Movies of today

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2003)

A few weeks ago I went to a screening of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men at the Cinematheque. I’ve read about this film ever since I became interested in movies, but I’d never had a chance to see it before. Just one of those things, I supposed. It was worth the wait – the film is one of Ray’s most powerful, melancholy works.

Before the screening, Cinematheque programmer James Quandt stood up and talked about the print. He said that in the course of putting the Ray season together, he’d discovered that The Lusty Men had become extremely hard to find. Specifically, he’d only been able to locate four prints of the film: two in 16mm, one in Belgium, and the one we were about to see. He apologized for what he called the “fair” condition of the print. It was mostly OK, but looked at times as though it was falling apart on the screen. Maybe from the pressure of being the only 35mm Lusty Men on the continent.

The Lusty Men

Well, this was the same weekend as the global protests against the war in Iraq, and any number of other things that count for more than the fate of an old movie. But I was fairly stunned at this revelation. The Lusty Men is part of the standard vocabulary of movie writing, referred to routinely as an important, even necessary film. I don’t ever remember reading about it being particularly rare in the way that, say, Vertigo was for a while. Maybe the truth is people haven’t realized. Maybe the movie’s slipped from our grasp, and we haven’t noticed.

If the movies were just about the art, maybe we should put creation on hold for a few years and just pour the money into safeguarding the art we already have. Of course, it’s more about the commerce. And art doesn’t function with such rationality anyway.

The threat to The Lusty Men illustrates one of the ways in which the fate of movies seems to me an unusually random thing. Another example is how slight changes in audience perception or acceptance make a huge difference – economically of course, but also in the judgment of history. Take a film like Narc, which opened this January. I was reading about it for months before the release – about the buzz from Sundance, about how Tom Cruise loved it, about how it reinvented the genre and was going to get an Oscar nomination at least for Ray Liotta and maybe for much more than that.

Well, the awards all passed Narc by, it didn’t get much of an audience, and that’s that – we’ll never ever hear much more about it. There have been hundreds of such movies – bathed in promise for a little while, but ending up in obscurity. But if things had gone a little differently, who knows?

I thought Narc was a pretty generic movie, tiresomely shot, and it made no impact on me at all. Ron Shelton’s current film Dark Blue is a much more interesting entry in the same vein. This movie never had any pre-release buzz at all, and the conventional wisdom is that anything getting its premiere in February can’t be worth too much. But it’s an entirely engrossing, muscular film, even if it flirts with melodrama a bit too openly.

Dark Blue

I don’t know much about director Ron Shelton, but based on what I know, I like the idea of him. He’s usually made movies set around sports, to the point where he seems almost obsessed: White Men Can’t Jump (basketball), Cobb and Bull Durham (baseball), Tin Cup (golf), Play it to the Bone (boxing). But he also made Blaze, about Southern politics in the 1950s, and he wrote Under Fire, the movie about journalists in 1979 Nicaragua. This seems to demand some remark about the axis between sports and politics, but I’m not sure what that should be. Maybe Shelton is primarily interested in exploring the nuances of a structure, people functioning within (and testing the edges of) a set of rules – sports and politics being two convenient vessels for this project.

And now he’s taken on the workings of the notorious Los Angeles Police Force, depicted here at the height of its notoriety – the five days leading to the Rodney King verdict (and ensuing riot) in 1991. Kurt Russell (in career-best form) plays one of those patented movie cops who’s gone way over the line and rationalized it to the ultimate degree. As in Training Day, there’s a younger partner who’s struggling with the ethos. The movie immerses itself in the cop culture with a fastidiousness reminiscent of Sidney Lumet movies like Prince of the City and Q&A, but there’s a greater relish to it. Of course, there’s nothing new about the lovable rogue either, but Shelton paints an entire machine of winks and nods, a community in which the backslapping and citations barely hold self-loathing and mutual betrayal at bay.

Shelton films the whole thing in a zippy, documentary-flavoured style, which achieves a substantial payoff at the end, where the verdict comes out and the streets go haywire. Truth is, I’m not sure the juxtaposition with the King incident really counts for much. It’s mainly a backdrop (although a terrific one which underlines the awfully fragile state of the LAPD’s relationship to the community), and as such the film can be accused of exploitation. But at the risk of sounding cynical, can’t they all nowadays?

The Life of David Gale

Take for example Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale, in which Kevin Spacey plays a former anti-death penalty activist who’s now on Death Row himself, and Kate Winslet is a reporter running round trying to save his hide as time runs out. The people who hate this film really hate it. Roger Ebert gave it zero stars, and wrote: “this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein.”

But Ebert’s primary objection turns out to be ideological: “I am sure the filmmakers believe their film is against the death penalty. I believe it supports it and hopes to discredit the opponents of the penalty as unprincipled fraudsters.” The problem, I think, is that Ebert approaches the movie as a serious work, rather than as a piece of trash. I thought Parker’s last two films, Evita and Angela’s Ashes, were about as wretched as it gets, and thus I now expect nothing from him except flashy tackiness. With this mindset in place going in, David Gale turns out to be a reasonable piece of corn, nothing more. Given advances in preservation technology, we’re assured of having it with us forever, but we really won’t need it.

Movie passions

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2003)

I’ll admit to a slight jealousy of people who completely immerse themselves in a fictional world: who watch the movies or TV shows until they’ve memorized them, read every relevant publication, start their own websites, passionately debate minutiae with fellow fans, attend conventions and – if their dreams come true – get married to someone who’s just as nuts about the whole thing as they are. Currently, of course, the main focus for such activity is the second Lord of the Rings movie – The Two Towers. To me, it’s just another movie at best, and that’s the healthier approach to it, all things considered. I do hate to miss out on a good time though.

I’ve been through various obsessions with one mythology or another, with all the symptoms: the list making, the cataloguing, the accumulation of memorabilia. As a kid, I was into Disney – really into Disney. At 5 or 6, I could tell you who provided the voices for all the characters, and I was pretty well up on the animators too. That evaporated when I was 7 or 8, to be replaced by the British TV show Doctor Who.

