The personal world has been invading the film world lately, but I hope to get a few things up this week, with a return to more frequent posting hopefully happening next week. Thanks for your patience guys, I’m itching to come back.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
The most dispiriting prospect of an “off” Woody Allen film are the scenes that actually work - that periodically break free of the filmmaker’s rigged, by-now-far-beyond-predictable worldview and show us what could have been, if only Allen could surrender to his gifts as he once did with greater frequency. Anything Else is possibly my least favorite Woody Allen picture, but I still remember that scene of Allen busting up that car – a random burst of desperate anger that only accentuated his impotence. Melinda and Melinda failed to come to life because Allen’s characters aren’t characters anymore; they’re placeholders - speaking in a stilted, amateurishly expository dramatic short-hand that critics wouldn’t tolerate of lesser directors. There’s no end to this dialogue in Allen’s newer pictures, the characters just keep talk, talk, talking - telling us how we’re supposed to react to scenes so divorced from actual human behavior they would baffle us otherwise. As tiresome as Melinda and Melinda was though, it also had a moment – between Chloë Sevigny and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a café – that pushes through the material and registers. Sevigny and Ejiofor are intense, erotic actors, and, discovering a mutual longing in one another, they conjure the old push-pull that used to be so vivid in Allen’s pictures.
What was once dramatic integrity (it was surprising, and necessary, to see Annie and Alvy fall apart for keeps) has become stubbornness – a curmudgeon’s refusal to shake free from an unnaturally dour outlook that’s as false as most romantic comedies, only in the opposite direction. The charge that we used to feel from watching a Woody Allen movie is that charge that comes from following any of our great film artists: watching a filmmaker, within the traditional constrictions of a film, wrestle with his obsessions, and try to resolve and explain them in ways that other people will understand and, even more daunting, enjoy. The problem with modern Woody Allen pictures is that the wrestling has ended, and the inner ghouls have won – Allen isn’t second-guessing or fighting himself anymore – he’s a scold who’s allowed his pictures to become repetitive and predictable – selling the same two or three pet themes over and over. The beautiful second chance that closed Hannah and Her Sisters worked so well because we could sense that Allen was as surprised by that ending as we were; but allowed it anyway.
A closed-off, nagging quality has been threatening to strangle Allen’s pictures for awhile, but he’s been able to get by with it, off and on, because he’s been dressing this cynicism up in thriller’s clothing – a genre where fatalism has a bit more novelty, particularly when stacked next to most mainstream thrillers, which nearly always pull their punches. In a romantic comedy though, which Allen hasn’t attempted straight-out in a while, the flat characters and skewed, redundant worldview stick out – we see the scenes missing their marks because Allen can’t sell us on their nonsense. Allen’s new picture, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is meant to be a sensual romantic-comic roundelay – the sort of picture that needs a reckless sense of play and timing and heat. But Allen is either resisting or suffering from bad instincts – the most galling being a narrator who addresses the moments that unfold off-screen; which, perversely, sound far more interesting than the moments we’re actually watching (we’re treated to the scenes most directors would cut, and denied the scenes most directors would cut to). Allen uses a narrator to drain his romantic comedy of romance and comedy - leaving us with neat, crisp, “written” scenes that have no mess or subtext. Vicky Cristina Barcelona has the same depressing asexual quality that characterized Robert Benton’s Feast of Love last year, but you could sort of pity that picture – it seemed to be trying at least, to be reaching but succumbing to a this-how-the-world-should-work naiveté. And if Vicky Cristina Barcelona was a failure, it would be forgivable, but this is obviously the film that Woody Allen sought to make, and has been making, and will most likely continue to make. Dianne Wiest could never conceive on this Woody Allen’s watch. Hell, Dianne Weist would never exist on this Woody Allen’s watch.
