This is Spinal Tap

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2007)

A few months ago I was giving a presentation, to an audience made up mainly of people I knew. I said I would talk for about ten minutes, and then something struck me and I said very deliberately, “Actually for about eleven minutes. This – one –goes – to – eleven – minutes.” And thereby, for a handful of listeners at least, I was king for a day, because I had achieved the much-discussed but seldom-achieved gold standard, to incorporate a verbatim reference to This Is Spinal Tap into an official proceeding.

This One Goes To Eleven

Actually my memory of the film was vague at best, and on viewing it again recently I see that I was slightly misinformed, for the line is actually “These go to eleven.” No matter, I was close enough. And certainly the scene in question, in which a dopey rock guitarist rhapsodizes about amplifiers on which the dial reaches one higher than the normal ten, deserves some commemoration once in a while. Although maybe I would have been even better advised to reference the scene in which the rockers’ intended epic staging of their number “Stonehenge” is undermined by a monument that’s only 18 inches high, considerably shorter than the dwarves that are meant to jig around in its shadow. Or else any number of deadpan non-sequiturs.

Some readers will already be lost, so I should rewind. This Is Spinal Tap, made in 1982, is a fake documentary about a British heavy metal band on a tour of America. Once modestly successful, they’ve now fallen on harder times – concerts are being canceled due to poor sales, other venues are patently unsuitable (one of several nadirs being the gig where they take second billing to a puppet show). Meanwhile their new album Smell The Glove is caught up in fights about the provocative cover art. Despite all this, the band retains an almost serene faith in their own artistry and the glory of the rock life. This is helped of course by the fact that they’re all pretty dumb.

Rob Reiner

The three main members of the group are David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls, played respectively by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer. Those three actors wrote the script for the film, along with Rob Reiner, who also appears as the director of the film within the film. This was Reiner’s directing debut, and it’s interesting to consider how much of the film’s success is his – after all, Guest has honed this style over several subsequent movies (up to last year’s For Your Consideration) without catching quite such a wave again. Spinal Tap was honed down (like all of Guest’s subsequent movies) from many hours of footage, and my guess is that Reiner’s more traditional comic instincts steered this culling process in a somewhat more conventional direction than the increasingly esoteric Guest has generally followed.

Analyzing career trajectories is a hopeless endeavour, but it’s interesting to see a symbiosis here, for Reiner’s next few movies, although never exactly challenging, put him on top of the mainstream pile for a while: The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men. I doubt I’ll ever have any desire to watch any of those films again, but you have to admit that’s a mighty safe pair of hands, and someone other than just a button-pusher. I think being immersed in Spinal Tap for a year or two may have juiced Reiner up pretty well. But it wore off, or maybe all the talk about his political prospects got to him, for his most recent three films were Rumor Has It…, Alex & Emma, and The Story Of Us. I haven’t seen two of those, and neither have you I imagine, or at least if you have, you probably don’t remember. But it’s the kind of inoffensive, incremental, irrelevant slate of work a US senator would produce!

Evoking The Life

I enjoyed watching This Is Spinal Tap again, but I do have difficulty understanding quite why it occupies such cult status. According to Wikipedia it’s number 64 on Bravo’s “100 Funniest Movies” and was selected for preservation in the US Library of Congress. In common with many test-of-time films, it didn’t do particularly well when it first appeared – suffering from, says Wikipedia, “the failure of many viewers to understand that it was not a real documentary.” Well, who knows – makes for a good story anyway. But I think the key here is the choice of milieu. Guest subsequently got some good laughs out of amateur theatrics and dog shows (and somewhat less from parodying Hollywood itself) but even people who actually do amateur theatrics and dog shows know you can only take it so seriously (unless they really need their balloon pricked) so I don’t know how resonant that can ever really be. Whereas heavy metal, whatever you and I might think of it, is an indelible institution. It is, to more than enough people to create a cult, perhaps the prototypical cool existence.

The appeal of Spinal Tap I think is as much in evoking the life as in parodying it. The band may be going through a rougher patch, but you think they’re still not following a better deal than ninety five per cent of the audience? They have the thing we might all wish for and which consciousness denies us, obliviousness. And daily validation. Last Christmas I was at my brother’s house, where the main attraction was the “Guitar Hero” Playstation game – you assume the stance, strut along on the guitar in sync with cues on the screen and if you don’t screw up too much the virtual crowd goes wild. My brother and his friend “practice” Guitar Hero all the time, although I suspect this is less about the game’s technicality than about mastering the stance and flourish (he’s got it down pretty well). Metal may be overdone, sexist, boorish, pretentious, and a multitude of other sins, and its performers may be increasingly aging and rather tawdry, but the genre remains closer to epic religiosity than any other branch of rock – its codes and patented moves now embodying delirious fulfillment. Spinal Tap couldn’t possibly be as enduring if they didn’t capture this so successfully, and then humanize it.

Or maybe it’s Guest’s inane monologue about how, if he weren’t a guitarist, he’d work at a haberdasher’s. Or Paul Shaffer as a lousy publicity agent, begging them to kick his ass. Or the sheer ludicrous perfection of the lyrics. I tell you, on the comedy scale, this one goes to eleven. Sure, the scale I’m using reaches to fifteen. But hey, eleven’s pretty darn good.

Making that world

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is a beautifully crafted jewel of a film, a complete pleasure to watch, but ultimately subject to the inherent limitations of any beautifully crafted jewel, that you can’t ultimately do much with it except put it back in the box. It’s summer in the mid-60’s, on a group of islands off the coast of New England; an orphaned pre-teen boy, Sam, runs away from his scout group to hike across some old Indian trails with a local girl, Suzy, who became his soul-mate at first sight. The other scouts, her parents and the local cop all head off after them; if they’re caught, he’ll be removed to the mainland orphanage, perhaps separating them forever.

Wes Anderson

I know my first sentence swung rapidly from enthusiasm to dismissiveness, but that’s the most accurate way I have of summing it up. When I came out of the movie (which elicited a rare ripple of applause from the Varsity audience), I felt completely happy and elevated, but I also had no idea what I was ever going to write about it. I mean, I could describe this scene or that scene, or say how I particularly like this bit or that bit, but where would that ultimately get you or me? For all its strengths, Anderson’s cinema doesn’t add to our sense of the world or of ourselves as the most significant films (at least as measured by my criteria) do; he just doesn’t see himself as that kind of artist.

In a recent Salon interview he put it this way: “My kind of movie — the kind I’ve always been interested in making — are ones where part of it is that we’re inventing a setting where I hope the audience has never been before. Part of the experience of the movie is going into this world, and the characters are a part of the world. They’re a part of what is making that world.” He’s proven his facility at refining these invented environments, and cinema wouldn’t exist without such dreamers – the trip to the Moonrise Kingdom doesn’t perhaps fall so far from Georges Melies’ voyages to the moon and to subterranean fairy kingdoms. But then Scorsese’s Hugo recently reminded us of how easily the world lost its taste for Melies’ visions.

Moonrise Kingdom

All of that said, although Moonrise Kingdom might sound in outline like a rather regressive project – eschewing the mainland, the present day, and to a great extent adulthood – it carries a rather moving sense of melancholy and regret. Suzy’s parents, both lawyers (occasionally addressing each other as “Counsellor”) have long fallen out of love it seems; she dallies with another man, and he seems to have had all the colour drained out of him. Likewise, the cop is lonely and almost affectless, and the scout master (who composes his daily log over a cigarette and a stiff drink) just bleeds a desire to count for more than his profession as a high school math teacher seems to allow him (the scouts actually seem like a godsend for Anderson, bringing along their weird rituals and iconography, and their sense of an idealism that no doubt seems naïve and archaic now, but embodies an honest desire for community and a kind of clarity). And even the two children have the least heady “love” affair you’ll ever see on screen – the magic of their relationship consists in large part of its matter-of-factness, which Anderson rather magically manages to keep from seeming like a mere stunt (you might find his approach to some aspects surprisingly frank).

