Red and Stuck (2008)
The lure of Red is seeing Brian Cox appear in more than ten-fifteen percent of the picture. Cox doesn’t do much with his voice or body here that’s much different from the government sleazies of his more widely seen pictures, but, as the star, there’s simply more of him: more of his resigned-hushed charisma, more of his stocky, dignified, generally miserable, oddly powerful frame. Watching the other actors in Red, Tom Sizemore, Robert Englund, Amanda Plummer, and several younger faces, whose work here would be laughed out of the message boards of Bloody Disgusting, I wondered what they must have thought of Cox as he worked on Avery Ludlow – a lonely retiree desperate for the slightest indication of remorse for the viciously pointless murder of his one companion – the dog of the title. Cox is acting in a movie that was never made; his co-stars are par for the picture you actually find yourself sitting through. This disconnection in quality has an unusual, unintentionally beneficial effect – we see Cox, ignored, restless, his intelligence giving way to something more primal – and we feel uneasy for him in the way we should feel for this man who lost what expectation for happiness he had left. We see Cox slumming, and we grow protective of him, particularly because the performance is so confident; so pared down and beautiful.
The rest of the picture, well, it has two moments that seize on what probably drew its creators to it: the murder of the dog (though the filmmakers muck that up by getting to it before we’ve befriended Red ourselves) and a long speech by Cox, in a rip on the Indianapolis scene from Jaws, telling of how he lost his wife. These moments have the sickening chaos of banality turning inside out – the point of a good horror picture. The rest of Red is a mixed-up revenge picture without the revenge, another wannabe deconstruction that can’t get past the rigidity of the formula. The violence, which is meant to be flat so as to deny us the hypocritical catharsis of most anti-revenge pictures, is indistinguishable from the tedium of the rest of the movie. One wonders how much of a hand the co-director Lucky McKee, of the also mixed up-but-promising horror pictures May and The Woods, as well as the unwatchable Roman, had in this mess. Can someone please give the man a budget and a timeline greater than two weekends and wait and see? McKee at his best promises something rare in even good horror pictures – empathy. The problem, though, may be that the qualities of McKee’s pictures aren’t meant to co-exist – he may not have the deranged, rebellious wit of a born horror filmmaker – he still wants the kids in P.E. to like him. McKee’s searching makes his clichés go limp when they should pop – as in the best parts of Rob Zombie’s movies.
I’m tempted to wish more money and encouragement in Stuart Gordon’s direction, but he seems to be doing fine without me, and that might only ruin him anyway - the equivalent of an interesting supporting actor going franchise-boring as soon as he wins an Oscar nomination. I can’t think of a director off the top of my head whose violence is more durable -Gordon’s biggest picture is the justifiably well-regarded Re-Animator, but he’s since continued to knock out increasingly sleek-vicious-funny horror pictures of a particularly sensual-satirically funky key. Dagon, occasionally crippled by inadequate funding, still has mood and an unsettling scene of violation – a perverse spoof of emasculation that paved the way for Edmond, Gordon’s film of Mamet’s play that trumps Mamet’s obviousness with unsettlingly plain, tickled, matter-of-factness; the picture, as pure Mamet as Mamet can get, could also almost be a spoof of Mamet in equal measure, and therein lies the appeal of Gordon’s touch – a flair for chameleon genre pictures that are deconstructionists in one light, revelers in the other. Gordon’s new picture, Stuck, seemingly as simple and straightforward as its title, also flirts with riding into the final frontier, the last taboo, of the American horror picture – economic collapse – but Gordon, no surprise, doesn’t play to the “common man” cheap seats. The picture nudges us, screws with us, indulges in sharp-daft hyperbole (most notably in an indulgent fuck-fest that’s a wink at the so-called sex in most mainstream movies) and then goes brutal. Every mood is given its fair due.