What’s the point of a romantic comedy without lust, fluid, food, life? What’s the point of approaching Vicky Cristina Barcelona in this manner? Like all Woody Allen movies, there are moments in Vicky Cristina Barcelona that click - where the actors breathe into the material. Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem are wonderful together, suggesting an interior dimension, history and hunger. They’re both clichés: full-blooded, crazed artists who embrace the passion that few others have the bravery to endure, but they’re at least vital clichés. Rebecca Hall, who had a sweet, lost quality in The Prestige, is initially pitifully underwritten here; she’s playing the neurotic who’s closed-off from pleasure – but she thaws convincingly, and there’s a pre-coital moment between her and a new lover that’s authentically moving. Hall recalls Mia Farrow; they’re both beautiful in a brainy, caged, way – you see the vulnerability and the self-doubt and the tug-of-war. Allen didn’t feel Rebecca Hall’s character while writing it – it’s vaudeville by now – but Rebecca Hall somehow feels Rebecca Hall’s character. Sadly though, there’s waste – a suggestion of an inspired idea that’s never allowed to bloom - that Hall’s tryst with an outsider improves her sexual relationship with her fiancé.
Scarlett Johansson isn’t much here, just as she wasn’t much in the second half of Match Point (she was charming in Scoop) but she shouldn’t be blamed. Johansson has been written here as a schematic contrast to the more important Rebecca Hall character; and she’s saddled with a variety of actions that have no believable function, especially her decision near the end, which happens for no reason beyond Allen’s usual chickening out. There’s waste to the Johansson character too, she’s shockingly bare when she’s confessing what she perceives as a lack of talent; and her arc has promising farcical implications: an insecure wannabe wild-child settles into a three-way sexual-royale where she becomes, by default, the straight one; but Allen drops that too – the messiness scares him, threatens what he obviously considers art, by now, to be – tidy and worked out, with obvious symmetry.
The theatre playing Vicky Cristina Barcelona was packed, primarily with elderly people, and they seemed to appreciate the polite pointlessness of it all – it’s sex and ache as tapioca, something to soothe and digest before driving home to 60 Minutes. Great Allen isn’t this comfortable and forgettable; it’s idiosyncratic, irritating, uneven, personal, unapologetic, apologetic, speculative, moving – it sticks. Some may claim me harsh and ungrateful; and, truthfully, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is an adequate film, not an awful one. But I believe in extending one of our great film artists more respect. I won’t offer Allen his gold watch and congratulate him for mediocrity because I refuse to count him out.
Posted on August 19th, 2008 in Reviews, Comedy, 2008 | 10 Comments
In a Lonely Place (1950)
This was written for MovieZeal’s noir month - which you should most certainly be checking out.
Humphrey Bogart was an ideal movie star, one of the movie stars, and that partially sprung from his ability to marry (and sentimentalize) what most men hope to be with what most men fear themselves to be; seemingly without effort. Bogart is one of American cinema’s lasting ideas of masculinity, but he also had a sharp, wounded verbal quality, and vulnerability, that could appeal to the sort of outsiders that noirs probably spoke (and continue to speak) most clearly to. Noir is the opposite of romantic comedy, we go to those to be comforted, to have our giddiest, silliest dreams confirmed; noirs play to our suspicions that life is rigged, and that the sexes are driven by irreconcilable desires (that men are obsessed with money as route to sex, and women are obsessed with sex as route to money). Noirs provide comfort too, it’s just of a different sort; they’re that friend with whom you can share your self-indulgent feelings of loneliness and alienation. Many actors, including the continually underrated Robert Ryan, embodied the noir in ways that few future actors will most likely ever match, but Bogart is our spokesman, a deserved legend. In some films he’s reveling in the highs of quick-witted self-absorption (The Maltese Falcon), and in others he explores what that mercenary shell might mask, such as In a Lonely Place.
Bogart toyed with his image more than is usually acknowledged (The Caine Mutiny, The Treasure of Sierre Madre) but In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray, captures Bogie at his squishiest – we see an ache behind the barbed, contemptuous quips. Bogart worked with Nicholas Ray two years prior in Knock on Any Door (unseen by me) and he produced In a Lonely Place through his Santana Productions. The picture is based on a novel by Dorothy Hughes, but the script by Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt reportedly deviated from it, and Ray strayed even further while filming – this picture is undeniably Ray and Bogart’s, reflecting their specific sense of romantic defeat. (Ray’s marriage to lead actress Gloria Grahame was also dissolving at the time, and that, rather icky, situation is also thought to have informed the picture. How could it not?)
