More big movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2003)

Master and Commander

Peter Weir’s films generally evidence a painstaking interest in communities placed under threat, often combined with a sense of the otherworldly. These meld most fruitfully in Fearless, my favourite film of his, about a man who survives a plane crash and then finds his relationship with the world transformed. Psychologically, the film is about denial and delayed reaction; in its impact, it’s almost like The Sixth Sense, studying someone who might literally be a ghost snatching some unsustainable last gasp with the world. At other times it’s a scrupulous examination of the activity that surrounds such an accident. Fearless was a commercial failure, but Weir’s list of successes is estimable: Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and others.

Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, based on Patrick O’Brian’s much-admired series of seafaring novels, continues Weir’s anthropological investigations. Russell Crowe plays Jack Aubrey, captain of a British ship in the early 19^th century, far from home in the South Pacific on the trail of a French vessel from Napoleon’s army; Paul Bettany is the ship’s doctor, his closest friend. The plot is basically just a series of encounters with the enemy ship, but the film’s substance is its evocation of life on the ship. It’s not a small achievement to evoke monotony and stasis while avoiding becoming merely monotonous and static, and Weir seems here like almost the ultimate craftsman. His film has immense physical and visual impact, without ever being overbearing in the manner of recent Ridley Scott.

Crowe is the film’s dominant presence, but he doesn’t overwhelm it: the captain is clearly the ship’s leader, but still a functionary of the Empire, subject to institutional constraints. He flogs an insubordinate sailor because the code demands it, without any Bligh-like relish. Events take the ship to the Galapagos Islands, at this pre-Darwinian point largely unexplored and undocumented, where the sense of an unspoiled evolutionary bubble provide a graceful counterpoint to the ship’s contrived but coherent society. This is the main outlet here for Weir’s more ethereal interests. All in all, it’s not surprising that Master and Commander has been a relative disappointment at the box office – for a big-budget epic venture, it’s remarkable intimate.

21 Grams

The title of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s English-language debut refers to the body weight that’s supposedly lost at the moment of death, and the film is to some extent a meditation on how normal life, placed in proximity to death, breaks down. Sean Penn plays a professor whose life is saved by a heart transplant; Benicio del Toro is a career criminal who finds Jesus; Naomi Watts is a wife and mother whose life collapses when her family is killed in a hit-and-run accident. All three suffer considerable anguish, and of course their stories eventually intertwine. The film is told in a highly fragmented style, switching madly between plot lines and points in time. Some critics have suggested that if the stories were told in a linear style, the film would seem like litte more than overwrought melodrama.

Which is neither here nor there – by what weight is profundity ever separated from banality? Around 21 grams at the most I guess. On its central theme, the film isn’t as subtly paradigm-challenging as the aforementioned Fearless. It’s a big film with big gestures, but its biggest idea lies exactly in the manner of its telling. Near the start there’s a beautiful shot of birds taking off, silhouettes against a deep sky, suggesting the film’s trajectory – it circles events like an aerial visitor caught in a gale, first making out strange details that only gradually cohere as it fights to a landing.

It also has big acting, acting of transformational power that’s central to the film’s fabric. The three main performances have a grungy contour we recognize as realism, but in an outsize way that facilitates Inarritu’s quasi-epic ambitions. 21 Grams is easy to criticize in various ways, but few films this year have matched it for sheer power.

Gothika

Halle Barry hasn’t exactly used her Oscar as a catapult to more challenging material: X2, Die Another Day, and now the horror film Gothika, which is the English language debut of French director Mathieu Kassovitz. Kassovitz is making his own voyage downmarket (but, undoubtedly, up-pay cheque) – from La haine via The Crimson Rivers to Gothika. Berry plays a criminal psychiatrist in a creepy old institution, married to the boss (Charles S Dutton), worrying about the case of a woman who insists she’s continually raped in her cell (Penelope Cruz). One night, driving home in a thunderstorm, she has an accident, and wakes up to find herself on the other side of the bars, locked up after murdering Dutton. The explanation for this belongs not to this world.

Gothika’s main point of interest lies in its vague glimpses of a feminist theme. The way that Berry reevaluates the plausibility of Cruz’s claims after finding herself in a parallel situation seems to be a stand-in for a broader notion of how a legitimately different female reality may be dismissed as mere hysteria. But, of course, the movie is generally a matter of sound and fury. It’s difficult to get caught up in a story where ghostly intervention allows for so much lazy, arbitrary plotting; still, it has enough grim diversity to avoid boredom. Berry is, I would say, stoic. Kassovitz does much the same directing job he did on Crimson Rivers. Everyone involved should have been doing something better, and it’s inconceivable they don’t know it.

Bad Santa

For me, the title of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa evokes Abel Ferrara’s memorable (especially if you’ve seen the uncut version) Bad Lieutenant, which means I was looking forward to something wildly offensive. Well, not so. Sure, this shambling comedy about a drunken low-life store Santa (whose annual grotto gig always ends up in him and his midget sidekick cleaning out the safe) occasionally raises half an eyebrow – mainly via references to Santa’s sexual practices. But this runs out of juice pretty quickly, and then the film spends way too much time on the fat kid who gradually warms his heart, and thus becomes yet another glossy self-actualization treatise. When I saw it, the crowd initially seemed primed for laughter, but got quiet pretty fast.

A big part of the problem is that Billy Bob Thornton (who, you’ll recall, is a wiry, laconic kind of guy) doesn’t look or behave like any kind of Santa to begin with – the physical mismatch really undercuts the material’s transgressive edge. The movie’s only raison d’etre would have been to go to the very edge of the envelope and then keep going – it probably needed to be debauched beyond reason. Zwigoff (who’s been complaining about studio constraints, but doesn’t seem to have been going that far out to begin with) was much better suited to the more gently surreal explorations of Crumb and Ghost World.

Fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2003)

So that’s it for the film festival articles – hope you enjoyed them. Let’s recap briefly. No matter how hard you work the festival, you can’t see more than fifteen or twenty per cent of what’s on offer, so I doubt whether anyone’s opinion on the event’s overall quality carries much validity. The best you can hope for is to minimize the time spent watching duds, and if you’re really lucky, to hit on a masterpiece or two. By that measuring stick, I had a better than average year. I particularly admired Greenaway’s Tulse Luper Suitcases and Rivette’s Story of Marie and Julien (of course those are both by aging auteurs – Rivette is 77 – so I guess it’s clear what pushes my buttons). Kitano’s Zatoichi was a satisfying people’s choice award winner. The galas, as usual, were mostly bland (Matchstick Men, Out of Time, Code 46); the American independent sector was fairly buoyant (Pieces of April, The Station Agent) and the foreign section a bit undernourished.

The obvious downside of covering the festival at length – no opportunity to write about the other movies that opened in the meantime. Let’s remedy that now, at least for the most obvious omissions.

Kill Bill: Volume One

It would be hard to actively dislike Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film (and first in six years) – like a puppy dog doing tricks, it forces a certain low-grade admiration from you. But the movie is far below the level of his best work – a complete wrong turn (and as such particularly disappointing given the long gestation period). I’ve previously written a mea culpa on Pulp Fiction – initially I was turned off by it, but on a second viewing found it infinitely more scintillating. In that film, Tarantino takes the mechanics of storytelling, blows them open, then sticks them back together with sheer panache as the glue – he makes time and character and normal motivation seem like infinitely malleable qualities. And the movie has a perverse but still touching romanticism, especially in the Travolta/Thurman plot strand. The film’s idealism is oddly touching here, perhaps because it’s so aware of how crazy and malformed their connection actually is.

