They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)
Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? suffers from too much “art”. The picture has a haunting, bizarre, taken from true events premise: in the midst of the Great Depression, a punishing dance-off is staged. The contestants, a variety of the poorest and most desperate, subject themselves to weeks of unending shaking and twirling, punctuated only by fleeting naps; and meals in which they are required to move while chewing. There’s also, seemingly timed to perfectly coincide with the dancers’ most vulnerable moments, race-offs, which eliminate couples at a faster clip and further underline the human-as-cattle motif of the program. An announcer (Gig Young) periodically chimes in with contrived, chilling, “humanity”, which is pitched in rehearsed, energetic blasts of encouragement that further deflates and hammers, hammers, hammers. This is all endured for the promise of fifteen hundred dollars, or, slightly more likely, a chance at attracting the interest of someone of influence in show business.
The dance scenes, staged in graceful, flowing alternations of long and close shots, deliver the outrage and frailty with which Pollack is clearly aiming. Too bad then, that Pollack doesn’t trust his subject matter. There’s too much self-conscious, faux-important, arty-art moralizing going on here. The actors, including Red Buttons, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Susannah York, and Michael Sarrazin, are all too wide-eyed and heavily misguided naïve. One wonders if this contest is the first indignity these people have had to suffer.
The idea of the picture is appalling enough on its own, so it’s redundant and disappointing that our director should take our hand and guide us across the exclamation points. We feel the waste, the constriction, but in a way that’s overly worked out and partially accidental in equal measure. Pollack clutters the action, which should be focused and unrelenting and speaking for itself, and distracts with devices such as flashbacks of Sarrazin and overly theatrical back-stage lightening. The poverty manifested as game-show sanitized physical misery (the kind that distracts from other, more naturally arrived at, physical misery), and its ironic, unnerving, juxtaposition with the cheery pageantry backdrop, should be the first and only concern. The material begs for a macabre sense of humor, a tongue in cheek of the damned sensibility (one can only imagine what Altman would’ve done with it, or the Kubrick of Lolita) but Pollack seems to be too insecure, too insistent on proving he’s an artist, to allow himself to fully act like one.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? gets stronger and hotter as the story inevitably gets bleaker and bleaker though, and Pollack, surprisingly, lets the characters’ continued deterioration stand on its own. The film’s other actor is its ace: Jane Fonda, in one of her best performances, which is clearly saying something. Fonda doesn’t subject herself to the picture’s thesis governed m.o.: she’s hard, sexy, bitter, and closed-off: come-on within snarling come-on. Fonda, even at her nastiest, is exhilaratingly alive: her hostility channeled as white-electric current. Fonda leaves the broad stuff to the less instinctual actors, and gets at the run-down engine of America at the time-no critique can rein this woman in.
Jane is sometimes too un-fake-ably self-possessed to convincingly register as someone with mortal concerns, someone who’s susceptible to human needs and miscalculations (it’s a barrier that surrounds all of the Fondas) but there’s a scene here, near the end; that sells her panic with a conviction I’ve rarely seen in the actress, even in her frequently brilliant work. The Fonda character, Gloria Beatty, finds herself paired with an older partner (Buttons) who’s clearly on his way out of the competition. Another race is called, and Gloria fights, screams, claws her way beyond the disqualifying bottom three places. The race goes on and on, much longer than we’re conditioned by movies to expect; and Fonda’s cynicism, her sweat, her panic, her unbendable will, unite and pitch forward with pure animal abandon. This is a memorable study of survival.
Gig Young is also fascinating in his ambiguity; he’s a portrait of charm and “the show must go on” savagery disguised as sympathy that might still, somehow, house just a little bit of authentic sympathy anyway. Young calls the contestants “good kids”, even in private, apparently oblivious to the irony of his own advice and solace-but he also always has a but up his sleeve-a way to further harvest the characters’ misery in the service of furthering audience satisfaction and profits.
The second half of the picture takes off from Fonda and Young’s performances (the first half is too dependant on the inexpressive Sarrazin); and the little details, which are initially minute, or perhaps only slightly irritating, gain a nightmarish quality in repetition: The siren that signals the return to the dance floor (it sounds as if it would announce the arrival of the secret police in another society). The increasing cruelty of the races. The spectators’ throwing of pennies at the contestants. The self-delusional announcements. Pollack’s touch, ironically, becomes surer with each fresh turn of derangement; probably because, by this point, the scenario has gained enough obvious, tangible affect for him- it straightens his sensibilities.