Getting into movies

For those who don’t know, this was a weekly half-hour show chronicling the adventures of a “Time Lord” who traveled through space and time in a spacecraft that, from the outside, looked like an old-fashioned police phone booth (Doctor Who is the sole reason why anyone under the age of 40 knows there were ever such things as police phone booths). Whenever the lead actor quit the role, the Doctor would regenerate into a new body and personality, thus allowing the show a new lease of life. My primary interest in it coincided with the dashing Jon Pertwee, after whom the actors became ever more lightweight. The show petered out in the mid-90s, although one often reads about plans for a revival, or a big screen version.

This broadened into an interest in science fiction generally. I’ve read a lot of Asimov and Heinlein and the others, but all before the age of 11 or 12. Of course, much of the genre is quite violent and/or sexual, so I was really getting away with something. Then, around the time of the first Star Trek movie in 1979, I became a Trekker. This seems now like a backward step – I think maybe keeping up with the entire genre was too arduous. I started buying movie magazines just for the Trek articles, and it’s really around then that I became seriously interested in film as a whole.

I can still remember drawing up one of my first film want-to-see lists, which included such gems as Private Benjamin and Hopscotch. The first adult-rated movie I sneaked into was Altered States; the second was Heaven’s Gate. Of course, Heaven’s Gate is famous for being a movie that no one went to see, so my wayward streak must already have been taking shape. I got into foreign movies around the same time, and since then – for over twenty years now – I’ve kept my passion for film burning pretty steadily. My records show there was a period of several months in 1984 when I hardly watched any movies at all, but I’ve completely forgotten what that was all about.

Repeat viewings

The main characteristic of my film thing has been a desire to see just about everything, which has consistently kept me from multiple viewings, intensive background reading, or from watching all those extras that come with DVDs (I’ve never listened to any of the commentary tracks on any of the disks I own). I’ve written before about the fatigue that sometimes accompanies this tendency. Without question, I’d like to linger more, to contemplate, to debate, to go back, to look again. But I haven’t done the latter since Bamboozled. A friend of mine recently went to see Talk to Her twice within the same week, placing a second viewing ahead of The Hours and Gangs of New York and About Schmidt and numerous other recent releases he hadn’t seen. This struck me as a Don Quixote-like endeavor – noble, and completely impractical.

Even so, I think I generally squeeze out some reasonable engagement with what a movie is all about (otherwise of course, there really would be no point at all). But I’m not best suited to films of sprawling complexities and multi-layered back stories and dozens of characters – the kind of movie where aficionados pore over detailed notes on the web and compare it to the book in painstaking detail. I went to see the first Lord of the Rings film, with its lengthy opening narrative about the origin of the rings and the lords of darkness, throwing around names and defining the parameters of its imaginary universe. I remember saying to myself: what the hell is all this about. By the time it got to Bilbo Baggins and his eleventy-first birthday, I’d had enough already. But I stayed, for the dullest sixteen – uh, sorry, three hours of last year.

I swore I wouldn’t be coming back for the other two movies and by golly I meant it. Nothing about the reviews for The Two Towers changed my mind. But then, just like its predecessor, it started to get nominated for awards – Golden Globes, and then Oscars. And I couldn’t stand not seeing one of the five Oscar-nominated movies – I haven’t been in that position for decades. So I went for it, despite severe misgivings.

The Two Towers

It helped that by the time I got round to it the theater was almost empty. I could spread out and enjoy the extra-large supply of snacks I’d smuggled in. Initially, I wondered whether I’d have enough to get me through the experience. The movie starts up right where its predecessor left off, with no recap or summary, and I’ve forgotten most of what I needed to know.

But ultimately it didn’t matter. The Two Towers is essentially a series of one-off action sequences, with far less exposition and dialogue than the first movie. It’s all well staged, and on this occasion I found myself better able to appreciate the unique fusion of spectacularly authentic New Zealand landscapes with digital and other wizardry: it’s a far more tangible-feeling fantasy than most of the genre. New cast members like Bernard Hill and Miranda Otto add to the gravity and nuance that others detected in the first film. On the whole, it didn’t feel like a minute over, well, three hours.

Of course, the only reason I enjoyed the film is that it allowed me to ignore all the Tolkienish elements I have no patience for. Whether this makes it a good or a bad adaptation, I don’t know. I would go online and research what the Tolkien crowd is saying about it, but I don’t have the time.

About Jack

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2003)

Alexander Payne made an amazing leap in 1999 with Election, a film that may well have deserved the Oscar that year. It’s wise and nuanced and complex, with scintillating characters and dialogue. And completely easy to watch. Almost no one makes art like that. A few years later, he’s back with About Schmidt, set again in his home state of Nebraska, but with an added element that surely says all you need to know about Payne’s post-Election credibility: it stars Jack Nicholson.

I don’t mean to take a cheap shot when I say that there’s a problem with any movie that casts Nicholson as an insurance executive who’s let all his chances get away from him. Some of the greatest performances come from casting against type, and Nicholson’s work here is a superior piece of acting, no question about it. But there’s no point pretending we watch movies in a vacuum. Star image contributes to the fabric of a film as surely as the lighting or the music. And About Schmidt has a problem: almost every element of Nicholson’s well-established persona works against the role he’s playing.

Who’s this woman?

For example, Nicholson says in voice over, talking about his tired 42-year-old marriage, that he wakes up every morning and wonders who this old woman is in his bed. June Squibb, the actress playing his wife, is just two years older than Nicholson, so she’s certainly an age-appropriate partner for him. But it’s impossible not to think of his affair with Lara Flynn Boyle and other facets of his legendary reputation. The relationship with Squibb becomes easy to chuckle at and to treat as fanciful, whereas Schmidt’s sense of entrapment should surely be painful.

