Real Life (1979)
Albert Brooks’ twenty years ahead of its time satire of our unattainable, inexplicable quest to imbue our entertainment with “reality”; to reproduce real life that’s blessed with sense, perspective and general watchability. That all of these elements are elusive and contradictory seems to always be beside the point. Reality television, in its current incarnation, is largely a blatantly false soap opera, catering not to our need for reality but to our obsessive drive to experience the most outwardly, obviously voyeuristic sensation that we possibly can, devoid of any distracting elements such as craftsmanship and story; the windows of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, without the killer and (unfortunately) without Grace Kelly.
Real Life isn’t targeting the spectators of reality television though (reality tv had yet to become a fashion statement). This picture instead concerns the ego of a wannabe creator of the sport: a filmmaker played (using his name) by Mr. Brooks himself. Real Life, Brooks’ first as director, has that not quite tangible tang that is always both the best and worst quality of an Albert Brooks film. Real Life, like the hero of Brooks’ Defending Your Life, doesn’t push its reason for being far enough-every joke (most of which are promising) hangs in the air, unfulfilled. This lack of fulfillment is disappointing but it is also precisely this lacking that gives a Brooks movie its charge. The tempo of Brooks’ pictures is original and true-and uncompromisingly reflects the self-loathing temperament of their filmmaker. This is why Modern Romance remains Brooks’ overall masterpiece-that picture picks up joke after un-punched joke too, only to eventually arrive at a cumulative effect that is unexpectedly heartbreaking- a major (in its minor key) movie of inner despair’s toll on basic human interaction-on the self-denial of the damn thing called love.
There’s always a POP moment in a Brooks movie though, at least the goods ones, that brings the entire picture together. In Modern Romance it was Brooks’ appeal to his woman, his assurance that, yes, he’s insane, but he’s devoted to her in a way that sanity prohibits (the picture, particularly for us fellow neurotics, is quite, legitimately, romantic). In Real Life, it’s also a moment near the end-when Brooks, after one setback and failure after another, caves in a fit of desperation and egomania. Brooks gets on his knees, and begs, begs, pleas for another shot at his failed attempt to capture an average American family, just as they normally would be (after countless intrusions).
The little things you wished Brooks had pushed farther up until this point: the attempt to sleep with the wife in order to save her marriage (have to see it to understand it); the racism, elitism and resentment batted back and forth between Brooks and a black colleague; the inner disintegration of the family (including a subtle Charles Grodin): all come to inform that final Brooks meltdown at the end; where he offers, after many promises of integrity, to splice just about any popular film into his real entertainment. Brooks has already sung for the public, has already played the literal clown, now, reduced to nothing, he faces the lowest of the low dark side of his manipulative, diseased effort to capture something “real”. This scene, and the ending this outburst triggers, is a major, unsettling, comedy moment, worth, like Modern Romance, all of the half starts that have occurred before. Here’s hoping that Albert Brooks, who has appeared to have succumbed to bitterness in his last few films, rediscovers his blistering black comic humanity of the unsaid, particularly in a world where Real Life’s finale is now just another thing on Fox, a taking off point for Meet the Baios, perhaps.
★★★
Advise & Consent (1962)
The political picture can be difficult, primarily because it appears to be one of the genres (films dealing with mental breakdown being another) that’s most encouraging of a certain suffocating self-righteousness. Life, humor, even sex mostly, are choked out of these pictures in a desire to be taken seriously as (I assume) works of criticism or essays of change (Oscar traps). Charlie Wilson’s War, the recent Mike Nichols release, is such a film. War began promisingly as a boozy, one thing after another chronicle of a guy in Congress that kinda-sorta grows a conscience by accident, only to squander its strengths and originality (a we scratch each other’s backs to keep the machine rolling by way of compromise by way of humor born of despair that fleetingly recalls a contemporary screwball comedy by way of Altman on a lesser day) in favor of the usual eat your vegetables civics beats. Charlie Wilson’s War had a more honest than usual ending, I’ll give it that, but I had checked out long before, finding the self-congratulation too stifling.
Happily, the problems many usually note of Otto Preminger’s movies (cold impersonality being a primary), run straight into the problems of the political picture in Advise & Consent, and cancel one other out in the process. The film concerns the approval of the President’s (Franchot Tone) nomination for Secretary of State, Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), by the Senate. Advise & Consent, unmistakably a Preminger film, opens with the most essential, definitively first, cog in the plot-the announcement of the nomination in the paper (an example of the picture’s admitted naiveté, primarily springing from a just adequate screenplay), which the President has made to the Senate’s excitement, dismay and shock. The conventional candidates were ignored (of course) in favor of Leffingwell, whom the President feels is essential to maintaining his legacy. The Senate Majority Leader (Walter Pidgeon) immediately kicks into spin drive on the President’s behalf, contacting a variety of (again, of course) eccentric characters in the Capitol in an effort to put the President’s nomination through with as little question and conflict as possible (the underrated Aaron Sorkin-Rob Reiner film, The American President, is a comedic gloss on an intentionally similar premise).