Until the end that is, which, not to put too fine of a point on it, sucks (no reveal here-but consider the title). They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? has a high-school short story ending: fatalistic and symbolic without the slightest consideration as to whether it fits the characters. On paper, the ending works-and it has effect in the movie too-but its stock, shock effect-melodrama that again distracts from the potent, despairing bulk of the story. The very final image is all that Pollack, and the audience, needed; a promise that the shop-‘til-you-drop madness is truly timeless, always shuffling, always racing, the music never ending. I’m playing devil’s advocate here to a certain extent, the picture is still a weird triumph- there are too many moments- and the subject matter is too strong, too readily lending to metaphor both past and present, for it not to be. But it’s also too fitting that the title to Pollack’s film should end with a question mark-the picture has unresolved issues about its unanswered questions.
The Strangers (2008)
The Strangers works for a little while, but it doesn’t get in your bones. The picture may eventually scare you accidentally though, by forcing you (if you’re a critic of some sort anyway) to consider what you’ll do if this run of pastiche horror films continues much longer unabated by even the slightest originality. Recite the weather forecast below the title and the running time? Stocks, perhaps? How much more can be said about the visually competent, or even assured, but hopelessly unimaginative home invasion by masked marauder(s) of vague motivation picture? Funny Games was a crock, but its contempt for its audience gave it a mild pulse. If I had seen The Strangers five years ago, I would have probably been more glass-is-half-full in my approach, but these pictures that are just passable enough to squeak by without offense are beginning to be the most offensive of all.
See the French picture Inside instead. It’s tasteless. It’s uncomfortable. The directors, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, may have crossed the line, but it’s a home invasion picture that’s artfully made, courts absurdity (stumbling into it often) and goes feeling around in a primal, sticky place of guilt, loss and legitimate, appalling, violation. You watch Inside and wonder how long it’s been bubbling in the back of its creators’ minds. You watch The Strangers and wonder how director Bryan Bertino, who shows talent, could have possibly roused himself, in his debut, to stage yet another picture that works the laughably tired, obligatory based-on-faux-true-events narration device; or that features the typically idiotic marching around the house outside of safety, completely divorced of any tangible, terrestrial reason to do so routine. Or the relentless, one-sided, pounding the heroes of these pictures must always endure, never scoring even a minor win against the villains. Never making one decision that is met with success. Future horror directors: if your picture doesn’t have the courage to stake out its own convictions, misery isn’t uncompromising, it’s tedious.
★★
Made (2001)
Friendship is one of those intangibles of life that most movies are destined to cheapen or over-explain or just plain get wrong. The movies, due to their mostly Point A yields Point B yields Point C yields Climactic Revelation structure, generally don’t allow that friendship, like love (and this is a problem of many romances too) usually, for better, for worse, for neither, just is. Made, Jon Favreau’s first and, so far, best picture, is a buddy movie, small in scale and ambition, but it transcends that condescending description because it embraces both the “small” and the “buddy” to their fullest. The smallness of the picture reveals a humble generosity of spirit that has remained, to a certain extent, in even the bigger Favreau pictures, such as this year’s Iron Man. The buddy (and the miracle) of this picture is that we actually believe that the two protagonists, Ricky Slade (Vince Vaughn) and Bobby Ricigliano (Favreau) are life-long friends, destined to forever screw one another over and bail one another out at the last minute.
Made was Favreau’s first picture as both writer and director, but he also, as we know, wrote and co-starred in Swingers, directed by Doug Liman, a few years prior. If memory serves, Made was considered by many to be a weaker sauce follow-up, a similarly themed picture that lacked the startling break-out-new-thing energy of the prior film. This is unavoidably true, to a certain extent, and I admit that I fell into that MORE! NEWER! MORE! NEWER! trap upon seeing Made the first time. But time has evened the playing field, revealing Swingers to be what it always was: a likeable, well-meaning, calling card for a talented group of men. Made is a more confident, shaggier picture, the jokes subtler and less readily announcing of their struggling screenwriter cleverness.
Ricky and Bobby are struggling boxers, though Ricky, it is immediately apparent, is only along for as long as Bobby sees fit to take the vocation seriously. Both are financed (vaguely) by the underworld, represented here by Peter Falk in a scary, profane, more vicious than is immediately apparent kind of performance that never gets awards consideration, but should. Falk finds seemingly innocuous lines, such as (paraphrasing a little), “I don’t mean to interrupt your little dream-fantasy whatever” and imbues them with a hilarious matter of fact old man’s no bullshit danger. Columbo as the crank you always suspected he was.