In previous reviews, I’ve summed up Anderson’s familiar style as being defined by, among other things, distinctive fonts, bright colours, slow pans, chapter headings, a stark use of close-ups alternating with a “figures in a landscape” approach to framing elsewhere, a certain laconic terseness in the dialogue, an avoidance of over-emoting, and left-field musical choices. When I reviewed The Darjeeling Limited a few years ago, I said it all “has the effect of draining the flavour from everything he looks at.” I didn’t like that film, about three brothers on a “spiritual journey: his view of India seemed to me just another source of gimmicks and bric-a-brac, presented without a shred of real engagement or integrity (I think I liked his earlier work – especially Rushmore I guess - more at the time, but it hasn’t had much staying power with me). The familiar style hasn’t changed here, but it certainly didn’t rub me up that same way. The opening credits play over a tour of Suzy’s house, as her brothers listen to Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra – it has the appearance almost of a giant doll’s house, but Anderson’s shot-making is too precise to connote play, feeling almost scientifically rigorous. Britten’s record (combining stirring music with a narrative guide to how it’s all done) reinforces that sense of investigation and instruction, as do the repeated head-on shots of Suzy looking through her binoculars (the film also has a narrator, who at various points instructs us in such matters as weather patterns and crop yields).

Rear Window?

In some ways the set-up reminded me of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but the intent isn’t voyeuristic – there’s nothing furtive about the act of seeing here, because this is a world that comes most alive from being observed. This is the glory of signature Anderson shots such as the sight that greets Sam and Suzy when they open their tent one morning, raised on a narrow strip of beach: they encounter what seems like half the cast arrayed before them, perfectly arranged across the frame. You wouldn’t want to change a single detail of such shots: if Anderson wasn’t a filmmaker, he could have single-handedly reignited the art of window-dressing.

Anyway, I was already feeling more positive about Anderson because of his previous film, the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox, which seemed to me a rather wonderfully peculiar fantasy (and rather oddly, his most fully realized examination of a fully complex community), and Moonrise Kingdom certainly continues this upward evaluation. Really, there’s nothing about it not to like. It’s hard for example to see Anderson as a great director of actors exactly, certainly not if that means “drawing them out” as the phrase goes – this is why the inscrutable Bill Murray is so vital to his universe. But the new film’s cast – including Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton – is pitch-perfect, and very well-integrated. And the film has any number of grace notes and moments of sweetness that I haven’t mentioned. In fact, the longer I keep writing this article, I realize that maybe I’m not in such a hurry to put the movie back in the box after all.

Malpertuis

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2008)

Had I seen the 1971 film Malpertuis before I recently bought it on DVD? I don’t know. Maybe I saw it on late night TV, twenty-five or thirty years ago, in some butchered version, perhaps under its alternative, graceless title The Legend of Doom House. I’m sure I once saw the trailer at least, or is it rather that I saw the trailer for a film called Necromancy, which was made around the same time, also with Orson Welles? Maybe I’m just remembering long-ago dreams, built from images of Welles and trips to Belgium and fears of old dark houses. Maybe it’s from someone else’s parallel dreams that the film emerged in the first place.

Harry Kumel

I know I had seen director Harry Kumel’s most famous film, Daughters ofDarkness, which I remember for its impressive sickly grandeur. I didn’t know much about Kumel, but I imagined him a mysterious, rather grand figure, constrained by some misfortune – perhaps even supernatural in origin – to spend his career in the shadows (having now seen him interviewed on one of the DVD extras, I can confirm that this impression was a little off). His films of the last 35 years are almost entirely unknown, and there’s been virtually nothing anyway since 1991. The films we do know seem to be resisting the temptation to collapse in on themselves. It’s tempting to see the confusion of titles as an expression of chronic evasiveness, as if they were vampires fleeing from the dawn. Daughters of Darkness, according to the IMDB, has also been known at times as Children ofThe Night, Erzebeth, Blood on the Lips, The Promise ofRed Lips, The Redness of the Lips, and The Red Lips!

Malpertuis, set in some unspecified bygone time, tells of Jan, a sailor who's knocked out in a brawl while on shore leave, and wakes up back in the vast, creepy house (Malpertuis) of his domineering uncle Cassavius, played by Welles. Cassavius is dying, and his will dictates that his relatives and hangers-on’s entitlement to their share of his fortune depends on their never leaving Malpertuis, with the last survivor among them inheriting everything. The group duly follows suit, becoming increasingly eccentric and weird, while Jan creeps around the house’s many dark corners in search of its secrets.

David Lynch

The film’s first half is relatively conventional, and during the middle section I was getting a little bored at times (although there’s always enough incident, some of it distinctly hokey, to keep you going), anticipating a potentially underwhelming whodunit kind of outcome. This categorically does not happen. The film suddenly lunges in an astonishing new direction, completely reinventing our understanding of the people we’re watching, then briefly suggesting it might have been a dream before plunging us back in, providing a crazily brilliant explanation for it all, and then ending on a final chapter set in the then-present day (or maybe that’s a dream too, in the mind of a character located elsewhere again). The revelation is highly mythic – it’s the kind of concept that we associate now with the films of M. Night Shyamalan (although I'm not comparing him with Kumel in any other way). It’s nuts of course, and it doesn’t do much to explain many of the specific incidents that went before it, but it’s undeniably grand.

More than the wretched Shyamalan, I found myself thinking of David Lynch, and Inland Empire in particular. Kumel’s film ends on a quote from Lewis Carroll -“Life, what is it but a dream” - and at that point it’s clear that any ending will be merely provisional, that Jan’s real fate may be an endless series of awakenings, demises and reinventions – something that marks him as a precursor to Laura Dern’s character in Lynch’s film. Whereas Inland Empire has Lynch’s customary brooding ominous quality, Kumel’s visuals are sharp and bright. Mathieu Carriere, the actor playing Jan, has a sculptured quality, and always seems objectified – whereas Dern had a surfeit of contradictory, ever-renewable motivation, he’s always a mystery. We don’t know if his actions are at all self-directed, or whether he’s merely carrying out a role in some impossibly complex pre-ordained drama. Ultimately it’s not clear whether he’s even human. Meanwhile, Susan Hampshire plays four parts in the film – a strategy which can be analyzed in fairly obvious terms, but which plainly adds to the sense of artifice.

Orson Welles

This isn’t to say that the film feels particularly modern. Michael Atkinson on the IFC blog refers to it as an “expression of a kind of 1960s-70s lawless filmmaking — well-funded and targeting a large counter-culture audience, but still often outrageously ridiculous.” It’s from that age of Euro productions where you regularly had actors dubbed into foreign languages – so in this case Orson Welles speaks Flemish. The deprivation of his famous voice would seem like a handicap, but he still dominates the movie despite minimal screen time (all of it spent in bed). Called on so often to add gravitas to a film in a minor role, and often far more imposing than anyone or anything around him, Welles the actor compiled a weird filmography (again of a wacky international diversity that would hardly be possible now) that sometimes despite itself takes on the illusion of coherence.

