Captain America (2011). Credits. The inflation of spectacle so taken for granted (see The Incredible Hulk / Iron Man), more plot points and traits crammed in and thus rushed through, and thus pat values, cliches, director Joe Johnston manages, if by no other reason than the suggestion of montage style from 30s/40s movies, to get an interesting counter-stroke from this prefab pulp, and perhaps only because even Marvel's textured, complicated, anti-hero twist to superhero comics fare is now just part and parcel. Compare Iron Man, whose Robert Downy Jr. lovable playboy and rogue entrepreneur railroads all sorts of bigger, more sinister implications into yuppie gadget love. Returning to the idea of nobility and compassion for a hero suddenly has a relief, at least in this vein, as long as it's not the wringing reverence of Spielbergian wonderment. The Nazis always help, of course, to sufficiently guarantee polarization of value, and all the more a Nazi who wants to outbid Hitler, and looks like the devil trying. They even try to trump Nazi uniforms, with a kind of WWI era gas-mask -- steampunk -- version of storm troopers (Johnston's Rocketeer was resume material for this). So along with Hugo Weaving's well-studied German accent, Stanley Tucci's typically more grounded and offhand performance (Tommy Lee Jones scores no points here for being used entirely as a cliche himself), Chris Evans's softer resolve as All-American Charles Atlas ad dream turned into modern movie and muscle method beefcake, Johnston gets this cheeky comment effect from, after a montage of a stage show promotional gimmick (for war bonds) that gives birth to the "Captain America" persona, glossing the action, more so with it a lot of presumptive superhero stuff. You get two treats in one, a sort of World War II era comic gung-ho trope out of cutting out lots of contrived obstacles, at least for one segment of the movie. It's sort of refreshing to see a superhero winning streak, the hero as the irrepressible force, and the amazing thing here is how the supervillain is constantly having to retreat and regroup. You can extrapolate whichever way you want from this, what this irrepressible innocent boy of the U.S. becomes in the post-war world, where even that naivete gets projected instead of overcome. (Compare again Tony Stark / Iron Man.) Note this for the turn of the film, it's bracketing sequence, of Captain America landing in the modern world, to see the results of all that, though the main purpose of this bit is setup for The Avengers sequel accumulation of all these Marvel heroes. But don't worry, there's plenty of contrived obstacles still in this movie, and honking love-interest stuff, along with a sort of garish lushness to make you feel that, instead of just any evocation of GI American cheese, you've got extreme flavor-blasted cheese flavor. That's CG superhero movies; that's the Marvel brand. We didn't win the war for nothing. And unless I'm mistaken, there's the suggestion, here, that all the power of these Marvel heroes, that Day-Glo baby blue goop that's involved in the cause of all of them, comes from the same Nordic mythic source. Perhaps I should consult Thor. Who's outbidding the Nazis? Iron Man's" conflict and implications go even further: power, corruption, presumptive value. [4/6/12]
Aurora (2010). Credits. Cristi Puiu, who gave us The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, seems bent on showing exactly the sort of thing drama, and more particularly modern film, cuts out. It's a waiting room realism, and in this movie, it's exemplified by the "climactic" scene at the police station. The plight of an old man trying to get medical attention, in Lazarescu, provides a much more Aristotelian, if not natural, unity, a through-line that gathers up all the clinical banality with the pathos for it. It's not so much the matter of sympathy in Aurora, although there is still pathos (despite Puiu injecting somewhat more ambivalence about it by giving this character also a health concern), as that we don't have the same unity of time. Since there is compression of greater time, once the intent of the character is manifested, it raises questions, retroactively as well, about why so much time was spent on the particular skidding off or unforeseen digressions, such as the neighbors with the overflowing water and the moving men all at once. We can certainly use much more of this sort of drama of revelation, and the sort of fascination even with the most utterly banal it can provide, but there are risks to it, which unfortunately justify the smugness of "entertainment" executives, and even people who otherwise consider themselves artists, and their, as Godard among others has referred to it, contempt for fact. Puiu himself plays the main character in this movie, and he's as intent as he is shuffling, making for a disarming menace in certain moments. [1/28/12]
One from the Heart (1982). Credits. One from the Heart is neither as good as its aspiration nor as bad as its reputation. You can see just where Francis Coppola is going wrong, and although it certainly manifested itself in financial terms, this becomes an extension of the conception, what's happening aesthetically (at least). This could be the index for not only the transformation in American movie art, but the generation of the 60s, a built-in sell-out, a structural susceptibility to being co-opted. Coppola demonstrates this at perhaps one of the most acute or sophisticated, thus poignant, if not tragic, levels. The film that somewhat inadvertently ends up being the reflexive paean to the whole Zoetrope culmination of the era of American movies that, roughly from about 1966 to 1979, was a notable exception from Oscar-type bland grandeur, is The Black Stallion. One from the Heart is where that same style, more oblique fascination than naturalism, common to films of all kinds around that time, such as Alien or Herzog's Nosferatu, becomes indiscriminate, profligate. The sensitivity to detail becomes the susceptibility to detail, infection of surroundings, a pure impulse of accumulation. Does it make any difference that Coppola has such an acute eye or taste for all this detail, an operatic grasp and composition for such a range? Or is it precisely that someone of such sensibility and even capabality would be exemplary for becoming a whole new level of what he would've been the exception to. Coppola is the man who was swallowed by his taste. On the one hand, it's fascinating to see an entire deco-ish house rebuilt for a stage set, just one part of the set at that, but there's still the fact of this indulgence, where all this effort is concentrated, when at the same time the story is about an ordinary couple learning that their dreams, even dream lovers, can't any more live up to them. The lot littered with signs that Frederick Forrest's character has something to do with, itself another set piece, is a microcosm for this extravagant doubling of the broken promises of Vegas, and the movie itself is trapped on the wrong side of the reflection. The celebration of artifice seems more a lodestone than a spree, and there's not the economy of even the gesture of the pathetic: compare Le Million (the model Coppola may have known, but, as with Herzog's Nosferatu which he named as a model for his Dracula, could not follow). [11/24/11]
Crazy Heart (2009). Credits. Jeff Bridges has these flashes of candor that contrast not only Maggie Gyllenhaal, but even the lushness of his own slumming portrait. It works in a way as analogy for glimpses through the muddy layers of the character's habits, and that means habit, too. The razor sharp extent of this offhand quality is Robert Duvall, who still at close to 80 shows how to have the greatest presence with zero mugging, an almost deadpan naturalism. Even his gestures, like the way he leans himself on the bar or pulls the bottom of his shirt down, are candid in a non-actor way, but thus more sharply evocative. Director Scott Cooper (he also wrote the script) manages to follow Bridges in this, which curiously means that the movie, too, is its own foil. The production design and cinematography have so much lushness, a movie redo of the 30s, that it's incongruous with the Bridges character, Bad Blake, and strangely it's the interiors which do this so that they often seem incongruous with the exterior. Where'd this guy living out of his '78 Silverado most of the time get this taste? Notice how he keeps his kitchen in one scene. It also messes with the line he uses on Gyllenhaal, that she makes the room look so bad, but this is also where the movie fails the most for other reasons. Apparently from expedience, since it's stretching out the trajectory of the characters across more movements (the novel's worth), the attraction of these two seems taken for granted on their meeting. There is no discovery, nothing that dramatized for us how this develops or why, particularly why he's so charming when he's supposed to be at his motel-room barest. Washed in with another one-night stand and easy joint pickup, it inadvertently leaves the Gyllenhaal character seeming as susceptible to that whimsy as the others, and does nothing to overcome everything about Gyllenhaal the actress that makes us wonder why she's the one that's supposed to be something special, because she's really quite incongruous to this movie, not in a flattering way. The crossover style of music and even the source for this movie, Waylon Jennings, all suggest a style, an ethos, of country that people like Bridges and Duvall (if for nothing other than Tender Mercies) are only the vestiges of. [11/6/11]
World on a Wire [Welt am Draht] (1973). Credits. Alphaville (expressly referred to with an appearance by Eddie Constantine), James Bond crossed with a proto-nerd satire -- it's hard to tell which subverts which -- Xeno's paradox, Plato's cave, Phillip K. Dick's pulp allegory of mnemonics, as particularly expressed in one scene in the move Blade Runner which this film anticipates, just as it does The Sims and role playing games and computer involvement, expressly by the title (if not quite the wireless version), all with Rainer Werner Fassbinder's toss-off flair, and not to mention his ghastly doll women (every woman in this film is particularly dressed up). If this is not the first time Fassbinder used mirrors and glass panes as a motif, the simulation theme here gives it a meaning it may not have had otherwise, suggesting its development. The actors/characters in the movie are for real life what the programmed identities are to them in the plot. When you double an actor in the same frame by showing him/her next to his/her reflection in a mirror, you have two images, a kind of split and doubled image, and in fact the reversal in the mirror is the reversal of a reversal which occurs in the film process, the inversion in the lense and with the negative process. Fassbinder's incessant use of windows and internal glass partitions similarly emphasizes this mediation, of the lenses more literally, and the screen, the entire recording and projection process, more figuratively. It's an extended version of the Hitchock trick, as in Frenzy when the camera tracks back down the stairs, of implicating the viewer in precisely the position of removal, detachment, of being outside, and not immersed in the world of the film or its story. Perhaps in Fassbinder's case it's more conscientiously Brechtian, or serving a purpose like that, but there is also his fascination with melodrama that also seems the opposite orientation, a kind of wallowing in it rather than extraction. It's not so much that he's making out of it a gallows camp, as it often is nonetheless, but that he finds something similarly uncanny already there, perhaps in spite of itself, in, for example, Douglas Sirk. Unfortunately, this can lead to the same sort of pulpish excesses, and in this case, whether due to the fact it was originally made for German TV which may have called for extending it to cover more spots (it has two parts), this is one of those things that feels like it has 15 different endings, each scene in the last part tortuously proving the previous was not the finale. The melodramatic effect ought to make the final finale, when after escaping to the next level of super-reality, the couple roll around on the floor, weird enough, but Fassbinder can't avoid a muckish skew, perhaps a bit more porn film than cinema verité, and besides that he'd hung other hints, the stranger implications (that paradox of Xeno, for one) over the whole thing. Compare also Tomorrow I Will Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea as 70s time-travelogue, not only the look and sound, but also the duplication theme. [8/27/11]