Ricky, normally the more divorced from reality of the pair, recognizes the boxing ambition for the joke that it is, and attempts to hammer this through to Bobby in the opening scene as they slug away at one other in the ring: two amateur friends too inexperienced, timid (and affectionate towards one another) to do anything besides stage a fight that elicits boos from even the sort of people who would attend such a match in the middle of the day. Ricky wants Bobby to cash in his goodwill with Falk and get them both started as criminal underlings. Bobby wants to stay legitimate, working slightly more innocent (and considerably lower paying) jobs such as driving around his own stripper girlfriend (Famke Janssen). That is a volatile arrangement, and it soon gets Bobby in a situation in which he can no longer resist Falk’s needling to get further in. Stuck, Bobby vouches for Ricky too, and the two are sent to act as gophers for a money drop in New York.
The above could be taken from a more action driven comedic thriller, Midnight Run perhaps, but I’m making Made sound more plot oriented than it actually is. Favreau sets his story in motion succinctly, gracefully, and uses it as a framework to stage virtually every imaginable scenario in which two very good friends can drive one another bat-shit with over familiarity. Onscreen, Favreau is a rarity: a legitimately interesting straight man who can upstage more stylized performers with a defeated, slumped, sharper than you expect verbal dexterity that calls attention to itself precisely because it doesn’t call attention to itself. Favreau has an unerring feel for desperation and defeat; and it shades his jokes of awkwardness and embarrassment in a way that shows such as the hellishly redundant American version of The Office repeatedly fail to understand.
Vince Vaughn is a stylized performer himself, of course, especially in this picture, and one that even Favreau can’t trump with his matter of fact under-acting. It’s no mystery why Vaughn has become a star; the mystery is that he hasn’t become an even bigger star. The tragedy is that either degree of stardom invariably leads to more lucrative and forgettable work. Vaughn is a delirious tight-rope walker here though; he and Favreau take that wonderful final scene in Swingers, in which Trent is revealed to be the deluded child we always suspected he was, and push that for the entire running time here. It’s aggressive, absorbing, brave, dangerous work: the sort of work that begs to become tiresome or self-amusing, but never does; because Vaughn and Favreau never lose track of the character’s damaged sense of humanity: his need to assert his existence and importance, regardless of how much it may increase his chances of getting himself and his friend killed in the process.
Ricky’s giddy, reckless, nearly surreal self-absorption and entitlement (watch the scene on the airplane or in the hotel with Sam Rockwell), particularly when stacked next to Bobby’s struggling to put things together wannabe family man, drives the central question of Made: why the hell does Bobby continually suffer this egomaniac? Favreau manages something tricky here: he answers that mystery, striving for pathos near the end, without compromising the picture’s unencumbered, airy tone. By the end we feel as if we’ve witnessed a true, fair (Bobby is ultimately just as naïve, in a less obnoxious though equally self-damaging way) exploration of two friends; two people who punch one another out so they can eat pizza together that night. For that alone, Made is an accomplishment, an authentically human movie.
★★★½
BC’s Services Will Resume…
soon. A move last weekend delayed things, followed by a few days of sickness (not encouraging I know) that delayed things even further. I hope to pick things up either later today or tomorrow. Your patience is appreciated.
Real Life (1979)
Albert Brooks’ twenty years ahead of its time satire of our unattainable, inexplicable quest to imbue our entertainment with “reality”; to reproduce real life that’s blessed with sense, perspective and general watchability. That all of these elements are elusive and contradictory seems to always be beside the point. Reality television, in its current incarnation, is largely a blatantly false soap opera, catering not to our need for reality but to our obsessive drive to experience the most outwardly, obviously voyeuristic sensation that we possibly can, devoid of any distracting elements such as craftsmanship and story; the windows of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, without the killer and (unfortunately) without Grace Kelly.
Real Life isn’t targeting the spectators of reality television though (reality tv had yet to become a fashion statement). This picture instead concerns the ego of a wannabe creator of the sport: a filmmaker played (using his name) by Mr. Brooks himself. Real Life, Brooks’ first as director, has that not quite tangible tang that is always both the best and worst quality of an Albert Brooks film. Real Life, like the hero of Brooks’ Defending Your Life, doesn’t push its reason for being far enough-every joke (most of which are promising) hangs in the air, unfulfilled. This lack of fulfillment is disappointing but it is also precisely this lacking that gives a Brooks movie its charge. The tempo of Brooks’ pictures is original and true-and uncompromisingly reflects the self-loathing temperament of their filmmaker. This is why Modern Romance remains Brooks’ overall masterpiece-that picture picks up joke after un-punched joke too, only to eventually arrive at a cumulative effect that is unexpectedly heartbreaking- a major (in its minor key) movie of inner despair’s toll on basic human interaction-on the self-denial of the damn thing called love.