Ray ostensibly worked in the noir several times, including They Live by Night, the overlooked On Dangerous Ground, and In a Lonely Place, and all of these pictures have a surprising fragility – it’s little wonder that Ray would go on to make one of the most iconic of all misunderstood youth pictures. Ray grasped the helplessness that drives these pictures on a chemical level - of things being hopelessly beyond our control. Ray doesn’t take the noir picture as a chic fashion statement; the plots are beside the point, and the “cool” has been discarded. Ray dwells on the outlook of the characters, who find it impossible to fathom why people respond to them so; and acknowledges the prevailing doom of the noir to stem from self-fulfilling prophecy (this isn’t new, but few manage it so convincingly and internally). There’s an authentic throwing-your-hands-in-the-air quality to Ray’s work. Many, more predictable, filmmakers would play the hero against society and watch one score points off the other, but Ray has a greater, more pained, empathy.
In a Lonely Place disappoints and soars at once. Bogart is Dixon Steele, an off-again, possibly on-again, screenwriter who falls for his neighbor, Laurel (Grahame) after she initially frees him from charges of murdering a young woman, who was last seen leaving his house the night before. Eyeing Steele – cold, calm, contemptuous - his name perfect movie short-hand - as she answers the policemen’s questions, Laurel tells the policeman she likes Dixon’s face. Dixon shrugs it off as he would anything else, but, underneath that pained, lined visage, he’s a goner.
The first act is just as you hope. Bogart’s performance sparks with the aloof, electric sexuality of Grahame; and the opening half-hour primes us for a classic obsessive-romantic-thriller, perhaps a Laura or a Vertigo of the Humphrey Bogart canon. But In a Lonely Place, ultimately, goes too far into Steele’s outlook, and embraces his fantasy of the perfect woman at the expense of dramatic perspective. Bogart and Grahame are initially terse and wonderful together, but Ray, in a misguided ellipsis, cuts directly to Dixon and Laurel in domestic reverie only a few moments after their meeting, with her typing Dixon’s adaptation and making his breakfast, while he works furiously on the next pages, inspired by the love of a woman who embodies everything he’s longed for. Grahame, who suggests Lana Turner with an extra bit of kink, if perhaps David Lynch had gotten hold of her, (her heat nearly stopped Crossfire) is an ideal actress to explore the Madonna-whore fantasy, but Ray flips her from potential whore to Madonna in the instant of a dissolve; dissolving much of the tension with it.
We understand what Ray is doing, theoretically, but we don’t feel it; imagine if Hitchcock cut from James Stewart encountering the reincarnated Kim Novak to them cuddling (with Novak now blonde, the transformation omitted) on the couch. In a Lonely Place is that jarring, and we want more fireworks; it’s perverse in an unintentional, counter-intuitive way to present Bogart and Grahame so earnestly. This trade-off is a constant in Nicholas Ray’s pictures – his put upon filter opens the thriller to new potential, but it also mucks up the primal gears of the thriller – Ray’s self-pity trumps his instincts as a dramatic movie-maker. Ray allows the subtext traditional to film noir pictures to swallow the text (Tim Burton did the same thing to the monster movie in Edward Scissorhands). In a Lonely Place, to really drive its effect home, should have emphasized the pull between Dixon’s fantasy and Laurel’s reality, and should have hinted somewhat as to how these miscommunications and tugs and conflicts inform their bedroom politics. There’s a moment in La Bête Humaine that underlines what In a Lonely Place desperately needs: Simone Simon, before kissing Jean Gabin, bites briefly at his face. I wanted Grahame to bite Bogart, or to grab him, or to otherwise hint at the wannabe bad girl that’s drawn to this mixed-up boy who dresses and acts as a tough guy. In a Lonely Place is too self-consciously interested in moving you, and it doesn’t understand that the thriller mechanics, which are shallow in most pictures, would be enriched by Ray and Bogart’s obsessions; and that Ray and Bogart’s obsessions would inherit, in the thriller mechanics, a needed slight of hand - giving the picture subtlety. In a Lonely Place is too often only about one thing, “I’m sad”. That would be enough if it worked on a thriller level too, but it pointedly doesn’t.