The President and Senate Majority Leader’s primary hurdle is South Carolina Senator Seabright Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in one of his grand, willfully bizarre scenery chewing roles. Laughton’s walk, intimidating in its purposefully, ironically visible vulnerability (an old fat man’s come on), has more personality and wit than many actors’ full bodied orations. Laughton’s full bodied orations then, which have no bearing on any kind of speech existing on planet Earth, are feats of hyperbolic poetry (also catch Witness for the Prosecution, if you haven’t yet) that puncture that ridiculous seriousness that pervades in many political pictures (The Contender, being another, recent, laughable example). Laughton accomplishes something notable here: he takes, as he’s normally apt to, his character so far into the theatrical stratosphere that he comes to resemble something more true (at least in our movie fed imaginations) than most movie politicians. Laughton signifies the idea of inner government as ultimate performance art, a perpetual game of evening the stakes, of give and take, tit for tat. (It stuns me that Preminger didn’t give Laughton a scene of eating rare steak.)
Preminger uses most of the other performers just as adroitly, with Gene Tierney, returning to Preminger after all those years, registering in a bit as a socialite Pidgeon is seeing in secret; blessing the film, briefly, with the pathos of her real story-a still beautiful woman, struggling to hold herself together amidst a society of jackals. Burgess Meredith brings the picture to a temporary standstill as a man of mental doubt who comes to accuse Leffingwell of Communist leanings; his frailty and torment seemingly borrowed from another picture, which brings the picture at hand to frightening, vivid life (he gives us a sense of the cost of all this nonsense without resorting to the pedantic). Tone, as the President, feels miscast at the beginning (we wonder how he could be elected) but blossoms, as Advise & Consent continues, into a memorable, convincing, portrait of casual, insidious, slight of hand entitlement.
Advise & Consent’s tone, and manipulation of plot, particularly pertaining to the Henry Fonda character, are what strike me as most interesting and subversive though. The opening third primes us for the usual, morally rigid story that subjects our spiritually untouchable character to a series of insults and doubt before allowing him to conquer all and rise to the occasion in order to bless us all with his sense of right and indignation. The picture introduces Fonda to us in a scene with his little son, drinking milk of all American things, never a good sign. Fonda’s scenes primarily consist of him defending himself to the increasingly self-amused Laughton character, again no surprise. Then the film drops Fonda almost entirely, after revealing him to be a bit more fallible than we expect. Contracting Fonda’s guilt, jarringly (like a disease), is an up to this point secondary character, Sen. Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), who discovers Fonda’s indiscretion via a manipulation on the part of Laughton. At this point, Advise & Consent, written off by Pauline Kael as mindless melodrama, comes to unexpected, feverish, lurid life.
The film, once again characteristic of Preminger, consciously concerns ahead of its time subject matter; namely, homosexuality, and the never-ending compromise that is service in the big government. To write off Preminger’s treatment of homosexuality, and its subsequent influence on the Leffingwell case, as merely melodramatic and puritanical (both true) is to miss part of the point: the Puritanism, whether a limitation of Preminger’s or an intentional manipulation of the filmmaker, informs Advise & Consent in a way that undeniably increases its fascination and tension. The shift in focus of characters is interesting enough for a mainstream American film of the early 1960s, but the shift in tone strikes me as amazing.
Brigham Anderson, facing professional and personal collapse, loses his wits, which in turn transforms much of the last third of Advise & Consent into a near horror picture. Yes, a gay club is portrayed as a nest of forbidden evil, but this is also the culmination of Anderson’s panic and is complimented by an earlier scene with Anderson and his wife at their home, and their child’s almost alien voice and she asks to play with dad. Is Preminger overplaying his hand? Or exhibiting considerably more empathetic filmmaking than is traditionally acknowledged in his work? I think it’s both, and that’s an unsettling accomplishment, with the picture’s brilliant, open-ended anti-climax serving as the cherry on top: revealing the entire story to be just one of many daily controversies, with the next already ready at the wings.
Preminger’s curious, remote approach dries the subtext free dialogue of the script. The superb, full compositions lend the picture a subtly and implication of inner life that is absent on the page. Preminger’s aloof outlook (a criticism that’s overstated but undeniably present), when wedded to the right story, perfectly compliments the barely repressed hysteria and perversion of the subject matter. Angel Face is a wonderful example, and so is Advise & Consent, rightfully regarded as one of Preminger’s strongest films.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
The tangible relief of again seeing a modern action-fantasy through a master filmmaker’s eyes carries us through a few minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Master shots! A sense of rhythm and pace! Punches that sound like shotgun blasts! The Wilhelm scream! I had forgotten how starved I was for a true escapist picture that feels apart from reality, that isn’t (or doesn’t fancy itself) an auteurist superhero film or a cynical commercial for toys that turn into other toys or whatever other nonsense litters our screens. The title sequence of Crystal Skull is witty and beautiful, and hints at a touch of knowing, sad humor. The object that the Paramount logo always famously fades into is, this time, a groundhog burrow, which promptly gets mowed over by a speeding roadster as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” plays in place of the familiar John Williams score. It’s the 1950s, twenty years since Indy rode off into the sunset with his father and friends, things have changed, and these first few moments establish that with something resembling grace.