There’s always a POP moment in a Brooks movie though, at least the goods ones, that brings the entire picture together. In Modern Romance it was Brooks’ appeal to his woman, his assurance that, yes, he’s insane, but he’s devoted to her in a way that sanity prohibits (the picture, particularly for us fellow neurotics, is quite, legitimately, romantic). In Real Life, it’s also a moment near the end-when Brooks, after one setback and failure after another, caves in a fit of desperation and egomania. Brooks gets on his knees, and begs, begs, pleas for another shot at his failed attempt to capture an average American family, just as they normally would be (after countless intrusions).
The little things you wished Brooks had pushed farther up until this point: the attempt to sleep with the wife in order to save her marriage (have to see it to understand it); the racism, elitism and resentment batted back and forth between Brooks and a black colleague; the inner disintegration of the family (including a subtle Charles Grodin): all come to inform that final Brooks meltdown at the end; where he offers, after many promises of integrity, to splice just about any popular film into his real entertainment. Brooks has already sung for the public, has already played the literal clown, now, reduced to nothing, he faces the lowest of the low dark side of his manipulative, diseased effort to capture something “real”. This scene, and the ending this outburst triggers, is a major, unsettling, comedy moment, worth, like Modern Romance, all of the half starts that have occurred before. Here’s hoping that Albert Brooks, who has appeared to have succumbed to bitterness in his last few films, rediscovers his blistering black comic humanity of the unsaid, particularly in a world where Real Life’s finale is now just another thing on Fox, a taking off point for Meet the Baios, perhaps.
★★★
Advise & Consent (1962)
The political picture can be difficult, primarily because it appears to be one of the genres (films dealing with mental breakdown being another) that’s most encouraging of a certain suffocating self-righteousness. Life, humor, even sex mostly, are choked out of these pictures in a desire to be taken seriously as (I assume) works of criticism or essays of change (Oscar traps). Charlie Wilson’s War, the recent Mike Nichols release, is such a film. War began promisingly as a boozy, one thing after another chronicle of a guy in Congress that kinda-sorta grows a conscience by accident, only to squander its strengths and originality (a we scratch each other’s backs to keep the machine rolling by way of compromise by way of humor born of despair that fleetingly recalls a contemporary screwball comedy by way of Altman on a lesser day) in favor of the usual eat your vegetables civics beats. Charlie Wilson’s War had a more honest than usual ending, I’ll give it that, but I had checked out long before, finding the self-congratulation too stifling.
Happily, the problems many usually note of Otto Preminger’s movies (cold impersonality being a primary), run straight into the problems of the political picture in Advise & Consent, and cancel one other out in the process. The film concerns the approval of the President’s (Franchot Tone) nomination for Secretary of State, Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), by the Senate. Advise & Consent, unmistakably a Preminger film, opens with the most essential, definitively first, cog in the plot-the announcement of the nomination in the paper (an example of the picture’s admitted naiveté, primarily springing from a just adequate screenplay), which the President has made to the Senate’s excitement, dismay and shock. The conventional candidates were ignored (of course) in favor of Leffingwell, whom the President feels is essential to maintaining his legacy. The Senate Majority Leader (Walter Pidgeon) immediately kicks into spin drive on the President’s behalf, contacting a variety of (again, of course) eccentric characters in the Capitol in an effort to put the President’s nomination through with as little question and conflict as possible (the underrated Aaron Sorkin-Rob Reiner film, The American President, is a comedic gloss on an intentionally similar premise).
The President and Senate Majority Leader’s primary hurdle is South Carolina Senator Seabright Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in one of his grand, willfully bizarre scenery chewing roles. Laughton’s walk, intimidating in its purposefully, ironically visible vulnerability (an old fat man’s come on), has more personality and wit than many actors’ full bodied orations. Laughton’s full bodied orations then, which have no bearing on any kind of speech existing on planet Earth, are feats of hyperbolic poetry (also catch Witness for the Prosecution, if you haven’t yet) that puncture that ridiculous seriousness that pervades in many political pictures (The Contender, being another, recent, laughable example). Laughton accomplishes something notable here: he takes, as he’s normally apt to, his character so far into the theatrical stratosphere that he comes to resemble something more true (at least in our movie fed imaginations) than most movie politicians. Laughton signifies the idea of inner government as ultimate performance art, a perpetual game of evening the stakes, of give and take, tit for tat. (It stuns me that Preminger didn’t give Laughton a scene of eating rare steak.)
