Eastern Promises (2007)
First, let me answer the question that all of you really want to know. Yes, Viggo Mortensen shows his nuts in a fight scene of staggering brutality. Was that the question? Maybe you actually wanted to know if the new David Cronenberg film was actually any good?
For the moment, and I’m reserving the right to change my mind down the road, I’m marking pretty good on my Eastern Promises ballot. It’s clear now after seeing the film what drew Cronenberg to the material, but I’m a little more curious as to why he settled for this particular script. Steven Knight, the screenwriter, also penned Dirty Pretty Things, a film that I found obvious and boring, and more than a little draped in un-fun, un-scary, un-perverse Oscar prestige. Nothing lowers the stakes of a thriller faster than delusions of the Golden Man.
Eastern Promises is a more effective and memorable film than Dirty Pretty Things, and that’s because Cronenberg injects the material with a kinky subtext of unchecked evil. The diary that Naomi’s Watt’s midwife, Anna, finds here is a bit like the ear in Blue Velvet, a naive hero’s passport to the id.
Lynch’s hero was, like many of us would or hope we would be, tempted by the pleasures of the underneath. We don’t have so much luck with Naomi Watts, I’m afraid. That’s a shame too, because Watts is one of the most unaffected, artifice free actresses working in the movies today.
The contrast between Anna’s personality (haunted, conservative) and wardrobe (tight leather jacket and jeans), seems to promise an object of erotic confusion that the film’s script doesn’t quite have the imagination for. Watts has proved, in Mulholland Drive, that she has the good girl lured by the bad in her, but here she’s Mrs. McGuffin, and its a testament to Watts’ talent that she brings it off as well as she does.
Viggo Mortensen, who previously teamed with Cronenberg in A History of Violence, gets to have all of the fun, and its the actor’s best work. His Nikolai, who with those shades looks uncannily like Ed Harris in Violence, is the film’s central mystery, an inverse of the his Tom Stall in Violence. I won’t comment on the extent of the two characters’ parallels, but I will say that Mortensen is an iconic figure of quiet, slow burn menace here. Mortensen never makes the mistake of trying to be a badass, which is of course the wussiest thing a would be badass could do.
Eastern Promises is structurally interesting in that the majority of the plot’s running time is dominated by a red herring. The film’s true interest remains at the sidelines, and we are forced to leave this world much sooner than tradtional films condition us to expect. Yes, Cronenberg pulls the fade to black three beats sooner than you expect gambit here, only much more is left in the open this time, and its a daringly perverse anti-climax. It’s thriller blue balls, the foreground heroes get what they want while the background schemesters ensure that the world remains a shitty place anyway.
There are other Cronenberg niches to be explored here: the tattoos, the shady not quite defined transactions on the sidelines, the seductive rot of night time London. All of this is impressive, and the first hour of Eastern Promises is confident and intriguing. The disappointment is that Cronenberg’s craftsmanship has been recruited to serve an underwhelming script. The plot points are obvious, and a third act surprise is an infuriatingly conventional bust.
See the film. It’s an interesting example of what a very talented, personal filmmaker brings to outside material, and its richly executed, but its, especially for a director of Cronenberg’s skill, not quite enough.
Hardcore (1979)
When Paul Schrader’s chilly, distant, intellectualized sensibility fits the subject matter
(Affliction, Autofocus, portions of his
Exorcist) the results can be extraordinary. When they don’t, and they don’t fit
Hardcore, his films feel like particularly boring, borderline inhumane exhibits at the Calvinist Guilt Science Emporium Road Show.
Schrader’s bad films are all theory, no feeling or story, you grab what he’s dealing with without giving the slightest of damns what happens. This is why Martin Scorsese was such an ideal interpreter of Schrader’s work. Scorsese isn’t perfect, and he can be overrated in stretches, but he understands, lives and dramatizes feverish obsession and guilt like nobody’s business.
Hardcore, like portions of the Scorsese-Schrader Taxi Driver, was evidently informed by that particular generation of directors’ pre-occupaton with The Searchers. You wouldn’t have to read too deep to get that here. George C. Scott is Jake, but he’s playing a haunted, immovable man of few words in the Wayne in The Searchers mode, only here Scott’s superiority isn’t under examination.
From the get go Scott is above the pornographers who’ve apparently made off with his daughter and there’s no friction or temptation. Scott is a prig here, the kind of character Harvey Keitel’s Sport assumes DeNiro to be in Taxi Driver, and if there wasn’t a little girl mixed up in this, you’d probably root for the pornographers.
I counted exactly one human moment in Hardcore and that’s early on when we can hear the strains of Neil Young’s haunting “Helpless” as Scott questions a porn clerk about a movie his daughter appeared in. That and Peter Boyle’s amusing supporting performance are it.
Review: Scarface (1932)
Like many of my generation, I first encountered
Scarface as a very violent Brian DePalma film that was released in the early 1980s (didn’t see it til the early 1990s, my parents weren’t
that permissive). The credits of that film obviously cite the Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht movie, and I further read about it (very scrambled memories being assembled for narrative momentum here) in something that filmmaker Francois Truffaut wrote, something that commended the Boris Karloff murder scene as represented by the falling of a bowling pin. I think Truffaut also said that Paul Muni, as the titular Tony Camonte, gave a startlingly apeish performance in the role. I almost saw this film in college but a mishap prevented that.