The problem intensifies once Schmidt’s wife dies. He goes to seed for a while, then sets himself a mission – to abort his daughter’s forthcoming marriage to a man that Schmidt thinks is an idiot (Hope Davis and Dermot Mulroney play the couple). He sets off in his Winnebago, reliving some past memories along the way. But Nicholson’s presence skews the film to the point that you don’t know how to take it. In some ways, Schmidt is clearly a creature of his environment, sharing the same basic values, generating the same banal remarks. On the other hand, he senses himself slipping out of sync with those surroundings, and becomes preoccupied by time running out. Nicholson, though, is so inherently out of sync that you can’t help perceiving it as an abstract rather than as an emotional dilemma. The movie, broadly speaking, is about Schmidt’s attempts to find equilibrium after he’s forced into a new phase of his life. But with Nicholson in the role, there’s no possible equilibrium.

Some critics feel more strongly about this than I do. David Edelstein in Slate compared the film to watching an episode of The Twilight Zone: “A Nicholson who doesn’t unleash the full force of his libidinous counterculture energy,” says Edelstein, “is a Nicholson unrealized.” I don’t think that’s quite right – Nicholson kept it bottled up in The Pledge, with great success. But that film was dense with mythmaking – it didn’t need verisimilitude in the way that About Schmidt does.

Every man’s reasons

Another problem with About Schmidt is that it’s primarily a dramatic piece (I think so anyway – the Golden Globes categorized it as a drama rather than a comedy), but it evokes laughs at every turn, and I’m rather uneasy about the source of those laughs. Basically, the film patronizes Midwesterners, reducing them to shallow nincompoops who live entirely through clichés and lack any philosophical perspective on their idiocy. To take one example out of many: in a bedroom decorated with Mulroney’s childhood mementos, the camera sticks on a shot of a certificate he earned for perfect attendance during some low-grade two-week college course. It gets a big laugh from the audience. But it tells us nothing new about the character, and it’s just an easy little dig at a culture that would recognize such limited accomplishment, and of a person who would accept it as a compliment. Fine, but as laughs go it’s like stealing candy from a baby, and where does it get you?

In slightly more considerate hands, About Schmidt might have drawn on Jean Renoir’s famous dictum (I apologize for once again using one of the most over-quoted lines in cinema): Every man has his reasons. Schmidt thinks Mulroney’s character is a fool who’s unworthy of his daughter, and he dreams of sabotaging the wedding, but in the end he keeps his mouth shut and plays along. “Look at these people!” he declares vis a vis Mulroney’s family, but there’s no substantive way in which he’s better than them (unless, of course, you see him as Jack Nicholson rather than as Warren Schmidt). Indeed, maybe that’s the main thing Schmidt should have been forced to realize. Either way, Renoir’s philosophy underlay Election far more than it does About Schmidt.

But the film has any number of compensations. It has terrific attention to detail, and you’ll seldom get such an authentic whiff of mid-price hotels and restaurants, of officers and trailer parks and living rooms. And reservations aside, it is often very funny. It sets its own pace, never breaking away from Schmidt himself, maintaining a kind of shocked geniality that may well sum up the mid-West.

Letter from Africa

And the film has a highly beguiling voice over, as Schmidt sets out his life in letters to a 6 year old African boy that he’s sponsoring for $22 a month. The device provides yet more incongruity, as Schmidt recounts mundane local details to a little boy who has no possible sense of the culture (always ending with a banal closing such as “Hope things are fine with you.”) We only ever see the boy in a photograph, yet in some weird way he’s the second most indelible presence in the movie (Kathy Bates’ much-praised turn as the mother of the groom was too familiar for my taste, and the rest of the cast isn’t really given enough to work with.) Schmidt’s connection with the kid actually is something that does set him aside – it’s his main claim to transcend his surroundings. Which is why when the movie makes this explicit in its final scene, it’s an intensely moving moment for Schmidt, and I think for most of the audience as well.
 

Nicholson’s career is so rich that he doesn’t need to add to it, and yet About Schmidt may win him a fourth Oscar. He may deserve it, and yet however strongly one assesses his acting, the fact remains that the film might have worked better with a less known actor in the role. But then it might also have been dumped straight to cable. Reading this article over, I feel I’ve understated the enjoyment I got out of the film. But after Election, we were entitled to expect something amazing. As much as Nicholson plays against type, in the end he does the film a big disfavor. He makes it just too easy to watch.

Vision of hell

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2003)

The favourite for this year’s Oscar for best foreign film must be the Brazilian City of God, directed by Fernando Meireilles. It helps its chances a lot that Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her is ineligible because its home country, Spain, didn’t submit it for consideration. Still, City of God would be a worthy winner of the award. It’s a film of enormous skill and scope, fusing serious purpose with canny entertainment values. And it marks yet another step forward in the amazing advance of South American cinema.

City of God

The “city of God” is a hellish slum in Rio de Janeiros, and the film intertwines several stories about the boys who grow up there, usually to become drug dealers or hoodlums. It’s a dirt-poor environment where parents are largely absent, and so is a sense of much of anything except the pragmatic appeal of lawlessness and anarchy. Meireilles is an award-winning director of commercials who leaps into this, his debut film, with the confidence of an established master. He turns the milieu into the world’s rattiest circus, marshalling the constant conflict and misery and danger into a ceaseless swirl of incident.

The film’s received some very high praise. Roger Ebert judged the picture the second best of last year, behind Spielberg’s Minority Report. He wrote: “In its actual level of violence, City of God is less extreme than Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, but the two films have certain parallels. In both films, there are really two cities: the city of the employed and secure, who are served by law and municipal services, and the city of the castaways, whose alliances are born of opportunity and desperation. Those who live beneath rarely have their stories told.”

“City of God,” concluded Ebert, “does not exploit or condescend, does not pump up its stories for contrived effect, does not contain silly and reassuring romantic sidebars, but simply looks, with a passionately knowing eye, at what it knows.”

I like the film, but I doubt I’m alone in finding that a bit much. Those who live beneath rarely have their stories told? In fact, don’t movies contain a disproportionate percentage of assassins, drug dealers and all-purpose “sickos”? The new South American cinema (judging at least by the admittedly thin sample of it that’s been shown commercially here) barely seems able to tell any other stories.