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Credits. Childish things. The children's games of grown men, and grown men playing like children playing grown men when they play cowboys and guns. That's why it's one of those things that flickers between the comment and the thing portrayed, and appeals to people who take it as either. Something distilled, movie-making like pretending, script concern largely a matter of making up in a scenic way. It's archetypal even as flawed. The length of it, although it adds to the epic thematic sense, also creates other proportion problems, time spent on other jags, but not on the relation of "Angel Eyes," or how two of them don't catch scent of the trail till about midway; and also too much repetition of the war is woeful refrain, which makes it childish in the sense of trite. The operatic conception, that became famous with the moniker "horse opera," is contributed mostly by Ennio Morricone, as his career suggests, scores for the entire range of pop. Sergio Leone's large and lurid image plan carries the wide-screen and deep focus to something more like a comic-book extent. This kind of broadness, while presenting a close-up detail, nonetheless works like the theme of a musical plan, and "melodrama" (which originally simply meant "musical drama") was never really far from "pop," from what could be popular sentiment, or simply this sort of distillation, a kind of thick shorthand. But that's like impressionism or expressionism, that sort of production, not merely subtraction. The twist on "melodrama" as it became the mauldin movie line is the sadistic as well as circumstantial meanness, evoked here more with a wryness or irony, but no less referring to a real one. It's the schadenfreude that's held up, that's drinks all around, and that's where the twist is, the complication, perhaps the subversion of the simplistic scheme of good and bad. That's where the ugly comes in. Compared to The Wild Bunch, which more conscientiously commented this grown men's games, this is played out more, particularly by Eli Wallach. Compared to Leone's own Once upon a Time in the West, which tries to be even more operatic, with the score, too, but more involved in issues, this has a kind of film noir theme bluntness, money, making it, the men outside the system tracked only on this line. The trick of the term "good" in the title played by its cast with the others: Wallach's character is the somewhat surprising protagonist, or at least empathetic center. Tuco is like the Toshiro Mifune character in Seven Samurai, which makes as much a link to that as Fistful of Dollars to Yojimbo, or as The Magnificent Seven, which had a precursor role for Wallach as Mexican bandit, to Seven Samurai. He's the no-bones mercenary, the unabashedly, defiantly self-interested, because of his circumstance, which makes him weasel-like but not a weasel, while Eastwood's "good" is, as suggested by Nietzsche's genealogy as well as the sly joke, simply the virtue of his own ability, an adjective describing capability even in self-interest or conniving rather than overarching moralism. He's actually a kind of irresistible or charmed weasel, but thus the equivocation or leveling with Wallach. As for the bad (the Lee van Cleef character), apart from less qualified or even cunning meanness, in the end it comes down to how it's just not good enough. [8/14/11]
Darling (1965). Credits. Like the emperor's new clothes, this is an exposé of the model, except the lie is given to her unbaring. There's nothing there, no "real" solid core or stature behind the "Ideal Woman," as one of the magazines is called that bears Julie Christie's face on the cover -- as her character, of course. It's certainly game, if not necessarily courageous in some grandiose way, of Julie Christie to have taken on this betrayal portrayal, reflexive of movie-stardom as well. (This was her tack as much as Schlesinger's or anyone else's, so not to have even that comment make something more of it.) The risk is of doing this pastiche of dilettantism, fundamental restlessness, and an often lurid pop treatment of the 60s version of it, without becoming those things, and the movie seems not to always avoid this, although perhaps they -- John Schlesinger, Frederic Raphael, Joseph Janni and company -- didn't want to. It was necessary to show the survey, the sweep of a course of a life, lots of time and phases, for a whole other, not majestic sense of "sweep." Thus even really great moments or flourishes or passages for other reasons, of observation in their own right -- oblique jags that seem to twist characterization but fill it out in other ways (such as the elbow in the back bit with the painfully suburban relatives); the crux moment of restlessness in the room with the typewriter, which is both exuberant and painful in its depiction; a frank, because completely in step, part about a friendship with a homosexual man, which seems as dramatic for that time by inverse proportion to how unassuming it's done -- have to be given the slip, as this flighty consciousness flits on to the next phase. But some of the parlor antics come off as a lesser La Dolce Vita and the skimming diminshes the sharpness of even the subjective tangle of the satire. Compare Alfie, which came out the following year, and took this self-betrayal trick of the confessional to a new, if not the, height. Similarities in the story also with Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd are not merely coincidental: Raphael and Schlesinger did their version of that with Christie after this. [7/15/11]
Christmas in July (1940). Credits. Sensible extravagance. The sensibility of extravagance, and the extravagance of sensibility. The extravagance of the gesture of being sensible. The way Sturges balances -- or suspends in a kind of tension -- the excesses of characters, individuals, their propensities, general and peculiar, and a basic decency, is somehow more pithy than Capra, yet still mythic, a projection. Which is nonetheless not to say it's entirely wrong or false. In some ways, Sturges is more assured in his lunacy, something more of the keenness of social parody (cf. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek for his trick of dealing with something off limits by making it screwball, though so totally screwball it strains "keen"), and this keeps him from the message-y strains of Capra, though Sturges certainly has his, too, perhaps the most self-justifying, if not aggrandizing of all at the end of Sullivan's Travels. Here, it's the fiancee's plea on behalf of her beloved protagonist, too, for the chance that everyone should have (contradictions of capitalism betrayed, paradoxcially indicated and glossed), although special note goes to a line in response to this by the boss character she's pleaing to: "That's all very deep dish and high falutin'." The fact that even the bosses have this colloquial footing doesn't come off so much a contrivance when it's also part of a pretty fair portrait of their interest, but it may be harder to take common sense debunking, balloon-bursting put on their side. Were the managerial types of that day less prone to bullshit babble, to diversionary, inflated language? This portrait of a kind of patrician accord, if not complicity -- a manager actually refers to the employees as the boss's children at one point -- is not necessarily as accurate as, or as much a testament to the facts, to the real the movie refers to, as to the projection itself, what people wish or hope the social reality to be, or at least defer to as a kind of default. Any sense of some gross warp of this 30s/40s representation, however, even as a matter of some sensibility time-bound, sillier because earlier, can be confronted with the persistence of this propensity in Americans that is as much laissez faire as common decency, as much apathy as civility, and conversely as much renunciation as complicity. Another example of passing a tell off as a gloss is the black janitor, whose lot in life is let in the window of comparison, but who is given the sharpest line of all, perhaps all of Sturges. When asked if a black cat (yes, a literal one, which also has the curious closing shot from an elevator view) crossing your path is good luck or bad, he replies, "That all depends on what happens afterwards." This movie is the neatest, cleanest argument of Sturges, sifting the hijinks into the cascade of the plot, the point it makes, and tempering all the kettle-blowing reaction. [7/9/11]
Chinatown (1974). Credits. Roman Polanski's worth can be measured in comparison to Alfred Hitchcock. While the latter did some great stuff (Vertigo ranks among the best films, and Frenzy, despite flaws, is a favorite of mine), and has fantastic sequences throughout his work (just one or two from Sabotage (1936) are better than the whole of Rebecca, his stodgiest work), there's a studio patness to his work in general. He often had hackish scripts and we know what he thought of actors. Polanski, on the other hand, gave us a cinema of paranoia that's much more subtle as evocation and allegory, despite however else it might seem outré. Rosemary's Baby is as good a demonstration of this as any, although Repulsion is for other reasons, well, easier to swallow. It was Rosemary's Baby that first brought Polanski together with Robert Evans of Paramount, and it was Evans's idea to put Polanski on the project of one of the best American scripts ever written. Evans didn't even understand the script (see The Kid Stays in the Picture), but somehow thought it great, and so, like so much great art, if we can't generalize for all art, and especially where something so collective, to put it nicely, as movies are concerned, there was one of those rare happy accidents, even bigger considering Evans. For whatever reason Polanski was picked, even if he was just a ski buddy for Evans, it was a shrewd result. Robert Towne's script could've been a well-made play in the hands of too reverent or passive a director. But Polanski gave it his edgy, snooping, leering quality, as from the Rosemary example. Without it being the cliche of verité, he gave the effect of a "real life" perspective of the film noir period, a sort of muckraking look behind the noir curtain. He got this also from John Alonzo's cinematography, a twilight of gloss and glare, the color having its own glamor, but also turning the noir to the light of day (all the clues in Towne's script about sensing and perceiving, eyes and noses, and the yellow tones of the cinematography go with them). And alongside all this is Jerry Goldsmith's score, shimmering and eerie, investing 30s brassiness with a similar nocturnal crispness, and its transposition with the incidental and effect music: the trilling of the lowest piano keys, a single shrill squeal of violin string; the harp-like chord that hangs on the edge of a clang, but falls into a full tone at the beginning of the main theme, and serves as tonal background elsewhere. The score lends the same quality as the production design and photography, the color palette and cast, a sort of burnished but thicker sharpness of the 30s, something woozy and crisp at once. Why, you could even say, watery. And water is the great pun-like encryption right under your nose for the whole time when the movie came out, all the chain of water references and symbols, and including most instrumentally a literal one figuring in the events of the plot, carrying the political issue of the day into this whole other dramatic speculation of the issue of seeing /not seeing, hiding and manipulating the public: Watergate.