For example, around the same time as Malpertuis, he was in Claude Chabrol’s Ten Days Wonder, as another scheming patriarch, intent on living his life as though the clock had stopped in 1925, certain of his own omnipotence. The film is quite an eye-opener for those who only know the clinical, precise Chabrol – a pre-cursor to the meta-narratives that now proliferate, but smarter and more fluid than any of them. It draws superbly on Welles’ bottomless resonances, and on those of Anthony Perkins, in quasi-Psycho mode from the outset.

None of this makes Malpertuis the movie that you most urgently need to see tonight, but there’s a power and a conviction to it that are missing from many objectively greater films. It has an almost endearing kind of earnestness, a belief that its deconstruction of life as a dream might actually be revelatory. The freshness of the opening sequences, in which Cassavius’ henchmen trail Jan through the streets after he disembarks, leaves no doubt that this all derives from a real world where you can breathe the air, and then there’s that catapult at the end into the immediacy of the modern world. Rather like how you bracket the experience of seeing a movie of course. Nothing so original about that parallel either, but if you immerse yourself into it each time as though it were new, then it might just always feel like a revelation.

Not dead yet

Tim Burton isn’t very central to my view of cinema. Even in his heyday, when most cinephiles were gushing over Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, I think my reaction was along the lines of, where’s the beef? I liked his 1994 film about Ed Wood, but it already seemed to suggest a fear of grappling with anything close to real people. So it proved, and in recent years Burton seems almost desperate for suitably outlandish subjects: efforts like Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were clearly going through the motions, albeit at a high level, like a cinematic God who never moved beyond creating different types of monkeys and parrots. The main exception was his version of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, which took a surprisingly scrupulous approach to the material, and stands as one of the best filmed stage musicals of recent years (not a high bar admittedly).

 

Dark Shadows

Nothing about his new film Dark Shadows suggested a break in this pattern – what need could there be to resurrect a mostly dimly remembered late 60’s daytime serial? Certainly audiences didn’t see any; they generally went to The Avengers instead. The movie seemed in advance to have a static, recessive kind of feeling to it, as if it were only passing through theatres as a courtesy on the way to joining that exhibition of Burton props and artifacts that occupied the Bell Lightbox for a few months when it first opened. I only went to see it because my parents – in their 70’s – were visiting and we wanted to see a movie together: they’d already seen The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, so this seemed like the most suitable choice from what was left. If you knew my parents – or hey, if you knew me – you’d see this doesn’t say too much for the film’s cultural relevance.

As the new film tells the tale, Barnabas Collins sailed with his parents from Liverpool to the New World in the 18^th century; the family’s fishing business flourished, spawning the coastal town of Collinsport and a huge family mansion. But Barnabas got into the bad books of a family maid, Angelique, by spurning her love; because she happened to be a witch, she killed off his parents and his fiancée and turned him into a vampire. In 1972, a construction crew digs up his coffin; he slays them all (a vampire gets pretty thirsty after two centuries) and heads back to his ancestral home, now in disrepair and occupied by the remaining dregs of the Collins dynasty. Barnabas sets on restoring the family to its former glory, a task aided by the treasures he retrieves from the house’s recesses, but hindered by being, you know, a 200-year old vampire, and by the fact that the new commercial power in Collinsport is now Angelique, still around and looking as good as ever.

Expert painter

Well, as I said, nothing about that plot conveys any urgent reason for resurrecting this material. The film’s a bit more persuasive than I expected though; if it’s something of a shame that Burton only seems at ease in highly manufactured landscapes, Dark Shadows reminded me how lovingly and expertly he plans and polishes that terrain. It reminds you of the cliché about the camera as a paintbrush: while your run-of-the-mill directors are barely out of the painting-by-numbers category, Burton conjures up one dazzling canvas after another, and even manages to make them all feel joined up. The way in which it’s dazzling is often familiar – lots of looking down at things from a great height, for instance, and not always avoiding the sense of too much digital paint being applied – but still, it’s as close as modern cinema comes to the sweeping pleasures of an old-time pictorial epic.

Burton also enjoys the 1972 setting for a while, resurrecting old Shell logos, putting Superfly and Deliverance into the local theatre, and spinning some good deadpan jokes – the notion that a blood-stained vampire could wander through town at night without anyone really noticing him, or the idea that Alice Cooper looks the same now as he did then. I don’t think I’ll ever see the Carpenters again without remembering how Barnabas reacts to the TV, commanding the “tiny songstress” to step out and reveal herself. This aspect of the film peters out rather quickly though, to be replaced by a more generic Addams Family-type weirdness.

Johnny Depp

But then there’s the cast. Johnny Depp’s acting career has much the same limitations as Burton’s directorial one, partly of course because the two are so often the same thing. You can’t but admire someone so resourceful and inventive, but when you actually scroll through his list of movies, you feel like you’re coughing up M&M’s. It wasn’t always like this – there was a time when his emphasis seemed to be on working with great directors, like Roman Polanski in The Ninth Gate and Jim Jarmusch in Dead Man, returning periodically to Burton for a mainstream visibility boost. But since the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie almost ten years ago, it’s been mostly dire (if lucrative), and his more serious projects like Michael Mann’s Public Enemies only made him seem lightweight. Depp’s starting to remind me of the story about how Peter Sellers decided to play James Bond in Casino Royale without any tricks, the way Cary Grant would have done, but came across as merely a blank.

Still, Sellers’ tricks, when they worked, were awe-inspiring, and so it is with Depp: his Barnabas is a stunningly precise creation, with not a breath seeming out of place. Everyone around him seems especially well cast too, and for a variety of reasons: Eva Green plays Angelique the old-fashioned full-throttle way; Michelle Pfeiffer as the surviving head of the household is chilly and iconic; Helena Bonham Carter, as a psychiatrist who came for a short-term assignment and never left, occupies her own world, which must be the way Burton likes it. Ideally, for sure, they’d all be doing something more substantial, but at least the movie gives them something to act, which is more than you can say for a lot of films now.

So on the whole, taking my parents to Dark Shadows worked out pretty well (they liked it – remarkably, they’d never seen a Johnny Depp movie before, as far as they could recall – although they thought the ending might have amounted to more). But despite its various pleasures, it only changed things so much for me, Burton-wise. Before the movie, they showed the trailer for his next film, Frankenweenie, an animated fable of a boy who reanimates his pet dog. It’s an expanded version of a short film Burton made right at the start of his career, in 1984. What was I saying about seeming desperate for outlandish subjects? I’m not sure who would have to visit town to get us into that one.

The Horror...

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2004)

Within a couple of days I read several articles which, in trying to grapple with the war in Iraq, cited either Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness or the movie it inspired, Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s film, a vastly complex and committed epic, seems a useful reference point to me as well in contemplating a war that, even more than any war, strains our frames of reference. As I write, it seems that almost nothing definitive can be said about it, whether about its past, present or future. As the uncertainty over its course remains profound, the official version of its genesis shifts – winding from weapons of mass destruction to a broader notion of freedom and stability which now itself seems to be defined in ever decreasing increments. The abuse of the Iraqi prisoners is officially an aberration, no matter the accumulation of evidence; but there seems to be little official interest in understanding the nature of the aberration, perhaps because of political expediency, or perhaps because it seems inherently beyond understanding.

Our Vietnam

Which indeed it is, if your view of America is that idealistic. For the rest of us, possessing even the faintest intuitive grasp of the arrogance of the conqueror, of the incendiary possibilities of boredom and hazy purpose backed up with official nods and winks, of the unquestioning sense of entitlement that seems to be replacing virtuous endeavour as the real American dream, the abuse may not seem quite so mysterious, not that this renders it less depressing. And I didn’t even mention simple racism.