Jackie Brown was more indifferently received, but it was a worthy attempt to keep moving forward. The sequences with Pam Grier and Robert Forster were mature and touching (Tarantino’s ability to rehabilitate overlooked actors is one of his most remarkable, almost endearing traits). And then the long silence, during which Tarantino acted in other people’s movies and on Broadway, turned up here and there to promote his enthusiasms for cult cinema of one kind or another, parried rumours of various projects, and then entered near-total silence. Which now ends.

Plenty of writers have recounted Kill Bill’s strengths more eloquently than I can – it is indeed an impressive piece of action choreography with a sometimes flamboyant sensibility. Supposedly it’s full of references to genre movies – I only picked up a few of them, if any. The story is wafer thin, and the film seems extremely padded, with numerous digressive scenes that could have been lost with no sacrifice of entertainment or thematic value. Without these scenes though, the film would seem programmatic – its peculiarity is really the main point of interest. Of course, this all implies that we’re willing to cut the director a lot of rope; “self-indulgent” is certainly a term that comes to mind here. The opening credits explicitly announce this as Tarantino’s fourth film, as though we’re all meant to be counting along.

The way the film uses Thurman, relative to Pulp Fiction, sums up the difference – here she’s merely an aesthetic object; not presented for our lust exactly (it’s an oddly sexless movie in general) but certainly not for our understanding either. Maybe volume two will make everything clearer. For now, when I hear volume one described as a film buff’s movie, it makes sense to me only if your idea of a film buff is a geek who, when he’s not in the movie theater, spends most of his time in his bedroom making up scrap books. Albeit, in this case, with particularly impressive design and layout. And the soundtrack’s great too.

Mystic River

Meanwhile, back in the world of adults, Clint Eastwood’s latest film is indeed as wise and compelling as most critics have been saying. It’s impossible to write about Eastwood’s career for long without raising the issue of violence. At his worst, he’s been merely a squinty-eyed cartoon, blowing away sleazebags without any hint of moral hesitation. Even his best work, like Unforgiven and The Outlaw Josey Wales, have moments where the relished supremacy of the gun seems to crassly assert itself over the film’s overall quality. Genial as he seems in person, Eastwood’s choice of material inevitably seems to say something about him. Like so many earlier works, Mystic River has elements of vigilantism, moments where the gangland ethos holds the spotlight. But on this occasion Eastwood demonstrates an objectivity he’s never reached before, attaining the scientific glare of a social scientist while making a movie that’s rich in geographical and psychological colour.

Sean Penn (in a performance that, along with his work in 21 Grams, marks him as the year’s preeminent actor) is a Boston storekeeper whose peaceful life crumbles when his daughter is murdered. Tim Robbins, a childhood friend whose own life was irreversibly damaged when he was molested as a kid, falls under suspicion. Kevin Bacon, the third friend, is the investigating cop. The film is about the terrifying unpredictability and randomness of life, but its uniqueness is in how it posits the ability to marshal and direct violence as the key to overcome this human chaos. It’s not triumphal in expressing this theme, but it supports multiple readings: the cross-pollination of intense precision and thematic ambiguity strikes me as highly unusual in this kind of mainstream American film.

The rest

Mystic River lost the top prize at Cannes to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which doesn’t seem quite fair to me. Van Sant’s film is well executed, but ultimately seems built around a relatively straightforward thesis about the banality of evil. Woody Allen’s Anything Else finds him in his best form for at least five years, which after Hollywood Ending counts as a welcome resurgence. The Secret Lives of Dentists is an underrated film that avoids the obvious while simultaneously celebrating it. Sylvia doesn’t do much to expand the biopic format. L’auberge Espagnole is overdone, but generally a joy nevertheless. Runaway Jury is mostly flash. Intolerable Cruelty has good moments, but who ever thought Hollywood would be a fruitful setting for the Coen brothers’ gift for exaggeration? The Human Stain is a silly, disconnected movie – presumably the book was better. And as for Master and Commander and The Last Samurai, more to come…

2003 Toronto film festival report, part eleven

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2003)

This is the eleventh of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2003 Toronto film festival.

In the Cut (Jane Campion)

Campion’s best film remains The Piano, and it seems increasingly unlikely that she’ll ever top it – it’s in so many ways unprecedented, as though it spring fully formed from some turbulent half-alien dream. Her subsequent films (Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke and now In the Cut) all contain ideas as interesting as anything in The Piano, but they lack its astonishing visual and thematic coherence, its fierce acting and icy weirdness. In the Cut, which has already opened commercially since its festival screening, is being marketed as a thriller, with the particular attraction of Meg Ryan in a hard-edged role involving several nude scenes (which comes across as a calculated provocation). But it’s not thrilling at all, and Ryan isn’t a particularly compelling presence in the film. It’s best taken as a loosely assembled scrapbook of impressions and ideas about female sexuality (for a near-definitive summary of these, see the October issue of Sight and Sound), with the ostensible plot providing the loosest of governing structures.

Ryan plays a teacher in New York who’s interviewed by a police detective (Mark Ruffalo) about a brutal murder to which she’s a possible witness; they have an affair; other strange men hover in the background along with a strip joint, phallic symbolism and other relentless oddities. There’s a lot of talk about sex, mostly rather earnest and knowingly raunchy. Ryan also collects lines of poetry that strike her (often gleaned from subway ads), and several of the film’s conversations involve the meaning of a particular word; the sense is of grappling for language and meaning, with sexuality as the predominant input. The film is shot in a claustrophobically jittery manner that made my wife physically sick, and possesses a persistent morbidity that left a couple of other women of my acquaintance nervous about walking home afterwards.

Some have compared the film (particularly re Ryan’s character) to the 1971 Klute, which actually seems more astute and subtle about compromised female sexuality than In the Cut does. It’s also somewhat tempting to compare it to Catherine Breillat’s work, such as Romance and Fat Girl – a comparison that further underlines the latter-day Campion’s relative lack of discipline and analytical prowess. Still, the film’s territory is inherently fascinating, and it does teem with stimulation (of all kinds).

The Middle of the World (Vicente Amorim)

This year the festival devoted its national cinema section to Brazil, under the title “Vida de Novo.” In summarizing Brazilian films of the last few years, the program book mentions Central Station and City of God, which I think may be the complete list of Brazilian cinema that I’ve seen over that period. So many resurgent national cinemas, so little time. I was only able to fit in one title this year: Amorim’s debut film (I particularly regretted missing Carandiru, a prison drama by Kiss of the Spider Woman’s Hector Babenco).

Middle of the World conveys a perhaps unavoidable ambivalence about Brazil – on the one hand sweeping beauty and passion and pride; on the other poverty and danger. The former generally carries more weight here though, which is why some might think the film a bit soft (as much Middle of the Road as of the World). A youngish couple and their five children cycle across the country to Rio de Janeiro in search of work, stopping at way stations, sometimes picking up a little money by singing and doing odd jobs, often going hungry. The eldest son is on the verge of going his own way; the father tries to assert his authority and keep his dignity even under these parched circumstances; the mother can hardly bear it, but keeps going.

It's a vivid, fluent film, packing a wealth of mood and incident into its concise 90 minutes. Ultimately, it’s more a travelogue than anything else – the ending is conventional, and the overall impression modest. You don’t feel the hunger and the weariness of their long trip as keenly as you experience the momentary pleasures of spontaneous music, or an encounter with some quirky character they meet along the way. But it’s a pleasant counterbalance to the scathing vision of City of God (not that I’m saying a counterbalance was necessarily required).

Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom)

Winterbottom had two new films at this year’s festival: In this World, a documentary-style examination of Afghan refugees, and Code 46, an enigmatic futuristic semi-thriller. In the last few years he’s also covered war (Welcome to Sarajevo), Westerns (The Claim), social drama (Wonderland), and an archaeology job on early 80s British rock (24 Hour Party People). Most of these played at the festival too. Only Party People feels at all vital, like a film that he made because he just had to. Usually, his eclecticism and speed seem like an end in themselves, as if his career amounted to some kind of contest entry (he’d be a good foe for Lars von Trier in round two of The Five Obstructions). Unfortunately, I don’t know of anyone who’s particularly excited by this, except apparently for festival programmers.

I didn’t see In this World, but Code 46 (which somehow snagged a gala spot) epitomizes what I’m talking about. It’s set in Shanghai, in one of those budget-friendly futuristic environments that looks pretty much like the present day, with a few bits of high-tech gloss and hints of Big Brother. It’s a more homogenized world too, at least in the major cities; traditional culture has largely been pushed into what’s called “outside.” None of this is particularly original or bracing, and the plot resembles a deadened distillation of elements from Minority Report, Gattaca, Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World, and others. It stars Tim Robbins as an investigator who can read minds by virtue of an “empathy virus” he’s ingested, and Samantha Morton as the quarry he falls in love with. The overall arc is one of tragic romance, of humanity trying to assert itself against increasing constraints. That reminds me of a lot of movies too.

I might have felt unusually distanced from the movie because I had to watch it from the mezzanine at Roy Thomson Hall – a location I detest. I can’t get wrapped up in an image that seems so far away – it’s like staring into the bottom of a bucket (my preferred spot is right up front in the second or third row, where it’s just you and the looming screen). Code 46’s forensic air probably suffered from this handicap more than a more exuberant movie might have done, so I feel obliged to make this full disclosure. That said, I’m still pretty confident the film doesn’t amount to much. Oh well, maybe next year’s pair of Winterbottom movies will be stronger.

Two greats

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2003)

Compared to a lot of movie reviewers, I think I spend relatively little time writing about actors. For sure, there are exceptions – you can’t review About Schmidt without writing at length about Jack Nicholson. But I used up my word quota on Spider without saying a word about Ralph Fiennes, and I don’t think many reviewers did that. So today, to remedy the balance a bit, let’s just chew the fat about two of the greats.

When I was getting excited about movies in the early 80s, two actors seemed preeminent: Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Both were still in their first decade of stardom; they were smoldering and reclusive and unknowable and they made movies sparingly, so that fans suffered a long frustrating wait between projects. They were clearly mature actors who made hard-edged adult projects – if you were under 18, you were probably sneaking into the theaters.

Ups and downs

De Niro worked mainly with Martin Scorsese and was already legendary for his preparation – particularly how he gorged himself to play the fat Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. He was regarded as an insolent chameleon, although people tended to overlook how he was already relying on certain mannerisms. Pacino seemed somehow more wounded and less molded – his characters were usually essentially tragic, and with the failed Bobby Deerfield he’d shown a rather bleak romantic streak. Whereas De Niro’s absences from the screen seemed attributable to deliberation, Pacino’s were rooted more in a kind of desperation.

Thirty-year careers obviously have their ups and downs, and when I was first focusing in, both stars’ status seemed in some danger of eroding. Pacino seemed unsure of his direction – Author Author, Scarface, Revolution – and then entered a four year silence. De Niro’s films were usually commercial failures despite their critical standing, and with his cameos in Angel Heart and The Untouchables he seemed to be slipping into smaller roles.

In 1998 De Niro made Midnight Run, at the time a remarkably straightforward film for him. I thought he was amazing in it – every gesture, every expression was perfectly calibrated, creating a complex character who was also utterly stylized. I went four times at least, and watched it subsequently as many times on video (when you’re young, you tend to overreact to certain things). I saw the movie again last year and I still think it’s a kind of masterpiece – a film with a unique worldview both whimsically abstract and wearily abrasive. And De Niro is amazing in it.

De Niro then started to make movies at an unprecedented pace, including numerous projects (Stanley and Iris, Jacknife, We’re no Angels) that surely wouldn’t have made the cut for him a few years earlier. Meanwhile, Pacino returned with Sea of Love. I still remember how excited I was about that. The movie was pretty straightforward material, but Pacino was completely magnetic in it – transforming entire scenes with his inventive, laconic charisma. Apparently reenergized, he quickly followed up with another Godfather film, a goofy cameo in Dick Tracy and, within a few years, an Oscar for Scent of a Woman (De Niro already had two, for The Godfather Part Two and Raging Bull).

The mellow years

Some time after that, I failed to hang on their careers with the same zeal. They both started to make the odd film I considered missable. Including projects yet to be released, the Internet Movie Database lists 12 films for De Niro from 2000 onwards, and 7 for Pacino. That’s the kind of pace associated with work horses rather than Method geniuses. With his hit comedies Analyze This and Meet the Parents, De Niro scored his greatest commercial successes ever. And people started to discern a pattern in Pacino’s career where he played the charismatic mentor to younger men in indifferent films – Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco, Colin Farrell in The Recruit, Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate.

They’ve both become more accessible in other ways too – turning up on award shows, or on Letterman, or in De Niro’s case even hosting Saturday Night Live (and apparently not having much fun). In Pacino’s case this accessibility seems like evidence of someone who’s finally comfortable in his own skin; who’s found a way to feel true to himself without drowning in angst. Even when his movies aren’t the strongest, it’s easy to see what drew him to them. The Recruit, for instance, is a run of the mill thriller, but his performance in it is amazingly inventive. He was just as great in S1m0ne, and even better in People I Know. In the meantime, he’s stepped up his stage activity – doing Bertold Brecht in Brooklyn last year and this year on Broadway in Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

But De Niro’s career has become inexplicable. My impetus to write this article came after I caught up with Showtime, the movie he made last year with Eddie Murphy. The movie isn’t so much bad as utterly valueless. It gives De Niro nothing to do that could possibly interest a great actor, and he merely seems to be drifting. His presence there is inexplicable. His recent movies like City by the Sea, The Score, 15 Minutes, Ronin – some of them are better than others, but none are worthy of the actor he was in the 70’s. But it’s not the material that’s so depressing – it’s De Niro’s increasing capitulation to it. I’ve sometimes wondered if this isn’t what appeals to him – to become as self-effacing as possible. Except that in other movies, such as The Adventure of Rocky and Bullwinkle, he seems involved solely because of a bizarre desire for self-parody.

Heat

In all the above, I’ve conspicuously failed to mention Heat, Michael Mann’s 1995 film in which the two, for the first and so far only time, shared the screen (they were both in The Godfather Part Two, but never in the same scene). I think the movie was more than I could absorb on a first viewing, but it’s since become one of my favourites of the 90’s. Pacino as the cop has some of the most flamboyant moments of his career, sometimes going clearly over the top, but to the end of painting a man so immersed in darkness that his only option is to define his own psychological and behavioral territory. De Niro, as the villain, plays a man who hardly lets anything slip – buttoned down and all business, although with an emotional streak that costs him his life in the end. The famous coffee shop scene, where the two acknowledge their places on opposite sides of the law, and the inevitability of a confrontation to come, is fascinating, but oddly restrained, as though they both feared where it might lead them to let loose.

It's hard to write at length about one without bringing up the other, and their careers seem very much like two sides of the same coin. At the moment I think Pacino has the clear upper hand, but that could easily swing the other way again. Actually I hope it does. Surely these two amazing icons aren’t through with surprising us yet.