There are moments where Ray achieves an ideal balance – a personal thriller. Early on, Dixon drinks and listens to Meredith’s (Martha Stewart) touchingly awed summary of the book he is to adapt next. Meredith is the girl who is to die the next morning, and Ray instills the scene with a slow-dawning dread. When Meredith, impersonating a character from the book, screams within earshot of Laurel next door, we know it’s being inserted for some reason, a trap being set. But the moment is also revealing of Steele, the bitter, broken softie; and of the sort of wide-eyed, poignant naiveté that Hollywood routinely crushes. Meredith is guileless, and that temporarily warms Steele, and steers him away from his original, more manipulative intentions. Steele’s home is also telling: a small, L.A. bachelor pad with an atmospheric courtyard that evokes clichéd notions of the struggling writer; as well as of someone walled off, away from everyone else. (The title is meant to be taken, as director Curtis Hanson notes on the DVD, to mean several things.)
There are two other moments, both images, in which the dialogue is thankfully barred from intruding. The first is understandably the most famous image from the film, the most truthful, and one of the most succinct and effective images in all of noir: of Dixon and Laurel, their irritation at Dixon’s continued interrogation reaching a quiet fever, sitting next to one another in a club watching a singer (Hadda Brooks) perform. Bogart’s eyes have never looked fuller, more haunted, or more unavoidably, purely alone; and Grahame embodies that woman sitting next to you, who has, whether she knows it yet or not, moved on. This is an intimate portrait of a couple as two single people. The second image is the final one, where Steele, having finally understood that he’s lost Laurel, walks out of that now-barren courtyard, his next step in the air. Dixon will probably pick up another drink, another assignment, another woman, another fight, all to go round and round again, with no relief until the final relief. That prospect shakes you – it earns the picture’s title.
Posted on August 17th, 2008 in Reviews, Classics, 1950 | 3 Comments
The Fury (1978)
Brian De Palma has always had noteworthy advocates over the years (most prominently Pauline Kael) but there is a portion of the population, even among the cinephiles, who find his charms elusive. (Ironically the De Palma picture that seems to have broken through with the general public with the most force is one of his more problematic, the Scarface remake). People partially resent De Palma for refusing, in many of his most famous pictures, to distinguish the funny from the serious, but you knew that already; some are perversely unwilling to accept that it’s all a joke, and all serious, all at once. There’s something else though – it’s De Palma’s daredevil’s spirit, his commitment to the rhapsody of his pictures – he finds the heart of a cliché, flips it inside-out, and still commits fully to that cliché. Almost all of De Palma’s great pictures have bad or inadequate or even laughable scenes, but they don’t shatter the mood – they heighten it – De Palma’s bad scenes are indicative as to why he’s a great director. No director working in the thriller form today has De Palma’s courage – today our pranksters are too afraid of alienating the critics, or too afraid of leaving the audience behind – they avoid the issue by quote marking it, congratulating the audience for congratulating itself.
I’m assuming The Fury was a paycheck picture, it kinda deals with telekinesis (like De Palma’s prior film, Carrie) and it was De Palma’s largest budget at the time (something like six million). Those who reject the cheesier passages of Dressed to Kill or Blow-Out or Carrie will probably find The Fury unwatchable, and, this time, those people aren’t entirely off-base. John Farris’s script, based on his novel, is unimaginative and insufficient for De Palma’s gifts – it’s one of those bad 1970s sci-fi pictures in which the characters wait ninety-some minutes for the climax to arrive, exchanging dialogue of increasing redundancy. I can’t imagine reading The Fury; but, revisiting the De Palma film, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The picture grabs you from the opening: a matter-of-fact, presentational credits sequence reminiscent of David Cronenberg accompanied by one of John Williams’ finest scores (it’s unusually subtle and sensuous for Williams – it has that sex-danger that characterizes the mood of a more personal De Palma picture).