Or graceful, at least, when compared to the desperate, depressing, miscalculated picture that follows. I could delay the inevitable for a few more passages (and did, in the first draft) celebrating Spielberg’s past and present gifts: his peerless, musical sense of play and action and reaction; his organic, nearly supernatural instinct for pure cinema storytelling, his uncanny (see how I struggle to continually produce words for Spielberg’s craft that imply “above normal human capacity”) ability to set-up and pay-off beats in hushed seconds without the slightest hint of strain, but you know all of that already. I could celebrate and/or mourn Harrison Ford, one of the greatest movie stars of all time, a warm, funny, idealized superman Humphrey Bogart for the next generation who lost his way after The Fugitive, but you already know that too. You want to know how good the new Indy Jones movie is, or, if you’ve already seen it, you want to know if it’s okay to feel let down after pretending to like it for a few hours. I’m giving you permission, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the worst Jones movie by far, that’s easy, but this new picture is also the worst Steven Spielberg movie.
There are bits here and there that remind you of Spielberg’s brilliance, that imply a possible struggle within the filmmaker to give a shit about a genre he’s long left behind (we really, in retrospect, should have known that already, after the chilly-scary deconstruction of the genre in the more effective than its generally admitted to be nightmare picture A.I.) but they are few and far between. Crystal Skull does have one legitimately inspired moment that has Jones stumbling into a suburb that happens to be something else entirely. This brief scene conjures that fear of the breakdown of the commonplace that Spielberg can portray so well when in his groove, and it establishes the time and place of the picture effectively, but the rest is a wash. Even the title sequence becomes icky after seeing the entire picture, portraying not sadness and knowing and regret, but contempt (there’s another creepy, tasteless joke in this vein-involving a statue of Marcus Brody, who must have shit Spielberg’s bed after Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Crystal Skull is lazy and misguided and lifeless throughout, with only the occasionally vigorous action sequence (or inspired camera beat) to pull it out of the muck. I would like to be able to say that the script, by David Koepp, the mad libs of hack screenwriters, (with an obvious Lucas influence-this is dead exposition as only that man can deliver), is his usual impersonal, connect the dots mish-mash, except it lacks even his pedestrian ability to connect the dots. The exposition in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the moments that explain to us the nature of the Ark of the Covenant are giddy, moody, but, most importantly, they project not the tedium of reading cue cards (until we can get to the next bit of labored physicality) but a sense of awe.
Ford also appears to be as bored as he’s been for the last several films, having failed to “come back” here as some would have you believe, but Spielberg, like Robert Zemeckis in What Lies Beneath, is canny enough to work around the current Ford persona. Jones’ lack of heartbeat here is moving and thematically apt, he’s been beat down by one too many obscure artifacts, lost one too many important to him. Crystal Skull, aping Last Crusade, is also a family reunion picture, only with Ford now in the Sean Connery role. That is a ripe, original idea for exploration, but that would, again, interfere with Lucas’ inhuman obsession with expositional bric-a-brac.
We should also acknowledge that Spielberg probably hasn’t totally, fearlessly, dived into his own head since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (maybe A.I. too, for both better and worse). The recent Spielberg pictures have much to recommend them, particularly Munich (one of the best films of 2005), War of the Worlds and Minority Report, but they are also uneven and self-conscious, too eager to please, and feed into Spielberg’s desire to be an “important” as well as successful filmmaker. What else could Steven Spielberg possibly have left to prove? In an interview for Minority Report Spielberg said he felt he’d earned the right to make a picture for himself, and I agree, but he appears to say that without actually knowing it. How long can Temple of Doom’s myopic reception be permitted to punish Spielberg, and us? Temple of Doom is imperfect, with an especially mean, juvenile sense of humor (though Crystal Skull makes that humor look positively Lubitschian by comparison) but it’s an exciting, original action picture, one of the most visually assured ever made, with an emotional transition in its hero that subtly holds together (and comments on) the physical beats that run through the picture like a locomotive, but that’s often unacknowledged.
So, lest anyone get offended, we got Last Crusade, which is dull but saved by Sean Connery and Ford’s byplay, and now Crystal Skull, which is dull but saved by nothing. Shia LaBeouf, more watchable than anyone could possibly expect in Transformers last year, again gives his part as much as anyone could given what he’s been handed to work with. LeBeouf and Ford have authentic chemistry, and it could have possibly salvaged a bit of Crystal Skull, but the script continues to strangle them, perhaps like one of those snakes Indy fears so much (and that gets a tip of the cap here that’s embarrassing).
The reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) is the film’s low point though: a crushing, dispiriting letdown that’s about nothing more than cynically “giving the fans what they want.” Allen and Ford look desperate and uncomfortable, two vaudevillians determined to appease the drunken fans so they can shuffle out the side-stage exit. The heat between Allen and Ford has gone, and once again, that, in itself, could have been something had it been acknowledged, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is in the business of self-delusion and unoriginality.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a failure, but it’s an undeniably interesting failure that’s poignant unintentionally and, sometimes, in spite of itself. The character of Indiana Jones is too rich, despite the filmmakers’ indifference, for the film not to occasionally carry a whiff of something greater and older. The sight of Indiana Jones, now grandfatherly in appearance, teaching classes in a building where he was once the subject of feverish underage admiration, is unavoidably moving. The sight of Jones snatching his hat, that beloved symbol of irrepressible adventure, from the younger generation is too loaded with movie love, no matter how hard the fanatical Lucas may try to deny us conventional emotional satisfaction. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an embarrassment, but it is, in a strange way, also life affirming. It will take more than the biggest disappointment of the year to tarnish a character that has given us years of pleasure and has very undeniably earned his rest. Spielberg, probably the greatest living pure filmmaker, has certainly earned the legacy he’s apparently terrified of pissing away. Here’s hoping Spielberg one day discovers the inner peace he half-heartedly blesses his hero with here, and again becomes the filmmaker he always has been and can always be.
★★
Speed Racer (2008)
Speed Racer, Larry and Andy Wachowski’s (The Matrix) newest exercise in fuck tha police, fight the power faux-outrage, is another of those pictures, like the new Star Wars movies, or Sin City, or (the God awful) 300, that places actors in settings that have been totally or almost totally rendered by computers. The prior pictures worked to varying degrees (Sin City being the best) but could never conquer the hesitation that you were watching something that was never actually there; unavoidably dulling the excitement, immediacy and, you know, human feeling in the process. These pictures, despite a (sometimes) visual originality and invention, ultimately feel like that steak that gets re-configured through the transporter in the David Cronenberg Fly: they don’t taste right, they don’t understand the flesh.
Speed Racer turns that disconnection on its head, creating a world so gloriously, obviously, flamboyantly deranged in its artifice that it causes the picture to do an emotional loop de loop; achieving something that is a. accidentally, b. subversively, or c. hypocritically poignant. I’m voting b and c. Speed Racer is a legitimate accomplishment: a hallucinatory children’s picture that has an un-paralleled empathy with that sugar freaking, Saturday morning cartoon binging mind state. But, Speed Racer is also unfortunately, (shades of The Matrix) an attack on the multiple forms of suffocating distraction that persist in modern American life that also (and here’s the rub) happens to provide more forms of suffocating distraction than any recent film I can recall.
Speed Racer at times literally, exhilaratingly, loses control; particularly in flashbacks to Speed’s (Emile Hirsch) childhood that zone out in a blitz of imagination approximating aesthetic overload that immediately cues us in to at least three or four different movements of heartbreak, disappointment and resentment. The Wachowskis, never visually modest, have an especially nifty trick (of which they’re a bit too enamored) of transitioning with an in-camera wipe that gives us the feeling of watching every plot strand, every character, at exactly the same time (an artful version of channel surfing). I normally don’t give a whit what happens to the characters in these types of pictures, but the Wachowskis somehow nearly play this excess of technique to their emotional advantage. The technique chokes the life out of the picture, but this choking of life is, at least partly, the point (an old race is, tellingly, shown with real cars). This world, this candy-colored anime play-land, isn’t passed off as “movie magic”, its Hell, a kiddie friendly Matrix, a place of commercial enslavement that Speed and family must fight with purity and gusto.
The Wachowskis, it must be said, have also become significantly smoother in weaving their anti-big brother tirades (Warners? Who produces their movies?) into their action. The latter Matrix films were (possibly) a little underrated, but their insistence in continually halting the action for self-righteous, half-baked, college text-book sociology fortune cookies was maddening and self-deceiving. Speed Racer works out its self-hatred and conflict through the action, which explodes onto the racetrack and out of the screen in giddy, poetic bursts of disorientation. The people who have complained of the brothers’ withholding crucial spatial information are missing the point. We aren’t supposed to be on the racetrack; we’re in the characters heads, which happen to be on the race track. The lack of visual context and clarity IS the suspense, we, for once, truly feel the speed.
There’s something else undeniably creepy and insidious going on in Speed Racer though. The picture preaches the usual Luke Skywalker (the final race echoes the first Star Wars film’s climax) follow your own beat sermon, but we can’t help but feel that, by buying into this, we are just buying into exactly what the real life consumerist bad guys (represented here by Roger Allam, effectively channeling Tim Curry) would have us buy into. Speed Racer, like all of the Wachowkis’ work (V for Vendetta being the most offensive) is ultimately audience pandering entertainment, decrying consumerist depersonalization while continuing to pioneer consumerist depersonalization.