It may have been that we were only catching on, seeing it so much later, that that significance was even more obscured. But even without this being encrypted, Towne's use of noir as a decoy for political parable is already betraying this blindness in general, the chain of references, the intricacy of all the symbols and foreshadowing, working like teasers and implications, and round about again for the whole sense of clues lying all around, that are there, that are even significant in unconscious if not subconscious ways. You don't "see" what they mean in some direct way. In some ways, we are swimming like this, in that sort of Lacanian oceanic, but it's the hedonism of the symbolic, keeping to the sense we only want all the things to have. Not wanting to see, or sense, what else they have for us to know. It's there as the misspoken, not just the order of language as what makes express, but how it can do the same thing, reveal and conceal, our inclination misdirecting. The words hide it under your nose. They are stating as misstatement, whatever type or degree of error that might amount to, even a bad accent pun. Another remarkable reflexive twist, so many of these clues are about, precisely, the senses themselves: the nose (for the nosey detective, and even the silly, cheap or banal kind of symbol is no less significant -- as Joyce said, too, about bad puns), the eye (ultimately for the overt/covert matter), the ears (for all the noise and misdirection and mishearing).
Chinatown is as much about this diversion of the movies themselves, which is why its own lush front (note even the title background design) is also to give a darker volume. It slips into the guise or mode of a fictive genre of that time, the 30s, all the better to subvert it, to outbid or overtake even film noir's own cold shower of reality conceit. Jack Nicholson's J.J. Gittes plays this out, the stooge of his own impetus for revelation: the truth in spite of us. The complication is not just using film noir as a parable, but casting this scheme, of covering, of allegory, of concealing/revealing, in all directions: the reality, of political import if not otherwise, of the day of the noir films (and the literature they came from), and the stroke and implication of this investment of the past for its day, the day it was made (cf. John Cawelti's "Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films"). What would also be "today," not only as it was then, the time of Chinatown, but what remains today. Chinatown was at the peak of an exceptional period of American film (from about 1966 to 1976), after which, partly as a reaction to that sophistication ("adult" themes, treatment or at least artistic endeavor), came "family" pandering, the golden age of production, design and cinematography, Spielbergism, CG, hyperbole.
Though it's not just a side note, as far as Jack Nicholson goes, this is hands down his best performance, not just because it's the best movie he was in, but his contribution. Cuckoo's Nest was a more spectacular kind of success and unfortunately got him off on the whole craze that made people want him to be hammy crazy, but just like with Pacino, who matured into a similar bizarre ham, Nicholson shows so much more composure and offhand manner in his younger days -- cf. even The Last Detail for how a more boisterous performance is also more subdued -- and this was the finest role for him. Faye Dunnaway also was perhaps the best actress of the time for simultaneously the demeanor of someone in the 30s, a society type as much as a movie star (foreshadowing her Joan Crawford, but with actually a far better, more subtle uncovering), but the grittiness or plain banality beneath it (again, Bonnie and Clyde was obviously a precursor, but this role is more situated and composed, vulnerable and less consciously demonstrative). [7/1/11]
The Tree of Life (2011). Credits. The most complete work of Terrence Malick's elliptical style or method, yet. The Thin Red Line is still a better movie (for example, leaving aside Days of Heaven or Badlands), ultimately perhaps because of the way it works as theme, point or argument, even if also poetically or rhetorically. But here Malick's expression is actually given its clearest demonstration, if only because of the necessary condition, the ground, of childhood, with all the paradox of personal and generic that entails, and he's got suggestions of the "oceanic" from which individuality is born, in a technical sense as much as any high symbolic one. This is simply the limit of scope we cannot avoid, as Freud also was at pains to show, and not necessarily the Ur-code of revelation or the mythic reclamation to aspire to. Edmund Husserl (with whom Malick may be familiar, after his study of philosophy and his work on Heidegger, a published translation) referred to this problem of the earth-ground, which is also that of history for our perception, what amounts to our horizon, and how this means that a pre-Copernican perspective of things will always be a factor for us. (As for the whole enterprise of phenomenolgy, it's very different not to be aware of this entire matter, to have the naiveté before it rather than one after it, and for those who run away from it like it's a homework assignment, and then want to ascribe some error of extraneousness or pretense to anyone else, I put some further discussion of this as a note below. But, then, if you want to avoid that, you've probably avoided this whole writing, if not the movie. As for even the sophisticated who wonder why Malick strays into first-run theaters with all this, makes for example the casting choices he does, which I also comment on below, Malick is not the one saying any of this doesn't relate, even for pop.) This doesn't exempt Malick from the risk of, or excuse him for committing what Samuel Beckett more wryly comments as the self-satisfying notion that all the stars are centered around "me." Like David Lynch, Malick is in touch with his reverie (and there are scenes here, images, that make a likeness to Lynch even more than an analogy: sudden more ominous views, of say a nightlight; certainly the flourishes of a childhood phantasm about the attic, like scenes with the giant in Twin Peaks). I acknowledge the awkwardness of putting it this way, and that no way of saying it would escape this awkwardness. Malick's pursuit of these internal workings is uninhibited, untouched by any conventional wisdom of pandering or suppressing or tailoring -- well, precisely to convention, which may be as much to say he's touched.
Timeliness itself is of a sort of disproporionate or paradoxical pertinence here. First of all, for those who outbid Malick with an aesthetic idealization of him, of whatever stripe (pro as much as, if not more so than con -- cf. the case of Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut), he hasn't suddenly gone around the bend into this sort of thing, whatever it might amount to. Not only did this have its roots in a project he was working on in the 70s, but even then Malick made statements (in rare events of public appearance or interview) to the effect that the idea of degradation or fall was not quite apt for even Badlands. Even if it's an obsession, Malick's meditation or concern with innocence involves the complication that bad, evil, or at least harm, are not external to it, do not occur to it simply as an outside cause, an accident or fall. This is demonstrated, in a perhaps more elementary way, in Tree of Life, where it's a matter of "ordinary" childhood, as compared to, say, some criminal profile of Kit Caruthers (who nonetheless had childhood, too). Malick's view of this American groping for innocence is no less unflinching for also having a softness, or lyrical tone, and it's this combination which now, curiously, is out of whack with the rakish mollification that has resulted, the clamorous, hyperbolic anthropomorphism and back-yard projection. In other words, while Malick can seem an incongruous, or even anachronistic tone comtemplating the 40s and 50s, it's in contrast to a diet that's really the 50s on steroids, and all the worse for the arrogance of the present, the new, the extreme, that kneejerks against any awareness of this. Even the use of dinosaurs serves this function, Malick, if inadvertently, striking the chord of what is strangely the very index of this cultural projection. The crux of the confrontation between science and Christian cosmology even gets displaced for the way this empirical trace of dinosaurs -- a sign in the Heraclitan sense, signifying as much unknown -- of the matter of origin has been commodified, and more expressly made into the ideological contradiction, as the producers who argued against the French notion of cultural exemption from trade agreements put it: dinosaurs are not "cultural" or "ideological," never mind scientific or cosmological, they're entertainment. Perhaps the ring of this would not have been there without the additional scenes of dinosaurs, after the first plesiosaur on the beach, including one where a raptor-like creature steps on another's head and then leaves it alone, but Malick, as with his casting choices since his return, seems unaware of or unconcerned with just how much risk there is for bad notes. Perhaps he wanted to directly counter the Jurassic Park line, but suggesting grace with the dinosaurs is a pretty cheap symbol no matter how you cut it, and pitches him right back into the anthropomorphism problem.
Similarly the heaven on the beach. He is pushing it to show that not everything can be shot with the Malick touch and come off with the same Kafkaesque, if more bucolic, eerie ambivalence for wonder. Like a Christian program version of Fellini, this ultimate appeasement is as much subjective, a testament or document of the mythic, imaginary, symbolic part of the "real," but it actually tips over into, at least the tone of, the trite profundity of 2001 or The Moody Blues. The first sequence of cosmic awe, which intervened between an introductory sequence so elliptical, it looked as if Malick would live up to my idea of outbidding contemporary fare by making the whole movie a trailer (an idea that's not just a joke or slur, as I've suggested elsewhere for Lynch), and that sent the first group from the audience for an early exit, is juxtaposed in a way that, in the context of the voiceovers (in this film whispered to the point of being lost, as if a reaction to criticism of the voiceovers of Thin Red Line, and they're the same style of metaphysical or existential questions), actually serves as the ultimate noncommital response. Whether god or the forces of the cosmos without such an author, here is life on scales we've now been afforded with the Hubble telescope, geology, microbiology and paleontology, as if everywhere answering our naive and bewildered questions with these cataclysmic forces that rush right up into our veins. Life does not wait for us to ask it questions. (Beckett again: "God is a witness that cannot be sworn.")
Put aside those parts, and the layered, involved, implicating and imbricated psychological evocation of childhood (conversely parenthood), a portrait or even "document" of evocation itself (and this begs the question of the exemplary role of "fiction" in something like understanding, if not truth, or to put it another way, what is the line of fiction and fact, or, perhaps easier to approach, realism and symbolism) turns inside out the reductive narcissism of the family that is the stew of virtually all American movies, making slight the distinction now between popular or mainstream or Hollywood and "indie." Malick's treatment of this relation, not just childhood, is more keenly observed for being less projected. It's a view of how our machinations work, rather than one given over to them entirely. [6/25/11]
Extra note on Husserl (from above): As well as this problem of the ground recognized by Husserl, phenomenology itself could describe Malick's approach. From Derrida's "Introduction to [Husserl's] Origin of Geometry" (translated by John P. Leavey, Jr.):
The historicity of ideal objectivities, i.e., their origin and tradition (in the ambiguous sense of this word which includes both the movement of transmission and the perdurance of heritage), obeys different rules, which are neither the factual interconnections of empirical history, nor an ideal and ahistoric adding on. The birth and development of science must then be accessible to an unheard-of style of historical intuition in which the intentional reactivation of sense should -- de jure -- precede and condition the empirical determination of fact.
This footnote of Derrida's in the same essay could as well describe Malick with Tree of Life:
In effect these pages of Husserl, first written for himself, have the rhythm of a thought feeling its way rather than setting itself forth. But here the apparent discontinuity also depends on an always regressive method, a method which chooses its interruptions and multiplies the returns toward its beginning in order to reach back and grasp it again each time in a recurrent light.