De Palma must have known what he was working with in The Fury, and he appears to have taken it as a personal challenge, he imbues the pages with something intangibly terrifying; a second, more perverse picture, a picture of hysteria and torture and apocalypse, appears to be playing out on the sidelines, just out of our reach. (This film does have a flaw that’s uncharacteristic of even most of De Palma’s “off” pictures – it’s asexual.) The Fury, more or less, concerns the efforts of Kirk Douglas, some sort of ex-secret agent, to retrieve his telekinetic son (Andrew Stevens) who has been kidnapped by John Cassavetes for the usual purpose of harnessing the young man’s power, probably for global domination. The Fury could’ve been Firestarter, or, at best, something impersonal and obvious (like the X-Men pictures), and it is; but De Palma also leaves little threads hanging that nag and titillate - and that are accentuated by the picture’s startling, painterly visual beauty. The Fury has a rapt, night-time intensity, and the ending is a sick-joke on par with classic De Palma (the picture ultimately reveals itself to be, like Carrie, another distorted fairy tale of self-actualization). De Palma presents Cassavetes’ experiments on Stevens, which could’ve been more mad scientist exposition, in vicious, surreal shards – depriving us of our bearings, and sealing our discomfort with Cassavetes’ peerless jackal’s grin (he’s one of the few slumming actors whose performances actually benefit from their obvious contempt for the material).
Kirk Douglas’ work here may be parody, I couldn’t quite tell – and if it’s straight (and there’s a 1960s studio post-coital pose at one point that has to be a joke), it’s obvious, but Douglas’ open, irony-free, approach ultimately works on you, he knows how to use his legend to his advantage. Stevens is a bland, attractive robot who doesn’t register at all (De Palma treats him with indifference – he’s a McGuffin); but Amy Irving, as his spiritual psychic twin (yes, it’s one of those) is shockingly strong, it may be more her picture than De Palma’s. Amy Irving is an intoxicatingly beautiful woman here, with big brown curls that appear to function as a security blanket, and she has a specific ability to look other-worldly and ordinary at once - a geek’s dream girl that the jock might have to go for too (precisely what she played in Carrie). Irving had the most thankless role in Carrie - the voice of conscience in an otherwise loony, operatic horror picture, but she registered anyway – she had a talent for making conviction look sexy amongst the more glamorous ultra-violent wreckage; and she lent Carrie’s stunt-ending pathos, whether it was intentional or not: the possibility of this girl’s prolonged misery is an unnerving thought to close that picture on. Irving is even better in The Fury - she’s so effective she makes you care for Stevens on her behalf, despite the fact that you just can’t help but not care for Andrew Stevens. Irving’s psychic moments, would should just underline the fact that De Palma and Williams are toying with sights and sounds familiar to fans of Vertigo, are authentically unsettling – you want this girl to have peace, and, if you’re familiar with De Palma’s work – you know that that’s not necessarily a given.
Carrie Snodgress, as Douglas’ lover and comrade, and Irving’s de facto guardian, is nearly as effective – this picture picks up in its second hour when it has the good sense to concentrate on these women (one should note, as others always have, how many rich female performances can actually be found in the De Palma canon). Snodgress essentially serves The Fury in the same fashion that Betty Buckley served Carrie – she’s the wounded, naïve do-gooder, destined to be hurt for entering a world that’s beyond her understanding. I find Buckley’s death hard to watch in Carrie, not for the gore, there are far worse murders to be found in that picture by those standards, but because De Palma’s staging of Buckley’s death is so purposefully, cruelly offhand. Snodgress’ demise here is similar – she’s discarded in a more beautiful but equally besides-the-point fashion, at the end of a tracking shot that may play as a parody of those old lovers-running-toward-one-another-on-the-beach commercials.
De Palma, curiously, undersells the deaths of two other prominent characters near the end of the picture, possibly to soften us for the big finale – so we figure the worst is behind us (similar to the ploys that end Carrie and Dressed to Kill). We respond to Cassavetes’ big death and Snodgress’ antic-climactic demise in the same way, and, while not obvious, for the same reason. We cheer for Cassavetes to get it, he’s a Snidely Whiplash after all, but his murder also signifies the perversion of poor Amy Irving; in the end, both deaths point toward the potential destruction of the only two yet-to-be-soiled characters in the movie. De Palma then abruptly cuts to the credits, there’s nothing left to matter. To paraphrase a Tarantino character played by a De Palma alum, this is a sell-out picture with a pulse.
