Finding meaning

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2003)

Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth isn’t as much fun as you’d want it to be, but it has a persistently anachronistic feel that’s at least semi-endearing. This is evident in the title itself – when did you last see a phone booth? Well, the film explains that we’re dealing with the last one in New York, the day before it’s slated to be replaced. Press agent Colin Farrell picks up the phone, and finds himself talking to someone who knows all about him (i.e. who knows he’s a liar, a cheat, etc.) The unseen voice is nearby, watching, and he says he has a rifle with a telescopic sight – a claim proved true when a nearby pimp suddenly takes a bullet. Now the cops are swarming around the booth, but Farrell can’t get out, because if he does, his antagonist will shoot him too.

Phone Booth

Phone Booth was written by Larry Cohen, who hasn’t directed a movie since 1996’s Original Gangstas. He used to be a prolific low-budget semi-genius, turning out movies with strong concepts, bracing wit and punchy visuals, but also with a fairly high quota of cardboard dialogue and mundane linking material. Phone Booth falls comfortably into the Cohen mould – a great premise that plays itself out in increasingly dull plotting. And, brevity being an essential B-picture attribute, the movie lasts less than 90 miuutes.

Without giving away everything about the sniper’s motivation, Phone Booth seems to be intended as something of a morality tale, about a sinner who gets severely tested and thereby at least partly redeemed. But from what we see of him, Farrell isn’t actually that bad – he’s well within the acceptable scuzziness parameters of Hollywood protagonists.  The movie fleetingly reminded me of the 1930s Hays Code, under which socially unacceptable behaviour had to be shown to earn its comeuppance. The aura of moral scorekeeping is accentuated by Kiefer Sutherland’s casting as the sniper’s voice – delivered in ultra-authoritative tones that never quite seem to be emanating from the world of the movie.

Gus Van Sant’s Gerry ought to be far more interested than Phone Booth in existential contemplation. This film has only two cast members (Casey Affleck and Matt Damon) as traveling companions who park in the desert to go and look at some unidentified “thing,’ then quickly get hopelessly lost. Van Sant constructs the film in relatively few takes, many of them lasting several minutes.

Gerry

Van Sant’s last film was Finding Forrester, just over two years ago. Here’s what I wrote about him at the time:

“Around the time of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant was regarded as a pretty cool director, but I doubt anyone’s too excited about him now. Good Will Hunting was effective enough, but a thoroughly mainstream picture, with sell-out alarms flashing all over it. Van Sant then decided to make an almost shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho – a project of considerable conceptual obscurity. One could certainly imagine how this could have yielded something interesting, and maybe it did, if you take the time to look carefully enough, but the world was otherwise occupied and probably always will be.

“Finding Forrester is thematically similar enough to Good Will Hunting that you suspect it’s a variation on the impulse that drove the decision to remake Psycho – except here Van Sant’s remaking his own movie rather than Hitchcock’s, and making it slightly less obvious. Or maybe it’s a disguised commentary on that project, with Forrester playing Hitchcock and (the boy he mentors) representing Van Sant. Whatever. The sure thing is that trying to figure out Van Sant’s decisions is more intellectually rewarding than watching the films themselves.”

All of which still sounds right to me. And now we have Gerry. Van Sant has been positioning himself on the high art road, referring frequently in interviews to Hungarian director Bela Tarr, a master of the long-take approach to filmmaking. He says: “Tarr’s style takes a lot of things that you’ve learned for cinema and ignores them.” As Van Sant points out, long takes are more likely to “force the audience to consider what it is they’re watching, and it also allows time to put the audience into the same space as the characters.”

But that experiment’s been amply tried and tested by now. If the long take and stripped down narrative serve to reveal something of value, terrific; otherwise it’s just an affectation. For example, consider how different Phone Booth would have been, shot in one long take, with the camera never leaving Colin Farrell’s face, and all other characters (not just the sniper) only heard, never seen. The impact of the morality play might surely have been more profound that way. The movie would have been a more existential experience, perhaps more susceptible to multiple readings (as a fantasy, as pure abstraction). On balance, it would probably have been a more interesting film. But, with a little less clarity of purpose, it might also have been the dullest, most pretentious thing you ever saw.