If . . . (1968). Credits. The glib manner of David Sherwin's screenplay (from a script called "Crusaders" by him and John Howlett -- that ought to give you another idea of the ambiguity of the subject, here) and Lindsay Anderson's direction makes this seem less pertinent, but it's more so in another way, one easy to miss if you see this as muckracking, revolutionary, or even just a figure or experience to "identify" with. One effect is that it refuses or fails to make a central figure out of Malcolm McDowell's character, hero, anti-hero, protagonist, whatever so many narcissistic icons of 60s movie are supposed to be, the sort of reduction to self-discovery that ends up working just like advertising, no matter what liberation it imagines (cf. The Graduate). Sherwin and Anderson give a slacker surrealism, caught square between the jaded experience of the English boys' school system and some debunking or flight from it. The school, by the way, doesn't have to stand for anything (it's rather bizarre to describe this movie as allegory), aristocracy, hierarchy, bourgeosie, society at large, because it is all this, even saying "clearly" or "obviously" or "self-evidently" tending toward the same useless qualification. It's something like manifest decadence. The whole fomentation and degradation of deferential society is the petty, petulant power play of school boys, punishment having long since become the ritualized incorporation of the corporal, capital threat behind social order, the formalized extorsion of civil society (the hazing in American frats has nothing on this long line). There's no one really outside this fabric in the movie, and it's showing how this "order" is already slack, distilled, brittle, unruly. That's the jaded part about what's already there: we don't get a setup prim dummy that gets knocked over by the liberated, hip or outsider, and even the imagination of that is qualified. McDowell and his cronies are almost another expression of the head boy group, a kind of liberal or libertine shadow cabinet, and there's even McDowell's masochistic infatuation with the violence "inherent in the system," as the Monty Python Holy Grail character says -- and the reference is not just fortuitous, see below. It's not the violence that is latent. It's the love of it. This is what the McDowell character is expressing. When he's offered the hand of the headboy that caned him beyond the usual dose, there are quite different senses of his "thank you" on both sides of the handshake, as much scandalous for being complicitous, which are not in terms of some conventional protagonist plot of empathy. The eruptions also become more surreal. Even the switch-off in the movie between black and white, and color suggests the confusion between the terms, using the pat distinction of a Wizard of Oz, or even its reversal in Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven), to confound. We don't know which is supposed to be the prosaic, the banal, and which the dreamy; which is the imaginary and which the defiance of the imaginary. There's even confusion about whose dream it is, as when Mrs. Kemp wanders the empty quarters nude. Thus the movie's title. Which nonetheless is also enough of an out to allow us to wonder whether anyone willing to be at Eton (the movie has a "College House," if it never says Eton), for example, in the first place would ever give rise, let alone vent, to such imagination. In this way, this is a nice reflexive slice of having your cake and eating it, too. It's as if popular whimsy were detached from its usual purpose and set off, like a string of firecrackers, against the official realism of either class reverance or socialism. In this way, by a different means or tone, there's a Hegelian ploy of showing how the system contains its own contradictions, is pregnant with them, or at least produces its own reactions. A more direct metaphor is made of this when they're in the basement unearthing relics of the dark past, the exotic of history and subconscious alike, and even find a cabinet full of preserved specimens, of which the one focused on is a human fetus. Because of this, more than anti-establishment fad pop of the 60s or even some revolutionary utopian fantasies about '68, despite the guise of those If ... is more in the line of the angry young man movies, like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning or This Sporting Life, where the protagonist never quite manages to see beyond the frame of his situation, even if not especially by the way he thinks he sees out of it. It simply decenters that for the collective.
Note in the other direction (in time) the similarities with Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: not only with all the boys' school sequences, where the buildings and rooms look similar (the chapel, the classroom), and there's even a forerunner to Cleese's sex instructor and a rugby match with a master playing with the boys, but the intertitles make the similarity, well, graphic. Did the Python group work off this? See also Terry Jones and Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns episode, "Tomkinson's Schooldays," for a spoof version of the boys' school account, especially the head boy racket. [6/11/11]
Short Cuts (1993). Credits. The short stories of Raymond Carver are a pretext for a muckraking paen to Los Angeles, a more sprawling view than The Player of the year before. While that film was more directly reflexive, of at least movie biz, it's interesting the way a Nashville treatment of Los Angeles seems even more a reflexive trick, like turning up the Hollywood stone to see what lives under it, a la Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust. While this is certainly not as grandiose as at least the 70s movie version of that, something itself pitched a bit too Elmer Gantry -- Carver's sights are set on finer detail -- Short Cuts does suffer from a similar tilt in that direction, more lurid and certainly the ending is more that sort of moral or at a least symbolic implication of catastrophe. Robert Altman has a habit of having his big finish undermine, or at least clash, with the realistic trajectory, but it's apparently very difficult to sustain the anticlimactic: it rarely gets past the writers themselves, or the producers and executives and decision people after, to the point where we'd see if audiences would take it. Altman for that is trying to do something like his forerunner, Jean Renoir, muffling the tragic, showing how it becomes anticlimactic, gets willfully swept under the rug if it's not simply ignored. But he's not quite ready, willing or able, at least in the American movie world, to do something like the grand forerunner of both of them, Chekhov with The Cherry Orchard, and show how all the drama of the character's lives is repressed in this kind of anticlimactic way, which makes them not just the result of violent tragic acts, and that the catharsis, but the entire portrait one the audience sees that the characters won't, intentionally or not. By curious circuit, Carver is in this line, his short stories like the photorealism of painting in their concentration on banality, but also with the curious paradox of the formal and the real: not only would "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" serve for comparison with this movie, especially the scenes with one couple invited to the home of another, but by a regress of the frame, we get a portrait of the stories people want, the way they tell them, to themselves as much as to others, how they want to frame life and what they want to make of it. Could this not have been a way to intercut the stories, instead of the intersecting lives conceit? Altman contributes here mightily to the derivation from his own Nashville, and this wave has not stopped since, despite having crested in any usefulness probably with Nashville. (It's gone all over the world, but the apotheosis of the conceit, the height of the badness that's come of it, is Magnolia -- find me one worse, or that even tries harder.) Contriving to have characters' paths cross is exactly the opposite of the dramatic effect of coincidence, and trying to tie all these characters together here, although often clever and fun, devious and poignant, in ways like Nashville, is additionally a strain considering the Carver stories as, at the least, inspiration. Nashville itself was a smaller bubble with an event to attract all its moths. And the filmmakers here contriving their own stories to mix with those inspired by Carver, you get a taste of Altman at his best and worst. Altman, even as he professed, is about the actors, with their performances, like jazz musicians improvising around the melody, making something else of it. While there's lots of good stuff even in the vein of Nashville -- the more glancing, incidental things, like just the cinematography of the opening title sequences, and this movie is similar to L.A. Story in its look, as well as the sense or tone it has of L.A. in general, a kind of sickly rich (Walt Lloyd was the director of photography of this, but interestingly, Andrew Dunn who shot L.A. Story would work with Altman later on Gosford Park) -- the worst of it is the climactic encounter with the baker and the entire Lori Singer thread. [6/4/11]
Scarecrow (1973). Credits. Scarecrow came out the same year as Emperor of the North and the The Last Detail, and one year after Pocket Money, but also brings to mind Midnight Cowboy (1969) in such a way as to make that the model for all these. The various realisms of these. Has a scheme like that of Sisters of the Gion, what's also the point of the scarecrow figure of its title: the extremes of two responses, counter to each other, that can provide correction or antidote to each other, but can barely make a happy medium between them. It's obvious how far either of them have gone, nearly around the bend, but even at that, after Pacino gives advice to the demonstrated excesses of Hackman's "logic," he demonstrates the flaw of his own: lack of discretion (and later we find out he's irresponsible in a more outrageous way). Great opening scene, for credits besides, because it uses the time of the credits for another purpose, a dramatic establishment of the characters as a standoff, a sizing up of each other, largely without dialogue, what might have seemed too long a scene otherwise. [4/30/11]
Inland Empire (2006). Credits. Topomania and broader monstrosity. When I played one of the Silent Hill games a few years ago, the graphic design was good enough, the plot unsatisfying enough, to inspire the idea of a video game that would be like a David Lynch movie. No matter how good the art, or the 3-D effects, video games are still on these x-y axes: the axis of literality or plotline, and the axis of figurality, but the latter is the vertical line of isolated, domesticated metaphorical moments subordinated to the baseline of flat-footededness -- the flatline. The "fantasy" that kids -- well, whatever age -- want is reduced and reducing to this plotline literality of wish fulfilment, wanting to imagine that you are just doing, but the doing that is fiction is scarcely touched. It's no coincidence that video games have become bad movies, slowed down by ham-handed "cut scenes," and movies bad video games that you can't manipulate. They're both being carried along that same axis. Now David Lynch himself has made the movie that is like that video game I imagined. The need for control(s) is moot. Inland Empire is an inversion of plot mechanics, a spiraling impetus of associations as in dreams, but as a regress of the frame of each situation. The very trigger of expectation, of what happens next, doesn't carry you forward, if that is the direction, as if in the line of action or chain of reactions. It's as if the causal drops the rug out from under you, carries you below, or above, or outside, to re-orient, mostly disorient, whatever's gone before. And in this way, it's one of the most satisfying things I've ever seen for not satisfying that urge of convential plotline.
