There Will Be Blood (2007)
There’s a tendency in people to believe that most great movies are impenetrable, that they contain a series of elusive codes and symbols that need to be poured over and deciphered. The film buffs relish this of course, but this belief may turn the more casual filmgoer off, believing a supposed Great Movie to be more trouble than it’s worth. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is certainly such a movie. Many will try to figure it out, many will write well intentioned college papers, but the most confounding thing about Anderson’s new film may be how up front it actually is. The film is stripped down, blunt, brutal, as single minded in its pursuit as its protagonist, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis.)
There Will Be Blood may be, at just over 150 minutes, one of Anderson’s longest pictures, but it’s his leanest work since his debut, Hard Eight. There Will Be Blood isn’t Citizen Kane, it isn’t The Treasure of the Sierre Madre (which I said after reading the script six months ago), it’s a classically structured horror film: concerned with one very disturbed man, who over and over tries to reach out to the society he doesn’t understand, and over and over fails. Whether or not he ultimately breaks through the cocoon of his own dementia is the central conflict, the drive of the film, symbolized, if you must, by the continuing explosions of the substance of his trade, oil.
It would also be tempting to write that There Will Be Blood is about The Twin Evils of Our Country, as personified by Plainview and his conflict with an opportunistic young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). But, again, I don’t think the film is truly interested in this pursuit. Watch how the film opens, and watch how the film closes, it is stubbornly, resolutely, about Daniel Plainview, no more, no less. Listen to Plainview’s final words, they are meant to be taken literally. By the end of the picture, Plainview’s conflict has been decidedly resolved, and his final words reflect that. While we’re talking about what There Will Be Blood is most assuredly NOT, let’s take a moment to note what Plainview is not, and that’s a monster. I’m stunned by the lack of empathy that even perceptive writers have shown in regards to this character. Plainview does monstrous things over the course of the film, no doubt, but he is not a monster. Plainview reaches out to people at least three or four times over the course of the picture, but it’s in his way, his language.
The film bears a bit of resemblance, strangely, to Kubrick’s flawed The Shining. That film WAS about the evil of man, and that was its limitation and mild undoing. Anderson, always a humanist, keeps things personal, intimate. The Andersonian dialogue and homage rich visuals have been starkly pared down, but Anderson’s true overriding obsession remains: the distance between fathers and sons, and the usually uncrossable bridge that exists between the generations. The final scene between Plainview and his surrogate son, H.W. (Barry Del Sherman) seems to me to be the scene that has been powering ever film that Anderson has ever made. Anderson has dug deep within himself to create There Will Be Blood; it’s a relentless, obsessive film about the relentless, obsessive pursuit of unattainable things. There Will Be Blood has been compared to Malick and Kubrick, but it doesn’t have their chic aloof, this is a film that hits hard in a sickening, funny, primal way.
I’ve never seen anything like Daniel Day Lewis’s Plainview (the characters’ names certainly invite a little of that bong water analysis that I just decried). The Huston comparisons are apt, but Huston never had the monstrous need, a determination to purge all vulnerability, that Plainview exhibits here and that actually makes him more fit for organized religion than Sunday. Watch how Plainview sleeps, or how he twists away from crowds like a wounded insect. Watch Plainview’s one moment with one of the little Sunday girls. To call Plainview an outright monster would be to deny the tragedy of There Will Be Blood, and the film is most assuredly a tragedy.
Do you know why I love this movie? And Paul Thomas Anderson’s films in general for that matter? Because they fucking go for it. There Will Be Blood is brilliant, muscular filmmaking, and would be a great movie regardless of how it ended, but it’s the ending that moves the film into the realms of the biggies. Anderson, Lewis, and Dano (who’s just as strong going head to head with one of our great actors in one of his best performances) just plain fucking go for it in the final scene. The film is a tone poem, a huge boil waiting to be lanced, and my oh my how these men lance it. They push into total chaos, of true bugfuck madness, and push and push, and push risking laughter, risking ludicrousness. Anderson has a taste for symmetry and the final scene is everything that the ominous, slow build opening is not, the ending is what Plainview has needed all along, a punch line that recalls the end of Taxi Driver. At the end we’re led to believe that Plainview has obtained the clarity his last name implies, and it couldn’t matter less.