And as for simply looking at what it knows – well, a two-hour movie necessarily involves a multitude of choices about it knows or doesn’t know. But in this case it’s undeniable that the movie’s points are pretty much made after the first hour. Up to that point we’re still gearing ourselves up to the film’s imaginative velocity. Beyond that it keeps on going, becoming more and more wrapped up in a single drugwar story that becomes increasingly mundane. The movie never loses its feeling for real pain and incident, for the intimate moment that drives home the cost of this machismo, but these moments increasingly seem like appendages to its central momentum.

What it knows

The comment about “simply looking” is off in another way too. City of God has a structure that travels back and forth through time; a voice over that refers to plot strands to be revealed later, or doubles back to clarify something that passed before. For all its immersion in the moment, it’s a technique that conveys a restlessness with what’s before it, a yearning to be somewhere else. In Alfonso Cuaron’s Y tu Mama tambien, the plot kept swerving off to explore the destinies of various secondary characters. City of God isn’t quite that volatile, but it foregoes the humanist patience of a movie that just looks.

On the whole, my own views are closer to David Edelstein in Slate. He writes: “The violence in City of God isn’t glorified, but it doesn’t get under your skin and haunt you, either – which is odd when you consider the movie’s sociopolitical trappings…and how many kids end up eating bullets on-screen. The only moment that rips the pulp fabric is when Lil’ Ze hands a gun to a boy known as Steak-and-Fries and commands him to choose which of two delinquent “runts” to shoot – one of whom looks 6 years old and suddenly begins to sob like the small child that he is. That infantile keening cuts through the camera’s wry objectivity. It’s the only time we ever think ‘Don’t shoot,’ instead of ‘Duck!’”

He’s right about the documentary-like tug of that scene (Katia Lund, who helped Meireilles in marshalling non-professional actors and navigating unfriendly terrain, is credited as co-director, which must indicate an unusually hefty contribution). And it’s not quite true the film never attains that level elsewhere – for instance, the Lil’ Ze character (he’s a child thug who grows up to be a drug dealer) has some moments of murderous rage that I found chilling.

But the sheer pace of the film, the relentlessness of its bad news, mitigates the effect of any particular incident. The emotional impact flattens out rather than accumulating. I sometimes worry, watching a film like this, that the sort of comment I just made reflects my own sheltered unfamiliarity with violence; that I wrongly assume it could only ever come, if at all, in small bursts, so that any kind of sustained violence must be by definition melodramatic. But I don’t worry about it for long, because such ignorance is far preferable to the alternative.

The Recruit

At the opposite end of the movie scale in just about every respect, Roger Donaldson’s The Recruit is a film of no social relevance and run-of-the-mill style. It’s about a young CIA recruit (Colin Farrell) led by his trainer (Al Pacino) into a complex plot where – as the movie keeps reminding us to the point of tedium – nothing is what it seems. Since we know from the start to mistrust everything the film seems to be telling us, there’s little practical option while watching it other than to put our brains on snooze.
 

The major compensation – and it is a major one – is Pacino, in an incredibly imaginative and charismatic performance. Virtually every line he speaks has a cadence or a shading that you can’t imagine coming from any other actor – and it’s not just eccentricity, for somehow it fuses into a compelling character. And for about the tenth time in his career, he has a rambling closing monologue so out of step with the pedestrian dialogue preceding it that he must have written it himself. Pacino almost convinces you you’re watching something profound – an achievement maybe only slightly less impressive than City of God.

A New York story

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2003)

Spike Lee may be one of the five most famous directors in the world, but his fame doesn’t mean he gets the respect that’s due to him. Actually it limits it. The antics at Knicks games, the commercials, the inflammatory statements and rabble-rousing – it’s more the profile of a poseur or provocateur than of a great artist. Of course, everyone acknowledges Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing, but after a string of flops we’re almost at the point where Lee might be widely regarded as someone who occasionally hits greatness despite himself.

Spike Lee

Lately he’s complained about budget restrictions (his failed ventures include a Jackie Robinson biopic), while yet becoming more prolific than ever. He has six directing credits in the last three years: documentaries on Huey Newton and Jim Brown, the concert film Original Kings of Comedy, a segment of the anthology film Ten Minutes Older, and two feature films – Bamboozled and his new 25^th Hour. Bamboozled was a flop, failing to generate much support even in Lee’s usual cheering section. I thought it was an utter masterpiece – one of those rare movies in which artistic risks and happy accidents combine to almost mystical effect. But most viewers stumbled on the film’s grainy camera style, Damon Wayans’ accent, and their own assumptions that blackface could no longer serve as the vehicle for effective satire.

As if in reaction to these recurring criticisms, 25^th Hour is one of Lee’s most handsome-looking films, with some of his most straightforward “good” acting. And, through its recurring references to September 11, it could hardly be more topical. He might be forgiven for thinking he can’t win, because 25^th Hour has been criticized for opportunism, for grafting its layers of significance onto a plot that can’t really carry them.

Edward Norton plays a drug dealer who’s been busted for possession, and the movie takes place on the day before he turns himself in for a lengthy jail sentence. He’s basically just a soft kid who fell in with the wrong crowd and the lure of easy money; the prospect of jail – particularly of assault by the other inmates – is paralyzing him. On his last day he spends time with his two oldest friends – one now a schoolteacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s obsessed with a teenage pupil (Anna Paquin), the other a Wall Street trader (Barry Pepper); with his pub owner father (Brian Cox), and with the girlfriend he suspects of turning him in (Rosario Dawson). And in perhaps the film’s dominant image, he walks alone with the dog he found dying by the side of the road and then saved – an act he views as perhaps the one good thing he ever did.

Diverse circle

Lee paints a diverse circle here – whether measured by racial background or age or worldview. During his last day of freedom, Norton tests the contours of this group as if already caged and exploring his boundaries. About halfway through the movie, he goes to the washroom, and his reflection in the mirror delivers a long, profane rant (accompanied by a visual montage) against almost every definable (mainly by race) group in New York. It’s instantly reminiscent of the similar sequence in Do the Right Thing, but that echo illustrates what’s different, and unprecedented in Lee’s work, about 25^th Hour. There’s no real anger to the dialogue here – it never seems like more than a rationalization of Norton’s predicament, an attempt to externalize his self-recrimination. This is confirmed at the end of the film, when some of the faces in the montage reappear outside the car as he’s driving away – but now they’re welcome, like the last thing he has left to grab on to.