Speed Racer brings to mind the one brilliant implication of The Matrix Reloaded, that Neo, our hero, was just another pawn of the Matrix, another program designed to foster a sense of false rebellion in a society that doesn’t want to do anymore than pay lip service to such ideas. The Russian nesting dolls of corruption are a true (and very real) Matrix of our society, as well as the one that the Wachowskis’ films have continually hammered against. But what are these talented filmmakers actually offering us beyond un-challenging self-delusion? Speed Racer’s admirers have called it revolutionary. But what, exactly, is the aim of the film’s supposed revolution? To paraphrase another Jeff Goldblum movie, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. By all means see Speed Racer, it works, it’s exciting, and it has a conflict of interest that may mark it as the most interesting big picture of the summer, but its time we hold the Wachowskis to more than visual button-pushing. They may know the path, but they’ve yet to walk it.
★★★
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Elevator to the Gallows has a menacing central image that the rest of the picture struggles to equal. Julien (Maurice Ronet), a man of dubious reputation, murders his boss, flees, forgets something, and gets himself stuck in the damn titular elevator trying to go back for it. Julien waits and waits, trapped, a bug in a particularly precarious jar. This sight, of a killer cramped and crowded by his own guilt, at the mercy of a larger justice disguised as perverse bad luck, is unforgettable. Unfortunately, Louis Malle, in his directorial debut, isn’t satisfied with this simple, ingenious scenario. The story splinters into another scenario, and then yet another, these latter plot strands only distracting from the sensuality and power of the original story.
Elevator to the Gallows is an example of two otherwise perfectly suitable thriller ideas being forced into competition with one another and nearly canceling each other out in the process. As Julien finds himself imprisoned in the faulty elevator, a callow young couple decides on impulse to steal his car and, well, they haven’t quite gotten that far yet. They eventually end up inadvertently framing Julien for a murder he had nothing to do with. The police close in on Julien for this second murder, all as Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the wife of Julien’s former employer as well as (of course) Julien’s lover, searches the streets for Julien, thinking he’s discarded her and their plan, running out with another woman.
Elevator isn’t as frantic as all the above would lead you to believe, Malle allows the picture a deliberate, dreamy, existential pace that distracts us from the sheer busy-ness (and ludicrousness) of what we’re watching. And we should be careful with the term ludicrous, as to apply logic to a picture that’s clearly striving for (and obtaining) the poetic is to miss the point. The sensuality of the images and the one thing after another tumbling dominoes nature of the scenario aren’t totally of a piece though. We’ve seen many noirs or crime pictures in which events shatter in many different directions, but the best of those pictures (let’s recruit Rififi as Exhibit A, as it’s in front of me as I write this) achieve a true willy-nilly chaos. We feel swept up with the characters as their existences slip out from underneath them. Elevator to the Gallows is a slower, narrower picture, and the excess of events is an intrusion. The frequent cross-cutting to updates of the other wronged parties breaks the “all alone as the world folds in” spell. (Let’s recruit, as Exhibit B, a picture that nurtures this sort of wounded mood, carefully, without a bunch of extraneous hugger-mugger, Le Samourai).
I wouldn’t dare advise you skip the picture though. I go back to the haunting image of Julien in the elevator, awaiting judgment, a regret or common decency still beyond him (he would appear to think in more animal, instinctual terms) smoking cigarettes to pass the time. There’s also the image of the beautiful Moreau in close-up, whispering words of love and concern to her doomed partner in a pay-phone, moments before the murder is to go down. There’s the near Expressionism of the interrogation room sequences toward the end: the room bathed in darkness, only the speaking parties allowed the slightest of vision by a sliver of light above. Elevator to the Gallows has a hazy, soft, but somehow sharp at the same time cinematography that conjures hallucinatory, naughty, sexy thoughts as corrupted by a greater moral decay and outrage (pointed references to Algeria abound). This picture would make an ideal double bill with either Godard’s Le Petit soldat or Allen’s Match Point. (The former also explores Algeria in thriller terms; while the latter also addresses the notion of chance as ultimate judge, jury and executioner.)
In the end, I still very much value Elevator to the Gallows, allowing the good and great scenes to count for more than the scenes that tend to verge on the tedious. The film is obviously the work of a major filmmaker (though that’s easy to say fifty years after the fact) and I imagine Elevator is a picture that will grow in estimation as it fades in immediate viewing memory, possibly reshaping itself in the mind as the slimmer, less tangible picture it was always meant to be. That possibility is one of the many facets of the magic of the movies.
Glitch.