★★★★
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Apparently 2007 is the year in which Hollywood set out to shut general malcontents like myself up and release a career summing masterpiece once every three weeks on the dot. Faithful readers, you probably think me a whore, or easily pleased. Not the case, at least I don’t think. Since writing for my little site though, the films have just happened to be, generally, pretty damn good. Come to think of it, maybe I should take some credit for that. I’m more than happy to assume some sort advisorial position on any film in which the producer would have me.
And so now we have Tim Burton, and his reworking of the famed production Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In terms of comparing one production to the other, I’m afraid I’ll be of little service. My familiarity with the source material is limited to the knowledge that the stage had two levels. I also knew of Sweeney’s preoccupation with ventilating people’s throats and of a certain Mrs. Lovett who happened to have a practical and sound business solution to all the bodies piling around.
I do know, however, that Burton has made a wonderful film: robust, lean, vicious, extraordinary. Burton may have been leasing his talents in the service of another’s vision, but what arrives on the screen seems to be vintage Burton, only tempered with a refreshing, newfound discipline. Sweeney Todd is pitch black demonic outrage, undiluted by the John Waters Light satire that has aged some of Burton’s earlier work. Sweeney Todd, as embodied by Johnny Depp, gets to finally indulge in what was truly meant to be Edward Scissorhands’ vocation: cut the living shit out of the fat, the pretentious, the comfortable, the false.
One would think that a film like Sweeney Todd would be an excuse for an eccentric like Depp to really cut lose and chew the scenery. Not so. Depp’s thing has always been his unpredictability, but even that, obviously, can be predictable and comfortable after awhile. Depp senses this and withdraws, his Todd is aloof, barely tangible, barely a character really. The film is starkly unsentimental in his complete, total insanity. The notion that Todd will be a classically wronged character is abandoned early on when he slits the first total innocent’s throat, and gleefully sends them tumbling down to Mrs. Lovett’s oven. Todd only asserts himself in cold blooded murder, and in delivering ironically beautiful ballads that don’t seem to belong in the film…until you begin to actually take in the lyrics. Depp’s voice clearly wasn’t built for musicals, but that’s precisely the point: the barber Todd isn’t built, or meant, for anything.
Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) seems to think she’s built for Todd, and this becomes the most unusual and surprisingly moving unrequited love story in the Burton cannon. Carter has been criticized in certain circles for this performance, but I think she’s terrific: the perfect human embodiment of the sort of distorted gothic China doll that Burton almost always strives for. She may actually be why Sweeney Todd is so effective; right in the center of all the constricted brutality lays a perfectly sweet little romance between a cannibal and a mass murderer. Lovett’s appeal to Todd’s romantic side, “By the Sea”, stays with you as you walk out of the theatre.
So does Ed Sanders’ Toby, a little boy caught in the middle of Todd’s warfare with London, Lovett, and a barber named Pirelli (Sasha Baron Cohen.) Sanders has a dazzling number himself, “Not While I’m Around”, that manages to go for the heartstrings without being cloying or compromising the decay of the rest of the Burton production. Cohen’s Pirelli is also a near showstopper, confirming the Sellers comparison to be quite apt indeed.
But I seem to be writing in circles here, listing like a ticker tape the various things I enjoyed about Burton’s film. Sweeney Todd hit me in way I can’t quite articulate. Todd, again like many films this year, feels like the picture the director in question has been marching toward his entire career. The film is an intense, emotional, bloody, very bloody, intangibly brilliant filet mignon of a gothic musical, and a major return to form for a director I used to revere.
