatures and the danger they represented to our stalwart crew.
Still, the real villain of the piece is (of course) Finn Haugen. The more the students wonder why the public is being kept in the dark about the TSS, the more threatening he becomes. Clownishly trying to explain why a Russian bear, its tongue sticking out like a cartoon creature, was found in Norway (a hilarious bit with a Polish delivery crew that supplied the bear “under the table” has to be seen to be appreciated), he turns into a bigger danger for the camera crew than the 200-foot-tall troll they just saw Hans dispatch. The obligatory title cards at the beginning and end of the film about the circumstances under which the footage that makes up Trollhunter was found, and pleas to help authorities locate the students shown in the film, give this horror film the mock/ironic edge that makes it so biting and fun.
Nonetheless, on the off chance that trolls do roam the earth, I’m going to write to the Norwegian authorities and suggest they search in Mount Horeb.
14th
11 -
2011
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9 comments »
Director/Screenwriter: Lars von Trier
By Marilyn Ferdinand
Melancholia, the film that garnered for its star, Kirsten Dunst, the award for best leading actress at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, has been finding both appreciative praise for its beauty and depth and indifferent and openly hostile reactions from audiences and critics alike for being slow, impenetrable, and just another uninspired investigation into Lars von Trier’s depression. While Melancholia is a quieter and more ordinary film in many respects than much of von Trier’s output, it shows a certain maturity in the way the director treats his twin obsessions of depression and the sorry lot of women in this world. He seems finally to have been able to put his bag of cherry bombs away and find a narrative that deals with these problems realistically.
Realistically? The film invents a planet called Melancholia that moves cometlike through our solar system and threatens to collide with Earth; it and its “dance of death” are “authenticated” by coming up in a Google search. However, if you accept von Trier’s statement that this is not really a scifi film about the end of the world, but rather a film about a state of mind, it’s easier to see this as a sensitive gestalt exercise by the director to locate the sources of his problems and attempt to exorcise them.
For von Trier, the bond between mother and child is the most beautiful and sacred, and disruptions to that bond have catastrophic consequences, often as the result of that love. We all know what happened to the children of Medea (1988) as a result of the ruthlessness of her husband Jason. In The Kingdom (1994/1997), Judith’s love for her bizarre baby, the product of impregnation by the devil, displaces any fear she might have of her baby’s physical repulsiveness and supernatural growth. In Dancer in the Dark (2000), a mother sacrifices her life for her son, perhaps without needing to.
And now we have Melancholia, which shows us both the positive and negative aspects of motherhood, and tellingly, of fatherhood as well, and how painful they each can be for children. In Part 1: Justine, the stunningly beautiful Justine (Dunst) has just gotten married. She is late getting to her wedding reception at her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law John’s (Kiefer Sutherland) massive estate because the stretch limo that carries her and her new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) is having trouble navigating the snaking approach road. With this symbol of a difficult birth at the outset, we are then confronted at the reception by Justine’s feckless father Dexter (John Hurt) and her mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling), a version of Sleeping Beauty’s wicked witch who basically lays a curse on the marriage in her crazed hatred of her ex-husband and the institution of marriage. Justine starts to unravel, her father takes a powder, and by the end of the evening, her union with Michael is over.
Part 2: Claire focuses on the approach of Melancholia in its “fly-by” of Earth. John, an amateur astronomer, is thrilled by this celestial phenomenon and shares his excitement with his young son Leo (Cameron Spurr). Claire is frightened that the planet will strike the Earth, a notion John dismisses with the full weight of scientific calculations behind him. Into this tenuous situation comes Justine, dull-eyed, mousey, and so depressed she can barely walk. She hopes that Melancholia destroys the “evil” Earth, thus wiping out all life in the universe—Justine claims she “knows” things and that Earth alone is inhabited. Claire, trembling with fright, buys pills she can use to overdose the entire family, while at the same time wondering where Leo will grow up if their planet is pulverized. When it does indeed appear that Melancholia turns out not to be “friendly,” as Claire says when the crisis appears to be over, she discovers that John has taken all the pills, leaving nothing for her and Leo. She frightens Leo by saying there is no escape, but Justine gives him back a ray of hope by building with him a magic cave of tree branches under which she, Leo, and Claire sit holding hands, waiting for their heavenly kiss.
What, then, is Melancholia? Von Trier offers a hallucinatory synopsis of the film to come with an ultra-slo-mo preamble of Claire holding Leo and sinking into the golf course their home overlooks, of Justine tangled in heavy yarn and skimming the surface of water in her wedding gown, of birds falling from the sky, of worlds crashing. It is as though the director were offering up a dream he had at the very beginning of the film, and then presenting us with his corporealization of his unconscious material—the gestalt of his anxieties and preoccupations. As such, both halves of his film constellate his concerns about families, showing the damage inadequate parents do to their children, and both the terrorizing and seductive aspects of depression itself.