Posted on August 12th, 2008 in 1978, Reviews, Horror | 16 Comments
Pineapple Express (2008)
Screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (and producer Judd Apatow, who contributed to the story) began with an amusing starting point in Pineapple Express. As with most of the pictures produced in the startlingly prolific Apatow cracker factory, Pineapple Express is an R-rated children’s film, but it’s the first of Apatow’s pictures to fully acknowledge it. The idea is to scale 48 Hrs. and Midnight Run and Pulp Fiction down to the size of our dweeby-slack generation – and produce a chase picture that never covers more than a few square miles - a gas station, a girlfriend’s house, a high school, etc. Our protagonists, Dale (Rogen) and Saul (James Franco) are in danger, but their instinct for survival is no less limited than their ambition, so they go nowhere. But they’re also ironically pop-smart - they’ve seen enough of these films to figure the bad guys’ motivations and hop to the next just-marginally-safer lily-pad. Dale and Saul flounder all over the place - but the bad guys, in a move recalling thousands of other movies, more recently Dumb and Dumber, figure them for something far greater than they actually are, because the bad guys, of the prior generation, didn’t have quite as much time to soak in all of the clichés they inadvertently live by. Pineapple Express is another hipper-than-thou post-modern pop blender, based on nothing more than movies, but the picture, at least in the first half, has an appealingly bent stream-of-consciousness, a mild satiric current. There’s nothing to it, including hypocrisy; the tired, half-assed moralizing of the usual Apatow production having been, thankfully, discarded.
Unfortunately, and typically, Rogen, Goldberg and director David Gordon Green (yes, the overrated indie director) are too taken with genre clichés to do much more than recreate them, squandering their original spark in the process (bad timing also hurts, Hot Fuzz is a similar, better, movie). Pineapple Express eventually works itself up to the chaos of the pictures it emulates; when the violence should have been as scaled down as the chases that set the whole thing in motion. The gunplay should be awkward and confusing, and set in apartments and fast-food restaurants; instead we get the usual drug-lab free-for-all, only with heroes and villains considerably less powerful than Nick Nolte and Robert De Niro and James Remar (who appears, too briefly). The action is well staged as these things go (and there are a few surprisingly nasty send-offs), but there’s no bite; we don’t feel the intrusion of one genre giving way to another. The potential violence of Superbad, still the best of the recent Apatow pictures, was more unsettling, because the picture never lost its original, more intimate footing: the John Hughes “one last night with my friends” subgenre. The dependably weird Kevin Corrigan doesn’t belong in Superbad, and he’s scary for that. Corrigan’s just another conviction-free goof in Pineapple Express.
The real reason to see Pineapple Express, and you could probably stand to wait until it arrives on DVD, is to see James Franco’s Saul, who speaks in an amusingly deflated lisp – Ratso Rizzo-Lite. Franco has been trapped in would-be dreamboat roles (most thanklessly in the Spider-man movies) for years; so his freedom here as a performer lends Pineapple Express most of its charge, and somewhat sustains it during the long, purposefully redundant stretches of action toward the end. There’s a faux-homosexual love scene (de rigueur for Apatow) that’s funnier than it should be for the daffy concentration Franco gives it. And Franco’s delivery of a line early in the picture, involving his term for the low-grade crap he unloads on customers he doesn’t like, is a laugh-out-loud moment. Franco’s role is unoriginal, but he lends the picture a frazzled screwball spunk and he keeps Rogen, who’s essentially reprising his role from The 40 Year-Old-Virgin and Knocked Up, on his toes.