★★★★
I’m Not There (2007)
Anyone who writes about movies in any way has, at one time or another, probably had an imaginary review tucked away before they even see the film in question. Maybe parallel reviews, one a rave, one a pan, one a bit of both, and then they see the film and match the result to the most appropriate of the two or three phantom templates. I walked into Todd Haynes’ sorta Bob Dylan exploration, I’m Not There, with the idea that I would probably write a polite little three or three and half star thing where I mention the beautiful craftsmanship, the brave performances (Cate Blanchett has gotten all the attention, but all of the Dylans are extraordinary in their own way) and leave it at that, having seen the film primarily for the fact that I want my Best of to be as complete as possible.
I’m Not There demolishes this attitude. The film demolishes everything really: the biographical format, past and present tense, the nature of identity, etc, etc. The film recalls Natural Born Killers in that it’s a total explosion of form. I’m Not There is thrilling, obsessive id, a film that needed to be made by its creator. The film is defiantly, confidently art house, but it lends the term credibility again. The film isn’t so much about the unknowability of Bob Dylan, as it is about unknowability period, how personality is defined more by atmosphere than we’d ever care to admit.
I’m Not There also simply makes the music movie thrilling again. The music explodes out of the film in torrents of inexpressible need and exhilaration. The film had me, about fifteen minutes in, as we see Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) play “Tombstone Blues” with a bunch of old bluesman on a porch somewhere in the legendary, ultra photogenic South. This is what other music films, in their cloying obligation to be all things to all PG people, have usually missed: the pure, intangible, salty necessity to play music with strangers somewhere in a place you barely recognize.
The film manages something else: it questions the mystique of Dylan, the self-important lack of self-importance, and totally buys into it at the same time. I’m Not There could almost be said to be structured as a chase film, with Dylan, in his various personifications, on the continued run from people who wish to explain and contextualize him. Reporters, lovers, anyone. I’ll confess: I think the Dylan of the 1960s and 1970s, is, obvious brilliance notwithstanding, an insufferably pretentious ass. The music rocks and works just like everyone says it does, but the cryptic double speak of Dylan’s interviews has always driven me a little batshit. The film, in its loyalty to this aspect of Dylan, becomes tedious for portions of the second half; we’re drunk on Haynes’ extraordinary skill and hung-over on Dylan’s poetry in equal measure. The film is exhausting and I was about to write it off as a stunt that’s not quite the sum of its intentionally desperate parts.
Then all of the strands, the Woody Guthrie, the Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), the Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), the Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), the de facto narrator Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) reach an existential crescendo of despair that overwhelmed me. The title track kicks in and the scope of Haynes’ intentions crystallizes in one of the more emotionally cathartic and shattering things to be seen in a film of 2007. This what is what David Lynch achieved in Mulholland Dr. and didn’t quite bring off in his even more ambitious but troubled Inland Empire: a gut punch of primal need, a portrait of a person or persons so lost in themselves that they are incapable of any connection with another human being. The characters’ devotion to their craft is the connection and possible salvation, and the film is honest in refusing to hint at whether this may or may not be enough. That is the hauntingly elusive answer of I’m Not There.
The film needs to be seen several times to be properly digested. It’s dense and live wire. Unhinged, reckless and extraordinary. I’m Not There may even be a movie that I see and hate the next time I see it, but I will always be grateful to Haynes for the experience I initially had. For all its indulgences and warts, I’m Not There is one of the ultimate artist films, one the ultimate chaos of the 1960s-1970s films and one of the ultimate time travel Fellini pictures all rolled into one big, bursting, unwieldy package. In short, Haynes has made one of the absolutely unmissable movies of the year.
★★★★
Merry Christmas
Technical glitches and scheduling have resulted in less posts the last few days, including a drop off in the just launched Classics Column. My apologies. I will be back Thursday with a look at Todd Haynes’
I’m Not There and from there we should be rocking and rolling as usual again.
Happy Holidays guys, hope they find you well.
