They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)
Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? suffers from too much “art”. The picture has a haunting, bizarre, taken from true events premise: in the midst of the Great Depression, a punishing dance-off is staged. The contestants, a variety of the poorest and most desperate, subject themselves to weeks of unending shaking and twirling, punctuated only by fleeting naps; and meals in which they are required to move while chewing. There’s also, seemingly timed to perfectly coincide with the dancers’ most vulnerable moments, race-offs, which eliminate couples at a faster clip and further underline the human-as-cattle motif of the program. An announcer (Gig Young) periodically chimes in with contrived, chilling, “humanity”, which is pitched in rehearsed, energetic blasts of encouragement that further deflates and hammers, hammers, hammers. This is all endured for the promise of fifteen hundred dollars, or, slightly more likely, a chance at attracting the interest of someone of influence in show business.
The dance scenes, staged in graceful, flowing alternations of long and close shots, deliver the outrage and frailty with which Pollack is clearly aiming. Too bad then, that Pollack doesn’t trust his subject matter. There’s too much self-conscious, faux-important, arty-art moralizing going on here. The actors, including Red Buttons, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Susannah York, and Michael Sarrazin, are all too wide-eyed and heavily misguided naïve. One wonders if this contest is the first indignity these people have had to suffer.
The idea of the picture is appalling enough on its own, so it’s redundant and disappointing that our director should take our hand and guide us across the exclamation points. We feel the waste, the constriction, but in a way that’s overly worked out and partially accidental in equal measure. Pollack clutters the action, which should be focused and unrelenting and speaking for itself, and distracts with devices such as flashbacks of Sarrazin and overly theatrical back-stage lightening. The poverty manifested as game-show sanitized physical misery (the kind that distracts from other, more naturally arrived at, physical misery), and its ironic, unnerving, juxtaposition with the cheery pageantry backdrop, should be the first and only concern. The material begs for a macabre sense of humor, a tongue in cheek of the damned sensibility (one can only imagine what Altman would’ve done with it, or the Kubrick of Lolita) but Pollack seems to be too insecure, too insistent on proving he’s an artist, to allow himself to fully act like one.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? gets stronger and hotter as the story inevitably gets bleaker and bleaker though, and Pollack, surprisingly, lets the characters’ continued deterioration stand on its own. The film’s other actor is its ace: Jane Fonda, in one of her best performances, which is clearly saying something. Fonda doesn’t subject herself to the picture’s thesis governed m.o.: she’s hard, sexy, bitter, and closed-off: come-on within snarling come-on. Fonda, even at her nastiest, is exhilaratingly alive: her hostility channeled as white-electric current. Fonda leaves the broad stuff to the less instinctual actors, and gets at the run-down engine of America at the time-no critique can rein this woman in.
Jane is sometimes too un-fake-ably self-possessed to convincingly register as someone with mortal concerns, someone who’s susceptible to human needs and miscalculations (it’s a barrier that surrounds all of the Fondas) but there’s a scene here, near the end; that sells her panic with a conviction I’ve rarely seen in the actress, even in her frequently brilliant work. The Fonda character, Gloria Beatty, finds herself paired with an older partner (Buttons) who’s clearly on his way out of the competition. Another race is called, and Gloria fights, screams, claws her way beyond the disqualifying bottom three places. The race goes on and on, much longer than we’re conditioned by movies to expect; and Fonda’s cynicism, her sweat, her panic, her unbendable will, unite and pitch forward with pure animal abandon. This is a memorable study of survival.
Gig Young is also fascinating in his ambiguity; he’s a portrait of charm and “the show must go on” savagery disguised as sympathy that might still, somehow, house just a little bit of authentic sympathy anyway. Young calls the contestants “good kids”, even in private, apparently oblivious to the irony of his own advice and solace-but he also always has a but up his sleeve-a way to further harvest the characters’ misery in the service of furthering audience satisfaction and profits.