Lynch has now taken the uncompromising dreamwork of Eraserhead through the figure eight loops of the fantastic of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and arrived at a cascade of premises, a Rolodex of representational frames and states, so that you don't know which is base, ground. Lynch has gone into digital video and, whether that has somehow freed him or inspired him to do so, into his most full-fledged disruption of narrative yet. That's only one way to put it. It may be a reclamation of narrative, a rescuing or reappropriation of it. (It shouldn't be necessary to state that this is also not just willy-nilly, jumping about, specious incongruity.) There's the sort of material here that is Lynch both successful and not successful, but all of it caught up again, so that even what seems to be his more awkward or strained or trite tendencies is evocative precisely of that, as material that's there, as in the unconscious, his or ours. The consequences are enormously satisfying, then a fall into the kind of meandering and grasping that are the risk of improvisation, then as startling, gripping and affecting a combination of the macabre and the silly, the surreal and the excruciatingly canny, as anything he's done, if not more so. He even pulls the trick on all this as affectation -- his own, or ours, for those of us who share it -- with another pull back, a regress on the filming itself, precisely at the moment when he's got us absorbed in the most abject "realism" (which usually ends up being a matter of whose story is told; this affects the sense of "evil" in the world, the position relative to the comment of it -- see below). Another curious distinction of this movie: however confusing or obscure or obstinate it seems, or whatever my resistances to it on watching it the first time, it gets better, easier, more interesting, with repeat viewing. This means the exploratory thrill doesn't evaporate, but more so, it's like the dream and the dreamwork after, which, as Blanchot suggested, is only the extension of the dream into waking life: not its resolution, as in solving a code, but the billowing or rippling out of its process of signification. [9/07]
Proposition: what can't get resolved. Significance that works in this way. Hanging, suspense, suspension. Misapprehension. The difficulty of the simplicity of signs and symbols. Easy associations, one thing signalling, linking another, but the folds of this, the layers, the convolutions. And this: Is there evil? Another cast of this: is there any other concern of art? Perhaps not necessarily put that way, but as conflict, nonetheless, this trouble, this agitation, this inner turmoil, is this tension produced by the division of identity, by persona and agency. (As Caillois says of the problem of perception itself, how can the perceiving thing resolve itself into what it encompasses in its vision. It must both belong and not belong to its view of itself, discover or contend with this blind spot or hole of self. The same problem has perhaps a more formidable expression by Goedel.) Whatever flashes of a naive literality of even this dichotomy Lynch has shown us (cf. Twin Peaks for the worst of it), there's no getting around his uncanny sensibility for the uncanny, for being "in touch" with precisely everything that defies grasp, conscious mastery: the "little" world, the even pathetic surreal puppet-like boxes that play out representation itself, the uncanny of the theatre, theatrical, drama, and even movies for this. The tones of all this, the sharpest evocations of a social index, what even "Hollywood" means in the most squalid familiar way, are caught up, tangled into, commingled with, the most "profound," or/as confounding, dreamlike imposition. The fall here from the Hollywood of dreams, even the cheapness of that, to literally the street of Hollywood, is one of the shrewdest evaginations, a turning inside-out job, at least a kind of debunking -- compared even to something like Nathanael West's book The Day of the Locust -- and doesn't stop at that turn, as I said above, the abject.
A man waiting in the "half light" Laura Dern says at one point. It's this twilight of significance that Lynch deals in. For at the same time that connections work with childish simplicity, they are also lost, adrift, detached: the sensation of memory without the object of it, feeling you remember something but you don't know what or why; this too in the play of dreams, where the sense, in one sense, is so strongly, vividly, imposed, without making sense in another sense. Perhaps dreams are nothing but the uncanny of the canny working of meaning itself, of everything as the process of sign or symbol. Haunted by our self, then. By the process of ourselves that we must watch as if a spectator, passively, as Dern says and is echoed and projected through a prism throughout the film. And "projection" could be the definitive term, or just as operative, here, for all the meditation on chronology, records working backwards to give us memory of the future, so that the psychological sense is played with the technological one. Internalization of trauma, the irresolvable psychic difficulties of harm, violence, loss, or guilt and the conflict of desire itself which can cause the same sense of splitting -- what is "evil" or even repression is not some force opposite or antithetical to desire, but another desire, drive -- even these are on top of, more abject forms of, the incommensurable and the irreducible agency of the self. The inland empire is the reign of self that can't be mastered.
It's no less significant that all of this is played out as woman, the plight of woman. Like Robert Altman with Three Women or Ingmar Bergman with Persona, Lynch not so much empathizes with women as sees the pertinence of the reversal of the hierarchy of the general, the example (as Nietzsche's ranking of women with mountebanks and Jews as experts at simulation, artists, the exiles of identity who thus become the exemplars, the ideal, of its process), of women as the empathetic, not just because of a conventional scheme of socialization of the role of the sympathetic, "sensitive," to the strong or less emotional man, but because of what underlies that, this very allergy to empathy, to all these processes of division and agency, which is the repression women are made to suffer as the external object, the scapegoat, precisely thus: the representative. Cf., not just for this reason, the rather un-supplementary presentation of Nina Simone's "Sinner Man" in the closing credits. [4/15/11]
Every Man for Himself (1979). Credits. Unruly, provocation, even to the point of the consideration of "good" movie, art, etc., Godard's "return" to movies after almost a decade showed that he had not left behind his agit-prop approach, method, tactics. He's even added to that, here with use of irregular slow motion and freeze frame, to go along with the increased displacement of sound: overlaying sound from scenes before or after, introducing other voiceover into this that mixes with dialogue of the scene, and a whole running gag about music which may figure as much as anything in the movie for all the rest. Godard's cut-up technique, like a re-application of constructivism to all the bourgeois weight that's been collected since, is, rather than between good or bad art, beside the point, perhaps sidelong of this whole consideration, or turning that on itself. Even psychologically, or for the matter of psychology, this is a similar confrontation, or suspension. Whatever would be more "personal" about a movie -- here the male character's name is Godard (Paul rather than Jean-Luc), is referred to as a famous personage, even fawned over in a way that is a typical Godard sarcastic exaggeration, rude abruptness as humor, has a cigar almost as present as his glasses and is slightly rumpled -- is no less hung on meathook quotation marks (perhaps guillotine guillemets in French). Note the ending of this character, which recalls and recasts that of Breathless as well, a suspending reflexive joke about having any sort of dramatic significance whatsoever, rebelling against even that as much by being unable to avoid it. The Godard outside this movie may identify more with Isabelle Huppert's whore -- note the gallows humor sex scene with businessmen playing office and cf. Tokyo Decadence -- than with the Godard character in it, what's said as much by that character's dislocation.
Just as Soviet montage seems more modern than much of its contemporary silent cinema, the pace of much in the shot as well as the editing, Godard by the 60s was already ahead of his time with the disruption of information, the change of the process by the amount and manner of encounter. His taking account of this is a progression with it and against it, and his pushing the disruptive process over anticipates, even as a critical response or confrontation, the more outrageous hyperbole, inflation and conflation of art and information in media up to today: the formula of the factitious. Adorno's Negative Dialectics comes to mind, an association that works by the title alone, if nothing else about that work. If one can do nothing but live this consciousness in a negative way, at least there's that: Sauve qui peut (la vie). [3/26/11]
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). Credits. What goes on. Emphasis on stretching out movement, prolongation, a sort of moving still, while at the same time a mysterious allusive story that floats around allegory, political or otherwise, sober and absurd. The script, written by director Bela Tarr and László Krasznahorkai is based on the latter's novel. It's like Kafka in this sense, although it also seems to be trying to be like Kafka which means it's straining sometimes. (The movie comes off this way more than the writing of the book, which has its own form of absurdity by elaboration, rather than Kafka's sparseness.) While this emphasis on the mesmerizing aspect of movement is often mesmerizing, and fascinating in a pictorial dramatic way, what it does even to characterization, particularly one long tracking shot of the profile of two men walking, there are other times when it strikes as just dragging out, particularly dramatically, as when it lingers on two people kissing. This bit was great for injection of at once banal and absurd -- one of the characters here had given the first flush of this wry sense in what had seemed more earnest without it -- but even though it's in keeping with the rhythmic perpetuation, stretched to monotone if not monotony (cf. the movie's title and the scene that locates it, the strange polemic of M. Eszter against the octave and modern tuning), it has the effect of souring, pressing a point several times after it's got. This may be director Bela Tarr's intention, to incorporate this very thing, use it. The movie is in some ways the complement by a sort of inverse tack to Outskirts of Pyotr Lutsik (1998). While they are similar in their sparseness and concentration, Tarr makes this a more formal ploy, and while Outskirts plays the infatuation with terror, political and otherwise, even goonhood, from that perspective, even if Lutsik's detachment or abstraction is more ambiguous, Tarr makes the detachment of everyone on the outside a matter of culpability, again in a more Kafka-like sense of the inevitable. For that reason, too, the more pertinent similarity is with something like Elem Klimov's Come and See (1985), rather than Tarkovsky, and the more conspicuous similarity there -- the emphasis on movement by protraction -- also brings out the contrast. Tarkovsky is reverant, ponderous, doesn't have the same dark humor counterpoint. Andrei Rublev by being perhaps most similar in its subject matter, shows this all the more. Gus van Sant makes the influence of Tarr explicit in Elephant and Panic Park. [3/24/11]
I Am Love (2010). Credits. The Damned reunited. Though this time it's more The Damned Like Water for Chocolate, but ends up being American Beauty. Near and far. Director Luca Guadagnino has a sophisticated composition style, both for single shots and sequences, that is at once remote and involved. It's not maudlin or solicitous, at least not on the face of it. We might be watching these people from a far window or as one of their unobtrusive members, perhaps a servant. We don't know whether we belong here or not, and what's more, we don't know who we'd belong to if we did, whose arm we'd be on or shoulder we'd be looking over or side we'd be on. This scope is enough to signify the family itself, as a class for a character if nothing else. Similarly Guadagnino's story plan circles in langorusly on its crux, its central character for only that, even the line of Tilda Swinton's Emma arrived at by the indirection of other family members. There's an earlier moment, at one of the family functions when this pace and distance changes. The movie skips into a quick-cut montage of incongruously close images. Emma is then awakened from a nap. This sudden flush of the internal setting will match up with later scenes: reading a letter to discover something about her daughter; an ecstatic moment with Emma's own spotlight isolation over a shrimp dish that -- I can't even resist jumping to the punch, here -- is a foodgasm; similar streams of passion consciousness by those on the other side of her; and then -- and it's hard to tell which is the more telling of the film, a kind of climax outside it, in spite of itself -- on the one hand, this montage comes flush with "reality" to put us a-swirl with nature and love-making, flowers and bees and locusts, like the food elsewhere, intercut with jumbled nude parts, but on the other hand, Emma's son has his own spurt of memoire involuntaire to put all this together as evidence, and it sparks his own passionate reaction. An accident results, but let's leave you hanging there for a moment.