Fact and fiction

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2003)

Dirty Pretty Things ought to be a slam-dunk – great concept matched with great execution. It’s directed by Stephen Frears, the British veteran who seems to be gaining increasing currency as one of the great directors – for instance, he was the subject of a special tribute at the film festival a couple of years ago. The lack of a recognizable visual style used to be a potential kiss of death under the auteur theory, but for Frears it’s generally cited as a strength – he’s engaged, committed, meticulous and funny, but ultimately allows the material to breathe in a way that, say, Oliver Stone doesn’t. I don’t know why Stone came to mind there, except that for a while he was at the top of the heap with two directing Oscars and another nomination within five years, the subject of huge scrutiny and debate, until he all but wore out his welcome. In a classic tortoise-hare reversal, it now seems clear that his place in the history book shrinks while that of others grows.

Dirty Pretty Things

Frears’ pragmatism has sometimes seen him smothered by unsuitable material (particularly Dustin Hoffman’s Hero), but one has to admit that My Beautiful Laundrette, The Hit, The Grifters, High Fidelity and Dangerous Liaisons form quite a resume. Except for The Grifters, and unlike a number of Stone’s movies, I haven’t seen any of them more than once – I guess I just like the auteurist excesses. But I’m sure Frears steered those works as close to maximum pay-off as anyone could have done. I don’t think that’s quite the case with the new film though.

It’s about immigrants in modern-day London – and it’s not about anyone else: there are no major white characters here. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a Nigerian doctor who fled from his country to avoid a trumped-up murder charge and now drives a cab by day. At night he works at a faded-grandeur hotel where the manager (Sergi Lopez) trades in human organs on the side: a fake passport in return for a kidney. It’s a horrifying premise, rendered all the more so through Frears’ unforced, matter-of-fact presentation. The movie’s early stages unfold this plot while painting a panoply of intriguing, marginal characters in a world where everything is a compromise: jobs, sexual pride, ownership over one’s body, love.

The film benefits immensely from Ejiofor’s sympathetic charisma, which compensates for Lopez’ rather by-the-numbers villain and Audrey Tautou’s rather pinched damsel in distress (her Amelie appeal isn’t particularly evident here). But in the end, the movie takes on the shape of a familiar thriller, grappling with the situation by a melodramatic reversal and, ultimately, by allowing its main characters to escape from it. That’s not unsatisfying as plotting, but you suspect the film could have accommodated a more penetrating analysis of what it depicts. Still, it’s refreshingly unsentimental, and it looks great, with a slightly tawdry look to the visuals, ably symbolizing the faded promise of the Britain that’s on display here.

Capturing the Friedmans

The story behind Capturing the Friedmans is stranger than most fictions. Andrew Jarecki made his fortune as the founder of moviefone.com, and then decided to become a filmmaker. He started making a documentary about New York City clowns, which brought him to David Friedman, one of the top children’s party entertainers. He stumbled in turn onto Friedman’s tortured personal history – fifteen years earlier, both his father and his younger brother had been imprisoned on multiple charges of child sex abuse. The father killed himself in jail after two years; the brother, who was only nineteen when he went into prison, served thirteen years. And it turned out that Friedman had videotaped many of the family’s conversations during this period, and was willing to make them available to Jarecki. Thus the project evolved into something more ambitious and darker than clowns could ever have yielded.

In part, Jarecki’s film is a relatively straightforward effort to understand what happened, constructed through interviews with detectives, lawyers, alleged victims, family members and others. Without ever seeming like an overt exercise in rehabilitation, the film casts severe questions on the adequacy of the police investigation and the credibility of the witnesses (the incident now seems like one of the notorious “false memory” cases). I think most viewers will conclude that the two men were certainly innocent of the bulk of the charges, but that there might have been something to the “no smoke without fire” view expressed in the movie.

This applies particularly to the father, who admitted to pedophilic incidents while denying the specific allegations. Based on his wife’s testimony, he sounds like a reluctant heterosexual who might have fared better in less strictly defined times – not that the movie traffics in overt sympathy. In one of Jarecki’s few striking misjudgments, the film only tells us at the very end that his 65-year old brother, who testifies to camera throughout the film, is a homosexual in a stable relationship. The timing suggests we should read this as a meaningful revelation (presumably as a window into the road that the father should have followed), but it struck me as manipulative.

Sadder than fiction

The film is generally far subtler than that though, and it’s overwhelmingly sad and disturbing. The home video footage, inevitably, is particularly painful and fascinating, as the family members strategize and accuse and yell at each other. The sons gang up not against the accused father but rather against their mother, who they regard as under-supportive (and more generally as a nagging woman who doesn’t share their intelligence or sense of humour) – this is another sense in which the film somehow seems almost to be about maleness. Even on the eve of imprisonment, anger and frustration coexist with goofy humour and occasional camaraderie, confirming human resilience but also showing how little they understood what was really happening to them. And of course, it’s impossible to know how much the fact of being filmed affected the family’s behavior. Some of the scenes, if they were being acted, would seem clumsy and not very well written. Maybe that’s life for you.

Of course, Jarecki was incredibly lucky to stumble on this material, and to some extent you might find yourself admiring his work more as assemblage and research than as art. That’s not fair though, for Capturing the Friedmans is extremely subtle and ambiguous. And it’s one film in which you categorically feel relief for the happy ending (or as happy an ending as the circumstances make possible), in which the brother is finally released and reunited with his now remarried mother. Although in a way you’d like to know what they do next, it’s better that the movie ends, before things turn dark again.

Shock claim: Gigli not so bad!

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)

According to the Toronto Star, only 2% of critics gave Gigli a positive review. So I should sew up my contrarian credentials for years ahead here, because I liked the movie. For sure, it isn’t an overall success, and there’s a pervasive sense of unease about it. But it has a crazy, endearing ambition. And a willfully perverse streak that I think deserves modest affection.

Martin Brest

As the world now knows, this is the movie that brought Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez together, playing two would-be assassins paired on a job, going from bickering to falling in love – even though she claims to be a lesbian! The world only knows this, of course, from the publicity overdrive; no one’s actually seen the film. It was a huge flop – I went on the fourth day of release, and there were seven other people in the theater. So much for the public’s supposed fascination with Affleck and Lopez.

More interesting to me was the film’s director Martin Brest. Brest’s last five films, in order, are Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, Scent of a Woman, Meet Joe Black and Gigli – a striking journey from king of the mainstream to commercial wilderness. Scent of a Woman won the Oscar for Pacino, but Brest’s clear artistic peak came with Midnight Run. It’s clearly a chase picture, but possessing an almost spooky composure and unity of vision. The De Niro-Charles Grodin partnership in that movie is one of my all time favourites – a fascinating duel in competing styles, that’s ultimately remarkably complex and even moving.

Gigli, which is the first film Brest wrote for himself since his debut Going in Style, seems like an attempt to recreate the ambiance of Midnight Run in a different genre. It’s a romantic comedy, blended with a fractured meditation on the nature of sexual attraction. Affleck plays Gigli, a not particularly proficient tough guy who’s hiding a mentally challenged kidnap victim. Not trusting him to do the job, his boss puts another professional on the case – enter Lopez. The majority of the film takes place in Affleck’s drab apartment, which occasionally gives the movie the look of a cheaply shot stage adaptation. A stream of one-scene cameos increases the theatricality – Christopher Walken as a cop investigating the disappearance, Lainie Kazan as Affleck’s mother, Missy Crider as Lopez’ distraught lesbian lover, Pacino as a crime lord.