Stuck would work if Gordon’s sensibility was the only thing to enjoy, his pictures have trumped weak performances in the past, but that, bracingly, isn’t the case here. Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea, as folks caught in a bizarre chamber power play, are perfectly in tune. Gordon brought something out of Suvari in her brief turn in Edmond – she was commandingly off, and sexy, in a part similar to the one she overdid a few years prior in American Beauty. Divorced from the banalities of aspiring stardom, Suvari tapped into something that had the potential to make her star – provided the right part came along. Stuck moves Suvari in the right direction, but real horror movies aren’t marketed these days. Too bad. In Stuck, Suvari expands on all of her promising bits in Edmond – she’s a rare thing for our generation in these two films – an attractive, funny, controlled, menacing, flake. Rea is as strong as I’ve seen – playing a pleasant, average, bent-over guy without telling us he’s overly pleased with his character’s normalcy – which allows us to come to him, legitimizing the gore. The gore is (intentionally) the only thing that hits you over the head in Stuck, by the end you’ve realized you’ve seen something full and playful and disturbing, something gleefully lacking in the need to pronounce its credentials. Stuck has something that the younger horror filmmakers, in their obsessions to remake old movies at the expense of everything else, lack – a relatable, casual, downtown worldview – a simple heartbreak – the kind of dependable disappointment that drives you to four beers and a shot after work, to celebrate Wednesday as “hump” day. Stuck has something to do with what nails us down every day, and why we’ll fight for our privilege to have five more minutes of it.
W. and Appaloosa (2008)
For a major presence in American movies, Oliver Stone has startling limitations, and they surface most obviously in his overrated 1980s melodramas, such as Platoon, Wall Street and Born on the Fourth of July. As a writer, Stone thinks in rudimentary terms - his characters are defined by too-studied platitudes, and actual life rarely intrudes or surprises. To call Stone one note is to understate it - you’re lucky if a 1980s Stone picture approaches one note - they’re lurid, off Frank Capra pictures with guilty freshman student faux-poetry, and their moralistic theses can be suffocating - the moralizing springing, like Scorsese, from a place of torment and contradiction, a thirst for atonement. In the 1990s, Stone came down with a case of pure filmmaking fever that lanced his schematic clichés – he developed one of the more sophisticated and exhilarating eyes in all American movies. The choked feelings that tried to emerge in the 1980s films found a voice – the writing had barely changed, but the visual tone, the mood and the tempo - exploding from just about every exploitation and violation of film grammar imaginable - touched on what was eluding the page. Stone’s best pictures - JFK, the first half of Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U-Turn - approximate how id affects memory, and these pictures play in a way that audiences, and even Stone probably, can’t quite put their finger on. Stone bravely embraced his instincts, more than justifying the shortcomings of the earlier pictures. The 1990s Stone pictures still pounded notes over and over - but the sledgehammer now had an unchecked, raw quality. Stone made the inner that was limiting him as a filmmaker the outer - a major achievement. People who fact-check JFK or Nixon miss the point - these pictures have a mystery, and a pain, that’s more authentic than matching the dates with the years. Stone, unfettered by the need to recreate history, recreated history - how it chokes and winds us up.
It takes Oliver Stone’s lack of restraint to take on George W. Bush right here and now, but that lack of restraint blocks him in a way that closer resembles his 1980s pictures. The ever shifting stock-color-jump-cut-footage-speed tapestry has been discarded, and that’s appropriate - Stone is after the present, not the past; but a self-consciously state-of-things time capsule can hand-cuff the greatest of filmmakers, and it swings the emphasis back to Stone’s naiveté, his conviction that we’re each defined by one convenient-solvable skeleton in the closet. The American President has a more mature grasp of political and emotional currents and how they define and pervert one another. The personalities of George W. and his network of family and advisors (the same thing) have been boiled down to “personalities” in a fascinating yet dreadful stew of parody and empathy. Stone latches onto Bush’s perceived daddy issues and tediously refuses to shake it loose. Reveling in his empathy, Stone reaches too far and too shallow in the opposite direction. W. is the making of a monster movie, or, better yet, Wall Street (they share the same writer) with Bush cast as both the Michael Douglas and the Charlie Sheen characters. W. is a stilted, choppy, walled-off picture; an attempt to make sense of a string of government catastrophes and uncertainty that goes both too far and not far enough tonally. The picture only bites when Stone the hyperbolist occasionally, jarringly, surfaces: moments of George W. mowing through a burger like a shark - chewing, chewing, chewing; or with a priest, played by Stacy Keach no less, who would be more at home in an occult thriller.