The computer ate my look at
Elevator to the Gallows, which turned out to be an early draft that wasn’t meant for other eyes anyway. The last draft, the draft which I was offering for your consumption, has somehow disappeared. I hope to re-write tomorrow, but I’m job hunting, house hunting, as well as hoping to catch
Speed Racer and
Indiana Jones. I will try to not let these things affect the consistency with which I post, but please bear with me if they occasionally do. I appreciate it.
Real Life.
Real Life will prohibit me from posting again until Sunday, at the best, or Monday, at the most likely. Next week we’ll have the Monday classic, of course, but
Speed Racer will, I promise, follow after that. Before we part though, a nugget of movie wisdom to ponder:
The War of the Roses is an occasionally hilarious, superbly paced dark comedy from 1989, featuring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito (who also directed) doing wonderfully bitter fun-house distortions of their audience friendly characters from the Romancing the Stone films. DeVito is a game and underrated director in general, but Roses strikes me as especially successful and brave. Can you image Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson signing on for a deranged blend of screwball, Looney Tunes and Very Bad Things today?
Mr. Jealousy (1997)
Noah Baumbach was there for me at a time when he was very much needed. I discovered Baumbach’s first two pictures, Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, when I was eighteen, a freshman in college, living with a roommate I detested, and working through all the other self-indulgent things young people generally find themselves working through. Baumbach didn’t invent anything with either of these pictures, but he achieved something almost as admirable, he redeemed a genre that’s generally a sitcom: grasping clichés we (especially young men) have to live with and turning them into something palpable and moving. These two pictures owe the usual debts to prior movies that most talented young person’s films have a habit of owing to (French New Wave, Woody Allen) but there’s a current of insecurity in Baumbach’s early films that’s specific to the last few generations, and justifies his playing in a familiar sandbox.
The insecurity being the kind that’s brought on by an aimlessness triggered by a surfeit of options, the illusion that we’re all “unique” and meant to amount to something more impressive or noble than living a life as a normal person (Wes Anderson recruited Baumbach as collaborator on the script for The Life Aquatic, which is appropriate as Anderson captures this youth-fueled discombobulation too, only in a more heightened European by way of Hal Ashby sense, Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s first film, most especially taps this). This illusion can be paralyzing, and while waiting, we find that we’re pushing thirty, forty, and still haven’t really done anything. We pass this or that girl up, possibly because she didn’t promise the specific adventure we had in mind when telling our love story to ourselves, or perhaps we turn down certain jobs or certain cities because we fear they might interfere with an airy outline of a job or opportunity that might happen should we might, might, might, maybe go to grad school, or raise money to make a film, or perhaps persuade a publisher that our collection of short stories is the next generation defining masterpiece.
Mr. Jealousy, Baumbach’s second film, isn’t as strong as Kicking and Screaming, it’s “minor Baumbach” to paraphrase an oft-quoted (around here anyway) character from Squid, but it’s a charming picture, self-conscious (Baumbach seems to include certain references, such as to Sunrise or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, more out of eagerness to prove he’s seen them than in the service of any dramatic or comedic effect) but confident in its slightness. The picture is about an insecure man, now 31, called Lester Grimm (Eric Stoltz), who is currently taking a break from harboring dreams of being a great writer. He’s teaching (of course), hanging out with friends, most prominently Vince (Carlos Jacott, a scene stealer) and dating. A narrator (Baumbach), who will pop in and out throughout the picture, explains to us, briefly, Lester’s dating history, which is, logically and unavoidably, a chicken and egg extension of his general self-loathing. Lester always believes girls are cheating on him, is always convinced he’s the least impressive person they’ve been with, thus effectively ensuring that they always cheat on him, and that he’s the least impressive person they’ve been with. Lester is not oblivious to this self-fulfilling irony, but his awareness is of no use to him beyond further self-justification.
Lester soon meets, through Vince and his fiancée (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Ramona (Annabella Sciorra). Ramona appears to be ready made for Lester (as they always initially), she’s beautiful, works in a museum (encouraging an interest in culture and the arts that compliments Lester’s film buffery) and has a certain endearing clumsiness. Ramona is a woman of the movies, a woman blessed with a man’s ideal looks and approachability, with just enough eccentricity to be interesting without irritating (Baumbach wouldn’t be too generous with his women, really, until Margot). Lester has the usual issues, but he’s managing, courting inner growth, until Ramona reveals that she used to date Dashiell Frank (Chris Eigeman), an acclaimed writer their age who has been heralded by critics as “the voice of his generation.” Lester, after a few episodes that manage to be more convincing than they’d sound if I were to recall them to you, decides to join Frank’s group therapy, which, in a nice touch, is led by director, actor and film-historian patriarch Peter Bogdanovich (I wish he’d act more, he has an instantly credible onscreen elder-statesman sanity that is only rivaled by fellow director Sydney Pollack).