Preminger uses most of the other performers just as adroitly, with Gene Tierney, returning to Preminger after all those years, registering in a bit as a socialite Pidgeon is seeing in secret; blessing the film, briefly, with the pathos of her real story-a still beautiful woman, struggling to hold herself together amidst a society of jackals. Burgess Meredith brings the picture to a temporary standstill as a man of mental doubt who comes to accuse Leffingwell of Communist leanings; his frailty and torment seemingly borrowed from another picture, which brings the picture at hand to frightening, vivid life (he gives us a sense of the cost of all this nonsense without resorting to the pedantic). Tone, as the President, feels miscast at the beginning (we wonder how he could be elected) but blossoms, as Advise & Consent continues, into a memorable, convincing, portrait of casual, insidious, slight of hand entitlement.
Advise & Consent’s tone, and manipulation of plot, particularly pertaining to the Henry Fonda character, are what strike me as most interesting and subversive though. The opening third primes us for the usual, morally rigid story that subjects our spiritually untouchable character to a series of insults and doubt before allowing him to conquer all and rise to the occasion in order to bless us all with his sense of right and indignation. The picture introduces Fonda to us in a scene with his little son, drinking milk of all American things, never a good sign. Fonda’s scenes primarily consist of him defending himself to the increasingly self-amused Laughton character, again no surprise. Then the film drops Fonda almost entirely, after revealing him to be a bit more fallible than we expect. Contracting Fonda’s guilt, jarringly (like a disease), is an up to this point secondary character, Sen. Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), who discovers Fonda’s indiscretion via a manipulation on the part of Laughton. At this point, Advise & Consent, written off by Pauline Kael as mindless melodrama, comes to unexpected, feverish, lurid life.
The film, once again characteristic of Preminger, consciously concerns ahead of its time subject matter; namely, homosexuality, and the never-ending compromise that is service in the big government. To write off Preminger’s treatment of homosexuality, and its subsequent influence on the Leffingwell case, as merely melodramatic and puritanical (both true) is to miss part of the point: the Puritanism, whether a limitation of Preminger’s or an intentional manipulation of the filmmaker, informs Advise & Consent in a way that undeniably increases its fascination and tension. The shift in focus of characters is interesting enough for a mainstream American film of the early 1960s, but the shift in tone strikes me as amazing.
Brigham Anderson, facing professional and personal collapse, loses his wits, which in turn transforms much of the last third of Advise & Consent into a near horror picture. Yes, a gay club is portrayed as a nest of forbidden evil, but this is also the culmination of Anderson’s panic and is complimented by an earlier scene with Anderson and his wife at their home, and their child’s almost alien voice and she asks to play with dad. Is Preminger overplaying his hand? Or exhibiting considerably more empathetic filmmaking than is traditionally acknowledged in his work? I think it’s both, and that’s an unsettling accomplishment, with the picture’s brilliant, open-ended anti-climax serving as the cherry on top: revealing the entire story to be just one of many daily controversies, with the next already ready at the wings.
Preminger’s curious, remote approach dries the subtext free dialogue of the script. The superb, full compositions lend the picture a subtly and implication of inner life that is absent on the page. Preminger’s aloof outlook (a criticism that’s overstated but undeniably present), when wedded to the right story, perfectly compliments the barely repressed hysteria and perversion of the subject matter. Angel Face is a wonderful example, and so is Advise & Consent, rightfully regarded as one of Preminger’s strongest films.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
The tangible relief of again seeing a modern action-fantasy through a master filmmaker’s eyes carries us through a few minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Master shots! A sense of rhythm and pace! Punches that sound like shotgun blasts! The Wilhelm scream! I had forgotten how starved I was for a true escapist picture that feels apart from reality, that isn’t (or doesn’t fancy itself) an auteurist superhero film or a cynical commercial for toys that turn into other toys or whatever other nonsense litters our screens. The title sequence of Crystal Skull is witty and beautiful, and hints at a touch of knowing, sad humor. The object that the Paramount logo always famously fades into is, this time, a groundhog burrow, which promptly gets mowed over by a speeding roadster as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” plays in place of the familiar John Williams score. It’s the 1950s, twenty years since Indy rode off into the sunset with his father and friends, things have changed, and these first few moments establish that with something resembling grace.
Or graceful, at least, when compared to the desperate, depressing, miscalculated picture that follows. I could delay the inevitable for a few more passages (and did, in the first draft) celebrating Spielberg’s past and present gifts: his peerless, musical sense of play and action and reaction; his organic, nearly supernatural instinct for pure cinema storytelling, his uncanny (see how I struggle to continually produce words for Spielberg’s craft that imply “above normal human capacity”) ability to set-up and pay-off beats in hushed seconds without the slightest hint of strain, but you know all of that already. I could celebrate and/or mourn Harrison Ford, one of the greatest movie stars of all time, a warm, funny, idealized superman Humphrey Bogart for the next generation who lost his way after The Fugitive, but you already know that too. You want to know how good the new Indy Jones movie is, or, if you’ve already seen it, you want to know if it’s okay to feel let down after pretending to like it for a few hours. I’m giving you permission, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the worst Jones movie by far, that’s easy, but this new picture is also the worst Steven Spielberg movie.