Three types of filmgoers may go for W.: the indiscriminate, the Bush supporters clamoring for sympathy at the expense of drama, and the auteur theorists who enjoy phrases such as “flawed masterpiece” and do back-flips turning every movie by a name into a hidden classic. The intentional and the unintentional are difficult to sort out here, that’s a challenge with most any Stone film, and there is, admittedly, a subtext of super-star strangulation that gives this picture a chilling-funny under-layer. Incorporating a traditional assortment of old and new big names, Stone treats us to an uncomfortable sight - of magnetic actors squeezing and sweating to suppress their natural energy and light to fit convincingly into the political mannequin roles that we’ve grown too accustomed to seeing and hearing outside of the cinema. These actors’ contortions have an unsettling, dehumanizing effect – they (accidentally, I think) deconstruct the radiation given off by the political machine. W. is a bad movie, but its badness is harder to shake than most, more conventionally competent, films. Brolin? He reminded more of his father than of Bush, but his W. is the strongest part of W., a feat considering the likelihood of embarrassment involved in Stone’s conceit of the role. Josh Brolin is undoubtedly a major star now; he survived his first post-coming out movie intact, and found a charisma, conviction, and somehow authentically inauthentic heartache amongst the wreckage.
Genre pictures can be more honest than the A-list movies we pretend to like each year, because they have to appeal to our true wants and needs – the durability of their clichés testifies to what our true preoccupations are. Appaloosa is a one of the most purely enjoyable films I’ve seen this year, because it, without making a show of it, happily discards all the revisionist-apologetic bullshit that’s been plaguing the Western lately. The picture, directed by star Ed Harris, also, in its own way, reflects what W. fails to – our broken, violent frustration with a broken, violent thing. The first two acts are the usual (scary, well-staged, funny) genre huffing and puffing, but the third act, when the bad guy is caught only to buy his way out of it, hints at the political paranoia and resignation that haunts our television sets. Harris resolves his picture the genre way, but the finale is unexpectedly touching - the bad guy in question, played by a typically-wonderfully debauched, self-pleased Jeremy Irons, may be down, but a friendship has been destroyed; and that registers more than usual because Harris, in one of his best performances in years, has such a fine, unexpectedly warm, back-and-forth with an equally vivid Viggo Mortensen. This picture has a poignant, more modern than usual (again without applauding itself for it) attitude toward relationships, including Harris’ eventual romance with “the girl”, here played by Renee Zellweger, who betrays him every chance she gets. Appaloosa, a shoot ‘em up, is more profound than the labored, plastic W., it understands why we check out – we want the comfort we feel our leaders have forgotten we want.
The Happening (2008)
I went with a friend to a free screening of Quarantine a few days ago, and the picture is as good a B-programmer released from Screen Gems to pay the bills during Halloween as you’re likely to expect or receive. The picture has an appealing William Castle quality that it sadly undercuts with violence too explicit and off-putting for such a frivolous, stupid movie. You want to laugh with it, but there’s a queasiness to it that belongs in a major horror picture. Quarantine still, despite amateurish performances, more effectively evokes societal breakdown than M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, The Happening. Shyamalan has seemingly succumbed to a disease common in our newer generations of filmmakers – he strives to “auteur” himself prematurely. Shyamalan, a wannabe Hitchcock or Spielberg, acts as both a filmmaker and his own critic-champion - his own Truffaut or Kael - defending him against those who wish to write him off as a reveler in genre muck. Shyamalan is a victim of our magic-bullet-quick-fix-want-it-now culture, he doesn’t have the patience to spend years turning out forgettable to efficient to brilliant thrillers with little to no appreciation; he seeks knighthood now, before he’s conquered the beast and entertained us effectively, consistently. And, until Lady in the Water, the snow-job has worked, because Shyamalan does have a primal talent – he has none of Spielberg or Hitchcock’s range, but there is a similar instinct for the little mundane things that accumulate to dread. Shyamalan could be a first class genre filmmaker if he could ever cut the auteur quest and drop the pop-religious-uplift banality that’s equal parts ego, condescension, and embarrassing naiveté.