We can dance around it for another few hundred words, but Pineapple Express is just too damn light and consequence-free, and too self-pleased. I also recently caught The Wackness, Jonathan Levine’s coming-of-age romance, and while it isn’t nearly as polished; with filmmaking that could probably be called incompetent (it looks as if it was shot through a sink half-full with dirty dish water); it, at the least, has a vulnerability that the Apatow pictures never have the courage to approach (and don’t refute me with the endings of Virgin or Knocked Up, they were the worst parts of those films, insurance policies to get the women in). Levine’s film is just as derivative and takes just as many dramatic short cuts, but you sense Levine using other movies because he’s yet to find the bearings to express his nostalgia in original terms. The Wackness has a felt, stifled, authentically clueless quality; Apatow’s pictures always leave the real conflicts (jobs, apartments, ambitions) on the cutting room floor, those things apparently arriving as soon as you decide they’re necessary. Speaking as a twenty-eight year old in considerable flux himself, that’s nonsense. Judd Apatow’s movies are just entertainment I’m told; and I should lighten up. But how many times am I supposed to be entertained in exactly the same fashion, before it feels like calculation? Or is, more simply, just boring?
★★½
Posted on August 8th, 2008 in Reviews, Comedy, 2008 | 16 Comments
Shine a Light (2008)
Martin Scorsese has directed pictures-for-hire throughout his career, but most of those past films (such as After Hours and his remake of Cape Fear) had a bit of him in them, or at least an engaging sense of play. Scorsese’s most recent pictures, and some of his most financially successful, have been more dispiriting. Gangs of New York, which Scorsese had been off-and-on trying to produce for decades, is probably the most continually interesting of his recent fiction pictures, precisely because it’s so screwed up in places (you felt, within the frames, the war between the old and new Scorsese). The Aviator and The Departed play smashingly the first time you watch them, but that electricity fades, revealing those pictures to essentially be bubble-gum pulp dressed as something else; more closely resembling the work of a Scorsese imitator than the man himself. Those pictures reflect the annoying tendency (particularly of my generation) to idolize Scorsese’s kinetic, druggy, speed-freakster’s mise en scène over everything else.
Scorsese imitators “do Scorsese” (remember that run of Mean Streets rip-offs?) because the visual style is appealing to them, and because it can very obviously be pinpointed as “direction”, we can see the director taking over the story, and that very clear ownership has an obvious appeal for a fledgling, insecure filmmaker. What these filmmakers normally miss is the obsession that drives the blasts of violence and color, and the supernaturally untethered camera and the slow-motion and the freeze frames. Scorsese’s visual style is informed by his desperate urge to get it all out, to purge, to somehow eliminate, or push through, the art that separates Scorsese’s movie-fueled id from the public. In The Departed, Scorsese’s direction was sound and fury, a depressing form of desperation (to be relevant and to make a story, which was better as Infernal Affairs, his own).
Music has always brought something out in Scorsese though (his best picture in years is No Direction Home) and his camera dances again in Shine a Light. I can’t imagine, beyond the challenge of reaching a larger audience; that Scorsese gave much of a damn about The Departed, but, now capturing his favorite band, the beyond-iconic The Rolling Stones, Scorsese’s pulse has quickened again, and you can tell because his camera (operated by nearly every soon-to-be legendary cinematographer working, including Robert Richardson, John Toll, Emmanuel Lubezki, and Robert Elswit) has gone instinctive again. There’s no shallow, trumped up pyrotechnics in place of emotion here, because Scorsese doesn’t have to talk himself and his audience into his subject’s importance. Shine a Light, on purely surface terms, is one of the most beautiful pictures I’ve seen so far this year. The vibrant, painterly image has returned to Scorsese’s work, but painterly in an intuitive catch-as-catch-can way.
Shine a Light captures a two-day pair of concerts that The Rolling Stones performed as a benefit at the Beacon Theater in New York City in 2006. The picture opens with a sly making-of prologue that is meant to demonstrate that Scorsese isn’t taking any of this any more seriously than he should. Scorsese, for better and worse (those credit card ads), understands by now how the audience reacts to “Martin Scorsese” and he tweaks that here; particularly as Scorsese shows himself, with typical urgent nonchalance (that reads like an oxymoron, but anyone who’s seen Scorsese speak knows), informing a technician that he can’t burn Mick Jagger.