Take me to the meaning

Gerry works along the same lines as that hypothetical alternative Phone Booth, but it’s never clear what Van Sant seeks to achieve through his technique. Those who rate Tarr as a genius (personally, I haven’t seen enough of his work to know) aren’t just yielding to a particular way of moving the camera – it’s about the way his technique reveals something, about ourselves, or the world, or art. When I saw Gerry, the audience seemed to find the movie intermittently comic (although this could have been the over-compensation of people starved for entertainment, as Letterman puts it), with at least two of Van Sant’s scene transitions serving as the cue for a ripple of laughter. In part, this is clearly deliberate: Affleck in particular has some silly monologues, about something he saw on Wheel of Fortune and about some computer game he’s been playing. For a while I thought the movie might be on to something – a knowing deconstruction of youth-speak. But I can’t extract a particularly coherent intellectual direction from what follows.

The film isn’t at all without interest. Visually, it’s often beautiful. The characters’ downward trajectory, enacted with very little overt emotion or recrimination, is inherently fascinating, and Van Sant populates the movie with enough idiosyncrasies to keep surprising the viewer. But when he talks about forcing the audience to consider what it’s watching, I want to throw the question back: did Van Sant truly know what he was making? Of course, inherent mystery, the accidental way meaning is created: these are central to the power of cinema. But a great director would do more to lead us there.

Big box-office

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2003)

If I continue at this pace, I’ll end up going to the movies less often this year than any since 1994, when I lived in Bermuda. Bermuda only had three movie theatres, so I was basically on a starvation diet. Not to mention that they generally stuck to bland, mainstream choices. Occasionally I flew to New York and binged, cramming in four or five movies a day (plus a play), but that wasn’t enough. So I came here. This year isn’t shaping up to be quite that parched – I’ve still been going once or twice a week on average, without counting my Cinematheque trips. But the point is, I’d usually be going two or three times a week.

Recently, I checked Variety’s top ten box office list for the week and realized I’d only seen one of the ten movies – and that was Chicago, which I saw back in December. That’s fairly shocking for someone who tries to keep his finger on the pulse. But movies like Bringing down the House, Old School, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days…these didn’t seem likely to me to have a pulse. Maybe, as the aging cops always say in movies, I’m getting too old for this stuff (they don’t usually say “stuff,” but you know what I mean). Except it’s surely that the movies are getting too young.

The Hunted

Anyway, I was perturbed enough at this situation that I then went to see The Hunted, which hadn’t initially made the cut for me. The main appeal was the fact that William Friedkin directed it. Friedkin won an Oscar for The French Connection, made it even bigger with The Exorcist, and flamed out with Sorceror. In the twenty-five years since then he’s made a stream of mostly forgettable movies (Jade, Blue Chips, Deal of the Century; the nadir was probably The Guardian, about a supernaturally possessed tree). But as you may have noticed by now, I’m overly nostalgic about directors who remind me of the 70s, when I was first getting into movies. Friedkin is pretty marginal to that project though, which is why the movie hadn’t grabbed me initially.

But in my sudden desire for a commercial fix, he seemed suddenly like a badge of class. And the movie has two Oscar-winning actors: Benicio del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones. Such a mix seems to suggest a deeper purpose. And that’s evident at times in the film. Del Toro plays an ex-soldier, a killing specialist, who’s gone off the rails and committed a string of murders. Jones is the man who trained him, now called back into action to track him down. When we first see Jones, he’s tracking an injured wolf; he catches up with the animal and it stands meekly as Jones tends to him. The point, instantly established, is that Jones is a man of elemental values and an inherent affinity with nature. Del Toro later expresses his own concerns about the treatment of animals; for instance, about the number of chickens killed on an average day.