For example, when Michael leaves the estate, Justine sends him off coldly with, “What did you expect?” Indeed, what did he expect from someone whose parents never gave her a positive image of marriage and who actively worked to destroy her happiness on this day? Her fragile ego was absolutely no match for them, and Michael wisely packed it in before he got caught in the maelstrom of their messed-up lives. Justine identifies with Leo, an only child in a house so large and isolated that he could be lost in it for days; there don’t seem to be more than a couple of servants to tend to the vast estate or the lives inside it. In dream psychology, the house is the symbol for the self, and this self is beautiful, but largely empty of life.
Claire is a loving mother, but she, too, came from the same damaged family as Justine. It is entirely possible that the approach of Melancholia is, in fact, her plunge into a soul-crushing depression. Notice that as she walks across one of the greens of the golf course, the pin flag reads “19,” a telling detail that picks up John’s repeated questioning of Justine about how many holes are on his golf course—18. Thus, we can’t take the events of Part 2 at face value even if we were to see this film as science fiction. And so, the Justine who tells Claire that her plan to go out nicely with a glass of wine on the terrace is shit could very well be a projection, and the horses who were nervously bucking in the stable suddenly going quiet as Melancholia looms at its largest in the sky could be Claire deciding to let go and fall down the rabbit hole. In a previous scene, she saw a naked Justine laying in a beautiful, forested area, looking at Melancholia in erotic bliss; could depression really be this beautiful and fulfilling? Most reviewers of this film have commented on the use of the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde throughout the film. The music is mournful, in keeping with the tragic love of the title characters, and Wagner preferred to refer to the prelude as the “liebestod,” or love-death. It’s certain that love and death are intimately connected in this film, whether of the body or the spirit, and Claire is flirting dangerously with it.
Von Trier isn’t the subtlest of filmmakers, but some people’s dreams are fairly straightforward (mine, for example). To prevent his vision from seeming trite, he surrounds himself with the best actors and knows how to get them to inhabit their roles with preternatural ferocity. I honestly don’t know what or how Kirsten Dunst made Justine breathe with the kind of magnetism mentally ill people generate, but she is astonishing and mesmerizing, by turns hateful, pitiable, sweet, and morose. It was interesting to see the father-son team of Stellan and Alexander Skarsgård fight for Justine’s attention, the former as her overbearing boss, the latter as her hunky, simple husband, but it did add a dimension of familial dysfunction to the proceedings. Gainsbourg did a nice job of falling to pieces, her more controlled facade to Justine’s angry intemperance an easily breachable wall, her anger limited to a simple “sometimes I really hate you, Justine.”
Melancholia is a long day’s journey into night that merges the beauty and horror of depression through its committed point of view, full-bodied performances, and precise visual sensibility. In backing away from his usual histrionics, Lars von Trier shows his serious and sincere desire to engage thoughtfully with his subject. My hat’s off to him.
11th
11 -
2011
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10 comments »
Director: Lloyd Bacon
By Marilyn Ferdinand
Well, I’m back in the saddle here at Ferdy on Films after a vacation to Paris, which included a visit to that temple of cinema, the Cinémathèque Française; I got a load of their fascinating Metropolis exhibit and viewed Fritz Lang’s Der Müde Tod (1921), with its German intertitles and French subtitles (!). Rod did an admirable job of paying homage to Halloween with his extraordinary run of horror film essays while I was away; I’m sure you’ll agree that no one writes about horror like Rod!
My return here today coincides with Veterans Day, a name change from Armistice Day that reflects the fact that World War I did not turn out to be the war to end war. It seems sadly naïve that the British believed they had reached such a pinnacle of civilization that they could fight one last war, triumph, and see the world attain the utopian harmony they believed the British Empire to be. In the spirit of both that naïveté and an event that would shatter it definitively, I have chosen to commemorate this holiday with a peacetime military film, Here Comes the Navy, the first of the nine pairings of James Cagney and Pat O’Brien and one set on the ill-fated USS Arizona. The last time I saw the Arizona, it was under the memorial in Pearl Harbor, still spewing oil 50 years after being sunk. Seeing its impressive profile on the water, its decks alive with swabbies and officers, hit me the same way viewing the Twin Towers in older films does—with a deep pain at the purposes and costs of war.