Interview (2007)
The opening of Steve Buscemi’s Interview is as curt and direct as the film’s protagonists pretend to be. Pierre (Buscemi), a fallen political journalist, whines to his damaged brother about a puff piece he’s being forced to do on the new star de jour, Katya (Sienna Miller). Katya practices her lines for an amusingly awful gig on a Dawson’s Creek wannabe with her co-star. Katya remembers, an hour after the fact, that she’s to meet a journalist to promote her new, to quote Pierre, “slasher film”. Pierre and Katya meet at the restaurant, disastrously, and leave separately a few moments later. Then something happens, and Katya and Pierre find themselves killing a few bottles of wine and bourbon and scotch together in Katya’s absurdly glamorous loft, and the interview proper begins.
Buscemi, remaking a film by director Theo van Gogh, has made a film in which two very fractured, insecure people meet and proceed, for the next eighty minutes and change, to personify everything that the other fears that society actually thinks of them. Pierre plays on Katya’s need to be seen as something other than sexy tabloid fodder, and Katya continually rubs in that, regardless of her importance in the grand scheme, she’s more important to most people than Pierre’s political grandstanding.
Pierre is sharper and more manipulative than Katya intially grasps, and Katya is even more aware of her every gesture, the stretch of the back, the purr of a seemingly insignificant detail, than even Pierre initially thinks. Katya appears to be the most cliched of movie stars, she wears her entitlement like she’s embarrassed about it, but, of course, she’s not. This second element, the actual expectation of the privilege, is not the hidden thing she’s fakes or conceals. The hidden thing is that there is NO hidden thing. Katya isn’t an onion, she’s an everlasting gobbstopper, one flavor morphs into another and then morphs back into the first flavor again. It’s all true, and all false.
Interview isn’t a bitter, misogynist fantasy though, Pierre’s hypocrisy and hall of mirrors evasion is just as apparent, and possibly more insidious, because he has the shield of self-righteousness. Pierre is the one we instinctively root for (unless you’re a movie star yourself, and if you are and reading this I’d love a blurb) and he plays his unattractiveness, his honed intelligence and indignity, the exact same way Katya plays the opposite qualities. Put these two in the same room together and you have a metaphor for about ninety percent of what is wrong with this country. These two are channeling the simmering hatred and frustrations of an entire country but we can’t help but really wonder if they’ll fuck.
Look, I know all this sounds like a college thesis wank, and that, to a certain extent, is impossible to escape. Buscemi and Miller, onscreen together nearly the entire time, are the reason to see the film. They breathe life into the platitudes I just described, and turn every nightmarish verbal reversal into something vicious, erotic, dazzling. Miller has been the almost Next Big Thing for a few years now, and it’s sad that it finally happened in a film five people (including me) saw. She’s brilliant, one of the best performances of either gender in the entire year. Her Katya may very well be one of the definitive portraits of the Actress. Miller has always been a beautiful woman, but she seems for the first time to be in total command of her appearance. She, like the character, continues to bamboozle us, to play our assumptions of the Actress against us. Her voice is even different here, huskier than you expect, hungrier, but that just may be another of Her Things, an instrument of distraction, but maybe the fact that you expect it to be a distraction is the actual distraction.
Buscemi is just as good, but not as surprising, as he’s been providing definitive portraits of the self-loathing loser for the better part of twenty years. The surprise with Buscemi may lie in his directorial performance here, and I say that as someone who loved his debut, Trees Lounge. Buscemi, as well as anyone I can recall, trumps the limitations of the one set chamber play, and really makes the thing sing. The film never feels static or stagy; it’s electric, humming with the characters’ desires. This may have been what James Toback was after in his silly, laughably self-absorbed Two Girls and Guy.
Interview doesn’t go wrong until the end, where it mistakenly provides a Victor to cap off the night’s proceedings. There are a couple of reversals before the end that work just fine, but I didn’t believe the final few minutes, they’re too cathartic. We shouldn’t be let off the hook so easily; we should leave the theatre bewildered.