The two, especially del Toro, have far less dialogue than you’d expect of roles requiring Oscar-winning actors, and their fights together have a fascinating ritualistic quality. Neither carries a gun – they rely on knives and makeshift weapons. Their ultimate confrontation has a thrilling air of unleashed savagery about it. You can see the subtext here – an evocation of primitivism. It definitely adds a layer of interest to the movie. The problem is that this theme doesn’t really yield anything specific, and ends up seeming like not too much more than an affectation. The linking material is highly mundane, and although the scenes between the two are stripped down, the movie still finds space elsewhere for conventional excesses.

Unappetizing behaviour

When I saw the film, I sat in front of a couple who talked pretty much through the whole thing. As far as I could make out, they were mocking it in a patronizing, college student kind of way, and since they started in this vein from the very first scene, I can only imagine they chose the movie with this pastime in mind. I suppose there may be a worse way of filling time while exercising one’s wits, but I don’t know what it is. Pointing out the contrivances, the simplifications of mainstream movies – this could be the very activity for which the phrase “taking candy from a baby” was invented. The only principled way of demonstrating one’s superiority is to stay away.

Still, The Hunted makes it easy for such unappetizing behaviour, through excessive grimness and occasional pomposity. This has always been a problem of Friedkin’s. He’s often pegged as arrogant, and little about his films suggests a sense of humour; indeed, the huge success of The Exorcist must have rested in part in the very idea, almost unprecedented at the time, of treating such material so solemnly. In the age of irony, stony seriousness generally seems like a sign that someone’s not seeing the big picture.

Even so, I enjoyed the movie enough that I decided to make it a box-office friendly weekend, and I went the next day to see The Core. This is an old-fashioned disaster movie in which the Earth’s core has stopped spinning, screwing up the electromagnetic field. People with pacemakers drop dead; birds go crazy in Trafalgar Square; freak atmospheric effects destroy Rome’s Coliseum, and then most of San Francisco gets razed. A disparate bunch of scientists and military people must tunnel to the centre of the Earth and, through a nuclear detonation, restart the stalled core; otherwise it’s curtains for us all.

The Core

For a movie with such a dire outlook, The Core is amazingly upbeat and jaunty. There’s no sense of horror, or pain, or of anything on the debit side of the emotional register. The premise is staggeringly implausible, and the movie doesn’t seem to care. After a while, the consistency of its attitude becomes highly engaging. It’s as if the movie had assumed a weird, but not entirely unworthy, task. A few years ago, we could all enjoy movies of mad destruction – Die Hard 2 or Armageddon could kill tens of thousands of unseen victims in bomb blasts or alien attacks and it was all part of the fun. Then we entered a phase where that seemed too real to be entertaining. The Core wheels it all out again, and even though the movie’s body count must be daunting, the movie feels as safe as a Disney cartoon.

I didn’t hear anyone laughing during The Core, although it wouldn’t have been hard to. I don’t know exactly what it is in us that seeks out such experiences, that allows us to be captivated despite our objective assessments. But whatever it is, I guess we’d be much worse off without it.

Real emotions

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2003)

A few weeks ago I wrote about Irreversible and Fat Girl, two movies that epitomize the concept of “not for all tastes.” In case you might think I spend all my time amid the perverse and the troubling, this week is all about nice movies.

The day before I saw Irreversible, I went to see Bend it like Beckham, the feel-good British hit about a soccer-crazed Indian girl who dreams only of the game despite her parents’ opposition. The movie happily embraces the genre formula – once the set-up is in place, I doubt whether it contains a single significantly new idea. I thought it was on the thin side, although immeasurably helped by its buoyant actors. It builds, of course, to an apparently hopeless dilemma – and then, out of nowhere, a happy resolution! The movie’s home stretch is a pure joy. I won’t deny it, I had tears in my eyes. The corniest of tears for sure, which is why I feel I’m going out on a limb even mentioning them.

Bend it like Beckham

After a century of cinema, the power of this kind of identification is undiminished. Professional filmmakers wield its elements like a military strike – the plot of frustrated desire suddenly vindicated, the yielding hero or heroine, the insinuating music. And maybe most of all – the editing. Is there a more powerful cinematic device than the simple cut from the hero’s face, as his eyes mist up and his mouth starts to tremble, to that of his beloved, looking back at him, reciprocating the emotions, sharing the symptoms? The mechanism is as simple as a trap – we find ourselves implicated so directly in their interlocking feelings that passive detachment is almost impossible.