For now, most people don’t think that Iraq is another Vietnam, which seems reasonable measured by geographic differences and by the simple point that the US can theoretically, for now, get out of Iraq faster than they ever thought they could in South east Asia. But each was an avoidable quagmire (of various kinds), prompted by stupidity, ideology, hubris, fear (take your pick) masquerading as policy. Personally, while acknowledging that the death toll and atrocities recorded in Vietnam far outweighed anything accumulated in Iraq so far, I find it easier (albeit with hindsight and based on no first hand knowledge) to accept the Vietnam war – at least the idea of it – as a consequence of its time. The nearness in time of World War Two and the Cuban missile crisis, in a Cold war environment, in a world not even that securely installed in the modern industrial age, let alone our own high-communication iteration of it, seems to me to have had better reasons for obsessing about geopolitical footholds.

With Iraq, none of that seems to apply. For every rationale handed out in a sound bite at one time or another, you can throw out a counterexample that merely underlines the arbitrariness of the project. Weapons of mass destruction – so why not North Korea? Mistreatment of Iraqi people – so why not Zimbabwe or a dozen others? And that doesn’t address the so-called policy goals that were hurt by the war (a stable economy; the broader imperatives of international cooperation) but for which the positives were meant to be so overwhelming as to sweep them aside.

Sprawling Chaos

Reading and watching about the Vietnam war, you get an impression of sprawling chaos in which individual pockets of soldiers constantly found themselves alone, abandoned in the jungle, lacking a strategic or perhaps even an actual compass. This doesn’t seem to be physically the case in Iraq (a problem with dismissing as an aberration anything that individual soldiers might do), but everything you read about it transmits a sense of rootlessness and confusion.

To return to where I began, and to the fact that this is a movie column after all, I watched Apocalypse Now again this week, in the expanded Redux version that came out a couple of years ago, and found that it took on even greater resonance in the light of current events. In its longer version, the film seems more digressive and confused and to sacrifice some focus, but I take that as a good thing to the extent that it better sets the stage for the famous confusion of the final stretch, where Martin Sheen’s Willard fulfills his mission to kill the errant colonel Kurtz, but while denying the film any true sense of resolution, even less of clarity.

The film’s most famous sequence remains that with Robert Duvall as the semi-crazed, surf-obsessed Kilgore, with his famous “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” line. Indeed that section of the movie, logistically brilliant and visually almost overwhelming, is a devastating depiction of war’s skewed perspectives and motivations. It’s one of the film’s most ambiguous stretches in that it would be easy to mentally relax and let the spectacle wash over you, losing the skepticism that the film so assiduously promotes elsewhere – presumably this temptation is part of Coppola’s method, and it’s hard to imagine he didn’t somewhat succumb to it himself. The sequence with the command-less soldiers on the bridge, spiraling into utter madness, is a more direct illustration of how the war degrades the warriors; other scenes, often perversely idiosyncratic (especially the ones that were cut from the original version) seem intended to create a near atlas of war’s irrational consequences.

Apocalypse Now

And then there’s that ending, where Sheen finds Marlon Brando set up in the jungle with his own mini kingdom, having tapped some sort of magic that allows him to appear godlike both to the natives and to the few Americans who hang around there, seeing profundity in his every mumbled utterance. It’s too pat to say that Kurtz has renounced his past actions and American ideology – his uniform and medals are still on display, and his calculated grandeur exhibits some variation on imperialism. The ending seems rather like an exercise in complexity for its own sake – having traveled all the way up the river, exhausting the catalogue of atrocities and excesses, Sheen finds a new paradigm that dwarfs his understanding, so that he seems merely to sag, becoming an easy prisoner (his traveling companion Frederic Forrest denounces Brando’s kingdom as “pagan idolatry,” as though everything we’ve witnessed to that point were somehow righteously Christian).

Of course, Brando himself is central to the way this works. In the same week I watched Apocalypse Now, I also rewatched Last Tango in Paris, an even more starling example of how his acting exposes great trauma both personal and political. His role in Apocalypse Now doesn’t have quite that scope, but watching it now, it seems more apposite than ever. The most insulting aspect of the war is surely the refusal by Bush and his minions (other than an increasingly distanced Colin Powell) to admit the complexity that Coppola’s film embraces, not just in the basic sense of admitting mistakes were made, but in acknowledging any affinity for fault lines and implications that might not fit on a flowchart. Like the slightly sinister superiors who send Martin Sheen on his mission, they see war as a linear thing, where every bend can always be quickly ironed out, allowing the resumption of the straight line.

Two 70's movies

I don’t think most people view the 70’s as a golden age in recent American history, given the economic and political miseries and lousy fashions, but the prevailing confusion was immensely productive for American cinema - many legendary directors did much (or all) of their best work during that decade. We all know about the glories of The Godfather and Nashville and Taxi Driver, but even lesser studio products of the decade usually feel rooted in specific times and places and people and ideas, with an overall texture that seems almost lost now. Of course those films were commercially calculated in their own way, but it’s as if the calculations were carried out in longhand, by people who didn’t necessarily check their math that closely; in contrast, the calculations are carried out now by computer, with superhuman precision, but often therefore with no human stake in the end result. To illustrate, I recently rewatched two minor films by major figures of that era, finding myself delighted once again at their idiosyncracies.

Starting Over

 Alan Pakula was one of my favourite directors of the era – I’ve written before here about his film Rollover. Pakula thrived in the 70’s, with Klute and The Parallax View and All the President’s Men: he was adept at distilling the paranoia and insecurities of the time, the underlying fear of liberty and soul on the line, into dark, gloriously textured thrillers. After that theme lost momentum in the 80’s, Pakula still made some notable films, like Sophie’s Choice and Presumed Innocent, but it was as if his artistic roots had withered away, leaving him to work on artificial turf.

 In 1979 he made Starting Over, a comedy starring Burt Reynolds (the biggest box office star in the country at that point) as Phil Potter, a newly divorced man whose attempts to solidify a new relationship are undermined by unresolved loose ends with his ex-wife. It’s an exceptionally low-key film – Reynolds is so quiet and undemonstrative he seems almost catatonic. I don’t mean that as a swipe at his acting talent – I think it’s a deliberate strategy worked out by him and Pakula, to embody his bewilderment and lack of self-determination, The woman he falls for, Marilyn, played by Jill Clayburgh, is a bit of a mess – not in some stylized movie manner, but in a gratingly plausible way – and on the surface it barely seems believable they’d even make it to a first date, let alone that they’d persevere beyond that. I mentioned it’s a comedy, but of the kind they barely make anymore, rationing the laughs out very parsimoniously. And anyway, those laughs, consisting of such things as Clayburgh falling into a dunking pool, or Reynolds putting on a Santa outfit, are more theoretical than actual. It also has really schmaltzy music.

Romantic comedies

 None of this, obviously, provides any reason to seek out Starting Over at this point. Yet it’s rather fascinating, because of the sense that Pakula was primarily interested in demonstrating the exhaustion of romantic comedy, rather than in actually making one. For instance, there’s a scene where Phil hooks up again with his ex-wife, played by Candice Bergen; Pakula films their undressing in a long single take, both distanced and tentative, while the title song (also distanced and tentative, sung by Bergen) plays on the soundtrack. It’s very weird – you could imagine such a scene being played for passion, or outright laughs, or perhaps tinged with some element of underlying disgust, but I don’t think numbing blankness would occur to most directors.