It’s as if Lee was officially giving up the ghost on his angry young black man persona. Not least of all because the film has less “black” content than any he’s made before. But the feeling of resignation goes further than that. 25^th Hour often feels as though September 11 had knocked Lee’s stuffing out of him. It’s a distinctly post-traumatic New York. The opening credits are built around the blue lights that for a while commemorated the two towers, and one of the film’s key scenes – a long exchange between Norton’s two best friends – takes place in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero. Touching on guilt and justice and recrimination, the conversation grapples with identity and stability, with a backdrop commemorating our most shocking reminder of those qualities’ fragility.

I mentioned that some critics find the 9/11 parallels overblown, and point out that Norton is an implausibly nice drug dealer. The latter opinion surely overlooks how Lee has always functioned as a satirist (Bamboozled even started out by defining the term “satire”.) His films have better surfaces than just about anyone else’s, but much as they radiate intense commitment and vibrancy, he never seems confined by his plots’ ostensible limits. He uses formal distancing devices (one of his favourites being close-ups with the background shifting behind them – as though the characters had fallen out of sync with their surroundings), fiery montages, dialogue delivered direct to camera. He filmed a big chunk of Crooklyn out of focus to reflect the protagonist’s disorientated state. His films have the feeling of vaudeville, of agit-prop, of performance art. He wants you to think.

Melancholy mood

 

But in 25^th Hour it all turns melancholy. I think Lee succeeds in virtually all his ambitions here. The film’s world is unquestionably stylized; it’s a fascinating aesthetic construction like all Lee’s films, but it also sustains a remarkably comprehensive study of attitudes (aided by an excellent cast). And at its heart, it’s as simple as this: someone led a good life he didn’t deserve and now must pay the price. What good can that presage for New York? Except that the film’s final passage explores the possibility that it might still turn out differently, that the relative lack of accountability might yet be extended, perhaps indefinitely. It’s a dreamy, elegiac passage, but beautifully rendered, summing up the film’s equilibrium between resignation and escape.
 

I should note though that the ending has been criticized even more than the rest of the film: the Globe and Mail referred to a “final 15 minutes that surely ranks among the clumsiest endings an otherwise good movie has ever received.” I don’t agree (at the very least, “clumsy” seems unfair to Lee’s fluency), but maybe Lee would take this criticism better than he’s taken others. Post 9/11, a certain amount of well-meaning clumsiness might seem to him merely like the mark of a good man.

Polanski's return

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2003)

If we all sat down to think up our lists of the greatest living directors, I doubt whether Roman Polanski’s name would turn up too often any more. In exile from the US for almost thirty years now, since fleeing a likely conviction for statutory rape, he’s continued to make a film every four or five years on average, but with increasingly less conviction or visibility. It’s a shame, because his early work was so richly diverse. He was born in Poland, but in his early 30s was already capable of making Cul-de-Sac and Repulsion, two movies with an equally advanced understanding of, but very different responses to, the tensions and absurdities underlying Englishness.

His first American film, Rosemary’s Baby, is fairly straightforward material, with relatively little thematic complexity, but Polanski renders it unimaginably unsettling. When handed a magnificent contemporary script, as he was in Robert Towne’s Chinatown, he produced one of the masterpieces of the 70’s – one of those movies that seems to have undergone a strange alchemy, acquiring a resonance far beyond what its raw materials should have allowed for. And many consider his version of Macbeth to be one of the finest Shakespearean films.

The Pianist

Since he took flight, the best-received film has been Tess, a carefully composed Thomas Hardy adaptation that hasn’t maintained much of a reputation. The rest are mere odds and ends: Pirates, Frantic, Bitter Moon, Death and the Maiden, The Ninth Gate. And now that he approaches 70, his career must be coming to an end.

All the more amazing that he won this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes for his film The Pianist. Not that many of the critics I read seemed to think the prize was deserved on merit. No matter – Polanski had returned. And with a possible Oscar nomination ahead, and his teenage victim now in her 40s and supposedly wishing for his rehabilitation, who can say that a return to Hollywood is necessarily out of the question?

I don’t mean to make The Pianist sound like a mere career calculation. Quite the opposite: it’s perhaps the most personal of all Polanski’s films. His parents were sent to concentration camps; his mother died at Auschwitz. The Pianist is his first film addressing the Holocaust. It recreates the war experience of a Polish Jew, Wladyslaw Szpilman, played by Adrian Brody, who avoids the camps only by the narrowest of margins, and then spends several years as a fugitive in Warsaw. The film is a superb recreation, slightly marred in places by the stateliness of script and casting that often characterizes European co-productions, but generally completely engrossing and moving.

Classic Polanski

One can’t help but probe the material for signs of “classic” Polanski, although it’s something you do with care. Even the most tasteless director would be somewhat self-effacing in dealing with a subject like this (I pass without comment over “Nazi-chic” films such as The Night Porter). Still, although I would never really have thought of Polanski as a natural choice for such material, his background notwithstanding, there’s much in his work to presage it.

David Thomson summed him up this way: “The violence in Polanski’s films is not especially prominent: it has seldom erupted with the force achieved by Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Fuller or Losey. Much more characteristic is the underlying alienation and hostility: the feeling that people are cut off, unsupported by any shared view of life and society. From this solitariness, the move toward acts of violence is stealthy, remorseless, and even comic…What enlarges (Polanski’s world) is his sense of humour, the lack of self-pity, and the curiosity that he retains for human behaviour.”

If we take Thomson’s synopsis almost as a Polanski blueprint, it’s clear how such a filmmaker, regardless of personal history, might be fated for this most traumatic of subjects – attuned to the condition of both jailed and jailer, infusing the work with humanism without sentiment. The film’s violence is pointed, and precise, usually presented at a distance that emphasizes its clinical design. There’s a scene where, as Brody and his family watch, a group of Nazis pulls up below and enters an apartment across the street. They throw a wheelchair-bound elder out of the window; herd the others outside; order them to run; shoot them as they flee. The sequence has a terrible choreography that conveys the grotesquely “experimental” nature of Nazism – the feeling that a whole race debased itself in constructing some morbid laboratory.