Gobble Gobble

The title, which again is the surname of Affleck’s character, serves as a metaphor for the film – it looks as though it should evoke Leslie Caron, is apparently meant to rhyme with “really,” but generally gets mispronounced as the more earthy-sounding “jiggly.” Which is one of the more minor examples of how Gigli meshes a romantic sensibility with a gratuitous coarseness. By coarseness I don’t just mean familiar swearwords, but such barnyard oddities as Affleck telling her early on that “I’m the bull, you’re the cow,” and Lopez initiating sex with the matchless line: “It’s turkey time…gobble gobble.” There’s a quality to this that seems to go beyond mere tastelessness, as though the movie were grasping at something elemental. At the same time, of course, it casts two beautiful people in the roles – and Lopez in particular is made to look as lovely as I’ve ever seen her. The conflict between these two strands is at the heart of the film’s “badness,” but I think it’s rather interesting if you think about it as an aesthetic construct.

As the relationship heats up, Affleck and Lopez have long monologues about the glories of the male and female genitalia respectively. Again, there’s something wantonly naïve about this, as though such subjects had never been discussed by anyone before. Lopez’ apparent lesbianism (which many viewers would probably read as a lie to keep Affleck at bay, until Crider suddenly turns up) is another source of fundamental sexual confusion. The relative claustrophobia of the apartment setting and the absence of a sense of the outside world (the cameos by Walken et al suggest it’s merely insane out there) occasionally cause the movie to resemble a weird behavioral laboratory.

Gigli’s most problematic element is the mentally challenged Brian, who communicates a considerable amount of sexual frustration (mainly expressed through an identification with Baywatch) while suffering through much abrasiveness and name-calling. I think Brest was trying to do the kind of thing the Farrelly brothers do with disabled actors – ennoble them by refusing to spare them. In Gigli it seems one-sided and plainly mean-spirited. And yet, the character is yet another strand in the sexually neurotic web I mentioned, like a painful embodiment of something from the other characters’ subconscious.

The ending, where Brian finds his version of Baywatch and (not really giving anything away here) Affleck and Lopez take off together is only partly a conventional wrap-up – even by the standards of romantic comedies, the permanence of the happy ending is highly in doubt. To me this confirms the extreme uncertainty and sense of conditionality that pervades the movie. So am I on to something here that others have missed, or is the above a colossal exercise in pseudo-intellectualism? Probably somewhere in between. Maybe I’m trying too hard to see merit in the film, but it’s hard to feel too guilty about that, given how others clambered over themselves to heap scorn on it.

Masked and Anonymous

Perhaps the second-most reviled movie of the year is Masked and Anonymous, a vastly confused, rambling odyssey which I take to be an attempt to find a fictional expression for Bob Dylan’s by now vastly allusive, complex persona. The movie (apparently co-written by Dylan under a pseudonym) is certainly a vanity project, a full cataloguing of which would probably demand intimate familiarity with the Dylan oeuvre – not something I can claim (although I’m enough of a fan to own Slow Train Coming, and even to listen to it once in a while).

Nevertheless, if I hadn’t used up all the space on Gigli, I could go on at some length about how the people in the movie (played by an all-star cast including Jeff Bridges – much more interesting here than in Seabiscuit – John Goodman, Penelope Cruz, Ed Harris (in blackface!), Jessica Lange, Mickey Rourke and the great Bruce Dern) represent this and that and how the basic premise and structure connote that or the other. Maybe it’d all be worth crap, I don’t know. But in summary, the film seems to me pretty close to what a Bob Dylan movie would have to be at this point, which is obviously vastly different from what that would have meant in say 1965. That’s probably all the information you need on that one. I will say though that Masked and Anonymous, for all its points of interest, is no Gigli.

Horse sense

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)

Seabiscuit belongs in a familiar category in American film – a nice little story, grotesquely padded-out with sentiment and would-be significance. As everyone knows by now, Seabiscuit was the 1930’s Depression-era little-horse-that-could; a written-off nag notable only for his prowess at sleeping and eating who somehow developed into a consistent winner, ultimately conquering the mighty War Admiral in a one-on-one encounter. I haven’t read Laura Hillenbrand’s bestseller, on which the film is based, but the movie explicitly regards Seabiscuit as the perfect symbol for his time – a creature written off and tossed on the scrap heap, who got his second chance and made the most of it.

About a horse

The new film, directed by Gary Ross (who directed Pleasantville and directed Dave and Big), is very well-made: handsomely photographed, lovingly designed, well cast, and making the most of the story’s lump-in-the-throat aspects. It stars Tobey Maguire as the horse’s unlikely jockey (too tall, volatile, blind in one eye), Jeff Bridges as the unlikely owner (a car magnate with his eye on the future, who thought horses belonged to the past) and Chris Cooper as the unlikely trainer (an eccentric who Bridges finds living in the bush): all three of them bruised by past tragedies and disappointments. Seabiscuit provides all of them (representing the country beyond) an opportunity for renewal and redemption, and Ross takes great pains to ensure that we don’t get tugged into the horse racing scenes as mere spectacle, that we’re always aware of their wider resonance.

At which point it seems necessary to confirm that, yes, it’s a movie about a horse. At one point I wondered whether Ross has ever seen Robert Bresson’s Au hazard Balthazar, built around the suffering of a poor donkey. By which I mean that there’s nothing inherently silly about an animal bearing immense filmic meaning and weight. It’s obviously a fine line though, when the most famous horse of the last century is probably Mr. Ed. Ross’ approach to this is to minimize the horse’s presence in the film. Seabiscuit doesn’t appear for the first 45 minutes, and he’s talked about in the film more than he’s actually seen. At the start of the big race, the opening buzzer sounds, and then rather than showing us whether Seabiscuit got away to the fast start they’d been planning for (and on the preparation for which the film has spent considerable time), Ross cuts to a montage of people around the country, listening to the race. It’s a shocking negation of his movie’s dramatic possibilities, as jarring an intrusion as something in a Godard movie.

Noble history

At this point, as throughout the film, historian David McCullough provides some voice-over narration on the historical context – at various points he tells us about Henry Ford, the 1929 crash, the depression, prohibition and so forth. It’s godawful stuff, like filler from the CBS Sunday morning show, doses of medicine that we must all presume to be good for us. As the film’s opening section flicks through the back stories of the three protagonists, regularly returning to McCullough’s ponderous asides, it feels like Ross hasn’t moved too far from his earlier career as a political scriptwriter. It’s only in America, I think, that ambitious mainstream films so often muse mistily on the country’s own past. The nostalgia seems superficially rooted in pride and fortitude, but by its very existence it seems to connote insecurity, a fear of a pending America that doesn’t know or care about the country’s noble history and of where that might lead.

You would have thought that Ross’ decision to downplay the horse would mean we get to know the human characters much better, but we don’t. It feels like the three protagonists, and Bridges’ wife played by Elizabeth Banks, are together in scene after scene, but they hardly talk about anything of substance. The movie shows them to us, but doesn’t illuminate anything. Bridges’ presence is especially disappointing, consisting almost entirely of a series of crumpled smiles on which the audience can project just about anything it likes. Maybe there’s some kind of metaphor for American history in there somewhere.

Seabiscuit is hardly a bad movie, but that’s because it’s only partly a movie, and partly a multimedia cultural heritage project. I really question which is the greater insult to the audience’s intelligence – the regular summer action fodder, or this kind of golden-flow patriot fodder.

Other myths

If you’re going to do the mythic thing, you may as well go all the way, and that leads you to Michael Polish’s Northfork – another specifically “American” creation set around a dying valley on the eve of being flooded by a new dam. It follows a group of men in black charged with moving inhabitants out of the valley, a priest caring for a sick child, and a group of angels searching for a lost colleague. The movie is shot in a desaturated colour verging on black and white; it’s brooding and allusive, sometimes starkly funny, and never straightforward. Except for isolated moments, I doubt the film will have much lasting stature – it follows too specific and esoteric a formula. And I doubt whether the Polish brothers (Michael’s twin brother Mark co-wrote and stars in the film) yet have the rigour of important artists. But it’s a unique movie, and mostly in a good way.