This is a promising situation for farce, and I’d be curious to see what the present day Baumbach, with the searing death-ray barbs of Squid and Margot, would do with it. The ultimate problem and (simultaneous) chief appeal of Mr. Jealousy is that it does nothing with the situation. This frustrates because part of us senses that Baumbach has a New Age screwball comedy in him, a neo-ironic picture that emulates the distant past pictures in wit but otherwise invents its own specific to present society rules; for once, perhaps, a modern screwball picture that wouldn’t feel like a tour through a condemned factory (a problem with a few of the Coens’ attempts at screwball, and it looked like it was a problem with Leatherheads).
This dead-end has its happy surprises though, it lends Mr. Jealousy an unexpected warmth and leisure; it’s refreshing to see a modern comedy so uninterested in actually making you LAUGH OUT LOUD. The picture is talky, and awkward, but you never fault it, the awkwardness, in fact, ultimately contributes to the picture’s truthfulness and ungainly empathy with its hero. It doesn’t hurt either that Eric Stoltz is terrific, Lester is probably his surest, most charismatic performance; and Eigeman, playing a purposeful cliché (he’s that maddening asshole who writes a best-seller by 25 and rues his inability to cat around with more discrimination) is nearly as good. Lester and Dashiell become unexpected friends, and my other regret of Mr. Jealousy is that it doesn’t pursue this avenue more aggressively. Lester’s romance with Romana is sweet, but bland. Baumbach is nothing if not self-aware enough, read in film criticism enough, to grasp that undefined women are a common thread in many young men’s films, and he seeks to address that, but he would have been better advised to stick to another cliché of the young writer, “write what you know”.
The ending finds Lester having finally written something he’s proud of, a play that’s (surprise, surprise) based on the events we’ve just seen. Lester, apparently more confident in himself, sees Ramona one more time, and the picture assures us of the usual ending (though it doesn’t show it) but I wanted to know where Lester exactly stood with Dashiell, they have a final toe to toe reckoning themselves, but they both seem unable to understand that they may be the true font of one another’s hopes and ambitions, which could, perhaps, might, maybe, might, perhaps yield a play about a book about a man writing a play about a man who finally realizes just to plain, simple, fucking, drop it and be.
★★★
Redbelt (2008)
You can be forgiven for finding the idea of Redbelt enticing. The notion of filmmaker-playwright David Mamet (a master of a distinct mood of simmering inner macho heat, greed and cruelty) tackling the corrupt world of pay-per-view sports is a promising one. Hell, the notion of Mamet stepping into the action arena at all is cause for an optimistic raise of the eyebrow. Mamet, at his best (it’s admittedly been awhile) spins electric dialogue of peerless musical fuck you aggression that has a redemptive, unexpected grace of timing and structure: haikus of the damned, the innocent and everyone in between. The chance that Mamet might find a syntax equivalent to that of his verbal wizardry seems especially great in the action genre, can’t miss really; both, at their best, relying on the spinning of poetry from aggression.
Redbelt is blessed with the usual Mamet cast: a mixture of the expected (Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon) and the purposefully, ironically out of place (Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer) but the picture, such as it is, rests on the inspired, could’ve been iconic if the picture was up to him casting of Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ejiofor is playing a movie staple: a principled, centered, humble hero, in this case a jiu-jitsu instructor, who finds himself tempted by vice and compromise following a series of unlikely coincidences and encounters. Ejiofor is minimal and commanding, conjuring the fantasy of a divorced from temptation good guy without looking prudish, no small feat; Mamet apparently getting off, for once, on creating a character of unquestioned, un-ironic purity.
The Mamet fan will be on guard earlier than the casual viewer, we know that a coincidence isn’t merely a coincidence, right? Mamet pictures, particularly the Mamet pictures that firmly reside in the man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, trust no one genre, are a little like feature length versions of that chilling scene that occurs late in the third act of The Game, (which could’ve been a horror riff on early Mamet anyway) when the Michael Douglas character discovers every person he casually encountered throughout the picture eating dinner together in a cafeteria. Everyone is normally in on it, nothing is chance. A panic stricken woman accidentally shooting Ejiofor’s window out, for example, immediately sets the Mamet fan’s truth sensors swirling.
The picture hums and flows in a way that Mamet fans will recognize and probably treasure, for an hour or so anyway. Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna fire mannered Mamet dialogue in a manner only they can. Tim Allen makes a bid for career redemption with a part that ultimately, like much of the movie, proves to be beside the point. Alice Braga is sexy as a woman who immediately arouses suspicion for being a woman in a David Mamet movie. Emily Mortimer continues to make neediness somehow attractive. David Paymer plays (effectively) the same part he’s essentially played his entire career. Mamet’s action, which some have had problems with, is actually the element of the picture that is underrated, coming in clipped, succinct, whizzy bursts that do actually manage to effectively mirror Mamet’s verbal rhythms. It’s the dialogue itself that falters.
I’m treading water. Redbelt is competent, never particularly boring, but it doesn’t ever amount to anything, it’s a jack in the box picture, winding, winding, winding, except the jack never pops out of the box. All of one’s hopes for a Mamet sports film (either a serious examination or a thrilling, brutal B movie or something in between) are dashed in the service of a picture that simply blows away, neither good nor bad. Redbelt is Mamet’s House of Cards, the punch-line being that it’s not worth the effort.