The need for discipline and unity is one thing that Biff Martin (O’Brien), an officer on the Arizona, tries to get through to Chesty O’Connor (Cagney), a seaman second class who only joined the Navy so he could square a beef with Martin that developed on shore. Chesty is sore that Martin cut in on his dance with his girl Gladys (Dorothy Tree) at a San Pedro nightclub and punched his lights out when Chesty was distracted by Gladys yelling from a window. Gladys takes up with Biff, whom she visits on the Arizona after Chesty loses the fight, sending Chesty to the nearest recruiting station. Rather than be sent directly to the Arizona, he’s surprised to learn he must go through 90 days of basic training, where he meets his comic sidekick Droopy Mullins (Frank McHugh). Both eventually are posted to the Arizona and the ongoing battle between Chesty and Biff moves into high gear as Chesty offers turnabout by “stealing” the girl Biff brings on board, actually Biff’s sister Dorothy (Gloria Stuart).
It is interesting to see the development of the personae Cagney and O’Brien will slip into in picture after picture. Unlike a film like Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), the men aren’t boyhood friends who tragically took opposite paths in life—Cagney plays an unforgiving, unrepentant sharp who hates not only Biff, but also naval discipline and the sheeplike obedience of his shipmates. Cagney assumes the hard, sarcastic look and attitude of Tom Powers, his ice-cold character in The Public Enemy (1931), mitigating it only when interacting with the buffoonish Droopy and the classy Dorothy. Still, he gets a chance to offer some comic lines from this film’s fine screwball script, and his flirtation with Dorothy as he walks her home is classic cocksure Cagney dripping with innuendo (slapped down rather seriously when Dorothy resists his seduction after he has misunderstood the intent of her invitation to dinner at her home). His vulnerability comes out ever so slightly when his shipmates shun him for mocking the Navy, and he even gets a chance to show off his eccentric dance technique in the opening nightclub scene.
O’Brien’s halo hadn’t been gilded yet, and he plays a naval officer who brawls when off-duty and ungentlemanly steals someone else’s girl and clocks an opponent when his back is turned. His insane attempt to hold down a dirigible by hanging onto one of its guide ropes sets up a thrilling finale for the film, as Chesty slides down the rope and parachutes the two of them to a hard landing. When Chesty is given rank above O’Brien for the rescue, it doesn’t come as a big surprise; O’Brien really comes off as inept and hard to respect, signaling perhaps the differences in the real O’Brien, the party animal, and Cagney, the withdrawn, teetotaling homebody.
For me, the fascinating aspects of life on board the Arizona trumped the predictable, if nicely executed story. I enjoyed seeing the men stringing up and sleeping in hammocks, and the naval costumes had a certain retro dapperness to them. During practice maneuvers, Chesty and other seamen practice loading the big guns that move in unison to fire on enemy ships and planes. We see real explosions and learn that Chesty and his shipmates are loading burlap bags of gunpowder into the cannons, setting up a fire scene in which Chesty is injured putting the fire out. If this practice actually was standard in the Navy, it certainly was mind-bogglingly reckless!
What also intrigues are preparations for the annual Navy Day show that caps the film, a type of event that still takes place in many places as air and water shows. The film shows biplanes taking off and a dirigible being moved out of its hangar and flying to the site of the event, a reminder that military air power in 1934 was hardly well developed. I was confused by the presence of African-American sailors on the Arizona, knowing that the period between the world wars marked one of the lowest for African-American participation in the armed forces. These characters were needed to forward a plan Chesty has to get off the ship to see Dorothy by buying a liberty pass from Cookie (Fred “Snowflake” Toones), an offensively stereotypical character, prompting the only occasion I can think of in which Cagney appeared in blackface. (UPDATE: Cagney also appeared in blackface in a Four Cohans act in Yankee Doodle Dandy.) It seems unlikely that the presence of black sailors reflected reality aboard the Arizona, but something about this fantasy integration pleased me quite a bit.
Gloria Stuart, known these days only for her appearance as an ancient survivor of the Titanic in Titanic (1997), was a first-rate love interest for Cagney, holding her own with his banter and bravado and generating some interesting chemistry. I particularly liked a scene where the pair argues about Biff reporting Chesty for going AWOL. Chesty resumes his tough-as-nails veneer as he breaks it off with Dorothy, but she stands firmly, if regretfully, by her belief in the doing one’s duty.
Unlike a lot of films, I thought Here Comes the Navy wrapped up its story beautifully. A running gag about Droopy needing to buy his mother some false teeth so that she can keep her job in the church choir resolves as Mother Mullins (Maude Eburne) sings “Oh Promise Me” at Chesty and Dorothy’s wedding. Mother’s offkey sincerity provides the perfect counterpoint to the scrappy partnership that was first forged between James Cagney and Pat O’Brien in this muscular comedy.
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