Another kind of myth-making is on view in Alex Proyas’ Garage Days. After The Crow and Dark City, the Australian Proyas applies his technical facility (no less impressive for being more or less indistinguishable from that of Guy Ritchie or the new breed of Mexican directors or just about any other movie director under 40) to a simple story of a rock band trying to make good. The trailer and poster give away what would otherwise have seemed to be the movie’s major twist: they eventually get their big break, but they suck. The movie enjoys sketching out their sundry misadventures, although it’s all extremely (almost defiantly) basic kind of stuff, with barely a cliché left outside the garage. And much as Seabiscuit almost forgets about the horse, Garage Days definitely forgets about the music, rendering their great passion strangely abstract.

Proyas can’t make a great movie out of it, but he makes it seem like more than a purely local story. He wields the tools of cinema so dashingly that the movie almost takes on a cosmic scope. There’s a word for this of course – pretentious. But at least he’s not lecturing us about anything.

Movie expeditions

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)

I don’t think I’ll ever forget how I saw the first few minutes of Raising Victor Vargas. It was a Saturday matinee at the Varsity. They went straight from the trailers into the movie, without the “Feature Performance” logo that normally lets you know the preambles are over, and since the movie has no opening titles or credits, I initially thought it might just be another trailer. The film starts with a disembodied shot of the title character Victor Vargas, traveling up his body as it might in some kind of commercial, and then launches right into the middle of a scene, so you could almost think they’d omitted the start of the movie. On top of that, the sound was way too low, so you really had to strain to hear it, and there was a major distraction involving what looked like a couple of cops and other guys searching the theater (maybe on a manhunt, for someone who’d slipped past the ticket taker?) In total, there was none of the easy promise that normally accompanies the start of a new movie. Raising Victor Vargas seemed like hard work.

Raising Victor Vargas

But this was all exhilarating, because it caused you to approach the film as an expedition rather than as a glide, which was exactly the attitude it needed. The movie, a simple story of young love in New York’s Lower East Side, has some moments of observation that are just gorgeous, and I found myself utterly transported by them, in a way that might not usually have happened. In one scene Victor invites a girl to dinner with his family; just straightforward burgers, and nothing really happens for a while except the stilted conversation you’d expect. It’s captivating, to the point that it’s actually rather disappointing when something relatively dramatic then takes place.

The movie has great verisimilitude, but there’s no question that it’s somewhat sentimental at times, going for emotional effects that, however well disguised and hidden under a layer of urban grime, are fundamentally hokey. But I don’t know to what extent life in that community is pervasively shaped by that kind of outlook. Raising Victor Vargas doesn’t have the knowing irony and glibness common to other branches of the teen movie genre. The movie isn’t overly political, but the community’s apparent homogeneity and insularity suggests that access to America’s vaunted upward mobility is uncertain here.

The two main female characters start off mutually reinforcing their indifference to men, then both surrender over the course of the film. This could be read as a filmic convention, or as sheer sentiment, or as a shaking off of impractical youthful idealism. I think it’s all of these – but it’s also a depiction of the mechanisms that may keep the women’s lives, and perhaps those of their children and grandchildren, not far from the block where they started. Young love is terrific and inevitable, but it comes with a price tag visible only with hindsight.

Swimming Pool

So I obviously liked the film, but it’s the work of a young director, and not completely sure-footed at times. For me, circumstances definitely helped. Contrast this with Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, which could hardly be more assured. If you watched it projected onto a sardine can, it would still seem unbowed. Ozon’s a young director too, although already with five features and many shorts under his belt. A few years ago I wrote a mixed review here of his Water Falls on Burning Rocks. Since then Under the Sand and 8 Women have boosted his reputation considerably. I liked, but didn’t love, both of them. But Swimming Pool is the first of his films that I think will grow in my mind. After I saw it, I kept mentally turning it over, thinking with delight of more nuances, more complexities.

My initial reaction though, when the movie ended, was slight disappointment that such a poised, allusive work had turned out to be yet another “meta” movie with a surprise ending that amounts to a cheat. The film, Ozon’s first to be filmed substantially in English, has Charlotte Rampling as a prim English mystery novelist who, suffering from a deep malaise, goes to stay in her publisher’s French summerhouse. Her peace is shattered by the arrival of his 17-year-old daughter (Ludivine Sagnier), a force of nature who lounges around the house naked and brings home a different guy every night. The two women initially clash, but Rampling eventually realizes she’s being provided with a better narrative than the detective story she originally had in mind. So their relationship grows more complex, but is everything what it seems?

Well, you know the answer to that one already. But I don’t think it’s too productive to worry about that the film’s ending actually means, or whether it “works” in terms of tying everything up. Viewed as a whole, the film’s a superb depiction of repression (which the film pretty much seems to peg as a specifically British malaise) gradually loosening up under the French sun; of a woman slipping out from under the patriarchal thumb and reinventing herself. For sure, Rampling’s character is a bit too much of a device – an extreme of self-denial postulated only so she can be melted by the film’s machinations – and everything that follows has a resulting artificiality. You watch it as a clever piece of work. But Ozon’s mastery is so exquisite that the reservations normally attaching to such material are heavily muted here.

Open mind

Towards the end, it becomes reminiscent of Mulholland Drive as identities shift (the wizened dwarf woman in one scene certainly seems like a Lynchian touch): the film connotes the freeing of Rampling’s psyche by visibly breathing out, allowing coherence to fray. The symbolism is sometimes a bit heavy-handed, such as in the equation of writing with self-determination, or in how the film marks Rampling’s transformation by giving her a nude scene to blow all of Sagnier’s away. And if you think about it too much, you might conclude that the movie is more truly about nothing than Seinfeld ever was. So the trick is to think about it just enough and no more.

Which must be a measure of what Ozon has still to achieve. The Swimming Pool is the kind of film that barely seems to need a spectator. Although I have no doubt it’s a better film than Raising Victor Vargas, there’s something truly endearing about the latter movie’s cross of sentimentality and naturalism – it seems to acknowledge some sense (maybe, admittedly, a naïve one) of the viewer’s humanity. Of course, that train of thought could lead you to awarding points for mere pandering, which is why heart-tugging movies perhaps tend to be overvalued in middlebrow circles as long as they carry a minimum veneer of intelligence. But once in a while, I guess that’s not such a major crime.

Anything but movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)

People keep accusing me of being movie-crazed. I deny it as a matter of policy, but it’s a shaky denial. I try to watch a movie a day on average – is that madness? It’s certainly tiring, and means a lot of other ambitions get squeezed to the margins. And sure, in an ideal world I’d be more well-rounded. But I do my best. Let’s take an inventory.

Books!

I have a feeling I’ve written at least twenty articles by now where, in the course of discussing a movie based on a book, I felt bound to admit it was something I hadn’t read. The fact of my pointing out these instances probably illustrates I feel a bit guilty about them – or at least regretful. There’s no question that (to name a few recent examples) About Schmidt, The Hours and Nicholas Nickleby would be fuller viewing experiences if, in addition to engaging with them on their own terms, I were able to critique them as adaptations. Not (I hope) in the dutiful way of merely noting similarities and differences, but as a way of identifying alternative portals into the work. I know that Chicago, derived from a stage musical that I’ve seen twice, seemed to me different (probably worse, actually) and more intriguing than it would have otherwise.