Seven or eight years later, I’ve finally caught up with Hawks’ blunt, brutal, lean, inventive, badass gangster picture, and its so nice to be able to say that a classic film is every bit as good as its considerable reputation, and actually (barring a few exceptions) ages better than the fifty years younger remake that it inspired. The DePalma film is exhilarating and live wire in places, but it is very much a part of the 1980s. With the exception of a laughable intro card that was probably insisted upon by the censors, the old Scarface ages exceptionally well, and is a remarkably perverse picture, certainly one of the best criminal gluttony movies ever made.
Paul Muni owns this. Yes, the acting, even from him, is a bit more presentational than we are used to, but that suits the part of a low rent gangster who flies too close to the sun to a tee, he’s supposed to seem a bit obvious, and brutish. I imagine that this role was very influential in how many great actors would approach the fall of the crime lord movie. Muni shows you the brute, the gaudy showoff, but he intimates the calculation behind that, and the animal hunger that’s behind even that. Camonte is a complete creature of impulse, and its that impulse that causes him to topple. The more morally murky, too little too late motivations behind Tony’s sacking in the later film is non-existent here.
In the finish of this film, Paul Muni has essentially become King Kong (Truffaut was right), and, though much more vicious and unforgiving than that ape, a similar pathos arises as Muni chokes on tear gas and writhes and collapses in a hail of bullets. This ending was probably originally meant to be played as unquestionably happy, but Muni has brought too much life, vigor and uncontainable need for it us to accept it so patly.
Hawks, one of the most respected directors of all time, seems to be roused by Muni and the subject matter. Hawks is a master craftsman, no doubt, but he’s not usually a showy guy, his patterns usually emerge in theme more than camera pyrotechnics. His work in Scarface is flamboyant, and playful, with enough death metaphor for ten movies, or half of The Departed. One of Muni’s other super famous performances, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, has been sitting around my house forever, unwatched. That will soon change.
Review: The Lookout (2007)
Scott Frank, one of the best lowlife-noir-crime genre screenwriters of the past decade, has decided to direct as well as write his latest, The Lookout, and the result is about as good as you’d hope, and in key with what Frank’s work is typically all about: no bullshit meat and potatoes craftmanship, story over ego. “The Lookout” has a straight forward, ready built for noir set up: a guy blinded by his desires getting involved in something out of his league, but there also seems to be a gentler character study struggling to get out, a more “Nobody’s Fool”-ish requiem for lost dreams, to never escaping your small town. This second thread humanizes the characters and steers “The Lookout” away from feeling like an exercise, but it also, like many genre splices, divides your attention. I almost felt as if I were watching two very promising, not quite there movies in place of one solid, coherent whole.
Our protaganist is Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Once a sharp, popular high school hockey ace, Pratt, at the height of his promise, makes an exceedingly stupid decision that costs a few of his friends their lives and leaves him scarred and brain damaged. Cut to four years later, and Pratt is a shambling shadow of himself, struggling to remember what he did just a few hours ago, working nights as a janitor at a bank, and having to tolerate the collective condescension of his entire hometown who once had much higher hopes for him. Well, except for Lewis (Jeff Daniels), his caustic, blind roommate who sees a little of himself in Chris’s self-loathing.
Pratt has figurative, and most likely literal, blue balls, a bubbling restless rage with himself, a hopeless prisoner to his own limitations. He’s the perfect mark. One night, as Chris is nursing a non-alcoholic beer at a bar (he can’t drink), and sheepishly trying to strike up a conversation with a young woman a few seats down, Gary Spargo (Mathew Goode), a sharp, good looking man who claims to remember Chris from the good old days, approaches, and wouldn’t you know it, he knows this knockout who used to have a crush on Chris back in high school…
Levitt, Daniels and Goode are terrific, and would be worth seeing “The Lookout” for even if it were a shoddier enterprise. Goode, in particular, stood out to me, probably because I don’t know him as well as the other two (I’m getting greedy with Levitt and Daniels, expecting brilliant, lived in characters every time out, as unappreciative as this sounds, they haven’t let me down yet.) Goode nearly stole the show in “Match Point” a few years prior, and his work here, while scuzzier, seamier, is not entirely dissimilar. He’s sexy self-entitlement, the guy who gets all the girls with a jolting malevolence at his core. Goode’s Gary Spargo, tall, slim, with close cropped hair, looks like a six foot weasel.
I’m not interested in discussing any more of the plot, but, rest assured, if you’ve seen more than one two time loser finds the wrong fix movies in your life, you’ll find this one easy to call, and Frank knows that. The pleasure of “The Lookout” is the telling, the mood, Frank’s facility with down home dialogue that reveals more than even the speaker realizes. Frank builds his film so well, that I felt a mild pang of disappointment when we reach the inevitably violent third act. I wanted to see these characters in a shaggier movie, free from the conventions of the three act morality tale, or, I wanted to see these characters in a harder, crazier three act morality tale. Still, its churlish to complain, “The Lookout” is a disciplined, confident ninety five minutes at the movies, with a few performances that stick to the ribs even while some of the plot specifics grow fuzzy.
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