It got me again a week after Beckham, when I watched last year’s film The Rookie on cable. This is about a high school teacher who never achieved his boyhood of making it in the major baseball leagues, but gets another chance. Baseball isn’t my cup of tea at all (although The Rookie intermittently conveys its essential appeal more skillfully than Beckham does for soccer) and this film, set mostly in Texas, has a homespun, laconic, small-town thing about it that set my teeth on edge. But at the end when he attains the dream, and the whole home town population’s there for him afterwards, cheering and milling around him as if he’d been to the moon, I gave in without much of a fight.

But the predictability of such responses makes them valueless. Although we generally disdain overt melodrama – there’s nothing very respectable about an unrequited weepie – a dose of notionally restrained tear jerking often seems like a mark of extra class. It’s as if we prize our tears so greatly, and part with them so sparingly, that we think a film could only coax them from us through rare skill and virtue. But I doubt that’s the case. Someone kicks you in the stomach – you double up in pain. The route to our tear ducts is almost as direct.

Satyajit Ray

Around the same time, I watched a series of films at the Cinematheque by the Indian director Satyajit Ray. Ray is regarded as one of the cinema’s great humanists – the Cinematheque’s brochure quotes Akira Kurosawa as follows: “Not to have seen the films of Ray would mean existing in a world without the sun or the moon.” And Pauline Kael as follows: “Ray’s films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in me than the work of any other director.” That complexity, one expects, would have consisted of more than a blissfully goofy smile and misty eyed contentment.

A movie like The World of Apu, for example, leads the viewer through a remarkable range of emotional states, a map of the human condition. The film travels from youthful idealism, through stunned comedy as the hero marries a woman he doesn’t even know, through tenderness and delight as he actually falls in love with her, then tragedy when she suddenly dies in childbirth, through loss and aimlessness to a final form of renewal. All this in a 100-minute film that never seems rushed or contrived. But also one, I would think, that’s far less likely than The Rookie to get the tear ducts moving.

Which is to say that Ray never succumbs to simple shot-making or emotional situation building. Maybe it could be expressed as the difference between identification and empathy. Identification is an essentially simplistic process – a means of guiding and conditioning our responses. With a film of greater restraint and objectivity, we lose the very direct emotional affect of the Hollywood trap, but the overall experience gains in depth. In The World of Apu, for example, we’re better placed to assess the character’s basic self-indulgence, and to reflect on what he tells us of India. As a matter of personal taste, Ray’s films don’t resonate with me as much as those of some other directors, but they’re models of refined intelligence.

All the Real Girls

David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls aspires to a similar condition. It’s the story of a love affair between two young people in a small dingy town (similar to the town Green depicted with such elan in his first movie, George Washington). Green seeks here to capture the maximum feeling of unforced reality. In practice, this consists of directing the actors (Paul Schneider and Zooey Deschanel) to ensure that no line is ever delivered in a straightforward way; every moment is marked by an ultra “realistic” assemblage of tics and stammers and incoherent utterances. This all supports the basic theory – that these two people in love (perhaps like all people in love) create their own terms of reference, their own normality. But the movie quickly ends up seeming extremely forced and gauche.

The relationship remains unconsummated long beyond what initially seems possible, and this provides what seems to me Green’s most effective insight – how in such a tightly-wound relationship, sex can be an unpredictable, even tragic weapon. The movie’s later stages contain several conversations in which the two talk at each other, each unable to make the other understand, despite their underlying affinity: they can’t see each other for the words. At times it’s intoxicating, but most of the time it’s too stylized to connect.

Green shows genuine ambition in eschewing the predictable mechanisms I talked about. Actually, I think maybe he eschews them too much. For all his pains, his contemporary kids seem less familiar than the 1958 Apu, and less heartrending.

A new musical

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2003)

Since the subject today is musicals, it’s hard not to go into a reverie about The Band Wagon and Funny Face and Silk Stockings, to name some of my favourites. But that will have to wait for another day. I’ve already tipped you off to my preferences though – I’m more an Astaire than a Kelly man. Not that I haven’t watched The Pirate and An American in Paris five times apiece. And I could also rave about A Star is Born, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, etc. etc.