There are bits here and there that remind you of Spielberg’s brilliance, that imply a possible struggle within the filmmaker to give a shit about a genre he’s long left behind (we really, in retrospect, should have known that already, after the chilly-scary deconstruction of the genre in the more effective than its generally admitted to be nightmare picture A.I.) but they are few and far between. Crystal Skull does have one legitimately inspired moment that has Jones stumbling into a suburb that happens to be something else entirely. This brief scene conjures that fear of the breakdown of the commonplace that Spielberg can portray so well when in his groove, and it establishes the time and place of the picture effectively, but the rest is a wash. Even the title sequence becomes icky after seeing the entire picture, portraying not sadness and knowing and regret, but contempt (there’s another creepy, tasteless joke in this vein-involving a statue of Marcus Brody, who must have shit Spielberg’s bed after Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Crystal Skull is lazy and misguided and lifeless throughout, with only the occasionally vigorous action sequence (or inspired camera beat) to pull it out of the muck. I would like to be able to say that the script, by David Koepp, the mad libs of hack screenwriters, (with an obvious Lucas influence-this is dead exposition as only that man can deliver), is his usual impersonal, connect the dots mish-mash, except it lacks even his pedestrian ability to connect the dots. The exposition in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the moments that explain to us the nature of the Ark of the Covenant are giddy, moody, but, most importantly, they project not the tedium of reading cue cards (until we can get to the next bit of labored physicality) but a sense of awe.
Ford also appears to be as bored as he’s been for the last several films, having failed to “come back” here as some would have you believe, but Spielberg, like Robert Zemeckis in What Lies Beneath, is canny enough to work around the current Ford persona. Jones’ lack of heartbeat here is moving and thematically apt, he’s been beat down by one too many obscure artifacts, lost one too many important to him. Crystal Skull, aping Last Crusade, is also a family reunion picture, only with Ford now in the Sean Connery role. That is a ripe, original idea for exploration, but that would, again, interfere with Lucas’ inhuman obsession with expositional bric-a-brac.
We should also acknowledge that Spielberg probably hasn’t totally, fearlessly, dived into his own head since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (maybe A.I. too, for both better and worse). The recent Spielberg pictures have much to recommend them, particularly Munich (one of the best films of 2005), War of the Worlds and Minority Report, but they are also uneven and self-conscious, too eager to please, and feed into Spielberg’s desire to be an “important” as well as successful filmmaker. What else could Steven Spielberg possibly have left to prove? In an interview for Minority Report Spielberg said he felt he’d earned the right to make a picture for himself, and I agree, but he appears to say that without actually knowing it. How long can Temple of Doom’s myopic reception be permitted to punish Spielberg, and us? Temple of Doom is imperfect, with an especially mean, juvenile sense of humor (though Crystal Skull makes that humor look positively Lubitschian by comparison) but it’s an exciting, original action picture, one of the most visually assured ever made, with an emotional transition in its hero that subtly holds together (and comments on) the physical beats that run through the picture like a locomotive, but that’s often unacknowledged.
So, lest anyone get offended, we got Last Crusade, which is dull but saved by Sean Connery and Ford’s byplay, and now Crystal Skull, which is dull but saved by nothing. Shia LaBeouf, more watchable than anyone could possibly expect in Transformers last year, again gives his part as much as anyone could given what he’s been handed to work with. LeBeouf and Ford have authentic chemistry, and it could have possibly salvaged a bit of Crystal Skull, but the script continues to strangle them, perhaps like one of those snakes Indy fears so much (and that gets a tip of the cap here that’s embarrassing).
The reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) is the film’s low point though: a crushing, dispiriting letdown that’s about nothing more than cynically “giving the fans what they want.” Allen and Ford look desperate and uncomfortable, two vaudevillians determined to appease the drunken fans so they can shuffle out the side-stage exit. The heat between Allen and Ford has gone, and once again, that, in itself, could have been something had it been acknowledged, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is in the business of self-delusion and unoriginality.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a failure, but it’s an undeniably interesting failure that’s poignant unintentionally and, sometimes, in spite of itself. The character of Indiana Jones is too rich, despite the filmmakers’ indifference, for the film not to occasionally carry a whiff of something greater and older. The sight of Indiana Jones, now grandfatherly in appearance, teaching classes in a building where he was once the subject of feverish underage admiration, is unavoidably moving. The sight of Jones snatching his hat, that beloved symbol of irrepressible adventure, from the younger generation is too loaded with movie love, no matter how hard the fanatical Lucas may try to deny us conventional emotional satisfaction. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an embarrassment, but it is, in a strange way, also life affirming. It will take more than the biggest disappointment of the year to tarnish a character that has given us years of pleasure and has very undeniably earned his rest. Spielberg, probably the greatest living pure filmmaker, has certainly earned the legacy he’s apparently terrified of pissing away. Here’s hoping Spielberg one day discovers the inner peace he half-heartedly blesses his hero with here, and again becomes the filmmaker he always has been and can always be.
★★
Speed Racer (2008)
Speed Racer, Larry and Andy Wachowski’s (The Matrix) newest exercise in fuck tha police, fight the power faux-outrage, is another of those pictures, like the new Star Wars movies, or Sin City, or (the God awful) 300, that places actors in settings that have been totally or almost totally rendered by computers. The prior pictures worked to varying degrees (Sin City being the best) but could never conquer the hesitation that you were watching something that was never actually there; unavoidably dulling the excitement, immediacy and, you know, human feeling in the process. These pictures, despite a (sometimes) visual originality and invention, ultimately feel like that steak that gets re-configured through the transporter in the David Cronenberg Fly: they don’t taste right, they don’t understand the flesh.
Speed Racer turns that disconnection on its head, creating a world so gloriously, obviously, flamboyantly deranged in its artifice that it causes the picture to do an emotional loop de loop; achieving something that is a. accidentally, b. subversively, or c. hypocritically poignant. I’m voting b and c. Speed Racer is a legitimate accomplishment: a hallucinatory children’s picture that has an un-paralleled empathy with that sugar freaking, Saturday morning cartoon binging mind state. But, Speed Racer is also unfortunately, (shades of The Matrix) an attack on the multiple forms of suffocating distraction that persist in modern American life that also (and here’s the rub) happens to provide more forms of suffocating distraction than any recent film I can recall.
Speed Racer at times literally, exhilaratingly, loses control; particularly in flashbacks to Speed’s (Emile Hirsch) childhood that zone out in a blitz of imagination approximating aesthetic overload that immediately cues us in to at least three or four different movements of heartbreak, disappointment and resentment. The Wachowskis, never visually modest, have an especially nifty trick (of which they’re a bit too enamored) of transitioning with an in-camera wipe that gives us the feeling of watching every plot strand, every character, at exactly the same time (an artful version of channel surfing). I normally don’t give a whit what happens to the characters in these types of pictures, but the Wachowskis somehow nearly play this excess of technique to their emotional advantage. The technique chokes the life out of the picture, but this choking of life is, at least partly, the point (an old race is, tellingly, shown with real cars). This world, this candy-colored anime play-land, isn’t passed off as “movie magic”, its Hell, a kiddie friendly Matrix, a place of commercial enslavement that Speed and family must fight with purity and gusto.
The Wachowskis, it must be said, have also become significantly smoother in weaving their anti-big brother tirades (Warners? Who produces their movies?) into their action. The latter Matrix films were (possibly) a little underrated, but their insistence in continually halting the action for self-righteous, half-baked, college text-book sociology fortune cookies was maddening and self-deceiving. Speed Racer works out its self-hatred and conflict through the action, which explodes onto the racetrack and out of the screen in giddy, poetic bursts of disorientation. The people who have complained of the brothers’ withholding crucial spatial information are missing the point. We aren’t supposed to be on the racetrack; we’re in the characters heads, which happen to be on the race track. The lack of visual context and clarity IS the suspense, we, for once, truly feel the speed.
There’s something else undeniably creepy and insidious going on in Speed Racer though. The picture preaches the usual Luke Skywalker (the final race echoes the first Star Wars film’s climax) follow your own beat sermon, but we can’t help but feel that, by buying into this, we are just buying into exactly what the real life consumerist bad guys (represented here by Roger Allam, effectively channeling Tim Curry) would have us buy into. Speed Racer, like all of the Wachowkis’ work (V for Vendetta being the most offensive) is ultimately audience pandering entertainment, decrying consumerist depersonalization while continuing to pioneer consumerist depersonalization.