I’m going to go on record, though, and say that film and theatre students most assuredly should NOT see Interview. Buscemi and Miller make this sort of battle of the sexes as really about something else thing look too easy, it could inspire too many dangerously banal imitators. Scratch that, I’ll risk it. All film and theatre students should see Interview, if only for the chance it inspires at least one of them to make another like it.
★★★½
Nobody’s Fool (1994)
The idea was to take a look at Steve Buscemi’s Interview this morning, but my brothers are currently over for the Holidays and a probing look at celebrity was not on their agenda. I didn’t press too hard though, I’m hoping to take at least one of them to I’m Not There in the coming days. We’ll save the good will for that.
All was forgotten and forgiven anyway when Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool was found only about ten minutes in playing on HBO last night. I’ve always loved this film, and remember seeing it and Shallow Grave in the same night as a freshman in high school. I think the Brady Bunch movie was big that weekend, but I was watching Paul Newman’s Sully hobble around Bath County, getting into a series of mildly coming of age adventures with his son (Dylan Walsh), his on again off again boss (Bruce Willis, one of his sharpest little performances), his on again off again landlord (Jessica Tandy) and several others. I fell in love immediately, and, if I recall correctly, this was the first time I looked at Paul Newman and saw him as more than one of my father’s leading men. This was one of my leading men too, this is one of OUR leading men, a man of rare, deep, but unsentimental humanity.
Of course, there’s a bit of fantasy to be indulged in here, there was in the Richard Russo novel too. We all wish we could be as charming about not fulfilling life’s obligations and fantasies as Newman’s Sully. The performance and the film idealize this a little, the idea of not having a job, being totally free, and shambling from one little episode to the next. Benton, along with Russo, who helped him on the script, don’t totally bail out though, the tug between the idealized and the raw is what lends the film a slightly topsy turvy, loopy power, you’re laughing and then a moment later you realize that wasn’t so funny. The Dylan Walsh character, who isn’t half as charismatic as the dad who abandoned him (Walsh knows this, and that makes it all the worse), continually blindsides Sully, and us, with references to his wrongdoing. Sully doesn’t usually reply, and that’s part of the charm, he never evades his sentence, he’s cast himself as the no good absentee father, and he’s determined to see the part through and not rob his son of the hatred he’s entitled to have.
Why aren’t there more films like Nobody’s Fool? Films that toss the three act structure aside and simply BE. Sideways is such a film. So is Wonder Boys. Nobody’s Fool is one of those films that’s so generous of spirit that you put away your critic’s cap and forgive it of its flaws, of which there are admittedly a few. Robert Benton (who directed Kramer vs. Kramer as well as co-writing Bonnie and Clyde for Pete’s sake) sometimes doesn’t quite trust us to be sufficiently moved, he applies the music a little too liberally in places. Things occassionally fit in their coming of age slot a little too neatly, the characters should be a little messier.
But these are minor issues. Sully is, along with Fast Eddie, Hud, and a few others, one of Paul Newman’s greatest creations. Benton also, refreshingly, gets small towns, understands how they can be suffocating and comforting in the same measure. Benton gets the pleasures of knowing everyone who eats in the cafe for breakfast, or the wonderful informalities of traditionally red tapeish affairs (I love that Sully is let out of jail to be a pall bearer.) The film skirts Mayberry tedium because it never plays the small town tropes as vaudeville, and the pain that Sully’s self-absorption has caused is never entirely forgotten.
I have to also confess that Nobody’s Fool rings a particularly personal bell for me as well. Sully reminds me just a little bit of my father, who has a habit of being everywhere and nowhere at once. I’ve spent many days in my youth going from place to place with my father and talking and eating and hearing stories and getting into little episodes. The final image of Nobody’s Fool is particularly moving and completely earned: Sully propping what’s left of his body up, a bit of rest fleetingly granted.