Then the show properly begins, and things are shaky, at first, opening with “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Shattered” (not one of my favorites), and these stand-bys are as tired and obligatory as you expect and fear for them to be, with Jagger’s famed herky-jerky physical explosions serving as the literal embodiment of Scorsese’s approach to The Departed. The Stones loosen up for “She Was Hot” though, and they maintain that momentum for much of the film, which refreshingly, surprisingly, includes wonderful, underplayed pieces such as “Far Away Eyes” and “As Tears Go By” (this one captures the punctured soul of The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s treatment of The Band); with a high point being their “Champagne and Reefer” cover with Buddy Guy. Guy, one of the Stones’ musical forefathers, gets the stubbornly indefatigable Jagger’s game up, and a momentary fever infects the music; for a few minutes, there’s more to the show than Jagger’s own legend - he has something to prove again.
Before Shine a Light was released, it was assumed by some that the only way the picture could dodge self-parody would be to embrace a mournful tone that recalled The Last Waltz; to acknowledge that both the filmmaker and the band had become franchises, and were battling for vitality again. Scorsese and Jagger have pointedly avoided this route, and, having now seen Shine a Light, it’s safe to say that that probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for the subject; or for our society as it is today, anyway. Many films of the 1970s embraced an indulgent doom-chic; a we’re-all-screwed-to-lose-to-the-man-and-there’s-nothing-we-can-do-about-it song. The Last Waltz reveled in the self-glorification of fading away. Our current society buys a different, opposing, delusion - an obsession for self-actualization, to be all you can be, eat your vegetables, follow your dream, and live to be 125.
Shine a Light reflects this, but manages to be a spiritual sequel to The Last Waltz anyway, one that happily confounds our expectations – the new Scorsese picture is a bookend to the old Scorsese picture, the other side of the coin, a portrait of older men finding a grace and self-fulfillment and ease that they thought, in their youth, to probably be elusive. Shine a Light is both braver and more hypocritical than The Last Waltz. It’s easy to look cool dying; it’s harder to look cool living. Shine a Light is about, regardless of ridicule, regardless of age, regardless of any other hindrance you can dream up, doing whatever you damn well please. The Rolling Stones: Keith Richards, Charlies Watts, Ronnie Wood, and Jagger, have become the Star Child of 2001, they’ve gone round and round so long that they’ve grown infinite and beyond themselves. Scorsese underlines this subtext with, perhaps too-cutely ironic, interview inserts largely taken from much earlier in The Stones’ career. Most of these snippets drive the same point – that Jagger’s legend isn’t a surprise to him. Say what you want of many of the Stones’ late albums (their most recent, A Bigger Bang, is underrated) but Jagger’s indomitable will and energy are truly, endlessly startling (recalling The Portrait of Dorian Gray). The key to Jagger and the Stones has something to do with Jagger and Richards’ guarded eyes, which never quite reveal the level of satire, of knowingness, to the rock-star clichés and “attitude” that they sell.
There is the Dorian Gray side though, the hypocrisy, the uglier side to the film: it’s undeniably dictated by commerce, by bad boys (both Scorsese and the Stones) going main-stream and taming their instincts for a wider audience. Some of the lyrics (”Some Girls” particularly) have been softened, profanity bleeped, and there’s no valid reason for a Scorsese-Stones collaboration to be a PG-13. The picture celebrates the courage and strength of the Stones’ longevity, but it also, perhaps hopelessly, points toward the fact that that longevity, in this business, can only come with dressing up and playing nice, taming what initially drove you. Stephen King once wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that his generation could’ve changed the world but opted to build Wal-Mart instead (King, of course, writes for EW now), and, as we watch one of the Easy Riders hawk insurance on television, it’s difficult to dispute that, or, at least the anger that fuels the generalization. Some folks, somewhat understandably, won’t be able to accept the plastic dimension of Shine a Light, and they’ll reject or avoid it. I couldn’t shake the energy and the rapture that fuels Shine a Light at its best. Amidst the commerce, amidst the brands, amidst the self-censoring, there’s something unavoidably poignant and alive: a bunch of legends, on both sides of the camera, who’ve done much more than most of us ever will, just having fucking fun.
★★★½
