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 Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
I don’t always respond to films where the cinematography could be listed as a co-star. I generally find them self-important and boring (Sam Mendes’ movies come to mind). These are generally the sort of movies where a character spouts some sort of “Sometimes in life you have to blah, blah” nonsense. Everyone involved wins an Oscar, the critics calls the film a “masterpiece” and the audience forgets the film until Miramax puts a Best Picture box set together.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a different breed of movie. The cinematography (by the amazing Roger Deakins) isn’t masturbation here, its at constant, poignant odds with the characters on screen. Jesse James has the look of something that could be meticulously composed, stately, lifeless and Oscar ready in lesser hands, but that, in Andrew Dominik’s film, is partially the point. The characters are trying to live up to the sort of false iconography that most movies offer (though the media of choice at the time would’ve been little paperbacks, penny dreadfuls I think), but their emotions are continually betraying and revealing them. Men cry at several instances in Jesse James and those scenes are more shocking than any of the graphic murders we see committed.
The outlaws of the film are all trying to be outlaws on the scale of Jesse James himself, who’s embodied here by Brad Pitt, in his best performance. Pitt has proven himself a star of considerable charm and charisma in past films, but I’ve never really bought his too self-conscious “actor” performances as much, particularly his overwrought turn in 12 Monkeys, where Bruce Willis should have been the one getting all of that attention.
Pitt is superb here: iconic, haunted, diseased, insane, elusive, with eyes that seem to be constantly shifting, changing perspective. There is something vampiric about Pitt’s Jesse James, or maybe its just the celebrity that dogs him constantly. There’s a mesmerizing scene about halfway through the film where James, rightfully suspicious that the Ford boys are up to something, stares through Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) as he offers an indulgent comparison between himself and James. Dominik keeps the camera on Pitt’s eyes, and they’re scarier than anything I watched in the first week of my Halloween series.
The film, as many people have been quick to point out, is long, but not indulgent. The extra running time allows us to fully soak in the texture and sound of scenes such as the above one, or an early scene between Frank James (Sam Shepard) and Ford that captures the constant alert that probably acompanied the life of an outlaw. In this early scene we get a glimpse of the Hell of the James’ lives, and we see Ford cluelessly tromping into it.
The Hell of celebrity is the one area where Jesse James risks heavy handedness though. I can buy Dominik’s view of the celebrity culture as transmitted disease, but I sense that he’s stacking the deck a bit. We see none of the fun that comes with being one of the most famous people in the world. None of the privileges, none of the favors, none of the initial ego boost. I think a hint of this would’ve added just that much more contrast to the melancholy that hangs over the entire film.
This is a minor issue with a full, vast film that still manages to work tonal wonders throughout. Jesse James, the character, is remarkably unsympathetic here, its as honest a portrayal of a real person as distorted by folk myth that I’ve ever seen. Robert Ford is even more complex, I sympathized with him initially, then, like the James’ I saw him as an opportunistic, shallow little worm. Then, as he’s vilified later in the film, I sympathized again, because he’s hated for doing things that are no more despicable than the acts of Jesse James himself. But timing is everything, and the public is fickle.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a great, great movie and my post here has only captured a bit of it. Is it a masterpiece? I think that movie writers, whether paid or voluntary, use that word too quickly in the hopes that they are the first person to correctly label a real masterpiece. I suspect that this film is, but it will still be around in a few years to receive the praise if it turns out to be true. Let’s wait and see.
3:10 to Yuma (2007)
I think 3:10 to Yuma was the movie director James Mangold had on his mind when he shot the star heavy Cop Land in 1997. Both films deal with an elemental man’s man morality set against a backdrop that doesn’t really give a whit about such things, and both are grounded in the old school meat and potatoes pleasures of the films of yesteryear. The kind of movies your grandparents say they don’t make anymore, but then again, they usually haven’t seen a movie since then to begin with.
Cop Land didn’t totally work. It had its moments, but Mangold’s sensibility seemed a bit quaint for a film that employed half of Martin Scorsese’s repertory (it bought into Stallone’s Marty character a little too whole heartedly). Walk the Line, another Mangold film, is immensely entertaining, but it left me wondering why a man as large and looming and conflicted as Johnny Cash was reduced to the same musical biography we’ve been seeing for twenty, thirty, forty years.
3:10 to Yuma fits just right. It’s kind of a square picture, and its not surprising in the least, but its unsurprising and square in a way that you find yourself craving after years of pumped up Hollywood “entertainment”. Sadly, a film that so firmly puts its eggs in one basket (”story”) very nearly qualifies as an art film these days.
We know the scenario going in. Russell Crowe is an outlaw. Christian Bale is the desperate man who finds himself helping turn Crowe over the authorities for an amount of money that would’ve been irrestible to most men those days, much less one who’s about to lose his ranch to corrupt townsfolk.
Crowe’s going to get all of the attention for this picture, he’s refound his slow burn authority, but Bale is the performance that saves the film, and keeps it afloat. On paper, Bale has the Stallone Cop Land part, the relentlessly moral, gimpy guy who can’t catch any breaks (Mangold needs to get over this relentless urge to stack the deck) but Bale has too much something, drive, electricity, to play to the audience in such a way. Bale explores the character’s less sentimental, more truthful, side and hints at an ego that might be the driving force of some of his hardship.
Crowe is most certainly back here (after the sluggish, hypocritical A Good Year) but the part of outlaw Ben Wade is a bit more catering to “cool” than Bale’s. Crowe gets all of the best lines, the majority of the better stunts, and (this is a problem) is not even really that much of a bad man. I know what some of you are thinking: Chuck is rebelling against complexity and shading in a film! No. I’m (mildly) rebelling against muddled storytelling born out of the ego of one of our biggest (and most talented) stars.
I’d usually give it a pass, but Wade’s “I’m a bad man, but I know it and I’m educated and sexy and only kill ones who deserve it” bit causes a few problems in the third act, particularly the climax. 3:10 to Yuma builds to a nifty us against the town shoot out, but you may find yourself contemplating the point of it all, particularly when Crowe could just call the whole damn thing off.
This issue is far from a deal breaker though. 3:10 to Yuma is a Hollywood genre movie that’s very well served by Mangold and his cast, and its as purely entertaining as anything I’ve seen this year. Mangold has found his nitch, and I for one vote that he sticks to it. Besides, star ego was as much a part of “Old Hollywood” as anything else.
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