 Similarly, on and off throughout the film, Phil attends a divorced men’s support group, where again the dominant emotion is a kind of frozen incomprehension. You gradually start to conclude Phil’s pursuit of Marilyn is analogous to the skullduggery carried out in Pakula’s paranoia films, driven by the demands of the system rather than by actual feelings. As with all conspiracies, the logic becomes increasingly self-absorbed, swamping whatever the original motivations might have been. Could he possibly put as much weight as he does on the act of jointly buying a couch with her, for instance, if his head was his own? The notionally happy ending doesn’t feel like one; it feels more like time just ran out. It’s not a political movie, but it seems to convey that what really needs to start over is the whole damn system - which in turn, watching it in 2012, could start off a whole complicated reverie on how much that’s actually happened in the meantime.

The Anderson Tapes

Sidney Lumet made interesting movies for some fifty years, but most people would put his 70’s work (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network) at the top of the list. He made twelve films in that decade, some of them derided (The Wiz), several others largely forgotten. One of those, The Anderson Tapes, made in 1971, has Sean Connery as a recently released convict, instantly snapping back into a life of crime, with a plan to knock off all the apartments in a high-end building. It fits into the heist genre, spending much time on planning and execution; but Anderson doesn’t realize that virtually everything he does is being recorded by various groups; law enforcement teams staking out the mobster who finances him; narcotics agents tracking one of the guys he ropes into the job; a jealous ex-boyfriend spying on the woman he sleeps with.

 This theme of oppressive surveillance is quite prophetic, and closely related to the Pakula movies I mentioned. The surprise though is that Lumet basically treats it as the punch-line to an extended joke: the plan fails, as it must (I can hardly think of a film where the likelihood of it succeeding through some surprise twist seems less likely throughout), but for a very different reason than we anticipate. The movie ultimately isn’t so much about the oppressiveness of power as about the way it creates its own reality. In the first scene, Anderson rails (equally prophetically) about the system that punishes personal transgressions while sanctioning corporate ones, and the film seems to confirm his angry incomprehension, by showing how he can’t hope to grasp how it all fits together (in part, because it doesn’t). It’s not a message movie though: Lumet enjoys himself with all kinds of character stuff (some of it very dated, in particular the depiction of a gay antique dealer) and vicissitudes - for instance, he depicts the efforts of a group of cops to enter the building in more detail than it really seems to need, presumably just because the nuts and bolts of what they’re doing interest him. But even such eccentricity supports that same theme, by tweaking our notions of how such a familiar-looking film should work.

 Again, these aren’t major films in the scheme of things, but they’re more productively stimulating than most of the pictures that get acclaimed now, despite – partly of course because of - their limitations and dated aspects. And of course there’s much more where those came from. I could do articles like this for a year. Maybe I should!

Desperate Women

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2006)

We went to see Friends with Money at the Cumberland on Good Friday afternoon, its first day of release, turning up around ten minutes early as usual, and found the place in the grip of a film-festival quality line-up, marked by mass confusion, angst about deliberate or inadvertent queue-jumping, passing cars stopping to ask what the fuss was all about, and all the other marks of a quiet film going world suddenly gone haywire. We stood in line for about half an hour, and then discovered that a steady stream of people had been circumventing all this and going straight to the members’ side of the ticket booth. We have members’ cards too, but we never thought of it. This could almost be the stuff of which riots are made.

Friends with Money

And what is it with people and the automatic ticketing machines? I agree that the menu format of the new batch of machines isn’t as friendly as it might be, but to me this just means you might take 40 seconds rather than 30. But I swear it takes the average person ten times that long. What are they doing? Diligently reading every single movie title and every single combo option? Simultaneously musing on that night’s dinner recipe? Are they caught in a moment of profound existential doubt that renders them unable to move? It’s all too frightening to contemplate.

Anyway, it’s very difficult to believe that this spectacle can be taken at face value – to indicate that Friends with Money was as significant an event for the Cumberland crowd as was the third Lord of the Rings film for the broader film going public. I guess it was the combination of a free day off and lousy weather. Such is the randomness of public acceptance. Which leads to another question. Is director Nicole Holofcener unlucky in only having been able to make three feature films in ten years (Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing and now Friends with Money) or is she lucky to have had the opportunity to make at least that much?

Before seeing the new film I might have said she was unlucky. I can’t actually remember a thing about Walking and Talking, except that I really liked it (there’s a review for you!). Lovely and Amazing was however a remarkably comprehensive chronicle of feminine issues and hang-ups, with an already legendary scene in which the character played by Emily Mortimer stands naked and is critiqued by the Dermot Mulroney character. There’s a cringe-inducing melding there of actress and role – something that’s even more pronounced in another key character: an overweight young black girl whose behavioural problems feel uncomfortably embedded. A third focal point, played by Catherine Keener (who’s been in all three films) has an anger that goes way beyond a mere thematic device, frequently rendering it amazing that the movie can continue to function as a comedy. Lovely and Amazing often seems to be catering to psychotherapists more than to movie critics, but it’s certainly one of the most interesting edge-of-mainstream films about women.

 Female Viewpoints

The five years since then support great expectations for Friends with Money – what is it they say about the wisdom of crowds? – but these are not realized. It’s again a structure of multiple female viewpoints – four long-time friends, three of them married with varying degrees of success (in apparently descending order of happiness, Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand and Keener) and a fourth, single, played by Jennifer Aniston, who has recently quit her teaching job to work as a maid. This opens up an important new investigative avenue for Holofcener – how poverty defines and limits the place of women. And the film’s best scenes show Aniston, a willing sucker for every male ploy and sob story, systematically allowing herself to be manipulated and exploited. Not to jump on a bandwagon, but it’s only a shame that Aniston is too blandly sunny an actress to push this to where it might have hurt.

In other ways too, the plush Los Angeles settings (the characters include a screenwriter, a designer of overpriced but popular clothing and another of up market bath products, and others who are simply loaded for unspecified reasons) don’t really help forge a case for the film’s broader relevance. The issues of the three monied couples seem at times merely like the fanciful melodrama that comes from having too much time on your hands. The McDormand character has anger management issues, and incidentally has stopped washing her hair because it just doesn’t seem worth it in the big scheme of things. But by the end, for no particular reason, she seems on the road to recovery. So what? And then there’s a running joke about people mistaking her husband as gay. His behaviour at times could hardly warrant any other conclusion, although it seems clear that he loves her, and desires her sexually. It’s a potentially interesting ambiguity, but not very convincing in its details, and it’s always in danger of seeming like a cheap shot.

 Overall, on this occasion Holofcener seems content to observe and very lightly parody, rather than to engage in any kind of diagnosis. The entire movie is a series of softballs that hardly evidence five years’ preparation. And at this point, regardless that Hollywood may still be primarily a man’s business, there have been plenty of movies that set out to show what women talk about when their partners aren’t around, or to delight in behind-the-back bitchiness. All too many of which seem to be set in or around the wonderful world of show business. The movie’s biggest disappointment, and the greatest proof of its low ambition, is in the happy ending it contrives for Aniston – a turn of events that will be denied to 99.999% of the maid population.