I used to read a lot, but it’s the old story – as your work gets more demanding and you pick up other commitments (walking the dog being a big one), something has to give. For many people, movies are the something that has to give, but I was never going to cut the cards that way. I still spend what seems like hours a day on newspapers, various internet websites and several magazine subscriptions including Variety and The New Yorker, but vacation reading aside it’s surprising if I finish even two books a year. Since the vacation reading is always non-fiction, it ended up that a decade went by without my reading a novel (except a few that I read in French as a learning exercise). Then last year, for reasons obscure even to me, I broke the drought by reading Jerzy Kosinski’s Blind Date. I thought it was pretty awful, so I guess that’ll be it for another ten years.

The irony is that I do read book reviews and I have a pretty good retention for titles and authors’ names, so I can fake my way through a conversation pretty well. My wife reads a lot, and I choose most of her books for her based on what I’ve picked up from reviews etc., but she doesn’t really care about names and titles, so I have better knowledge – in that superficial sense – of what she’s read than she does. Anyway, I’m thinking maybe I’ll catch up when I retire. Except by then I’ll have forgotten what most of the movies were like, so I’ll have to watch them all again. And that’ll be very time consuming.

Music!

Last Christmas, my wife gave me a Macintosh ipod. This is one of the cool-looking little gadgets which carry close to 1,000 songs, either downloaded off the Internet or from your own CDs converted into MP3 format (2016 note – that’s right, that’s how old this article is, it seemed necessary to explain what an ipod was). I’d often admired the ads (I think Apple is the only company whose advertising consistently works for me – I bought one of the ill-fated cubes as well) but frankly I didn’t think I’d ever use it enough, so I showed some restraint. But she got one for me anyway, and it turns out I use it all the time – walking the dog or to and from work, on the subway. At least one and a half hours a day, and that’s on a slow day. I absolutely love the thing. And it made me realize how long it’s been since I just listened to music. It’s always been in my life, sure, as I worked on the computer or read the paper, or whatever, but I never drive any more, and that wiped out a large block of pure listening time. With a few exceptions, I haven’t gotten to know the CDs I bought in the last ten years as intimately as those I bought earlier. I regretted it, but it just seemed like another one of those things.

But now, with my head full of music as I follow the dog round the park, I’m hearing subtleties I never knew about, and they’re just thrilling me. This really came to me when I was wandering around in the dark early one morning, listening to The Band’s recording of The Well, from The Last Waltz soundtrack. I must have heard it at least fifty times, but it had never struck me, as it did then, what a truly wonderful arrangement it has. I could make a similar point over and over again with different examples. My current ipod wandering-in-the-dark favourite is Joni Mitchell’s latest album Travelogue. Played at home on the stereo, it’s more interesting than actually good – a somewhat overblown symphonic reinterpretation of her own songs (and not generally the best ones either). But on the ipod, it sounds staggeringly haunting.

I guess my taste is pretty wide, although no more so than a lot of other people. I guess I just don’t look the type. I also have on there Barbra Streisand, The Sex Pistols, John Coltrane, Neil Young, Quincy Jones, the soundtracks to Will Rogers Follies and Sunday in the Park with George, Pink Floyd, Charles Mingus, Prefab Sprout, Bobby Womack – maybe you’ll concede me the point about the wide taste. My big blind spot is classical music. I know it’s a crazy generalization even to put it that way, but it’s simply not what I enjoy.

Plays!

Here’s another medium in which I easily manage to exceed average activity, even if that isn’t saying a lot. I probably see around five plays a year – about half of them here, the others in the course of a vacation to somewhere or other. But I’ve never been to the opera or to the ballet, and the best guess is I never will.

And once in a while I go to an art gallery or a photo exhibition. So what’s the big picture? Even if I say it myself, for someone who spends so much time on movies, I’m not a total wipeout in other areas. So recently there came a weekend with only one new film I wanted to see – usually it’s two or three. I love movies, but I actually thought this was great. I’ll have all this extra time, I thought to myself. So what did I end up doing? I watched three other movies on tape.

Zombie movie

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)

According to the Internet Movie Database, George Romero is making a new film next year, called The Ill. It would be only his second film since 1993 – the other was something called Bruiser, which I’ve never had a chance to see. I don’t know whether this glacial pace is a sign of artistic deliberation or just lack of economic opportunity, but it’s a sign of Romero’s odd status that either seems possible.

George Romero

Romero has almost always worked in the horror genre, most famously with the zombie trilogy that began with Night of the Living Dead, and his films show every sign of budgetary constraint (particularly the use of no-name actors) and capitulation to genre expectations. But he regularly renders it plausible to believe that he chooses the genre simply because it’s a fitting vehicle for his particular philosophical and thematic concerns. Not that I don’t think he enjoys spattering the ketchup around a bit.

I’ve also failed to see his 1978 film Martin, which many claim as his masterpiece, but of those I have seen, the pinnacle has to be Dawn of the Dead, which I have on DVD. I used to think of it as one of my “guilty pleasures,” but I guess I’m getting too old to be very guilty now. This second film in the trilogy opens on scenes of utter chaos as the zombie plague pushes civilization into the most tenuous of corners. It gradually focuses on a quartet who flee in a helicopter, arriving at a suburban mall where they seal themselves in and briefly settle into a life of parodic consumerist plenty, while the zombies clamour ineffectually outside the doors.

Romero's cinematography is crystal clear, almost gaudy; the zombies are so in our face that the film dares us to laugh at the absurdity of the premise. But they also take on an enormously specific identity, suspended in some godless limbo between what they were and what hell has made of them, shambling ineffectually until they catch a whiff of a live human, when they become crazed cannibals. You realize that the movie’s deadpan aesthetic reflects the dehumanization of the premise, and it becomes way more unsettling than seems possible from the raw ingredients.

Danny Boyle’s new zombie movie 28 Days Later obviously evokes Romero, and Boyle acknowledged that the film’s supermarket scene, where his own band of survivors ransacks a deserted store, is a nod to Dawn of the Dead. 28 Days Later is an effective film, but I guess it must be significant that it made me think about Romero’s film more than about 28 Days Later itself. Boyle’s opening certainly outdoes Romero though. After a prologue where a group of animal activists set free an infected chimp over the protests of a terrified research scientist, we jump via the “28 days later” caption to a man waking up in a hospital, finding himself alone, and then wandering outside into an utterly deserted London. He walks in solitude across Tower Bridge, through Trafalgar Square – only an apocalypse could generate a London like this.

28 Days Later

After some initial encounters with the demented population, he runs into a couple of fellow survivors who tell him that while he was in a coma (after a bicycle accident) a mysterious infection engulfed virtually the whole country. They later find a man holed up with his daughter in an apartment building, then pick up a radio broadcast about a survivor community to the north. They set out in a cab, finding a group of soldiers in a country house, planning how to start things over, but the soldiers’ ambitions conflict with theirs…

Boyle shoots the movie in an ultra-grainy, low-definition hand-held style that frequently plunges into incoherence – the encounters with the zombies are splashes of blood and shadow and movement, impressionistic bursts of darkness that reflect the unknown, overwhelming nature of the new world in which they find themselves. In one scene the taxicab drives past a field of flowers which look like blobs of super-imposed colour. The style is generally effective, but I think it buffers the audience from forging a visceral connection with events. The ads quote someone as saying it’s the scariest film since The Exorcist, but I didn’t detect much fear in the theatre when I saw it. It’s a chilling presence for sure, but the pseudo-documentary style is such a cliché by now that it actually emphasizes the film’s artificiality.