I love musical theatre too. In the early 90’s, there was a time when I’d seem just about every big musical then playing on Broadway. Before that, I’d stayed away from the theatre for years, after a bad experience in London with a production of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending. It supposedly starred Vanessa Redgrave, but from where I was sitting it could as easily have been Dame Edna Everage. Between the distance, the heat and the uncomfortable seat (a hard bench actually), I was miserable.

On Broadway

But when I first visited New York a decade or so later, I had the resources to afford a better seat, and it seemed crazy not to experience Broadway theatre. So I went to see The Will Rogers Follies, which was a hot ticket at the time. I loved it. It had literally never occurred to me that theatre could be so vivid, so bright, so damn entertaining: I was hooked. I saw Grand Hotel and City of Angels and Kiss of the Spider Woman – I even saw the legendary flop Nick and Nora, in the narrow gap between the opening and the closing.

Eventually I stopped going to New York with the same frequency, but I still catch musicals whenever I can. On a recent trip to Chicago I saw 42^nd Street and Sunday in the Park with George – a duo that sums up the breadth of musical theatre: the one brassy and exuberant and devoted to pure pleasure; the other fiendishly clever and intricate, but with moment after moment of pure beauty.

I didn’t actually see the musical Chicago on my trip to Chicago (it wasn’t playing), but then I’d seen it twice already. The first was on Broadway, and although we were once again stuck with bad seats, it stands out as one of the best things I ever saw there. The second time was in Oslo, in a Norwegian production – and no, I don’t speak Norwegian. It had the feeling of a somewhat faded facsimile, with some plainly inadequate casting (you don’t need to speak the language to know a note’s not being hit), but the sheer style and musicality were again irresistible.

Chicago!

With all of that, it’s obvious why I was looking forward to Rob Marshall’s new film of Chicago. This project has been in the works for years (it premiered on Broadway in 1975) – I remember reading about a proposed film in the mid-80’s, with Goldie Hawn and Liza Minnelli mentioned as possible stars. The subsequent return to Broadway and the tour circuit came in a phenomenally popular stripped-down production – there’s no set as such; everything takes place against a black backdrop with minimal props. As such, it’s highly and deliberately theatrical – not the most obvious candidate for translation to the screen.

That’s what I thought going into the film, and it’s pretty much what I thought coming out. The film is an able and effective transcription, but adds just about nothing to the experience of seeing the play. Some may read this and say: well, how could it? And maybe that’s the right response.

Except that it seems like such a passive use of the possibilities of cinema – more an archival function really than an artistic one. On the other hand, nothing kills a musical like too much cinema. Richard Attenborough, for instance, filmed A Chorus Line in 1985 in a style laden with fancy angles and edits and movements, and smothered whatever the heart of the material may be. Marshall avoids the worst excesses of this approach, but his camera is never as elegant and reflective as Vincente Minnelli’s in The Band Wagon, nor as piercing and engaged as Bob Fosse’s in Cabaret. Overall, in fact, his film has a rather cramped, dour look to it.

Fosse’s is the name most often associated with Chicago (he directed the original production) – to the point that you hardly hear a word about John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the music and lyrics. But he’s actually barely relevant here – Marshall rechoreographed the entire film, and in a far more generic style than I can imagine Fosse, a famously idiosyncratic perfectionist, ever being happy with. Kander and Ebb, on the other hand, wrote a terrific set of songs, most of which made it to the movie intact; the film wisely also preserves the Broadway orchestrations.

More musicals?

As for the performers – well, they struck me as a mixed bag. Richard Gere, as the conniving “razzle-dazzle’ lawyer Billy Flynn, seemed miscast to me. He has the self-regard, but not the flamboyance; someone like Kevin Kline might have been better. Renee Zellweger – much the same. She’s committed, but inescapably pallid; her casting would only have made any sense if the play were being reimagined in some direction I can’s envisage. Catherine Zeta-Jones seems more comfortable than the other two put together. She has the poise, the ability to strut and kick, the authentic hardness that Zellweger lacks. The fact that her role has been relatively reduced from the stage version, while Zellweger’s has been relatively expanded, is a distinct miscalculation.