This is all trading sumptuous for sumptuous. If not the key, then jutting in enough to behave as one, is the Indian American (not to be confused with American Indian, he actually says) who appears at the London business meeting. His character is like a ticker machine of cant about returning to nature and changing the world. This is supposed to be his pitch to the family, to get them to sell their business and reinvest in unspecified other things that are going to do all this saving and changing. But just what has this family been missing that it's going to see with any other appetite? What line's being crossed, but more importantly, where's it drawn? Guadagnino (et al., there are three co-writers) is so careful not to give us any strawman, any conspicuous antagonist, either in person or principle, and everything that may be expressing to us some general repression of all these characters is also this dispassion. Is Emma having to break out of the luxurious style of this movie itself, the fancy trappings, designer labels, the lush photography of the elegant locations, the stunning 1930s home (built for the Necchi and Campiglio family, whose fortune was made on sewing machines and such -- the family in this movie is called Recchi -- and which was for a while headquarters for the fascist party)? Is it just that they're all rich spoiled relations, set against each other in their stew of petulance? Doesn't everyone have conflicts?
Guadagnino's montage scheme suggests liberation from repression, if nothing other than a formal one, but on the one hand, the manner in which the movie fawns over opulence -- and the food is the worst of it, here, where it really comes off as a midcult wet dream, since the chef is an outsider and just a humble genius -- and on the other hand, the facile material of the exception to, i.e. liberation from, this life confuses, inadvertently or not, the issue of pleasure, enjoyment, gratification. The discovery of her daughter's lesbianism prefigures Emma's own sex/food awakening, but that was first prefigured by a whim for photography over drawing, which the patriarch almost didn't like. Sex, true passion and nature are equated in the aforementioned montage progression. There is also something to Emma's being an outsider. But what is this something? She's Russian, but even her Russian-ness becomes some vein of swarthy true-natureness which her chef can tap into, an authentic dish with only the clearest broth (I didn't make that up) that sets off the explosion. So, what, an Italian self-criticism of ethnocentricity that's at the same time a critique of degradation to artifice, only shown up by Russian ethnic essentialism? But it's easy to see how easily this kind of backpeddling liberal daintiness is bumping into all sorts of much worse suggestions. At one point, when the son is in London, the street montage goes all pop movie 60s, and that's the kind of platitudinous scheme it is.
This Italian family never makes any fangs express, is good to their workers, the son is the one who genuinely wants to preserve the family, while his father wants to sell off to the eco-idealist. When the son reacts to his mother, the confrontation produces the kind of accident the Greeks called fate, and that movie plots can scarcely wriggle free from if they try, and the last sequence is a sort of suspense crescendo, without payoff, worthy of Dario Argento (see Suspiria). The message seems to be: wealthy liberals need to go green. This is a sophistication of style acquired for a lesser conception. As Forrest Gump was a domestication of magical realism, this is a Bertolucci version of American Beauty. While more like Bertolucci than Visconti in being decorous and composed, this family is as overdetermined for egoistic "spiritual" awakening -- a musical chairs of salvation that changes nothing of the liberal structure -- as The Damned family was for evil shenanigans. There it was a matter of all too strident dramatic rhetoric, melodramatic contrivance; here it's the consequences but as if too polite to accuse anyone.
The shortcut for all this is the title. To put that sort of banner over all this -- and there is no direct statement for this in the movie -- is a move even more heavy-handed, and at the same time sillier, than that 60s style of grown-up wish fulfillment dream, something that situates this movie in the line of refurbished groping earnestness that's been going on everywhere the last 20 years. I could try to explain how, despite the somewhat complex overturning sentiment, the complication for identity that allows a relinquishment as much as a grandiose claim that can also omit so much consideration (just put the statement in the mouth of different people and situations to see how much differently it comes off), it demonstrates passing unexamined vaguery, not to say naivete, for profundity, but I think that would just be my own fancy way of saying: daft [2/13/11]
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). Credits. Even describing this as one of the silliest romantic comedies of Woody Allen might be slighting the term "silly." Precisely what we lack from Allen anymore is any inspired silliness or humor, and his movies are mashing comedy and tragedy together into a bland mix of farcical motions without the flavor. While I find plenty of occasion to argue against the presumption of action, and particularly violence, as drama or even anything significant, Allen who might be giving relief is making a very good case for how bad the opposite can be. He's reduced everything to a conceit of dialogue, but he's no longer good at even that. What was once an offhand manner, an invasion of scripted dialogue by tics and feints and starts and comic regresses, is now its own mannerism. And this movie is a particular case of how the action, and any comic possibilities of it, are reduced to elliptic reference, even the montages for that minimized. It's worth noting, for the contrast, that the music for these cutaways, "In a Persian Market" performed by Wilbur de Paris, is the best thing in the movie. As I've said before, Allen is giving us the bad dinner theatre of the movies. Helen Hunt's one-note honk is the worst register of all this, having to deliver Allen's writing at its worst as a refrain of gradeschool insults, and with his now typically sidelong direction. There's no charm to her crustiness, and any other side to her we get is a schizoid switch, no less mechanical, contrived, imposed in a sucker punch with Dan Aykroyd than with hypnotic suggestion, which is, believe it or not, the central device of the movie. But believe me, Allen hasn't done less with less. There's no witty evocation of the period, not even parodic as pretext for contrivances like an insurance investigator, the hypnotism or sexist turnabout. The set-up is obvious, but still laid on thick with nothing funny, thus dragged out for the whole movie, with nothing to give a literal fireworks scene any emotional payoff, and even after that there's another epilogue making us go through the whole romance turn shtick again. [2/11/11]
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010). Credits. Three hours of state bullshit. Does that sound like the makings of a good, an interesting, an other movie? Although it doesn't seem like it, even after a while if you give it that much of a chance, this turns out to be a countermeasure not just to entertainment as formulaic as doctrine, but to the matter of the factitious in documentaries. This is exposing the wizard by way of his mask, holding that up for what it is. What was for all practical purposes the dictator of Romania is suffocated in his own armor. We're left to see everything increasingly thin and vapid, the increased reduction of sloganeering abstraction, the consolidation of everything into obedience, autocracy. Ceausescu in one comment abjures abstraction in favor of "real" action, this itself a turn-upon-turn contradiction: this movie shows us that such abstraction is the chief ideological action of all these despotic regimes, personality cults. He then adds a qualification that, of course, abstraction has its uses. (He cites a love poem as an example.) One moment that pokes through this official sheen of reality, showing only the slightest hint of any conflict with Ceausescu's leadership, is entirely inside the state and party machinery, at one of its show congresses. When a party member is yielded the floor to take exception to an unprecedented consolidation of power, he's not just shouted, but chanted down, a show indeed of support as vaporous as it is vociferous, hollow by its monotony and unanimity. And it goes on and on, the director of this assemblage and presentation, Andrei Ujica, making the gesture of subjecting us to the unedited excess.
There is a framing device outside this official archival footage: a hasty sort of show trial of Ceausescu after his overthrow in which he says repeatedly that he refuses to make any comment. The material in between, as the title suggests, gives us the official reality that Ceausescu will not contradict. This is counter-agit-prop assemblage. Among other things, there is provocation here to know just what any of this is refering to, what the reality is, the utlerior, not only the situation, the facts, but the intent for whatever ostensive situation that presupposes the real one. Ceausescu's bizarre, perfunctory visits to bakeries, quick handling of bread, for example, seen here with uncut preparation shots, workers standing at the ready in early morning halos of TV camera lights, were part of his increasing "ideological" denial -- contradiction -- of the food shortage problems his debt schemes produced. The movie, in a kind of documentary reflexive counter-stroke, is a provocation to find out what is not being shown. But the other thing going on here, that makes it not simply a replay of broadcasts or oligarchic state commercials, and at the same time demsontrates another conundrum, is that what's being assembled is footage that, despite being from the Roman National Television and National Film Archives, was largely unknown, certainly to a public outside Romania. It's thus a kind of state of narcissistic neurosis, an official public reality for the state itself, the controlling members, if not merely the autocrat. Who else would be the biggest fan of the personality cult if not that personality that wants the cult?
This is borne out by perhaps the most aghast-making and ghastly scene of the film, a pageant by North Korea's Kim Il-sung, the second one in the movie, which includes a stadium flip card stunt version of Romanian history, or lore anyway, along with thousands of synchronized dancers, as a tribute presented to Ceausescu -- and literally presented to the audience of him and Kim, their entourage. This is a gigantic state spectacle in which there is more of the population performing than in attendance to watch, and only by overthrow of Ceausescu's regime have we come to see it outside. And that ghastly is notwithstanding footage of bears being baited with a strung-up horse carcass and then shot. There are also these odd scraps of something like home movie footage. As gruesome as the bear sequence is, a possible betrayal of a more personal and intimate sort of malevolence, the preponderance of this material is more of a tepid, if not squalid, attempt at intimacy, for example, the dictatorial first couple seen taking a timorous swim, rather like some non-descript grandparents.