There’s also an equal-opposite weakness to Shyamalan’s proficiency in shallow thriller mechanics - a startling ineptitude with emotional texture. Shyamalan’s debt to The Twilight Zone has been widely acknowledged, and I keep waiting for one of his films to nab the punch line of one of the most unsettling episodes, where the heroine discovers she’s a mannequin, on temporary vacation from imprisonment in a warehouse. All of Shyamalan’s pictures, unknowingly, are working toward this chillingly irrational joke. No Shyamalan character has ever been allowed a convincing reaction to the otherworldly, or even worldly, traumas that grip them. The children are drones, creepy little adults incapable of panic or irritation. The adults are Antonioni or Kubrick characters, without the irony built in. Shyamalan rips off all the right people to support his hubris, but he perversely borrows all of the right legends’ worst tendencies: Hitchcock’s plot at the expense of character; Kubrick’s tonal monotony; Spielberg’s desperate homespun pathos; Antonioni’s fashion statement ennui.
The crap rises to the top in The Happening, because Shyamalan’s gifts for misdirection – his slow-burn timing, his movie-sense composition – abandon him here, and all that remains is the flat, amateurish-expository dialogue and the school-prig moralizing. Imagine a fourth rate Bergman remaking The Day of the Triffids and you’re close to the strange mixture of art and genre constipation that grips The Happening, which is essentially a weak-sauce retread of Shyamalan’s canniest picture, Signs. The Happening is one of the worst mainstream big-budget studio pictures I can remember seeing; it’s a full, dispiriting, approximation of what a talented-pretentious high school student would do with a few B-stars and sixty million dollars. And there’s, even for Shyamalan, an offensive, appalling breach of common sense that works its way towards insensitivity. Facing a potential collapse of society, a father leaves his wife behind so she can buy a gift. Having predictably lost his wife, the same father leaves his little girl behind so he can find the wife. The little girl, of course, takes it all in the usual flat, mute, glass-eyed stride that’s essential of all Shyamalan children. Another’s wife, faced with said collapse of society, confesses her deepest betrayal to her husband – a rendezvous with a co-worker over tiramisu. Shyamalan’s humor has always been labored, but here it’s something worse than embarrassing: his humor, and overall temperament, is supernaturally disconnected from anything resembling American middle-class life. Recent Spielberg pictures have been accused of being out-of-touch, and those criticisms are half-and-half on-the-mark, but those critics haven’t seen anything yet.
Many brilliant-great-good-ok directors make bad pictures, but The Happening, and parts of The Village and Lady in the Water, are so bad they retroactively deteriorate our enjoyment of the Shyamalan pictures that worked or most worked, such as Unbreakable and most of Signs. The Happening is the cinematic equivalent of pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz, and our deflation at a once promising talent is similar to Dorothy’s. Put Mel Brooks’ name on The Happening and you have his most precise parody since Young Frankenstein. The very premise of the picture is oddly, accidentally, revealing – the world is forced to outrun, and own up to, air. Shyamalan, to survive as a filmmaker, will have to come to terms with (hot) air himself.
Just Two Moments with Paul Newman.
Paul Newman, a legend with a glorious, famously high resistance to fluffery, would’ve most likely preferred we keep our remarks of his death clean and muscular. That’s the brilliance of Newman’s great work anyway, there’s no “brilliance”, no ticks ready-made for critics to tack adjectives onto (unless that was the joke). A Paul Newman performance, even in pictures below him, is one of the great pleasure of cinema of all walks and colors – a Paul Newman performance is a Jean Renoir picture within one – a generous, humane thing that confidently risks passing by unnoticed – providing you’re fool enough not to notice. Paul Newman normally didn’t hide behind his enviable looks with self-conscious bruises or noses (one wishes that Leonardo DiCaprio, a talent, would follow suit) he simply gloriously was, with a remarkably generous empathy with the audience watching him. Many stars, even the great ones, swallow themselves up - allowing their continual struggles for brilliance of truth (or beauty) to dominate their performances. For Newman that was nonsense; he understood that happiness and despair needn’t always manifest themselves in tangible, actor-ly “meanings” and symbols and contortions – they usually took the form of pumping your gas or drinking your coffee, or seeing, fleetingly, the guarded part of a woman you aren’t supposed to see.