A couple of reviewers pointed out that the movie’s theme of media manipulation and hunger for fame are even more timely now than ever, and while that’s true, I can’t see how the film does much to draw on that timeliness. Marshall keeps the songs separate from the action, filming them mostly in unadorned settings much like those of the stage production, and intertwining them with the narrative as a kind of surreal commentary on or counterpoint to the action. This ought to have provided a perfect opportunity to inject some Brechtian distance (think again of Cabaret with its use of the MC), but that’s far beyond Marshall’s ambition. Actually, the derided 1981 film of Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven, which dropped fantasy song and dance scenes into a gloomy Depression-era story, was more ambitious and intriguing.

Chicago has been a big hit, and of course won the Oscar, so I hope it inspires more movie musicals over the next few years. If so, then its main service will have been as the bridge out of the desert we’ve been in since, well, Oliver (which was the last musical to win the Oscar for best picture, in 1968). Actually, Chicago has much more in common with a spectacle like Oliver than with the films I mentioned at the start; it smacks more of coordination than of joy, more of perspiration than inspiration. I enjoyed watching it, but not as much as I would have enjoyed seeing the stage production again.

Controversy

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2003)

Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible is the latest official atrocity from French cinema – infamous for a scene of a man being beaten to death with a fire extinguisher and for another, nine minutes long, of a rape in a subway. The movie premiered at Cannes last year, and people walked out in significant numbers. Since then it’s been a major talking point among critics. The issue, as always: is it art or exploitation.

Well, somewhat to my own surprise, I’d probably vote for art, although not without some reservations. The film’s first half, in particular, is a fairly miserable viewing experience, denying the viewer any of the pleasures conventionally associated with narrative cinema. It’s arranged in reverse chronological order, shot in an extremely vertiginous camera style that frequently adds to the confusion and would certainly provoke motion sickness in some viewers; even the credits, which here come at the start of the film, are hard to read. And then there are those two sequences – each masterfully executed, but painful to watch.

Irreversible

The second half of the film, moving back in time, takes us to the events before the rape, and Noe’s feeling for character may come as a considerable surprise. We see the two lovers (Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel) waking up in bed, enjoying the experience of each other – it’s a fresh, beguiling scene, almost joyous after the film’s dark first half, but of course utterly compromised by our knowledge of what’s to come. The final scene is a playful vignette with children playing around a water sprinkler; the camera tilts up to the sky, and then the image starts to oscillate and shimmer, as though the screen were under attack by some inner force. This arises to a crescendo, an experience that seems to have left cinema far behind. It suddenly ends, and there’s nothing else except a closing title that fills the screen: Time destroys all things.

This echoes the woman’s earlier statement that “the future is already written.” Noe’s film certainly makes the case for a fatalistic pessimism. But that’s not of particular artistic interest in itself, any more than the various ironies that flow out of the structure. I was most taken by it as a simultaneous embrace of cinema, and a repulsed coil from it. Even at its most grueling moments, the film exudes artistic engagement – the rape scene (a single take) is chilling in its precision and determination. But, as I said, it denies the spectator everything. I think the movie is too knowing and (in its own grim way) sincere to be exploitative. But it’s too nakedly experimental to be passionately admired.

Before Irreversible, the most recent cause celebre was Fat Girl, which actually got itself banned from Ontario for a while. The ban’s been lifted now, and the movie coincidentally found itself playing here at the same time as Noe’s work. I went to see the film again (my first viewing was at the festival a couple of years ago) and I think the verdict on this one is clearer – it’s a stunning artistic achievement; probably the best film by its director Catherine Breillat.

Fat Girl

Breillat is known as a feminist who uses explicit sexuality in her films. She has many defenders, and others who find her work pretentious, self-indulgent and unilluminating. Her best known work, Romance, chronicled the sexual hang-ups and encounters of a morose young woman: the film was so oppressive that even many well-wishers recoiled from it. Fat Girl (the French title would be more accurately and allusively translated as To my Sister) is more cunning and insinuating.

