(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2006)
In Neil Marshall’s The Descent,
six young, thrill-seeking British women go caving in a remote area of
Philadelphia: five of them don’t know that the sixth has switched the game
plan, plunging them where no man or woman has gone before. And no wonder, once
they find out what dwells down there. The
Descent is a classic straight-down-the-line horror thriller. Marshall
supplies a punchy beginning so we know he’s serious, then kicks back for a
while, expertly establishing the quirks and tensions within the group.
Everything that happens in the caves, where fun turns to irritation and then to
anxiety and outright disaster, is superbly dramatized, with masterful
orchestration of light and space, rock and metal, physical fragility and,
eventually, monsters!
World Trade Center
Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center
could also have been called The Descent,
to refer both to the two Port Authority cops trapped in the rubble, whose
rescue the film dramatizes, and to the broader calamitous reality and
implications of what happened on September 11, 2001. But such a title would
already smack of “interpretation,” and Stone’s approach here is almost directly
opposite to the feverish speculations of films such as JFK; instead he adopts a “right thing to do” approach paralleling
the stoic professionalism of the two protagonists. I watched it in the third
row, consumed by the screen and unaware of the rest of the audience, and I must
say that I’ve seldom been so fully occupied by a two-hour picture. The
depiction of the event itself, concentrating on the blind chaos, the sense of a
world out of control, is especially effective. But even the conventional
opening montage of early morning New York City has an unusual fluidity and
beauty to it.
The film, concentrating on the agonized families, inevitably becomes
ever more straightforward as it goes on, although the execution remains superb
in all respects. The acting is all very fine too: Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena
play the cops, and Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal their wives. I don’t know
how it could have been carried off much better, so the question of course is
whether this is the film that was actually needed. The closing voice over tells
us that 9/11 reminded us of the many capabilities of man, and that it’s
important to remember the good along with the evil. But this seems to me a
simplistic paradigm, because we already understand the good better than we do
the evil, and in any event, neither is ultimately as important as the events
that were set in motion, and that continue to consume us. The film has only a
brief glimpse of Bush on a TV screen, and we must rely on the briefest of
remarks and reactions to suggest any broader perspective. There’s a reference
to Iraq in the closing captions, which could be taken as a subtle endorsement
of how 9/11 was used to justify that wretched initiative. But, if so, it’s so
subtle that you can’t make anything of it. It’s often been difficult in the
past to figure out exactly what Oliver Stone has been trying to say, but it’s a
new experience to have him apparently so happy to say nothing.
Brothers of the Head
Keith Fulton and Louis Pena’s Brothers
of the Head, a boozy, druggy, music-drenched documentary-style parable of
decades past, feels closer to what an Oliver Stone movie used to be, although
Stone never had this light a touch, and would surely have thought himself above
such apparently inconsequential material. In one of the year’s wackier
premises, the film depicts a pair of conjoined twins who front a rock-punk band
in 70’s Britain, flirting with success before their psychological and physical
frailties bring them down.
For a while, the film feels weighed down by logistics, with the central
characters too far in the background, but it gradually comes together, perhaps
working especially well as a new and fresh spin on old rock movie clichés; it’s
a very poignant depiction of creativity born out of, and of course dependent
on, extreme adversity. It’s also so good at evoking the unkempt lifestyle that
you may need to fumigate your clothes afterwards.
Little Miss Sunshine
Little Miss Sunshine was this year’s consensus
“discovery” at the Sundance Film Festival, and for once you can see what the
excitement was about. The raw material is familiar enough – a dysfunctional
family squeezes into a rickety old bus for a road trip (so that 8 year old
Olive can compete in a beauty pageant), and gets some of its rough edges
smoothed off along the way. But this particular version has lots of raw feeling
and many funny lines, even if a few too many of those come from the easy direction
of a foul-mouthed grandfather (impeccably played by Alan Arkin).
What’s most surprising is the film’s portrayal of a family living under
real economic constraints. Details like Olive asking her mother how much she
can spend, when they stop at a diner for breakfast, are rare in movies,
particularly with the naturalism we see here. The astute costume design and art
direction contribute to a feeling of uncommon depth and precision. And it’s
hard to deny that several of the characters really are losers, if only by the standards they’ve set themselves. The
title doesn’t lend you to expect too much bite, and indeed the movie could have
gone further; Greg Kinnear, as the father trying to make it as a motivational
speaker, sees his dream shattered, but we don’t know where that’s going to take
him. Instead, once they get to the pageant, it shifts into easy (if again very
well executed) parody and subversion. It’s a funny ending, but these pageants
are so flagrantly tasteless and pathetic that the target doesn’t seem very
relevant to where the film’s been going. Overall though, it’s only because of
the general high quality that one can raise these sorts of objections.
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