Ceausescu comes off even in the official stuff as quite uncharismatic, even for a dictator, with no sort of show presence or training. He has the small, retiring frame and blank demeanor of some laborer or peasant subject that might be seen as part of his own faceless public backdrop. Even when he gets worked up, particularly in a speech that appears to be set up entirely for the smallest inner circle in an empty banquet room, he is unmannered, teetering, boisterious in what is only awkwardly oratorical style. A home-movie like shot of the Ceausescu couple in a horse-drawn snow sled, in winter garb as from a modernized Balkan fairytale, makes them like a midcult Nicholas and Alexandria, the prole-peasant appropriation of the finery and privilege. This suggestion gathers up the other home-movie stuff to cast the sense of Czar Nicholas's infamously heedless diaries over all this material, so that even the recording of official events has a creepier insular sense, a public media version addressed to the self, the one self, personality, ego, subsuming the people. Even for a regime professing communism, there is still the matter of the body of the king, the sovereign (cf. Jacques Derrida on this, for example, The Beast and the Sovereign). It makes you want to know, and as a provocation also, consider that -- if you wonder why subjecting anyone to this material, even as evidence, as a document, and as much as three hours or even just three hours of it, has any significance -- Romanians had to live through two decades of the effects, everything this doesn't want to represent. [2/5/11]
Hollywood Ending (2002). Credits. Imagine Woody Allen directing a movie blind. Amazing, as that's what I've been doing since Everyone Says I Love You. This doesn't provide the sort of reflexivity I think Allen intends or wants, however. But that's the thing about the blindness of narcissism, if that's not redundant. Even what you include as your self-examination, criticism, irony, or if nothing else, humor, jokes about yourself, tends to be flattering, and certainly omits or ignores so much more. The movie begins with a scene rife with possibility, reflexive tricks spinning off in different directions. Not only is it the possibility of what we haven't seen in a long time in a Woody Allen movie, it's that of what we've never seen: a level of reflexivity about even the making of an Allen movie. There's even a line about the light and sun that situates the scene's own bizarre, artificial sunset lighting. It's as if these Hollywood executives were having their lives bronzed. Cut to contrast shot, similarly artificially over-produced, of heavy blue and blizzard background, Woody Allen identified by voice. This has the abruptness of his earlier comedy, if not any joke that's as funny. As it goes on, we get something much more like the straight shooting of comedy, detached from what has become only cloying dialogue, whether trying to be funny or serious. I actually laughed at some things in this movie, which I realized I hadn't done much in many of his movies of the 2000s. There is, for example, later on, one sight gag that recalls the best of Allen, that way he used to have of doing something abrupt and understated at once. He (by stand-in) falls off a set platform in the background of two people talking.
The elderly Allen drift sets in, however, so that even if he certainly makes things unpredictable, it's because he doesn't follow on any sort of pertinence that may have been set up. He takes about half the movie to introduce the main premise: he goes blind. What's really interesting about this, since the movie makes hardly anything interesting of it, is how Woody Allen, when he's playing blind, focuses his gaze more. This calls attention to, bears out, what I noticed back with Everyone Says I Love You. Allen's retiring gaze took over his movies, so that they seemed to be adrift, unfocused, everything in them, the writing, the lines of the plot, the other actors, the activity on the set, precisely as if they were directed by someone with this wandering gaze. Certainly there's lots of jitter and bustle, but this is the nervousness that goes along with Allen's lack of focus. In an added layer of inadvertent turn of this extraneous comment irony, even the movie his director character makes Allen leaves off-screen. We don't get to see the results of the movie directed blindly, not even a gag is made of that. We only get the comments made by others who see the footage. Nothing comes of this in the direction the title of this film suggests: there's no Hollywood upending, no trump or subversion of the Hollywood ending by its own means, no turnabout for either Allen the director, character or not, or the execs. He doesn't make a movie the execs can accept by suppression of his own vision, literal for figurative, nor does he make something even better in spite of himself. He doesn't make a Producers, an unexpected or unwanted hit, or even an interesting reversal on this. It simply leads to the Woody Allen version of the Hollywood ending (he gets the girl), which by now, is just double annoyance. [2/5/11]
Anything Else (2003). Credits. There are two good jokes in this movie. One is the title joke, and it does provide a nice little frame and circle, and thank god Allen didn't finish with another pairing off, as it looked like he was going to do at one point late on. Just starting down that road, just suggesting it, was so annoying after all the digressive gyrations, it made me groan and flinch. It's too bad, because when Allen has finally taken to other kinds of endings, more interesting for at least the variation, the movies themselves are no longer good. Here the best example of the worst is the crescendo of utterly manufactured commotion in the apartment with a rifle, a piano and split-screen, Allen himself doing such a lame version of ineffectual shtick. How's that for the state of things? Ineffectual even at ineffectual. The other joke is a good idea, suggesting something like the build and report of earlier Allen and with the larger cast of a premise, but it's barely hinted at, goes off faintly in the distance. The main character is irritatingly, to a degree beyond what was intended by the premise, unable to extricate himself from relationships, lover or agent, for example. Then when he complains his analyst isn't helping, Allen's character says it's the same exploitation, the same problem. There's even the suggestion this regress could be carried to god, but this is not brought off in any eloquent way, not as one joke, and certainly not in any sort of cogent scheme for the movie. What difference does it make that there's also a pushover protege for Allen, a new version of himself, and a woman who's a snake in the grass (you think that's stretching it? -- she actually has a line where she says snakes are sexy), when all of them act like Woody Allen? If you want to get a load of a mature Christina Ricci in underwear, Allen comes up with plenty of excuses for that, but whether being sexy or possibly pathological would have anything to do with her acting, we can scarcely tell. (This may be fortunate for her, based on evidence from Monster of the same year.) The pitch of all the stops and starts, stuttering qualifications, defiantly naive assertions of taste (sort of positive affirmation style), all nervous and detached at once (like Allen eating a sandwich early on) makes a chorus of the cast, and despite all the retreading Allen is doing (the paranoia of over- or misheard anti-Semitism from Annie Hall, the response in kind from Manhattan, even the sad agent from Broadway Danny Rose), it's not the same old song and dance, because it used to be better. [1/29/11]
The King's Speech (2010). Credits. If you slum with the posh, is it -- slosh? Director Tom Hooper has a curious double tack that is, again curiously, apt for the subject matter here. The microcosm for this is Hooper's use of off-center framing. At times this is showy, even pushy, such as the first visit of the Duke to Logue's office. The decor of this office makes this mixed result even more easy, obvious: an overdone dilapidation, a decorous slumming. Hooper's almost more lush with the "modest" settings than he is with the royal ones. When we first see Logue at his dining table with his family, even the sparseness is so theatrical, like the space of a stage, it's disorienting. The return visit of the Duke, with the model biplane, is where Hooper's centering and focus serves well, and in fact establishes what is best about the film, a kind of close-up perspective intimacy that bears out an absurdity of monarchy, of sovereignty. Scriptwriter David Seidler and Hooper do well to plumb this material for all this inversion of political and personal perspective, a kenosis of royal personage, applying a wide-angle (literally, almost fish-eye, in the early scenes approaching the microphone in the stadium) scope of banality to figurehead life. The best stroke for this is Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth, first as a matter of casting. Rush provides the chuminess and personableness that is a stated premise of the character's therapy, at least of the script, without wringing. He really does personalize, even the acting, the role, and his close-ups are persuasive in the way the speech therapist is to be, and thus for his execution of the part. This is a foil for the vulnerability and frustration of the Duke, and Firth has, if nothing else, the dumb fortune of being of a type to express this sort of regal frailty in looks and manner. There are lots of similarities, here, to The Queen, not only the suspense of a big speech the public awaits from the monarch, but more suggesting the uses of these stories. But whether it's simply unfortunate circumstance or not, this generic aspect to the story, also what makes it like so many melodramas of the overcoming adversity type -- and there's too much of the kind of wringing of this at the end, even if couched more elegantly, the fuzzy languid close-ups again -- is the way Seidler's script reverts to sympathy for the monarchy in the opposite direction. [1/26/11]
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Credits. Being matter. It proceeds -- though some would disdainfully call it hardly that, at such a slow pace -- at the pace of patience, or at least waiting, that sort of banality. A much more tranquil, or at least much less restless, pace of the passing of life. If director Apichatpong Weerasethakul seems somehow more attuned to dreams, to the way things speak, or work, or play, that way, if not to something we might have to contend or suppose or infer more, like belief, or myth, if not spirits themselves, it may be simply that he's not restricted by other impulses. It's the way David Lynch is relative to so much else in American culture. Weerasethakul is often as shrewd or keen to the uncanny, the approach from both directions, mundane and surreal, and he may be even more savvy about a kind of beyond to even a literalism of the surreal, certainly to any patness of the metaphysical that would make it as banal as realism. Not quite as satisfying -- perhaps that should be more precise, in some sense for something like a melody -- as Tropical Malady, which broke it's narrative frame in the middle to suggest the conundrum of incorporation that way, too, this movie nonetheless makes similar startling turns, again also by virtue of the contrast to its extremely drawn-down pace. This pace of protraction of shots, for example, allows images to float in a kind of abstraction, often a matter of dimness, so that it takes some time to resolve them into figure (the best example, and what makes this more apparent for the rest, is a long shot of a cave opening with two people lying on the cave floor, the cave shadow cutting across them). And this itself may as well be a figure for all Weerasethakul is dealing with, this abstraction we are ourselves as the phenomenal, if not the phantomal. A man breaking into a grin comes as sudden a turn, even in this slowness or stillness, as the dissolve appearance of the ghost he's thus responding to. Skipping into a series of actually still images just as Uncle Boonmee relates his dream of visiting the future resonates this floating effect further, as well as other material referred to, including reframing a monkey-spirit in a way that even implicates its presentation by the movie, as put-on, effect, all this also invoking Christopher Marker, and most particularly La Jetee. This sophistication of the levels of frame of reference, the rhebus effect that relays relations, transfers events to beliefs to stories to myths to imagination to dreams to abstractions, etc., and round about again, might seem to belie the low-key circumstances of Weerasethakul's personages or plots, but even that can't be reduced from the keenness of the perception here, and in fact whether it's inadvertent or not. Which is saying Weerasethakul's movies happen to you like dreams. It's precisely a matter that this goes on already in things, the ghostliness before ghostliness, identity, event, in the "natural" even before the supernatural. In the closing segment, the characters who have not apparently died, who are distinguished from this apparent death otherwise, see themselves in separate versions in the same room. Perhaps we are ghosts of ourselves, already in this life a matter of past lives, different versions of ourselves with our decisions of the undecidable, already the ghosts clinging to people as was said before in the movie, and if not in any other way than by virtue of this split-screen double exposure, images and movies themselves: that we can leave these different image-instances, making us the matter of them. "Deep down, I know that reflection is only an illusion." Thus for both. [1/23/11]