It revolves around two teenage sisters – Elena, lithe and attractive, and Anais, the fat girl of the title. Their relationship swings between hostility, with the attractive girl regularly belittling the other, and extreme closeness, at which times they acknowledge that their intermittent hostility only confirms the depth of their bond. On a summer vacation, Elena meets a boy who talks her into losing her virginity. His long artful manipulation of her, while Anais listens from the other side of the room, is the film’s centrepoint, perfectly fulfilling Breillat’s clinical interest in the mechanics of sexual politics.

But the film’s greatest impact comes at the very end (on the assumption few will go to see it for the story as such, I’m going to give away the ending here, so read on with caution). On the trip home, the two girls and their mother pull into a rest stop. Anais watches from the back seat as the others fall asleep. Out of the darkness, a man jumps on the hood of the car. Swinging an axe through the window, he kills Elena; then he strangles the mother. He drags Anais into the woods and rapes her. In the morning the police bring her out. “She says he didn’t rape her,” says one policeman to another. “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to,” she shoots out, and the film immediately ends on a freeze frame of her face.

Earlier in the film, Anais said several times she wanted her first sexual experience to be with someone meaningless. Now she has her wish, and in the process, her film has been wiped almost clean (the film allows a reading of the final incident as Anais’ fantasy, or as a fulfilment of her will). She insists on keeping for herself the truth of what happened; but on hearing the policeman tell her story, she instantly reacts, anticipating skepticism and trying to deflect it. The destruction of her family marks, in the crudest sense, her ascension as a woman, but that instantly brings compromise and evasion. It’s a moment gripped in ambiguity and contradiction, a microcosm of Breillat’s cinema.

Who decides

The theme of feminine self-determination turns up in Irreversible too: Bellucci says at one point, before her world collapses in on her, that it’s always the woman who decides. Rape is the ultimate violation of that point of view, but Irreversible isn’t really concerned with that – it’s violating the universe itself. Noe’s cinema is one of total pessimism, if not despair. Breillat in contrast seems almost lighthearted, although that’s a highly relative assessment. She maintains at least some of the pleasures of classical cinema (since Fat Girl she’s made another film, Sex is Comedy, that recreates the shooting of the sex scenes in Fat Girl and exhibits a general sense of goodwill toward the medium), which I think ultimately makes her indictments more powerful.

In both these cases, the elements underlying the controversy are central to the film’s artistic intent. I’m sometimes skeptical myself about the claims that attend extreme material, but not here. Both films, quite reasonably, may be beyond the bounds of what you generally want to look at and think about, but such a judgment of taste would involve a sacrifice of artistic experience.

Inner worlds

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2003)

I don’t really think of myself as a big David Cronenberg fan, but there must be something about him, because over the last year I’ve watched several of his movies for a second time. The most rewarding revisit was Crash, which I’d hated the first time, but which after a few years seemed utterly fascinating in how it constructs its own language of desire and engagement. In a way the movie’s impact is based on sheer persistence as much as on its specific achievements, and the emphasis on celebrity car crashes seems to me to be making a conventional point about star worship, but overall it’s still a stunning vision of tragic displacement. People often disparage sex films for not actually being erotic – but here’s a film that really merits the distinction: it’s hard to get aroused when the sexuality is so completely about negation. I don’t quite know how meaningful Crash may be as a metaphor for anything real, but at the very least, it’s one of the great gloomy fantasies of the age.

Rewatching Cronenberg

I also saw Naked Lunch, which has a surprisingly dour tone for such an outlandish piece of material. Again, the film’s structure, which has sickness seeped into its pores, is mesmerizing, but the theme of the relationship between writing and death doesn’t seem as productive as anything in Crash. The movie is a key submission for those who think Cronenberg is basically just weird.