★★½
The Left Handed Gun (1958)
It’s impossible to see Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun nowadays and not consider Bonnie and Clyde, the ironically, morally gray outlaw picture that Penn would direct nine years later. The films are startling in their similarities, particularly in their ahead of their time insistence that violence amount to something more than men merrily, mindlessly blowing one other away in the service of some self-justifying, hypocritical, appease the manly man coda. The Left Handed Gun isn’t nearly as violent as Bonnie and Clyde, there’s no way it could have been in the U.S. in 1958, but you may find it, in its own way, even more uncomfortable than Clyde. There’s a disconnection of style and artistic temperament in Gun that’s unexpected and frightening.
Younger viewers can slip Bonnie and Clyde into their DVD players and prepare themselves for one of the first of the new wave of violent, rebellious American pictures of the 1960s-1970s: Bonnie and Clyde undeniably belongs in that era. The Left Handed Gun, on the other hand, shot in stunning, stately, black and white, looks just like another breezy, authority reaffirming American western of the 1950s, perhaps directed by Howard Hawks in the second or third act of his career, and that expectation comes to bite you in the ass. The Left Handed Gun behaves according to the standards of the day, at first, complete with instantly dated opening song, but it gradually becomes something darker and more ambitious. Bonnie and Clyde, like Psycho or any other classic that’s at least partially legendary for its bloodshed and anarchic sensibilities, unavoidably braces you through cultural osmosis. The Left Handed Gun has the benefit of relative obscurity; it’s a vicious little animal that doesn’t announce itself with a BEWARE sign.
I tend to forget how dangerous Paul Newman can be in the right role, as his wonderful elder statesman performances have a habit of coming to my mind first. Newman’s charm, at times, particularly in his youth, could trump whatever the character may have actually been about (the traditional trap of the movie star) but he was also, and would continue to be, an astute, instinctual actor; a man very much aware of his presence and charisma. Occasionally, Newman would turn that heat right back on the audience (Hud, Cool Hand Luke) and do something risky and uncomfortable, or at least more risky and uncomfortable than you expect. Billy the Kid is cut from the same cloth: good looking, commanding, likeable, but also a flake; a live-wire who reaches for his gun at the slightest provocation with no consideration as to how the gunfight will affect his friends or himself the day, or even moments, after. Armistices, apologies, secret alliances, back door hand shakes, these are the dealings of corrupt higher-ups; Billy’s gun is, in his eyes, the great equalizer.
The Left Handed Gun may have an even fuller, more complicated understanding of its troubled hero than the (still greater) Bonnie and Clyde. Billy the Kid is glamorized, revered (largely by townspeople unaware of how casually he screws people caught in the cross-fire) but the picture never dilutes his self-absorption or near insanity. That refusal comes into focus in what is possibly the best scene in the picture: Billy and his de facto gang are at a party hosted by destined pursuer Pat Garrett (John Dehner), and a gentleman, resenting Billy’s fame as well as the subsequent, by the skin of his teeth pardon afforded by an armistice, tries to start something. Billy initially resists, and Newman handles his push and pull towards and away from violence and agitation with understatement, slowly boiling to an intense, unchecked fever. It’s a testament to Penn, Newman and John Dehner’s work that the almost murders of The Left Handed Gun are more disturbing than the actual murders of most pictures. This picture, at its best, has that same liquid violence to comedy to violent comedy to slapstick volatility that marks Bonnie and Clyde as an undeniable masterpiece.
The true bloodshed of The Left Handed Gun is also a triumph, memorable in its strangeness and near abstraction. Billy and his boys, as they must, ultimately disregard the armistice and plug one of the men they’ve vowed to punish for their former boss’s murder, and the shooting is ghastly and cold-blooded: the man’s terrified, twisted face framed in a triangle as he collapses to his death. Another murder, committed out of indifference to a promise Billy made to Garrett, is a bit more justified but even more perverse in its violation: the partygoers cry and stand shocked and aghast, the weight of what’s just transpired acknowledged with remarkable (even for today) honesty.
Penn, again foreshadowing Bonnie and Clyde, doesn’t let us off the hook with a lazy, convenient ending either: the right person dies and the right person lives, but the final act is denied any riding off into the sunset closure: the final killing is as much a suicide as anything else, a loss brought about from imperceptible damage, bitterness and twisted authority. The ending is even more of a lump in the throat than Clyde’s, that picture, reminiscent of Easy Rider, at least allows us a certain self-glamorizing, self-pitying, the little guy can’t ever win fantasy. The Left Handed Gun pitilessly reveals Billy the Kid to be every bit as self-motivated as the big man he opposes, he’s just not as adept at playing the game, which is, unfortunately, our country in a nutshell.
© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress | RSS