Paul Newman had a quick, sure physical wit, a command of gesture and body. The Color of Money is a good movie that could’ve been great if Martin Scorsese hadn’t buried it under his – in this context – ridiculous auteur-Catholic-redemption obsessions, but it has one of the sharpest, most telling, expressions Newman ever graced a movie with (saying something). Newman, as the broken, sly, privately embittered “Fast” Eddie Felson, watches Tom Cruise’s Vince plead with a loser to keep playing nine-ball with him; it’s a game, a mocking earnestness with which Vince is only partially aware. The loser, John Turturro, starts walking, and Cruise offers to play without money - to see his best game. Newman’s response is a quick-slow glance of shock – this kid’ll eventually get himself killed - that’s also electric with possibility. This Eddie, miles from the beaming ego of the early passages of The Hustler, who’s now selling cheap booze and backing other players, sees in this kid’s talented-manic, comically deformed inability to self-censor, a rebirth. All in two seconds. Scorsese, sadly, undervalues Newman’s economy and keeps piling it on, slowing the movement of the typically tangy-poetic Richard Price writing. (Scorsese’s merging of personal demons and pop would be surer in his “Life Lessons” portion of New York Stories, also scripted by Price.)
Only Paul Newman was capable of this particular two seconds. Most would’ve overplayed, or underplayed, or overplayed their underplaying (though Michael Shannon implies a similar command in this year’s Shotgun Stories). Newman knew exactly how much to give and how far to push – he stylized (unavoidable to an extent – he’s undeniably Someone Else) without calling attention to his stylization – he was an everyman movie star who embodied, fully, the varying contradictions of those terms. Newman’s characters – Luke, Sully, Butch, Billy, Hud, Frank – felt our pain, gave our pain its due, while still glorifying the pain to the point that we expect, demand, from our movies. Paul Newman epitomized the notion that we’re all the stars of our lives; and he breathed into that idea both truth and fantasy – the definition of a true movie star. Paul Newman was a movie star who pushed being a movie star to the point of great acting. Everything is controlled and united in a great Paul Newman performance, but there’s little that can, without doing him a disservice, be said or written of a great Paul Newman performance; because the effort behind those words and praise implies an effort that’s never actually revealed in the work.
It was aging Newman that struck me, despite the iconic highs of his youthful work, in my most primal down-home place. As Sully, another train-wreck of a man led to nothing by the scattershot desire to be everything, Paul Newman gave possibly the performance of his life – it captured everything that we loved about him from young to old – the contradictions, the charm-insolence, the righteousness, the resignation, the player, the wit, the comedian, and, ultimately, the aging man who carried, breathlessly, all our resignations on his shoulders – someone of something tattered and pure at once. Nobody’s Fool is the one picture of Robert Benton’s that I’ve seen that I unreservedly like much less adore (it’s small town sugar sold just right), and Newman’s performance is key; besides its own value it also appears to inform the swiftness of all the other gifted actors who surround him (an influence, again, typical to great Newman). At one point Sully assures his dispirited, self-disgusted co-worker Rub (Pruitt Taylor Vince) that his adult son will never come between them. He’s my son, you’re my best friend, Sully rasps in that graceful-up-down-no-bullshit cadence that only Newman could summon. Rub tries to choke tears, and Sully kills the awkwardness in the flip way, that way we all do when faced with something revealing and vulnerable and embarrassing. The scene hangs with you. You watch it and you know that you’re seeing one of the best moments in Rub’s life, a moment of simple, direct, unaffected affection. The scene works so well because it plays, directly, on how we, ourselves, respond to people like Paul Newman. You don’t praise Paul Newman for a performance as you would the performances of most other great actors; you thank him for it.