The other film I rewatched recently is the 1977 Rabid. Cronenberg’s reputation is still heavily coloured – maybe excessively – by this and other early works like Scanners and The Brood; most accounts of him tend to turn pretty quickly to his supposed obsession with bodily ickiness (admittedly he does return time and time again to devices of basic repulsiveness, all the way up to his last film existenZ). Rabid is about a woman whose skin graft operation goes horribly wrong and turns her into a carrier for a vampire-like condition, visualized in a way laden with sexual metaphor. The movie isn’t much more than a low-grade zombie movie, and Cronenberg was still on a heavy learning curve when he made it. It presages one consistent aspect of his style though – a deliberate, cool approach toward uniquely transgressive subject elements. In interviews, Cronenberg seems very much like his films – a well turned out, low-key individual who could clearly go over the edge at any second.

His latest film Spider may be the best reviewed of his career. Respected critic Amy Taubin considers it one of the ten best films ever made. That may be the far point on the scale of enthusiasm, but it’s hard to find a bad review of Spider. Nick James in Sight and Sound called it “slow perfection and a true work of art”; Stephen Holden in The New York Times called it “as harrowing a portrait of one man’s tormented isolation as the commercial cinema has produced.” Ironically and bizarrely, although it qualifies as a Canadian film, it didn’t even get into the five Best Film nominees at this year’s Genies, despite Cronenberg himself winning the prize as best director.

Spider

Ralph Fiennes plays Spider, who’s released from a mental asylum after many years and goes to live in a halfway house in London. Initially the film chronicles the sparse rituals of his new life, then it changes into a memory of Spider’s childhood, with Gabriel Byrne as his father and Miranda Richardson playing both his mother and the cheap tart who disrupts the family. The film places the adult Spider into the middle of these childhood scenes as an unseen observer, compulsively watching events unfold, his lips occasionally muttering the “lines” along with his young self. This is intercut with frequent shots of Spider in his room, compulsively scribbling in a notebook in some secret code (or maybe it's pure scribbling). The film’s distinctiveness is in the ambiguity over whether we’re watching his memories, or a pure fiction written by Spider, or a mixture of both. Cronenberg maintains this ambiguity beautifully, almost until the last possible minute.

Cronenberg’s theme of bodily self-disgust manifests itself subtly here – in repeated shots of Spider’s nicotine-stained fingers for instance, but especially in what retrospectively seems like the film’s key scene: he goes into a pub looking for his father, and one of the local tarts flashes her breast at him. Beyond recording the kid’s obvious embarrassment, Cronenberg doesn’t linger on it at the time, but this moment seems to spark Spider’s escalating confusion. The use of Richardson in both parts, representing both poles of a crude good-evil opposition, is very subtle in that we’re never sure whether Spider actually sees them as the same woman, or whether this is a symbolic device for the benefit of us, the audience.

Similar points could be made about much else in the film: Spider moves through almost abandoned streets, seldom encountering anyone except the figures in his head – is this a representation of his objective surroundings, or of his mental landscape, or both or neither? I know of course that movies needn’t be analyzed so literally, but Spider seems to demand it – it foregrounds the process of image creation. The film’s most “normal” shot is the opening one, where the camera moves along a railway station platform as the passengers get off and walk to the gate – eventually they’ve all dispersed and then there’s Spider. It’s the only time in the film we look directly at so many people, and seems designed precisely to make that point – that we’re departing now from straightforwardness.

Puzzle Movie

Ultimately, Spider is a bit too much of a “puzzle” movie (something signaled by its shots of jigsaws, a broken window rearranged on a tabletop, and suchlike) – it reveals the “truth” and then it’s over. I think it’s possible to see the praise it’s received as actually a bit of a mixed compliment for Cronenberg: it tells him his more ambitious visions aren’t wholly successful, that he needs to rein himself in – in other words to deny much of what made his reputation. After a first viewing, I find the film distinctly easier to write about than I did his other films (I wouldn’t have had a clue what to say about Crash), and ironically that leaves less reason to see it again in the foreseeable future. It seems much more self-effacing than his other films (excepting perhaps his motor racing movie Fast Company, which I’ve never seen), and as such does perfect service to Spider’s inner world. I admire it immensely and yet, ironically, while watching it I missed those Cronenbergian extremes.

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.