Lucy Liu

Which is probably about the same percentage of the maid population that would ever go to see a film at the Cumberland. Anyway, a couple of days afterwards I went to see Lucky Number Slevin (no line-up there of course), which is no more than a pleasant timewaster at best. Lucy Liu plays the kind of woman we’ve seen since the beginning of movies – she clicks with the hero from the first instant, accepts his wild predicament, is attractive and funny and extremely smart, is directly useful in that she’s a police coroner (this at least, if memory serves, marks her as unusual), sleeps with him on the first date, and in the last scene seems ready to throw in her fate with his completely. If that’s not a male fantasy, I don’t know what is. And yet this archetype, even at this late date, still seems to me a more promising object of investigation than the desperate wives of Friends with Money.

Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol, the great French filmmaker who died in 2010, made movies for over fifty years – more than sixty of them, as well as various television projects - and his career embodies the richness and bumpiness of a full and varied life. In his youth, he was part of the French New Wave, fresh and modern, drawn to everything excluded to that point from classical cinema. In his maturity, he became known as an acidic observer of the weaknesses in human nature, making several unforgiving studies of murder and adultery and betrayal. As an old man (he lived to be 80, working right up to the end), he became a cinematic (and, by all accounts, actual) gourmet, generating a startling variety of variations on themes of corruption, deception and compromise.

Alice ou la derniere fugue

 Although esteemed, Chabrol’s reputation was certainly more mixed than that of contemporaries like Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, and it’s tempting to say he simply liked making movies too much. His filmography teems with oddities – lumpy international co-productions of the kind where you can tell the actors were speaking their lines in different languages, genre quickies of the sort that would go straight to DVD these days. Actors like Rod Steiger, Jodie Foster, Mia Farrow and Alan Bates turn up in his lesser films, not one of them achieving anything that would make the cut in their obituary essays. Sometimes his films feel rushed and ragged, as if churned out under strictures applied in some mysterious game show.

The mid-70’s were a particularly quirky period in Chabrol’s career; none of the films he made in that period made the cut for a Bell Lightbox retrospective a while back. I recently rewatched three films he made in succession in 1976, 1977 and 1978, and while they wouldn’t really be an adequate entry point for someone unfamiliar with his work, they’re a wonderfully quirky encapsulation of why he’s so rewarding. The best of them, by some distance, is the one he made in the middle, Alice ou la derniere fugue. It starts in the middle of domestic desolation; a young wife (played by Sylvia Kristel, of the Emmanuelle films) gets summoned by her husband, and forced to listen to his insufferable account of his day and his problems. When he’s done, she calmly announces she’s leaving him. She drives with no fixed destination in mind, ending up a guest at an old man’s country house after she has an accident during a storm. The following day, the house is empty, and there’s seemingly no way to leave the grounds. Realizing she’s being manipulated by some force beyond this world, she attempts to shield her inner life from her manipulators, while looking for a way out.

Blood Relatives

 In the end, the film falls into the same category as countless other cinematic teases, with the closing scenes requiring you to reinterpret all that’s gone before. But Alice is an unusually alluring puzzle, rich in the texture and rhythms of the old house, constantly disquieting for Kristel’s icy delicacy and its quietly sustained cruelty. The character’s name and the premise certainly evoke Alice in Wonderland, but there’s nothing down this rabbit hole except squandered promise, a theme carrying a strong feminist subtext here (albeit somewhat ambiguous, as it would have to be in a movie built around a then-icon of erotica).

 After this, Chabrol came to Montreal, for the French-Canadian co-production Blood Relatives. It stars Donald Sutherland as a detective investigating a young girl’s brutal murder; the only witness, her cousin, identifies her own brother as the killer, driven crazy by an incestuous attraction; but the familial dysfunction goes deeper than that. This is one of those wayward co-productions I mentioned, perfunctorily written for the most part, suffused with a feel of just trying to get it done, with international actors meaninglessly present in supporting roles (Donald Pleasence though is very memorable as an unreformed sex offender). It benefits in the home stretch from some structural quirkiness, as Sutherland spends most of the last half hour reading the dead girl’s diary, after which the mystery is wrapped up in about five minutes. And the denouement features some authentically Hitchcockian echoes (a recurring influence on Chabrol’s work). One can’t help cherishing any movie that brings Canada into the sphere of the greats, but unfortunately it only adds to our reputation in that era for squandering our artistic opportunities.

The Twist

 The Twist, or Folies bourgeoisies, is much weirder. Bruce Dern (allowed to indulge his intense line readings to the point of extreme unpleasantness) plays an American writer living in Paris, married to a Frenchwoman (played by Stephane Audran, Chabrol’s wife of the time and the star of many of his best films), undergoing a creative block, having an affair (with Ann-Margret!) and generally approaching a breaking point. The film sometimes evokes Blake Edwards of all people, illustrating the writer’s chaotic inner and outer world by bending normal rules of behaviour and interaction, spiced up with sometimes quite lurid fantasies). Taken at face value, Chabrol’s handling often feels rather stunned here too, as if he were simply trying not to fall off the bus; the film patently doesn’t “work,” assessed against any conventional criteria.

 And yet there’s something true at its centre, about how our rituals and obsessions and proprieties have become an end in themselves, rendering us distorted and miserable, eroding our natural bonds, and pushing us into absurd attempts at over-compensation (for instance, the wife suddenly purchases a flamboyantly impractical old country castle).

I think Chabrol wanted to make a film that strands the viewer, teasing us with the prospect of  a relatively conventional comedy of manners but then withholding almost all the pleasures and pay-offs that accompany that; it ends with an incoherent flurry of behaviour shifts, ending with a highly unconvincing expression - delivered in the dark - of a willingness to try. You feel the twists, the bourgeois follies, could perpetuate themselves forever.

Chabrol’s reputation would be much the same as it is if he’d never made these three films, and as a general rule of course, in a world of excess choices and too little time, we’re better off seeking out a director’s major works before burying down to the secondary ones (two of his most esteemed early works, Le beau Serge and Les cousins, came out on Criterion DVD a while ago). But I must admit I love these lost children of world cinema, in all their imperfections; in the same way that you love someone more for their eccentricities and quirks than for the stuff on their resume. They’re a part of the reason why I perpetually think of my crazy consumption as a true nourishing adventure, not merely an obsessive duty. 

More summer movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2009)

This year’s Woody Allen disappointment, Whatever Works, uses Larry David as stand-in, playing a self-proclaimed genius and proclaimed-by-all pain-in-the-ass who somehow gets married to a much younger (but improbably both stupid and naïve) woman (Evan Rachel Wood). I don’t really know where to begin on setting out the movie’s problems – I suppose the fact of having virtually no laughs would be as good as anywhere. David is great on his own show Curb Your Enthusiasm, but isn’t at all appealing in this role; he’s merely cold and hectoring, whereas Allen himself would have lent all the drivel a greater inherent warmth (since it so plainly is drivel - everyone’s a loser and what’s the point since the universe is ending anyway etc. – it seems over-compensatory that the character is a former brilliant physicist who once came close to the Nobel Prize). The events that overtake the Wood character’s parents, once they turn up, might suggest a developing thematic interest in sexual unorthodoxy and self-discovery, if you’re in the camp that thought the three-way thing in Vicki Cristina Barcelona was more than an affectation; but even if you appreciate the intention, you’d surely hope for more (i.e. any) finesse in the plotting and characterization. The philosophy is pretty much laid out in the title, except of course it’s more a rejection of philosophy; a notion of life as a clumsy series of lurches, where you sometimes fall on top of someone else and out of exhaustion or apathy just decide to stay that way. I don’t mind that Allen’s given up on aspiring to be Ingmar Bergman, but you’d hope he could at least be more diverting than a random surf through daytime TV.