The second half of the picture takes off from Fonda and Young’s performances (the first half is too dependant on the inexpressive Sarrazin); and the little details, which are initially minute, or perhaps only slightly irritating, gain a nightmarish quality in repetition: The siren that signals the return to the dance floor (it sounds as if it would announce the arrival of the secret police in another society). The increasing cruelty of the races. The spectators’ throwing of pennies at the contestants. The self-delusional announcements. Pollack’s touch, ironically, becomes surer with each fresh turn of derangement; probably because, by this point, the scenario has gained enough obvious, tangible affect for him- it straightens his sensibilities.
Until the end that is, which, not to put too fine of a point on it, sucks (no reveal here-but consider the title). They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? has a high-school short story ending: fatalistic and symbolic without the slightest consideration as to whether it fits the characters. On paper, the ending works-and it has effect in the movie too-but its stock, shock effect-melodrama that again distracts from the potent, despairing bulk of the story. The very final image is all that Pollack, and the audience, needed; a promise that the shop-‘til-you-drop madness is truly timeless, always shuffling, always racing, the music never ending. I’m playing devil’s advocate here to a certain extent, the picture is still a weird triumph- there are too many moments- and the subject matter is too strong, too readily lending to metaphor both past and present, for it not to be. But it’s also too fitting that the title to Pollack’s film should end with a question mark-the picture has unresolved issues about its unanswered questions.
The Strangers (2008)
The Strangers works for a little while, but it doesn’t get in your bones. The picture may eventually scare you accidentally though, by forcing you (if you’re a critic of some sort anyway) to consider what you’ll do if this run of pastiche horror films continues much longer unabated by even the slightest originality. Recite the weather forecast below the title and the running time? Stocks, perhaps? How much more can be said about the visually competent, or even assured, but hopelessly unimaginative home invasion by masked marauder(s) of vague motivation picture? Funny Games was a crock, but its contempt for its audience gave it a mild pulse. If I had seen The Strangers five years ago, I would have probably been more glass-is-half-full in my approach, but these pictures that are just passable enough to squeak by without offense are beginning to be the most offensive of all.
See the French picture Inside instead. It’s tasteless. It’s uncomfortable. The directors, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, may have crossed the line, but it’s a home invasion picture that’s artfully made, courts absurdity (stumbling into it often) and goes feeling around in a primal, sticky place of guilt, loss and legitimate, appalling, violation. You watch Inside and wonder how long it’s been bubbling in the back of its creators’ minds. You watch The Strangers and wonder how director Bryan Bertino, who shows talent, could have possibly roused himself, in his debut, to stage yet another picture that works the laughably tired, obligatory based-on-faux-true-events narration device; or that features the typically idiotic marching around the house outside of safety, completely divorced of any tangible, terrestrial reason to do so routine. Or the relentless, one-sided, pounding the heroes of these pictures must always endure, never scoring even a minor win against the villains. Never making one decision that is met with success. Future horror directors: if your picture doesn’t have the courage to stake out its own convictions, misery isn’t uncompromising, it’s tedious.
★★
Made (2001)
Friendship is one of those intangibles of life that most movies are destined to cheapen or over-explain or just plain get wrong. The movies, due to their mostly Point A yields Point B yields Point C yields Climactic Revelation structure, generally don’t allow that friendship, like love (and this is a problem of many romances too) usually, for better, for worse, for neither, just is. Made, Jon Favreau’s first and, so far, best picture, is a buddy movie, small in scale and ambition, but it transcends that condescending description because it embraces both the “small” and the “buddy” to their fullest. The smallness of the picture reveals a humble generosity of spirit that has remained, to a certain extent, in even the bigger Favreau pictures, such as this year’s Iron Man. The buddy (and the miracle) of this picture is that we actually believe that the two protagonists, Ricky Slade (Vince Vaughn) and Bobby Ricigliano (Favreau) are life-long friends, destined to forever screw one another over and bail one another out at the last minute.