Depicting the Holocaust

The second half of the movie consists almost entirely of watching and waiting. Brody grows a beard and looks increasingly like Jesus; he almost starves to death; and when the last of his safe houses literally collapses around him he can do no better than scrounge around in the ruins – apparently almost the last free man left in the city. The elegant aloofness of his profession decays into near-madness. There’s a magnificent (if somewhat contrived), enormously resonant sequence near the end when a Nazi officer, on learning his profession, forces him to play. He hasn’t touched a piano for years, but he discharges the task brilliantly, instantly regaining his suppressed identity. As you watch though, you don’t know if you’re watching a resurgence of life or a final affirmation before death.

Films about great collective events always run the risk that the travails of the protagonists will overshadow the broader importance of the events depicted. The obvious solution is to avoid protagonists, but few films even attempt this (Peter Watkins’ Culloden is a classic exception). The Pianist can’t sidestep this; indeed, Brody may spend more screen time alone than anyone since Tom Hanks in Cast Away. This makes his experience highly anomalous, but it travels the same tragic arc as his family in the camps: diminishing hope, physical decline, and ultimate total destruction. The only exception is that he avoids death itself, and the film avoids making any trite statement on how to value that difference. Polanski’s great achievement is to stay true to the story’s solitude while making that solitude speak to everything we don’t see.
 

Polanski’s film is a meaningful addition even to a subject as meticulously explored as this one (the year’s other Holocaust film, The Grey Zone, had equal thematic ambition but seemed to me substantially less well executed). The trifling quality of his recent work vanishes here; maybe for the first time, Polanski seems not just brilliant and intuitive, but wise. As though, in depicting the pianist’s long ordeal, he somehow drew not just on the ghosts of his childhood, but on the lessons of his own long exile.

True stories?

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2003)

The common view – and I’ve pushed it as much as anyone – is that Hollywood doesn’t take on the same range of material it did thirty years ago, but it could be much much worse. This Christmas season, with About Schmidt and The Hours and Chicago and Gangs of New York, we certainly had diversity, and not a little quality. And on New Year’s Eve, they were joined by perhaps the most marginal project of all: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, adapted from the autobiography of Chuck Barris, who created TV shows like The Dating Game and The Gong Show.

Chuck Barris

If you think trash culture put the Western world on the slow road to hell, Barris must resemble the devil incarnate. As the movie presents it, his sole motive was to be rich and get laid – no thought for art or quality or taste. His talent was for coming up with easy-to-grasp gimmicks and then for socking them to the audience with a cotton-candy irresistibility that kept you watching, no matter how much you knew it was bad for you. His heyday was in the 60’s and 70’s – by the more ironic, savvy 80’s, he was basically a has-been.

He then wrote Confessions, in which he claimed that throughout his career as a TV producer, he’d also been working as an undercover CIA assassin, and had killed more than 30 people. I haven’t read the book, and don’t know how convincing it seemed to anyone, but presumably it was all just a fantasy, or an exercise in conceptual humour. The film version is directed – his first movie as such – by George Clooney, who also plays a supporting role as the CIA agent who recruits Barris. Barris is played by Sam Rockwell, who has an appropriately flaky quality. Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts play the key women on the official and unofficial side respectively of Barris’ life.

The film’s most appealing notion is that this double life makes a fiendish sense. It posits that the chaperoned trips taken by the winners on The Dating Game provided cover for Barris to travel on his murderous missions (there’s a nice shot of a contestant’s crestfallen expression as she learns of her prize – an all-expenses paid trip to…West Berlin). More fundamentally, it draws a link between the cultural impact of mass-audience TV and the CIA’s political “engineering.” Some Barris shows, with their prize washer dryers and refrigerators, fetishize the consumerist side of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; others, like The Gong Show, sacrifice self-respect and decorum for the sake of the shortest term buzz.

You can imagine it as a kind of two-pronged attack – a subtle calibration to herd the audience right where someone (Nixon?) wanted them. Their trashiness seemed even at the time to define new cultural territory; now – in an age where we’re accustomed to assuming that all trash might have a subtext – it seems in some ways prophetic. Barris might have been more significant than he knew (maybe his importance depended on him not knowing), and wouldn’t it round it all out  nicely, to have a hand in killing off designated enemies of the state?

Or maybe he’s just a buffoon and a liar.

Clooney’s career

Although Clooney’s appeared now in several big box office hits (The Perfect Storm, Ocean’s Eleven), I’m not sure he’s yet shaken off the sense of a TV actor who got lucky. He’s unquestionably charismatic, but extremely low-key about it – he speaks in a quiet, even tone; using his softly piercing eyes for modulation. Recently he’s seemed ambivalent about his career: he’s been quoted as saying he’s not that interested in the big multi-million paydays, and intends to make more of the films he likes. He’s working on his second Coen Brothers film after already making three with Steven Soderbergh. Along with Three Kings, these choices show a genuine adventurousness and artistic integrity, but it’s doubtful that those attributes have done much to shape his image yet.

Confessions, consequently, is a crazy piece of material, with a surprisingly even tone. Clooney surrounds the piece in shadow and discreet angles. He gets more flashy here and there, but stays far away from the constant pyrotechnics of something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (a direction in which this kind of material could easily have gone, I think). Overall, it’s an effective, insinuating style, deftly bringing out the material’s ambiguities and possibilities.

Everyone always says in interviews what a nice guy Clooney is, and accordingly he enticed half the cast of his last movie Ocean’s Eleven to help him out here. Roberts plays a minor supporting role and Matt Damon and Brad Pitt take on blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos as contestants on The Dating Game. The use of Damon and Pitt is interesting; they stand there as losers while the woman on the other side of the screen gets seduced by the silver tongue of the third contestant who, of course, isn’t in the same league as a looker. It’s a good visual joke, but depends entirely on us stepping outside the movie to acknowledge the presence of the two star actors. As a tip-off not to get too wrapped up in this, it confirms Clooney’s skepticism, and his confidence.