The Girlfriend Experience

Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience stars Sasha Grey as a high-end escort in Manhattan, alternating the nuts and bolts of client service with trying to build her profile and earning power, even as the economy crashes around her. Grey in real life is a porn star who seems to be doing the Madonna-esque thing of positioning herself as a conscious manipulator of image and affect (for research purposes I checked out the general access sections of her website, which are very snazzy), although on this evidence she’s a pretty recessive personality beneath that.

It’s only been a few months since the release of Soderbergh’s ambitious two-part experiment Che, and the new film surely carries more modest aims: to capture something of a time and place, set up some parallels and oppositions, and leave the audience mildly provoked and intrigued. It generally achieves that, but it’s such a narrow métier that the movie doesn’t ultimately feel very important. Grey’s character must surely be at the extreme high-end of the sex worker spectrum, and her white-bread relationship with a personal trainer going through similar entrepreneurial struggles (but with less focus and finesse) surely can’t be that representative either. I expect this is part of Soderbergh’s point though, that we’re watching a very particular (and likely short-lived) phenomenon; where for a determined or lucky few, a perverted economy and crazed notions of communication and self-definition (both technological and personal) seem to open up almost unlimited possibilities. The ending of the first half of Che, with the guerilla leader high on the success of the Cuban revolution, captured something similar; the much more downbeat and morose second half showed what generally becomes of such apparent new paradigms, and The Girlfriend Experience’s rather poignant final scene starts to return us to her profession’s more familiar mechanics and surroundings.

Tokyo Sonata

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films usually have at least a foot in the beyond – Pulse makes the Internet’s dehumanizing potential literal and murderous; Charisma concentrates a spectrum of environmental worry and paranoia into the tale of a mysterious tree. He’s an accessible storyteller, but flexible with narrative and behaviour in a way Hollywood norms wouldn’t allow. Tokyo Sonata is the most grounded of his films that I’ve seen, with no overt supernatural or otherwise inexplicable content; but then, since it’s about the modern Japanese economy and its dehumanizing impact on the nuclear family, the strangeness takes care of itself. The father loses his director of administration job when it’s outsourced to China, and can’t bring himself to tell the family; he becomes part of an army of briefcased liars, trying to preserve some notion of authority and viability while it all gets away from them. The movie doesn’t find too much positive in the twisted structures of modern Japan, and through references to Iraq casts a wider critique too; ultimately it suggests that the way forward (as individuals, if not for the economy as a whole) lies in a fuller attention to small pleasures (art, family, making the most of what there is. It’s maybe not that amazing an insight, but still one the policy implications of which are yet to be fully grasped.

Public Enemies

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is an exciting crime thriller, but may be most satisfying if viewed as an almost quasi-abstract meditation on image making and identity in an age of corporatization and depersonalization. I don’t mean today (although the contemporary resonances are a large part of the movie’s excitement), but rather the 1930’s, where a politically pressured FBI (led by a young J. Edgar Hoover) pulls out all the stops to capture bank robber John Dillinger, popularly regarded as the most wanted man alive. As played by Johnny Depp, Dillinger is certainly ruthless and capable of anything, but he’s also a romantic, leaping to create a classic love story with a hat check girl (Marion Cotillard), and apparently increasingly intrigued by his own public image; he never seems to take particular pleasure in the money or the rush (some have found Depp’s performance too opaque, but it’s much more allusive done this way).

The public, seeing him as a Robin Hood-type character, largely esteems him, but his type of crime is becoming a threat to the organized interests (who, as they exploit the new technology of the telephone to extend the reach of their gambling operations, make as much in a day as he does from any of his jobs). Mann never seems to be straining for easy present-day parallels, but his approach is inherently allusive, and the use of digital technology renders everything almost eerily vivid at times. The movie is frequently reminiscent of his earlier Heat, both in its overall shape and even in many specific scenes, but the historical period (although scrupulously recreated) allows the film to work more in a classic genre vein; it feels throughout both like a memory and a prediction.

Bad schools

As I write this, Tony Kaye’s Detachment is in its second week at the Yonge-Dundas AMC – I hope it makes it to a third (if not, then of course it’ll be on DVD soon). After writing in recent weeks about new films by Terence Davies and Whit Stillman, Kaye provides a hat-trick of veteran directors (he turns 60 this year) who’ve endured long gaps between projects. After making it big in advertising and music videos, he hit the ground running in 1998 with the eye-popping American History X. I recall a few commentators calling it a potentially dangerous film, on the basis that its portrayal of the bad (life as a strutting white supremacist) was so much more vivid and exciting than the presentation of the good (repentance and renewal). You could see what they were getting at – Edward Norton (who received an Oscar nomination) was at the peak of his powers as a man who’s fully articulated and rationalized his beliefs and derives an intense, sexy physicality from them, whereas the movie’s expressions of the case for not being a racist were constantly anemic. Despite the epic ambitions implied by its title, the film barely took the first step at setting out the broader context for what it portrayed; still, it was exceptionally vivid and gripping. Kaye professed himself unhappy with it though, saying it was edited against his wishes; at one point he tried to replace his name in the credits with that of “Humpty Dumpty.”

Tony Kaye

Eight years later, he released the documentary Lake of Fire, a long and unsparing journey through America’s abortion wars, sufficiently even-handed to leave the filmmaker’s own sympathies in some doubt (although it was unmistakable that one side of the argument sounded much more bombastically neurotic, and male-dominated, than the other). The film shows up most high-profile documentaries for the trifles that they are, but given its subject, it didn’t get much exposure. That’s the extent of Kaye’s official cinema career up to now.

That doesn’t mean there’s been nothing to write about though. At various points, Kaye’s eccentricities reportedly included a phase of taking an inflatable E.T. doll everywhere he went, and a breakfast meeting at the Beverly Wilshire, where he ordered a 30-egg omelette and "exactly 2.7 ounces of dried oats." In 2002 he was involved in one of the more fascinating phantom films, a documentary to be called Lying for a Living, covering an acting class taught by Marlon Brando and attended by Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nick Nolte and Michael Jackson. But the relationship between Brando and Kaye broke down, with the actor allegedly leaving death threats on the director’s voice mail; Kaye announced he wouldn’t be stopped from “taking the footage and exploiting (Brando) to hell,” but nothing of the work has ever been seen. In 2008 he made a thriller called Black Water Transit, which remains unreleased and apparently lost in a sea of lawsuits.

It’s been impossible from all that to know whether to expect any more films from Kaye, or what they might possibly look like, but Detachment is something like two parts Lake of Fire to one part nutball (the opening titles denote the movie as a “talkie by Tony Kaye”). Adrien Brody plays Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher taking on a one-month gig at a semi-hellish inner-city school, so disconnected from the community that when they hold a parents’ night, no one shows up. Henry’s an effective teacher, with the knack of connecting even with the roughest kids, but his refusal to commit to a permanent assignment means his impact is perpetually transient, and his inner life is a mess. But then, whose isn’t? - the rest of the staff (played by a diverting cast including Lucy Liu, Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks and James Caan) are just as marooned in misery, loneliness, or at best in some battle-hardened caricature of themselves. There are moments of connection and enlightenment, but overall little sense of possibility – most of the kids, plainly, will sink into minimum-wage misery, at best.