The big picture in 28 Days Later is a bit hard to figure out. The zombies seem to come out mainly at night, but even allowing for that, there aren’t many of them around, or many dead bodies. Since the infection takes hold in a mere twenty seconds, it seems that chaos must have descended with horrendous speed, but it left the streets remarkably clear of abandoned traffic, corpses, debris and suchlike. On the other hand, the movie makes a fair bit of behavioural sense, even if some of the characters might appear to have adapted rather too easily to their new circumstances. It seems particularly shrewd about the troublesome sexual politics of a world where ten men (worse, mostly macho soldier types) coexist with only two women.

On the whole, Boyle seems more cerebral than Romero, which would be an advantage in almost any genre, except maybe this one. 28 Days Later plays effectively on a multitude of fears, but the almost naïve sincerity of Romero’s film ultimately proves more intriguing.

Owning Mahowny

There’s another movie about a destructive zombie in a desolate wasteland – well, no, actually it’s about an embezzling assistant bank manager living in Toronto. Based on a true story, Owning Mahowny tracks the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as he embezzles and gambles away over ten million dollars. This kind of movie material is often rendered splashy and flamboyant, but that streak is largely confined here to John Hurt’s grinning-serpent performance as the manager of Mahowny’s favourite casino. The rest of the movie is deliberately drab, mostly confined to colourless interiors, befitting Hoffman’s extremely interiorized performance.

The gimmick is that he’s a world-class embezzler who never really benefits from his crimes – he rates the gambling experience, on a scale of 1 to 100, as a 100, but it sure doesn’t show. The casino and his bookie get rich, the bank manipulates him to better squeeze their clients, even his mistreated girlfriend seems to draw some kind of perverse satisfaction from his errant ways. Receding behind huge glasses and a barely changing expression, Mahowny becomes a virtual commodity, like the mounds of cash that change hands around him. It’s a simple premise really, and the film sometimes seems a bit threadbare and hokey, but it ultimately has substantial wherewithal. The immensely versatile Hoffman really seems like someone who could play any man alive, or dead.

Green man

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2003)

It seems now that every mass-market comic book movie comes with a spin about how this particular movie represents a more cerebral take on the material (whether Batman, Spiderman, X-Men etc.) than we’ve ever seen before. And now we have Ang Lee’s Hulk, for which some of this commentary is more than usually persuasive. Here’s Roger Ebert:

Dealing with issues

“The movie brings up issues about genetic experimentation, the misuse of scientific research and our instinctive dislike of misfits, and actually talks about them. Remember that Ang Lee is the director of films such as The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility, as well as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; he is trying here to actually deal with the issues in the story of the Hulk, instead of simply cutting to brainless special effects…Lee has broadly taken the broad outlines of a comic book story and transformed them to his own purposes; this is a comic book movie for people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a comic book movie.”

The film stars Eric Bana as Bruce Banner, whose research into DNA takes an unexpected turn when he’s accidentally exposed to a huge dose of deadly radiation. It should kill him, but he doesn’t know that he inherited abnormal DNA from his presumed-dead father, also a scientist, who experimented on himself before Bruce was conceived. The DNA/radiation combination turns him into the Hulk, a raging green beast who emerges whenever Bruce loses his cool. Rival scientists duel with the military for the economic and strategic potential of this genetic breakthrough, but Bruce’s ex-girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) is the only one who seems to care about him, including his father (Nick Nolte) who now reappears with his own crazy schemes in mind.

Remarkably for a film of this kind of breadth, Hulk has only five characters of any consequence: Banner father and son, Connelly and her father (Sam Elliott) who leads the military efforts, and a scheming scientist played by Josh Lucas: over 95% of the film’s dialogue goes to this quintet. Especially given the doubling of the parental estrangement theme (Connelly and Elliott have an icy relationship), this concentration of interaction lends the film a uniquely odd feeling: of an anguished chamber piece, almost a stage piece, played out on an absurdly vast canvas.

Full of talk

The film has a vague handle on a witty central metaphor: Banner’s relationship with Connelly was on the rocks because of his emotional inaccessibility; turning into the Hulk is the ultimate remedy to that problem…but of course introduces its own problems. In some relationships, you just can’t win! There’s almost no humour in the film though. Lee obviously understands the Hulk’s potential as metaphor – how could you not? – but seems to have no specific strategy for unlocking it, other than to have his camera stare somewhat plaintively at the characters.

As Ebert says, the film is full of talk, but it’s absurd to suggest it has anything significant to say on the subjects he lists. The loquaciousness seems to me more like a sign of frail self-confidence on Lee’s part, almost like a delaying tactic before he surrenders to the action. Throughout the opening section, Lee uses a dazzling array of techniques for transitioning from one scene to the next: all manners of wipes and dissolves and blends and split screens. It’s broadly reminiscent of comic book style, of the artist’s ability to control the tone by varying the size and placement of individual frames. Sometimes, the effect in the film is rather beautiful, but it’s an aesthetic approach that calls attention to itself, and to the movie as an artificiality. And all the talk, despite its superficial “depth,” can’t overcome the story’s perhaps insurmountable silliness.

Recent comic-book movies played up their protagonists’ sexiness by emphasizing their sleek, sexy muscularity. This option isn’t really available to the makers of the Hulk, who are stuck with an absurd, lumbering green monster. Even the film’s defenders have criticized, to varying degrees, the computer-generated character for not looking real enough. At worst, in long shot, it’s like watching a mere green blob moving across the landscape (“Toss a plastic toy figure across your yard,” said Glenn Lovell of the San Jose Mercury News, “and you’ll have a good approximation of what this film’s $140 million-plus budget bought its producers”). In close-up, the Hulk looks more convincing, but still inherently absurd.

The Abstract Hulk

Even so, the action scenes still often have a certain grace to them, although there’s nothing to match the duel above the treetops in Crouching Tiger. But they lack any sort of conviction. We’ve all become used to the trade-off entailed by computer-generated wonders: as the spectacle’s wow value goes up, our emotional involvement in it goes down. Watching action scenes now is more about grading the execution, measured against the ever-increasing stakes laid down by other big movies, than about visceral investment. One of the ultimate examples is the fight scene from Matrix Reloaded between Keanu Reeves and the dozens of Hugo Weaving clones. It’s hard to remember a more impressive display, both in conception and execution. But as many writers commented, it nevertheless leaves you flat, because there’s no sense of danger to it whatsoever. And how could there be? When you had Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine beating each other to a pulp on top of a moving train, then you felt some danger.

Lee compounds the abstraction of the action scenes by staging many of them in the desert, always a movie locale of such resonance that the most straightforward thing seems symbolic. The scenes seem underpopulated and stark – echoing the film’s lack of substantial people. It’s as though the film was a microscope, stripping away the usual action movie diversions to illuminate its central psychodrama. In this sense, Lee’s more contemplative “Eastern” side is amply evident in the film. But much as he indulges the characters to a point, he doesn’t invest them with the detail and rough edges that would make them into more than archetypes. Bana was apparently deliberately directed to be fairly bland, the better to support the contrast with the beast within him. It seems a simplistic strategy. The biggest disappointment is Nolte, who’s almost always compelling in his films, but not here.

When the concept of Ang Lee directing a Hulk movie was announced a couple of years ago, it was startling and exciting, and you had no idea how it would work. Now the movie’s out, and it’s a testimony to the concept that you almost want Lee to direct a sequel and get it right next time. But the artistic update’s too limited. He’s in the same spot now as Martin Scorsese after Gangs of New York – someone for whom going back to smaller movies wouldn’t be a limitation, but a liberation.