★★★½
I Am Legend (2007)
A couple of posts ago I had a mild, vaguely pissy attack where I wrote that respect for the Richard Matheson novel would bar me from catching the Will Smithing of I Am Legend. I wrote that there was no way that a 200 million dollar holiday movie would maintain the ending (which explains the title I might add) and that this is one Will Smith sci-fi de-balling that I could afford to miss.
So here we are. Now you know just how unwavering your principled, self-righteous writer can actually be. Cut to three or four days later and I’m writing a post of what appears to be an overwhelmingly popular film. And it’s going to be a fairly positive post at that.
Make no mistake. Director Francis Lawrence and writers Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich and whoever else worked on I Am Legend, have, as anyone could have predicted, chucked the majority of moral ambiguity that makes the novel stick, hurt and move. The novel is about the nature of evil being a matter of perception, being determined by the majority, and the lead character evolves into something that it would have been extremely disconcerting for fans to see Will Smith play. The protagonist, Robert Neville, became the menace, the elusive thing that now haunted a different world. He became something that would probably be used to scare children a couple of hundred years down the road. All from just a garden variety human.
Here’ the rub. Now having seen the film, I think Will Smith could have pulled it off. No, I don’t believe him as an average man (to be fair, the film doesn’t try, he’s some sort of huge military crusader scientist), and some of his emotional marks feel a little pat, but he’s immensely likable and that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Smith’s star wattage could have been used to add just another layer of subversiveness to the material that would have made the ending that much tougher to shake. Will Smith, one of America’s biggest stars, slowly evolving into the next society’s boogeyman. Could have been something.
But this thing is expensive, and it’s Christmas, and we have cookies and happy meals to sell. We want our evil to be rote and one sided and comfortably tucked under the carpet by the time we reach the end credits. Smith’s sanity here is never tested too hard. He’s a very decent, Good Guy, and he wants to cure the new society more than kill it to ensure his own survival. His growing resemblance to the enemy is never under examination and a pivotal betrayal at the end of the book has been excised. This is, basically, a more mature variation of the same cocksure Will Smith that kicked E.T’s ass about ten years ago.
All that said, Francis Lawrence has made a huge leap as a director from the fussy, labored Constantine. The future New York City of I Am Legend is a beautiful, haunting creation, and Lawrence seems to know what he has with it. Lawrence doesn’t cut away or play around or dress things up with a bunch of camera convolutions, he instead plays with US or, more precisely, plays the ironically open spaces of the film against our expectations of the more traditionally cramped horror picture. Lawrence drops us head first in the desolation of the environment, and we feel for the Smith character that much more. This is the happiest surprise of the new I Am Legend, it most assuredly does not back down from the melancholia of the material. With the exception of his family dog and a few dummies he converses with in a hopeful attempt to preserve his sanity, Will Smith is alone, alone, alone. There are no “Ahh, Hell No!” appeals to our comfort here.
The third act is a problem, and the portion of the film that’s most in line with the fears I had going in. It’s dull and conventional, and relies too heavily on some of the worst monsters to appear in a reputable horror movie in quite some time. They look a lot like the robots in I, Robot actually, but at least those things were supposed to look fake. I assume. I Am Legend is a Christmas apocalypse freak show that largely works though, and it captures, however fleetingly, a bit of the chill of the source material; the loneliness, the terror, of change.
★★★
Next Week
I didn’t do my homework last night. The idea was to watch A Mighty Heart and comment on it today for your morning diversion. Didn’t happen. Could’ve happened. I was in front of the TV, the DVD right there, but I reached for something to read instead. This movie doesn’t cry out to me, for the same reason that you haven’t seen reviews of In the Valley of Elah, or Lions for Lambs or any other number of war is bad but we’re still rich and pretty films. It’s not that I feel that it’s too soon for films to examine the various current issues that plague our country, because I don’t. It has more to do with the fact that all of these films happen to look like they suck, self-fellatio as substitute for any particular drama. A prestige film for various celebrities to knock out in between their romantic comedies and action movies. If I’m to write a Best Of 2007 soon, and I intend to, I should’ve seen these movies and others, but there was always something else. I could pretend to regret my decision, but that would be an insult to both of us.