Made was Favreau’s first picture as both writer and director, but he also, as we know, wrote and co-starred in Swingers, directed by Doug Liman, a few years prior. If memory serves, Made was considered by many to be a weaker sauce follow-up, a similarly themed picture that lacked the startling break-out-new-thing energy of the prior film. This is unavoidably true, to a certain extent, and I admit that I fell into that MORE! NEWER! MORE! NEWER! trap upon seeing Made the first time. But time has evened the playing field, revealing Swingers to be what it always was: a likeable, well-meaning, calling card for a talented group of men. Made is a more confident, shaggier picture, the jokes subtler and less readily announcing of their struggling screenwriter cleverness.
Ricky and Bobby are struggling boxers, though Ricky, it is immediately apparent, is only along for as long as Bobby sees fit to take the vocation seriously. Both are financed (vaguely) by the underworld, represented here by Peter Falk in a scary, profane, more vicious than is immediately apparent kind of performance that never gets awards consideration, but should. Falk finds seemingly innocuous lines, such as (paraphrasing a little), “I don’t mean to interrupt your little dream-fantasy whatever” and imbues them with a hilarious matter of fact old man’s no bullshit danger. Columbo as the crank you always suspected he was.
Ricky, normally the more divorced from reality of the pair, recognizes the boxing ambition for the joke that it is, and attempts to hammer this through to Bobby in the opening scene as they slug away at one other in the ring: two amateur friends too inexperienced, timid (and affectionate towards one another) to do anything besides stage a fight that elicits boos from even the sort of people who would attend such a match in the middle of the day. Ricky wants Bobby to cash in his goodwill with Falk and get them both started as criminal underlings. Bobby wants to stay legitimate, working slightly more innocent (and considerably lower paying) jobs such as driving around his own stripper girlfriend (Famke Janssen). That is a volatile arrangement, and it soon gets Bobby in a situation in which he can no longer resist Falk’s needling to get further in. Stuck, Bobby vouches for Ricky too, and the two are sent to act as gophers for a money drop in New York.
The above could be taken from a more action driven comedic thriller, Midnight Run perhaps, but I’m making Made sound more plot oriented than it actually is. Favreau sets his story in motion succinctly, gracefully, and uses it as a framework to stage virtually every imaginable scenario in which two very good friends can drive one another bat-shit with over familiarity. Onscreen, Favreau is a rarity: a legitimately interesting straight man who can upstage more stylized performers with a defeated, slumped, sharper than you expect verbal dexterity that calls attention to itself precisely because it doesn’t call attention to itself. Favreau has an unerring feel for desperation and defeat; and it shades his jokes of awkwardness and embarrassment in a way that shows such as the hellishly redundant American version of The Office repeatedly fail to understand.
Vince Vaughn is a stylized performer himself, of course, especially in this picture, and one that even Favreau can’t trump with his matter of fact under-acting. It’s no mystery why Vaughn has become a star; the mystery is that he hasn’t become an even bigger star. The tragedy is that either degree of stardom invariably leads to more lucrative and forgettable work. Vaughn is a delirious tight-rope walker here though; he and Favreau take that wonderful final scene in Swingers, in which Trent is revealed to be the deluded child we always suspected he was, and push that for the entire running time here. It’s aggressive, absorbing, brave, dangerous work: the sort of work that begs to become tiresome or self-amusing, but never does; because Vaughn and Favreau never lose track of the character’s damaged sense of humanity: his need to assert his existence and importance, regardless of how much it may increase his chances of getting himself and his friend killed in the process.
Ricky’s giddy, reckless, nearly surreal self-absorption and entitlement (watch the scene on the airplane or in the hotel with Sam Rockwell), particularly when stacked next to Bobby’s struggling to put things together wannabe family man, drives the central question of Made: why the hell does Bobby continually suffer this egomaniac? Favreau manages something tricky here: he answers that mystery, striving for pathos near the end, without compromising the picture’s unencumbered, airy tone. By the end we feel as if we’ve witnessed a true, fair (Bobby is ultimately just as naïve, in a less obnoxious though equally self-damaging way) exploration of two friends; two people who punch one another out so they can eat pizza together that night. For that alone, Made is an accomplishment, an authentically human movie.
★★★½
BC’s Services Will Resume…
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