There’s no business…

Clooney also breaks up the action through brief interviews with Barris’ contemporaries – none of whom, of course, has anything to say on the central question of whether any of this stuff could possibly be true: they serve only to confirm the least contentious stuff about the man. I’m unsure whether this is an explicit parody of the “witnesses” in a movie like Reds.

There’s a hilarious scene where Robert John Burke, as an FCC guy, gives a group of contestants a pre-taping lecture on network standards and practices, identifying lasciviousness with un-Americanness and referring to “sick, subversive remarks.” It’s patently absurd, and yet not so far removed from some cultural debates that still recur nowadays. I think the movie could have profited from spending more time in that territory. As it is, it gets bogged down in the spy stuff, becoming increasingly repetitive and murky as it goes on (as though Clooney were aiming to evoke, of all things, the last passage of Apocalypse Now).
 

In the end though, he finishes on a recording of Rosemary Clooney (his aunt) in an unapologetically upbeat version of There’s No Business Like Show Business. I don’t think the implications of the choice run that deep, but they might. That uncertainty partly reflects the film’s own confusion, but also its genuine success in sowing ambiguity and dislocation. Which, for a movie about Chuck Barris, may be as great an artistic payoff as anyone could ever have expected.

Gunplay

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2003)

I’m an immigrant to Canada – one of the luckiest of all immigrants in that I came here as an English speaker, with a Canadian wife and a good job already lined up. I wouldn’t pretend to have suffered or struggled in the way that the term “immigrant” often connotes. Still, I’ve shared the experience of arriving in Canada with a profound sense of fear and insecurity, of not recognizing basic references or understanding basic rituals, then of assimilating and settling into accepting Canada wholeheartedly as the place where I ought to be.

Ten years ago, my wife and I had a choice between New York and Toronto. At the time I may have been somewhat more inclined toward the former – after all, it’s New York. But we mutually decided to come here instead. I’ve never regretted it for a second, and I’d be very reluctant to move to the States now; I’m generally lukewarm even about visiting there. I’ve become very disillusioned with America (I suppose a cynical interpretation might be that this is the measure of how I’ve become Canadian). It’s de rigeur to be a detractor of George W. Bush, but my heart sinks whenever I contemplate the record to date. It’s so far beyond a laughing matter.

The 51^st State

The other week I was watching the action movie Formula 51. In its European release it was called The 51^st State, which alludes to Britain, where most of the action is set, as an appendage of the US. There’s a scene where a Liverpool drug dealer played by Rhys Ifans (a former schoolmate of mine in Wales, readers may recall) lays out a vast arsenal of high-tech guns for the inspection of an assassin played by Emily Mortimer (the winsome younger sister from Lovely and Amazing). It’s one of those scenes that wallows in the intimacy of destructive possibility, of Schwarzenegger-type murderous potential dropped into your back yard. I was rather taken aback at the crassness of it. And then it struck me – I couldn’t imagine something like this in a Canadian film.

Not that I’ve seen every Canadian film, of course, so there may be some evidence to the contrary that I’m not aware of. But if there is, it’s an anomaly. British films increasingly spawn that kind of posturing – think of Guy Ritchie movies (pre-Swept Away), Gangster No. 1, numerous other Rhys Ifans movies. And yet, British gun control is even tougher than Canada’s, and the murder rate is almost as low. Not to mention that given the geographical distance, Canada ought to be far more susceptible to cultural influence from the south. But we seem to retain our decorum in a way that others, frankly, don’t.

Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine explores America’s gun culture, with the bear-like Moore doing his familiar sub-Letterman shtick with a variety of nuts and celebrities (most prominently, NRA president Charlton Heston), weaving in some broader reflections on what led the country to its wretched state. The movie effectively establishes its key thesis – that America’s propensity for guns and violence is correlated with a pervasive excess of fear: fear of violent crime, home invasion, fear itself, and of more esoteric threats that fade in and out, like shark attacks and killer bees. The sensationalist media feeds this frenzy; so do the swaggering language of politicians, the coarse popular culture, and a bastardization of the country’s “traditions.” Guns in such jumpy hands breed violence that seems to reinforce the original fear, leading to more guns and more violence – a delusional, sick spiral.

Litmus tests

The movie is rife with omissions though. Most prominently – Moore says he’s a lifelong member of the NRA, and although he says in interviews that he merely holds his membership for contrarian purposes, this isn’t clear from the film. It never actually proposes banning personal use of guns, and says nothing about control measures stopping short of that. It just keeps reasserting the broad, relatively easy point that America has too many guns.

But, and here’s the surprise, it allegedly doesn’t have so many more guns than Canada, on a per capita basis (according to the movie). So Moore comes to Sarnia and Windsor and Toronto, where he “discovers” that Toronto’s “slums” look like America’s middle-class neighborhoods, and no one locks their doors. Which makes you wonder about the accuracy of what he shows us of America. But still, he captures the key point: that Canada avoids America’s neuroses and rhetorical excesses.

That famous slogan “it’s the economy, stupid” wasn’t quite right, or at least isn’t now. Americans don’t just vote the big-ticket issues. On the contrary, they allow issues like gun control and abortion and other ideological “litmus tests” to outweigh any subtler considerations. If they thought about it rationally, they’d realize the substance of their lives isn’t found there. But they don’t think, and the country thus drifts into dysfunction. The gap between rich and poor widens to a potentially destabilizing extent, and still the Republicans propose further tax cuts and breaks that would widen the disparity further. America’s dealings with the rest of the world have regressed to the crudity of good vs. evil, with the UN lectured on its lack of “backbone” and the whole notion of international cooperation reduced to a cynical shrug.

Raw anger

The situation demands raw anger, which isn’t Moore’s stock in trade. Not that humour isn’t often the sharpest ideological tool. But Moore’s shtick is all too easy to brush off. His film seems structured to highlight outrage and guffaws in equal measure. At one point he harasses Dick Clark for what seem to me like tenuous reasons, and he carries out one of his patented attacks on corporate America, turning up at K-mart headquarters with two Columbine survivors, demanding that the company stop selling handgun ammunition. When K-mart promptly agrees, Moore seems properly non-plussed and ceases his activism, but it’s hard to know where this really gets us. He doesn’t prescribe a broad agenda for action. Basically, he sugars the pill (or would sugar it except that, as I already pointed out, he doesn’t actually prescribe one). And when he presents a catalogue of American outrages to the accompaniment of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World, we can only conclude we’re in the company of a pretty crass sensibility.
 