All that said, expect A Mighty Heart, and possibly the first Chucking of a classic, for tomorrow. The classic thing on Friday will be a regular feature. These Classic columns are not my own nominations for immortality, but instead my reactions to films that have already, for a while now, been granted the gold stamp of classic by the various invisible people that do such things.
As for next week, things are still a bit in flux but this is the perfect world line up:
Interview (Steve Buscemi); Killer of Sheep; I’m Not There; The Girl Next Door.
Again, this list could go in another direction entirely, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for new release I Am Legend. I, Robot, Smith’s last strip mining of famous sci-fi, got a free pass because I wasn’t familiar with the source material. I’ve read the Richard Matheson novel that inspires this new one though (and you should too) and I’m too invested in the film’s brilliant, sure to be discarded here ending to sit through two hours of Smith’s please, please, please love me mugging. Smith can be very charming, but he needs to drop the action thing. Romantic comedy suits him better. Oh, and I hated Legend director Francis Lawrence’s last movie, Constantine, too.
Didn’t mean to get off on a drunken uncle sour grapes tangent there. Let’s brighten things up with a wish to Santa: that the There Will Be Blood release date of Dec. 26 applies to D.C. as well as the usual major citites. Me thinks I can’t wait much longer than that.
See you guys tomorrow,
Chuck
Election (2005); Triad Election (2006)
Election and its sequel, Triad Election, have been playing in various festivals over the last few years, the buzz around them and their director, the prolific Johnny To, being considerably strong. The buzz is justified. Both films are tight, mean little gangster movies, and the now obligatory Faustian morality of the genre (still so overwhelmingly powerful in the first two Godfathers) works here too, because To isn’t trying to outdo Coppola in the Shakespearean grandeur department. To, like David Chase of The Sopranos, sees things more matter of factly.
The characters sell their souls for money and power, but it’s seen here as part of an inevitable process, an organic governing of society that involves the actual government, the triad (like our mafia) and assorted big businesses. The extinguishing of morality is viewed as evolutionary rather than tragic. To paraphrase a masterpiece that also happens to deal in inescapable corruption, To sees the future, though his films are quick to point out that the future, the past, and the present are inseparable.
At around 90 minutes and change each, you should just go for it and watch the Election films in a double bill, the majority of the stuff I just mentioned doesn’t come into play until the second, better, deeper film. Election is, inescapably, concerned with character introduction, we meet our various organizations and figure out the lay of the land as the forthcoming election for the Chairman of the Wo Sing Triad reaches its conclusion.
The election is meant to prevent violent upheavals in leadership, but I imagine you know how effective that turns out to be. The election of this first film is a close race between Lam Lok (Simon Yam), cold, calm, middle class, suburban looking, and Big D (Tony Leung Ka Fai) a dangerous hot head who resents the likelihood of finishing in second place. If you know your gangster movies, then you know Lok is the more dangerous, and this is confirmed beyond a shadow in the film’s abrupt, savage ending.
Election is a bit too dense for its own good. I hate to penalize films that make you work for the plot but I feel that it ultimately doesn’t benefit this film, particularly when compared to Triad Election. Election has a middle act that bogs down in the hunt for a relic that you don’t really care about, with convoluted loyalties that don’t ultimately add up to a whole lot; Triad Election is almost a horror film, following Jimmy (Louis Koo), a secondary character from the first film, as he takes on Lok for control of the triad. Where the first film feels cluttered, Triad Election is confident and more personal, detailing one person’s disintegrating integrity at a hushed, haunting distance. I know “distance” and “personal” don’t normally go hand in hand, but such is the strange tone that To works so well here.