The Front (1976). Credits. This is a clean-stroke, modest little argument about an irresistible political situation for even, well, art or aesthetics, if it eschews even that pretense with something like the entertainment world. It has the merit of taking this tack, if that's not just showing or sticking to it. Woody Allen's collaboration in this project is to be sort of the name front for all these, by the time of this movie, almost not as famous (Zero Mostel's, and certainly Martin Ritt's if for being a less recognizable face, arc represents just about the level Allen will pass in the next year) people who were actually blacklisted, in a way inversely proportionate to his character. The modesty of his character is a kind of unflinching, offhand willingness to help, or rather lack of any resistance to, constantly mitigated by banalities of a similarly in-stride selfishness and a slightly more complex problem of misrepresentation that makes any nobility at cross-purposes with the standards of a love interest he wants to impress. Zero Mostel's hangdog pathos, played counterpoint through that "always on" 50s comic circuit shtick, serves as well as an index for that more broadly, as a kind of exposé, as for the more particular tragedy of the ruination by the McCarthy witch-hunt thugs and collaborators and the generally spineless. This movie locates Allen, on the cusp of his next big leap (one year before Annie Hall), putting even his self-conscious narcissism in among others, a kind of social scope. In particular there is one shot of him, a close-up profile, in a very serious moment, with music, that is incongruous against the iconography of his movies before and after, a kind of 70s movie intrigue effect. A particularly good nasty touch is the resort show host's outburst of vicious, unregenerate spite at Mostel's character, a microcosm of the way this scapegoating and baiting presses, quashes and humiliates, and when it finally provokes, the victim can be blamed; all the convenient impugning justified, kneejerk. Even with the tricks of the climax -- the bad result turned into the happy ending of the false nobility trope of Allen's character, as much as the defiance of the hearing -- the effect of this offhand manner is to avoid a shrillness to match McCarthyist manufactured righteousness, to show that what should underlie exhortation to defense, or even morality, is just a simple, regular refusal of this sort of desperation, not to mention helping or defending others as a self-interest, the same reflex. [1/22/11]
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Credits. Woody Allen straight and late: distill the humor from his compression, and it's like taking out the whipcrack of irony. What's left of his inventiveness, the way he plays with things, turns them over and prods them, is a kind of social dinner theater instead of a comedy of manners. There is more cringing than laughs. That is best demonstrated here by the voiceover narration. This alone may be the single worst way Allen has ever expressed himself in a movie, aside from Interiors whole. This voiceover, which is not situated in the plot in any way -- it's not a character in the events -- is strident and prim at once. Although this has as much if not more to do with its delivery by Christopher Evan Welch -- what was Allen as director thinking, there -- the writing of it is not just the expedience of filling in gaps of the story or providing mortar for the context of the characters. It's also delivering the convenience of the conception, a treatment version of these characters as Allen whimsies. Of course all characters are this, and Allen has been one to emphasize this artifice. But where we once had, for example, a clever prism of ego as a chorus of first-person thoughts in Hannah and Her Sisters, here we get, from the chichi prosaic, "After the girls unpacked and Judy’s husband, Mark, got home from the golf course, lunch was served on the terrace," to the vulgarly leading, "In the days that followed Vicky and Cristina drank in the artistic treasures of the city. They particularly enjoyed the works of Gaudí and Miró." Here Allen is just failing at film, at the images of this, at showing us and trusting us to see, and the imposition becomes smarminess. This is also a factor of not locating this narration. If Allen had done something as simple, as convenient a contrivance, as turning this narrator up as some character, even at the end, à la deus ex machina, it would have served the turn of making it one voice among the others, included it in the portrait of self-assertions, rather than leaving it the imposing assertion of the portrayal, Allen himself. This is precisely the cleverness Allen has had in the past to include himself as a character (compare Hannah again, as also an example of making himself more tangential), and what's failed here. It's a shame, because even with all that, this movie is significant in another way. After wincing and squirming at the way Allen turns curiosity and perception of difference and complexity into his own kind of domestication, draws it up as kinkiness with the pretty bourgeois linen of his own bed, perversion in the parlor (Juan Antonio's sudden respect for monogamistic symmetry implored of Vicky seemed more like Allen's, and made me imagine the kind of elective diversity, not to mention the uncontrollable kind, that would defy even this), I was expecting -- dreading -- it all to be settled in the usual Allen way, everyone paired up and off (even if triangled) as if some twinkly new beginning, however belied by all that had gone before, could be final. But Allen here makes the stroke of a formal closure, a kind of circle, to the point of uncertainty, a disturbance or dislocation of the state of things, which also crosses the characters, Vicky and Cristina. And it would be a great stroke, if it weren't for those other problems of the way of getting there. Woody Allen may be the best, or best as, a representative of our own fickleness, forcing us to see ours by playing out his own, an agent in something of the form of a merry trickster. Unfortunately, it's not always with the sense of the merit of that, and played straight, without the appeal of the humor or self-irony, it leaves us a lot more of just embarrassment. [1/12/11]
Bright Future (2003). Credits. Though Japan certainly had its 60s movies, on the whole that period seemed more like the U.S.'s 50s: giddy, campy, loopy pop. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future, if not an index of anything larger than itself, is like those 60s movies, mostly in the U.S. and U.K., but to a certain extent in Europe, that turned all the themes of malaise, turmoil, the problem of conformity, revolution, into a more palliative kind of whimsy. As Pauline Kael commented, there was a commonplace of people, a fortiori grown-ups, bolting from their regular lives to fly kites on the beach or run in fields, as absurd a solution as the happily ever after of the conventional or traditional lore. Was this merely co-opting? The new happily ever after? This film does something very similar to Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata in setting up the same sort of whimsy to trope, including material that makes it seem more irresponsible on the level of the portrayal than of the thing portrayed: both movies involve home invasion family slayings, so similar as to be intentional symbols, if not unconscious compulsions -- of the artist. It's understandable that this be a figure of bursting the order of society, but the transfer between rhetoric and referent, the symbolic operation of this, becomes more problematic as a factor of how heavy or serious, how significant, it's supposed to be at the formal level, what seems contradictory to the mores or morals precisely that are supposed to hold outside the gesture, so to speak. Here, this is only superficially -- very superficially -- alleviated -- to put it mildly -- by being made an act of sacrifice. What a bizarre sacrifice -- or, to the point, what a bizarre sense of sacrifice. As with Tokyo Sonata, I kept thinking that Kurosawa's orchestration, both as writer and director, was much more cool and composed, belying the wild sort of lurching his story assembly amounted to. But, in a curious way, which seems almost contradictory to that, these juxtapositions, confrontations that he sets up to have all sorts of forceful if not fruitful, intriguing if not apt, implications, seem to work as counterweight, a series of reactions like checks and balances. Here the closing shot, the long tracking one of the band of boys with their own uniform, even more so than the closing scene of Tokyo Sonata, is a drawing back, a wider frame on all the contentions, something open and inconclusive, a kind of active uncertainty. [1/9/11]
True Grit (2010). Credits. Right down the fuzzy line. It's enjoyable, appreciable, for many things, many details and moments and observations, and as a Coen brothers movie. The bragging and tall-tale self-promotion in contrast to the blunt horrific fact of capability may be the best touch, even more than the emphasis of diction that suggests contractions weren't invented till the 20th century. Matt Damon is served well, as well as used well, in this, similar to the way Brad Pitt participated in his troping in Burn After Reading. Jeff Bridges was already cozy in this: the Dude. The courtroom scene (far better than the cutesy, even by Coen standards, outhouse one) does everything to situate this truly grittier Rooster Cogburn, the compromise of his character as well as its delivery by Bridges. What's best about Bridges, and in contrast to John Wayne just about in toto, is the way he hunkers into himself, is retiring and impervious, making even the eyepatch work for that. Wayne's bravado was all about sticking out, but that meant his particular twangy strain of acting as well as his chest. It seems the biggest correction to the '69 film is Mattie: a real 13 or 14-year-old, Hailee Steinfeld, as opposed to 20-something Kim Darby, and much more a straight shooter.
Was this the inspiration for the project, along the lines of Lolita? Becuase I still did not get the appeal of the story, the reason -- why this, now. Their alterations more inside the frame here are only slightly less confounding than why they wanted to update The Ladykillers. Yes, it's certainly a better job, at least for the sake of the book, than the '69 John Wayne banner movie, although from another account I've read, there is still missing a great deal, if not the main point or thrust, of the significance of the theological disposition, the sense of grace, and for the meaning of the title. (It supposedly comes close to the idea that no matter how or how much you are capable, no matter how tough a son of a bitch you are, this gets you nowhere, has nothing to do, with the dispensation of grace or facing the abyss.)
After all the pains taken for gritty details, down to hair and teeth, there's a shift in palette during the climactic ride at the end -- and I don't mean the bravado one, which the Coen brothers do well to shift the weight of by juxtaposition to this other. (Note how it suggests the point about grace and capability, demonstrates it, if not quite making it explicit.) The Bridges Cogburn real ride of vigilance, with all the necessary dramatic irony, effectively ghastly and touching at once, becomes artificial in a way that is more than expedient. It was particularly the storybook night sky that made The Night of the Hunter manifest, the segment of the kids in a boat floating down the river with its counterpoint stagy frogs and spider webs, but later I was reminded of how "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" was the same song used in that movie, so this association may have been primed throughout. A homage to that film, too, is fine, but if it were to serve any overall plan, to put True Grit in the light of Night of the Hunter, it's too little too late, an incidental evocation, an end note.
The hasty epilogue scenes with the grown-up Mattie smooth the film out with the matter-of-factness that is supposed to be her own grit facing the banal inevitability, or inevitable banality, of the time and death that wastes all. This is another admirable step away from even the inference of a happy, warm or triumphant ending formality (certainly the kind of anthemic tone of John Wayne), but it unfortunately has a less useful minimizing dramatic effect. The final shots also carry the palette contrast somewhere else: Edward Gorey which unfortunately in a color movie suggests Tim Burton. Perhaps they wanted to remind us, too, of the artifice involved, call attention to the frame, frame the quaintness of the frame of it all, but by comparison, I like better the way the story at the beginning of A Serious Man was situated and situated the whole as this matter of storytelling. [1/5/11]
All text of film comments ©[year noted in each] Greg Macon