Obviously, I’m letting my own preconceptions colour the review pretty heavily here. But I think Moore’s movies demand that kind of response. Bowling for Columbine is in many ways one of last year’s most worthwhile films. But it takes on a subject that seems to me to demand nothing short of greatness, if it’s to avoid the kinds of easy generalizations and woolly affirmations favoured by gun control advocates. Even so, the movie has truth enough, and is profoundly depressing. We have but one consolation – that we’re here rather than there – but for how long can we sustain it?

Meaning in life

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2003)

Have you ever tried to step outside your own life, and to speculate what kind of movie it might make? Reflexively, most people will reply it’d be the pits. I don’t suppose there are too many real-life James Bonds, for instance, reading this column. But there are plenty of smaller scale movies – ones where a plot summary amounts to very little, and where the wonder lies in the perception of the everyday.

Human identity

With an opening like that, you might be expecting me to write now about Adaptation, the current film sensation that famously mixes invention and self-reflection. But that’s not where I’m going. In passing, I’ll admit I was disappointed in the movie. After ten minutes, I’d already gotten as much out of it as I did out of the whole two hours. The film’s too self-conscious and abstract for you to surrender to it as entertainment, but too glib to be fully intellectually engaging.

Let me go in another direction. The other week I was watching Much Music – a show called Meet a Rock Star or something along those lines. This particular episode was about meeting Snoop Dogg, and the lucky winner was a white kid from what seemed to be an upscale British Columbia neighborhood. The kid seemed to be doing everything in his power to evoke his hero – speech patterns, posture, general approach to things – but the lack of authenticity, the sheer incongruity of a boy from this background behaving that way, was hard to get over. I’m not suggesting the kid is a fake. I’m sure that on some level this is currently his “natural” way of behaving – and who wants to be governed by a narrow, predetermined view of human behaviour anyway? But, to say the least, you got the feeling that he’ll be off on another thing a few years from now.

I can’t help thinking that when an upscale BC white kid decides to live his life to the beat of Snoop Dogg, he’s playing to an invisible camera. Surely many of us are; I know I am a lot of the time. The advertising industry depends on the premise that we think we’re being watched more than we actually are; that how we’re seen is inseparable from who we are. Of course, if we really are being watched that much, it’s by the prying network of hidden security cameras I keep reading about, rather than by a jury of style gurus. Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look our best.

Personal Velocity

But even if you just live a modest, insular life, there may be a movie in there. It wouldn’t necessarily take much. Reality TV shows like Survivor and The Osbornes represent staggering feats of editing – retaining just a few percent of the entire footage shot. Wouldn’t we all have grand drama lurking in our lives, if you removed 97% of the flab? I’m sure I would. If you took the splashier moments from my year and mixed them in with some of the more pensive ones, you might end up with a pretty good narrative on underlying alienation, or something like that. It’d probably be a complete fiction, but potentially a hell of a documentary.

Filmmakers have tried to resist that manipulation – a direction that generally leads toward minimal editing and extreme length. But no one cares to watch those movies. You can only possibly find an audience by finding moments that encapsulate the whole: a near contradiction in terms, if you view the essence of life as being in its very duration.

This is all a lead-in to Rebecca Miller’s film Personal Velocity, which is an almost exemplary example of how small things, seen on screen, may become profound. It’s based on her book of short stories, and consists of three separate half-hour segments; perhaps normal life yields up meaning (or the appearance of it) more readily when taken in small doses. Not that these stories seem “small,” certainly not if there’s something pejorative to that term.

All three episodes revolve around New York women, and the title alludes to their different growth modes – people make wrong turnings, or even if they make right ones, they may outgrow their destinations and need to choose again. The movie is optimistic enough to allow all three women a closing moment of revelation, but intimate ones – so intimate indeed that one could miss them. The difference between success and failure, as seen here, may be little more than a state of mind, a certain way of integrating things. All three women in Personal Velocity have rather unhappy pasts, and to the extent they triumph, it’s by learning to take what they need from those experiences.

The first sequence has Kyra Sedgwick as a battered wife who takes her children and flees from her husband, ending up in a tiny town where she takes a waitressing job. Sedgwick’s odd, worn sexiness is perfect here, and the episode builds to a conclusion that depends on her reclaiming her promiscuous youth. Like nearly all films that depict female sexuality, the movie carries a certain ambiguity: if it were directed by a man, you might suspect it of romanticizing sluttishness (Miller’s voice over for all three stories is spoken by a man, as if she were toying with our sense of who’s in control here).

Metaphysical dimensions

The third sequence has Fairuza Balk playing a pregnant woman, driving desperately away from the city after an incident that nearly killed her; she picks up a hitchhiker who’s been brutally beaten, and who ultimately leads her to a deeper acceptance of her own condition. If it’s the least successful, it’s because the metaphysical dimensions seem too strenuous – the artistic calculations are more visible than in the other two episodes.

 

But the middle story is superb, and stands as one of the best short films I’ve seen for a while. Parker Posey plays a book editor whose career takes off, causing her to question her happy marriage to a New Yorker fact checker. Although it’s set in a somewhat glitzier environment than the other two, there’s really nothing out of the ordinary about the raw material: people fall out of sync with each other all the time. But Miller expertly weaves in the woman’s problematic past, leading us off on tangents and bringing us back again, illustrating all aspects of the character with astonishing thoroughness. In a way, the story’s about a woman who suppresses her natural killer instinct, gets it back again, and decides to surrender to material values: there’s no pretense of nobility, and no false sentimentality either. The decision she makes is both mundane, because thousands like it get made every day, and astonishing, because it shows the extent of her capacity. The mundanity is inherent in the story, but it takes an artist to bring out the astonishment.