This second film is also more violent and over the top, the lurid set pieces contributing to an escalating sense of a society reaching the brink of collapse, and being reigned back in by a larger structure of deeper corruption. Tradition, again, still turns out to be about who has the biggest stick. Several scenes should be mentioned, but let’s leave it at just one, that of several gangsters, in bizarre animal and clown masks that recall Kubrick’s The Killing, burying someone alive, the steady hum of a vent the only soundtrack. The broad arcs of gangster films are usually the same, it’s the bits of “business” in between that make or break them. Triad Election has enough great little vignettes of inhumanity for five pictures, but I’m going to let you discover the others for yourself.
Election : ★★★
Triad Election : ★★★½
Lust, Caution (2007)
Or, a gifted director finally crystallizes the pet obsession of his fifteen year filmography and no one gives a shit. Ang Lee, the director of Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (no one mentions Hulk, though thematically it fits, which may have been the problem) has with, Lust, Caution returned to China with a story of espionage and passion that bares more than a passing resemblance, like several other recent thrillers, to Hitchcock’s Notorious. How refreshing it is then that a director actually EXPANDS on the Master’s thriller, and delivers a sharp, ripe film of devastating poignance.
We immediately know we’re in a more urgent Ang Lee movie as the camera sweeps over four ladies in the midst of a game of mahjong. The camera is quick and desperate, trying to keep up with the waves of unspoken things that hang in the room. A gentleman enters soon after, and the pregnant tension increases exponentially. You may accuse Lust, Caution of many things, but you won’t find it lacking in pregnant tension.
Which I think has been the problem for some people. You either get into these long slow burns, moments that are extended until the breaking point and then extended a few moments longer, or you don’t. When a director is this in his mojo, and has as much control over his medium as Lee does here, I say go for it. The film’s look, the sound, the mood, everything is lush and elegant.
And the story itself couldn’t be older. We open in Shangai 1944 on a beautiful young woman, Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang), a student who falls in with a mysterious political figure whom she’s meant to expose so that an amateur team of would be revolutionaries can assassinate him. That figure is Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), who is supposedly torturing information out of the resistance to Japan’s occupation of China. We flash back to the young girl, and to how she was recruited into the effort, and how she conspired to meet Mr. Yee.
The film is a remarkable work of empathy. Lee seduces us into buying into Chi’s view point. We see Shanghai as she would, a sensual place of mystery and danger. We also see Mr. Yee as she would, a charismatic, older shadow who promises (primarily sexual) experiences that have eluded her up to this point. The first hour or so is foreplay. We build. Build. Build. Mr. Yee takes Chi to a tailor to help him with a new suit. That becomes dinner. She invites him in for tea (where her party awaits to kill him) he looks her over…and declines. This is the ripe sexual danger of the old school thrillers, and Lee, at times a bit too cautious for his own good, is in peak form here. He plays with you, and…
…Chi’s little girl bubble bursts in a shocking, vicious anti-climax. Yee finally consumates both of their desires, and his brutish way with her will stick with you. Yee is reasserting his masculinity, the ground he feels he’s losing with Chi, but he’s also not sure of her. He suspects something, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that he, especially that first time, is trying to fuck her to death. And she, of course, finds that she likes it. Watch how Yee is with her after that first time, and how he turns an offering of a coat into a thinly veiled proclamation of whoredom. The other trysts, which earned the film an NC-17, are even more powerful. These two want each other so bad, are so confused with yearning and duplicity and all of the other things that are closing in on them from outside, that they want to fuck THROUGH one another, to find some new cleansing communication that can perhaps be a signal of escape.
Of course, Chi’s loyalties become confused. But do Yee’s? This is where Lee has saved his final black joke, taking it further than Hitchcock ever dared, painting Lee’s most convincing portait of society as toxic suppresser of our hidden values. Leung, a long time star and collaborator of Kar Wai Wong’s, is at his career best here. Mysterious. Pained. Animal. And just plain fucking movie star cool. Wei Tang, in her first picture, is even better in a more ambitious, demanding part. Something tells me that time will be kind to Lust, Caution and that a critical re-evaluation will take place. This movie is too accomplished and forceful.
★★★★
© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress | RSS