Speed Racer brings to mind the one brilliant implication of The Matrix Reloaded, that Neo, our hero, was just another pawn of the Matrix, another program designed to foster a sense of false rebellion in a society that doesn’t want to do anymore than pay lip service to such ideas. The Russian nesting dolls of corruption are a true (and very real) Matrix of our society, as well as the one that the Wachowskis’ films have continually hammered against. But what are these talented filmmakers actually offering us beyond un-challenging self-delusion? Speed Racer’s admirers have called it revolutionary. But what, exactly, is the aim of the film’s supposed revolution? To paraphrase another Jeff Goldblum movie, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. By all means see Speed Racer, it works, it’s exciting, and it has a conflict of interest that may mark it as the most interesting big picture of the summer, but its time we hold the Wachowskis to more than visual button-pushing. They may know the path, but they’ve yet to walk it.
★★★
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Elevator to the Gallows has a menacing central image that the rest of the picture struggles to equal. Julien (Maurice Ronet), a man of dubious reputation, murders his boss, flees, forgets something, and gets himself stuck in the damn titular elevator trying to go back for it. Julien waits and waits, trapped, a bug in a particularly precarious jar. This sight, of a killer cramped and crowded by his own guilt, at the mercy of a larger justice disguised as perverse bad luck, is unforgettable. Unfortunately, Louis Malle, in his directorial debut, isn’t satisfied with this simple, ingenious scenario. The story splinters into another scenario, and then yet another, these latter plot strands only distracting from the sensuality and power of the original story.
Elevator to the Gallows is an example of two otherwise perfectly suitable thriller ideas being forced into competition with one another and nearly canceling each other out in the process. As Julien finds himself imprisoned in the faulty elevator, a callow young couple decides on impulse to steal his car and, well, they haven’t quite gotten that far yet. They eventually end up inadvertently framing Julien for a murder he had nothing to do with. The police close in on Julien for this second murder, all as Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the wife of Julien’s former employer as well as (of course) Julien’s lover, searches the streets for Julien, thinking he’s discarded her and their plan, running out with another woman.
Elevator isn’t as frantic as all the above would lead you to believe, Malle allows the picture a deliberate, dreamy, existential pace that distracts us from the sheer busy-ness (and ludicrousness) of what we’re watching. And we should be careful with the term ludicrous, as to apply logic to a picture that’s clearly striving for (and obtaining) the poetic is to miss the point. The sensuality of the images and the one thing after another tumbling dominoes nature of the scenario aren’t totally of a piece though. We’ve seen many noirs or crime pictures in which events shatter in many different directions, but the best of those pictures (let’s recruit Rififi as Exhibit A, as it’s in front of me as I write this) achieve a true willy-nilly chaos. We feel swept up with the characters as their existences slip out from underneath them. Elevator to the Gallows is a slower, narrower picture, and the excess of events is an intrusion. The frequent cross-cutting to updates of the other wronged parties breaks the “all alone as the world folds in” spell. (Let’s recruit, as Exhibit B, a picture that nurtures this sort of wounded mood, carefully, without a bunch of extraneous hugger-mugger, Le Samourai).
I wouldn’t dare advise you skip the picture though. I go back to the haunting image of Julien in the elevator, awaiting judgment, a regret or common decency still beyond him (he would appear to think in more animal, instinctual terms) smoking cigarettes to pass the time. There’s also the image of the beautiful Moreau in close-up, whispering words of love and concern to her doomed partner in a pay-phone, moments before the murder is to go down. There’s the near Expressionism of the interrogation room sequences toward the end: the room bathed in darkness, only the speaking parties allowed the slightest of vision by a sliver of light above. Elevator to the Gallows has a hazy, soft, but somehow sharp at the same time cinematography that conjures hallucinatory, naughty, sexy thoughts as corrupted by a greater moral decay and outrage (pointed references to Algeria abound). This picture would make an ideal double bill with either Godard’s Le Petit soldat or Allen’s Match Point. (The former also explores Algeria in thriller terms; while the latter also addresses the notion of chance as ultimate judge, jury and executioner.)
In the end, I still very much value Elevator to the Gallows, allowing the good and great scenes to count for more than the scenes that tend to verge on the tedious. The film is obviously the work of a major filmmaker (though that’s easy to say fifty years after the fact) and I imagine Elevator is a picture that will grow in estimation as it fades in immediate viewing memory, possibly reshaping itself in the mind as the slimmer, less tangible picture it was always meant to be. That possibility is one of the many facets of the magic of the movies.
Glitch.
The computer ate my look at
Elevator to the Gallows, which turned out to be an early draft that wasn’t meant for other eyes anyway. The last draft, the draft which I was offering for your consumption, has somehow disappeared. I hope to re-write tomorrow, but I’m job hunting, house hunting, as well as hoping to catch
Speed Racer and
Indiana Jones. I will try to not let these things affect the consistency with which I post, but please bear with me if they occasionally do. I appreciate it.
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