Detachment

Detachment obviously belongs in general terms to a long line of hard-edged school movies, but Kaye’s approach is somewhat impressionistic, severely rationing the familiar scenes of classroom interplay. Its title refers to a quote from Albert Camus - “And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world" – and it returns constantly to Henry’s exploration of that state: he tells the class he doesn’t have any feelings they can hurt, but we see him in tears while riding the late-night bus. Actually, the character talks so often about his and our pain, hollowness, loneliness, failures and so on that it gets distinctly repetitive. Presumably that’s largely deliberate though – stasis and stalled momentum is a large part of the point.

And it’s not just that the educational system is stalled, but that it’s actively corrupted. A visiting speaker talks about the school’s dismal reputation deflating local property values – not an unfair point perhaps, but one that emphasizes how educational achievement is just another input into capitalist machinations. Henry extends the point further, talking to his class about how an active consciousness provides their only defence against the overwhelming doublethink promulgated by the prevailing powers (the implication though is that they can only expect limited assistance from the school in developing this consciousness).

Sanest person in the room

It’s plain from all this that Detachment is one of the more ambitious current movies, but it’s ultimately rather limited: for every moment that connects, there’s another that feels cliched or unfocused. Kaye seems to have titanic ambitions for Henry, whose burden also includes a dying grandfather; a murky family history, evoked in distorted flashbacks throughout the film; and an increasingly fatherly relationship with a teenage hooker, but these aspects of the film are probably its weakest. At times Kaye seems inclined to carry him to some point of no return, but actually the final scene is probably the film’s most conventionally hopeful (albeit in the sense that you might draw hope from seeing a plant growing on a trash heap).

One might imagine Tony Kaye is just too old and weird to achieve much more than he has already, if parts of his films (and pretty much all of Lake of Fire) weren’t so spellbinding and incisive. Maybe it’s all an act, like the time Joaquin Phoenix recently spent pretending to have lost it. I did find an interview where Kaye calls himself “a very normal and orthodox person that goes out of their way to present eccentricity,” adding that he’s now realized that if “you want to make challenging movies, you’ve got to be the sanest person in the room.” But of course, a lot depends on what kind of room you choose to enter.

Final summer movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)

As summer winds down, here’s as mixed a bag of movies as I’ve ever covered in a single article.

Moliere, directed by Laurent Tirard, is a Shakespeare in Love – type creation, positing that an episode in the famous French dramatist’s younger years might have dropped him in the middle of an intricate real-life farce (a lecherous merchant, a misconceived arranged marriage, etc.) thus laying the groundwork for the development of his later artistic personality. Writers much more knowledgeable about Moliere than I am pretty unanimously pronounced the film a dud, and it certainly often feels laboured and superficial. It probably works better if you forget the pretensions to real life, and just take it as an undemanding trifle, in which case the enjoyable performances and easy contrivances might be enough to put it across. Although I do think I already saw this film last year, when it was called Casanova.

Director’s Downfall Oliver Hirschbiegel, the talented director of Downfall, is the latest European artist to be beaten to a pulpy hack at the hands of Hollywood. It’s not all his fault - other directors supposedly perpetrated much of the damage on The Invasion, which bears his name, after he left the project. It certainly evidences a confused guiding spirit. Jack Finney’s Body Snatchers remains intriguing material, and this version – centering around Nicole Kidman (who’s indifferently deployed) as a Washington psychiatrist watching everyone around her turn into a pod person – has some serviceable paranoid moments. But it’s hard to think of a recent movie where the writing and editing are so consistently wrongheaded.

Would you believe I’ve never seen a single episode of The Simpsons? But here I am, a big screen snob to the last, shelling out money to see (as Homer points out) something I could be watching at home for free. So I’m not able to comment on how the movie enhances, or doesn’t, the TV show, but I can report that I enjoyed it – it’s fast moving and inventive and you’re never waiting more than thirty seconds for a pretty good gag. It didn’t seem that ambitious to me though, and if the litmus test was whether I’m inspired to watch any episodes of the show from this point on, it probably failed. But maybe my snobbery is such that it never had a chance of going any other way.

Rocket Science, directed by Jeffery Blitz (who previously made the overrated Spelling Bee documentary Spellbound), is a quirky little movie about Hal, a compulsively stuttering teenager who gets pulled into the high school debating team by a hyper articulate girl (on whom he unsurprisingly develops a crush). For a while, as we watch his sincere but wretched efforts, the film feels rather unpleasantly cruel, then there’s a twist and it evolves into something much more intriguing. There are lots of quirky little movies out there, and this one has more than its fair share of strained Rushmore-seeking wackiness, but there’s some seriously impressive overall thinking woven in there too.

Summer Of Apatow

The summer of Judd Apatow continued with Superbad, on which he’s officially only the producer, but for which he’s nevertheless scooping up all the credit. Jumping back a few years from Knocked Up in Apatow’s exploration of arrested male development, this one follows a couple of high school buddies on a wild odyssey in search of booze for a big party, at the end of which they expect to break their lifelong sexual losing streaks. Actually the movie’s a rather lumpy hybrid – half the above, and the other half the adventures of two grossly unprofessional cops, which plays merely like an over (and over) extended Saturday Night Live skit. The stuff about the kids, although hardly revelatory, is consistently well played and even quite sensitive in spots, and the non-stop raunchy talk inevitably produces a good stream of laughs. Best of all, the movie doesn’t have a central flaw as egregious as Knocked Up’s implausible conception of the central female – indeed the young women here are surprisingly well-observed.

Better so than the heroine of The Nanny Diaries, directed by the makers of American Splendour. I don’t actually share the common disdain for Scarlett Johansson’s talents – she doesn’t do much here, but that’s just fine for her aimless character, who spends a summer as a nanny in a fabulously wealthy, fabulously screwed-up Upper East Side household when she can’t decide what else to do. The movie occasionally casts itself as an anthropological study, but is drastically short of revelations, and the occasional potential for something more painful and cutting (mostly embodied in Laura Linney’s performance as her employer) isn’t taken up. It’s nice enough to watch, but you wish it mattered more.

The Real End

Lady Chatterley is a French version of the D. H. Lawrence novel, directed by Pascale Ferran. It won best film at the French equivalent of the Oscars, which tells you a lot (if you didn’t know it already) about the difference in cultural sensibilities. Running almost three hours, it’s an extremely detailed observation of the frustrated Connie’s sexual and emotional awakening, via an increasingly passionate affair with the gamekeeper on her disabled husband’s vast estate. This is very much a woman’s story, and has been criticized in some quarters for what might be seen as wishy-washy romanticism (and in others for overlooking Lawrence’s social consciousness). But if you submit to Ferran’s sometimes-quirky perspective, and to the mesmerizingly detailed performance by lead actress Marina Hands (who also won the top French award), it’s the most satisfying film covered in this article. It’s certainly a cousin to The Piano, but (high praise coming) it also put me in mind at times of the composed mystery of someone like Jacques Rivette.

It hardly seems appropriate to include The 11th Hour, this year’s documentary on our wretched post-industrialization prospects, in this company. At one point it (correctly of course) points to crazed consumerism as one of the many contributors to our malaise, and I couldn’t help musing at that moment about how the movie itself is merely being offered as an alternative to Rush Hour 3 and Becoming Jane, catering (based on what I saw) merely to a tiny audience of the predisposed. Doesn’t it somehow demand more than a movie, some more all-encompassing forceful platform? Actually, The 11th Hour itself probably doesn’t – the basic message is incontrovertible and incredibly depressing, but this is a superficial, overly polite, rushed treatment of it. And as with so many others, it insists on closing on a note of optimism and faith in human possibility, presented so tritely that it undercuts the impact of what comes before. But the real ending of course will be presented soon enough, playing in your local piece of the planet.