Posted on October 8th, 2008 in Rants | 10 Comments
Elegy (2008)
Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal is a trim 150 pages, but it plays longer – you feel as if you’ve lived and fought with it; with the aging, egotistical man who spends the length of the book ranting and ranting and ranting. The man is a cultural critic, and he uses his honed faculties as a weapon and permit for self-absorption. A womanizer up in his years, the critic seethes with backhanded need and bitterness and regret dressed as entitlement that’s still, underneath, actual entitlement, which eventually gives way to terror. The Dying Animal is primarily the critic’s dissertation on a former lover, a much younger Cuban woman who, throughout the narrative, remains distressingly vague – her humanity is the critic’s preconceptions of her youth and elusive beauty. The Dying Animal is a May-December romance torn apart, the pieces lying on the sidewalk. Roth’s novel is startlingly angry, passionate, dirty and alive – his words trip on one another, sidetracking from rationalization to rationalization – reveling, driving to penetrate… what? That’s not so certain, though it has something to do with sex as anesthetic for mortality, but that sounds clichéd, and undersells what The Dying Animal ultimately achieves. Roth redeems and transcends summary with ambiguity and clear-headedness. Roth eventually gets to something true of most all of us – that we dodge death through clichés, but he does so in a way that’s life affirming without being “life affirming”, he affirms life by refusing to boil it down. The ending is haunting – faced with the collapse of his false idol, the critic considers fleeing, he’s too old, too deeply entrenched in his narcotics, to allow decency to interfere with illusion. The novel is somehow self-absorbed – enthralled with Roth’s image – and tender, it’s a magic trick.
Reverse that and you have Isabel Coixet’s adaptation, Elegy. The title change is honest at least, this picture, like the Roth book-to-film The Human Stain, is another production that mistakes reverence for fidelity. The danger with Roth, as with other writers of comparable stature, is that his greatness seems to constipate filmmakers; they don’t wish to offend him, which may be exactly what he wants. Coixet stages the picture in that fine, false, consciously blocked Oscar way, and the performances are, largely, as good as they can be, but Elegy is conventional, and the characters are types. These types worked in the Roth novel because he painted them ironically, but Elegy is just another love story. That, in itself, would be ok, but why interfere with Roth’s work for the sake of formula? I was just bored for an hour or so, but near the end I was working toward offense – the ending endorses the platitudes the novel dismantled.
The good news: Ben Kingsley continues to prove he’s a stronger, more forceful actor in mediocre dramas or genre pictures – he’s an embodiment of our country’s obsession with age and extending potency (making him ideal for a real stab at this material). Once an on-screen saint, Kingsley has allowed advancing age to free him of his self-consciousness. Kingsley – taut, sharp, with a sly, lacerating sense of humor, has an ease that women may wish more men had, as well as a vigor and unpredictability associated with youth - the best of several worlds. Kingsley carries his years of off-and-on acclaim with him in Elegy, he has a baggage that compliments the part in clipped, exciting ways - managing to cut the sentiment in places. Kingsley nearly saves two nowhere strands – strained relationships with an old lover (Patricia Clarkson) and son (Peter Saarsgard). Saarsgard has nothing to work with, he’s a flat limp noodle, but Clarkson is a more of a waste. A once interesting actress, Clarkson is falling into a trap – as I’ve said before the Julianne Moore syndrome - of turning to formula misery in performance after performance. The former lover had a few of the strongest passages in The Dying Animal, but Clarkson doesn’t project the stung fading beauty that lent the moments their power – she’s too self-reliant, too cocooned and unwilling to challenge the part. Watching Clarkson’s second or third scene in the picture, I wanted desperately to get back to Penélope Cruz –
- who doesn’t have much either. Cruz, sadly, after such wonderful work in Volver and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is back to the sort of role that strangled her in earlier American pictures. Cruz is a playing an ideal – a flawed man’s path to redemption, and that’s a hoary old bit of bullshit that’s all but unplayable. It’s admirable that Cruz gets as far as she does, but she isn’t allowed the fire that Roth gave the character – and so the shock of the ending is lost. The character, facing death, loses her primal draw – but that’s missing in Elegy from the beginning. The movie is too polite – it doesn’t want to upset our boring talk of it during dinner afterwards. The picture has no blood, no messiness, no desperate primal thrust – the fucking here is the usual art-movie stuff, which means there’s nothing. The arguments, once inflamed and personal, are well-considered and flaccid here; the fevered concern of dying is also lost, because no one’s alive to begin with.
More good news: I enjoyed Dennis Hopper, his part is the screenplay’s most egregious voicing of subtext, but he exudes an unhurried warmth that I’ve never seen from him before, and his chemistry with Kingsley is the one truly pleasurable thing in the movie. And Hopper’s final moment has a faint whisper of the source material – he’s a man lost and humbled – facing something that could be nothing masked as everything, or vice versa.
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