(Nicolas Winding Refn, USA, 2011)
Refn's movie prompts an important question: is there a point at which style, raised to some critical temperature, transforms into substance? Based solely on the evidence of DRIVE, the answer would have to be no. Refn's visual panache is hard to fault, but the film suffers from a fatal kind of formal incoherence. With all of its long stretches of impeccably composed, dialogue free, music heavy (and frequently slo-mo) action, it would be easy to mistake this film for some detached "meditation" on violence, chaos, or some other such Serious Concept, and indeed, several critics have done exactly that. But DRIVE isn't some highfalutin think piece - it's a good old fashioned morality play. To be fair, several critics do seem to have understood this, but also seem to have missed the fact that it's an incredibly poorly done morality play.
Gosling's character, the not-quite-titular Driver, is a classic Nameless Hero; a taciturn man who lives by a code. He's honorable, extremely competent, and his cool facade is meant to hide a heart that yearns for love. But his life is thrown off-kilter by the introduction of Carey Mulligan as the cute girl who lives down the hall. In attempting to help out the woman for whom he's fallen, he sets into motion a string of events that ends in disaster. Because our hero isn't just nameless: he's also tragic. Violence follows him like a bad odor, and how could it not? It's stamped on the back of his signature driving jacket; the totemic scorpion, a born predator, compelled to strike even if it means self-destruction. All the scorpion knows is how to sting; all the Driver knows is how to use force, whether it be with a car, a hammer, or a shotgun.
Taken on their own, these are compelling ideas, and it's to Refn's credit that he attempts to bring them alive in the movie. But he buries their human dimension under a thick layer of superfluous stylization, and all we're left with is a limp pseudo-tragedy. The ending is meant to feel both tragic and redemptive - the Driver may not have found a connection to human society, but he did manage to save his beloved and her child. The problem is that we're never given enough information to care very much. The most interesting characters - really, the only people in the movie worthy of such designation - are the gangsters. Brooks' performance, despite being given little to work with in the script, is perfectly pitched between menacing swagger and mournful regret. In a few keys scenes involving him and his associate, play by Ron Perelman, there is more emotion and sympathy than in any of the multiple shots that linger on Gosling's worried eyes.
And we know what Zizek would say - something along the lines of DRIVE being about the frustrated libido, the explosion of violence that results from the stifling of sexual urges. And he'd have plenty to back it up - DRIVE, for all of it's sensuous colors and sultry camera movements, depicts nothing more sexual than a kiss, and even that is used as a prelude to a sudden outburst of brutal violence. Gosling is weirdly asexual, or even pre-sexual, in his depiction of the Driver. Carey Mulligan's character is blandly wholesome, and it's telling that she is saved, and Christina Hendricks' sexy gun moll meets a rather different, and much more gory, end. There is a scene with some nudity, but it's mostly decoration - a frozen tableaux of fake tits and blank stares that watch helplessly as Gosling threatens to bash a man's head in with a hammer. All of which seems to suggest that sexuality, in this film, is something just outside the frame - a marker of human messiness that threatens at any moment to disrupt the crisp, squared-off images. It's an interpretation that makes the movie a little more fun to watch, but not as much fun as if Refn had stuck to his guns and concentrated more on good old-fashioned drama.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
LUCK
And so it goes. After airing its ninth episode, LUCK will conclude its run on HBO this Sunday, having been swiftly cancelled after a third horse was fatally injured during production. The news came as a disappointment, and a bit of a shock, but there's little question that they did the right thing. Less surprising was the sudden rash of cynical posturing on the internet: commentators and "industry insiders" who wasted no time in claiming that this was really all about ratings, that if the show had been a Sopranos (or even True Blood) -sized hit, they would have just kept on trucking, dead horses be damned. Glib speculation, especially in the internet age, is nothing new, and it's important to remember that even an artist-friendly shop like HBO is still driven by profits. Still and all, to suppose that the creative powers behind LUCK would have permitted the risk of injuring more horses to continue for the sake of viewership is to miss the show's main subject. For above all, LUCK was about (and created by) people who love horses.
Among the horse lovers is David Milch, for whom LUCK was clearly a passion project. Through Milch's writing, the horses emerged as a central motif and unifying symbol. They represented something real amidst the shell-games of late capitalism. They were something onto which the characters - being Milch-world, these people were vibrantly flawed and broken - could project their hopes and dreams. They brought joy and exaltation; as Milch has often remarked, the substance and purpose of art, a raising of the spirit from all that weighs it down.
I'll go on the record here and say that I didn't love LUCK as much as I wanted to. It's been a long time since DEADWOOD was prematurely axed, and for those of us who had come to love that star-crossed but immensely satisfying show, LUCK seemed full of promise. (For another post is the ill-fated JOHN FROM CINCINNATI, which was unfairly maligned but problematic, burdened with inconsistent performances and pedestrian filmmaking.) LUCK's relatively modest flaws are difficult to nail down, exactly, but I suspect it had something to do with a fundamental creative disconnect between Milch and Mann. This pairing certainly had its benefits, but even from the beginning there was the whiff of over-development - why have just one prestigious mega-producer when you can have two? - being the kind of thing that studio execs tend to go all mushy over. Milch clearly has a long-lasting relationship with HBO, but he's known for his, shall we say, unconventional methods, of which he himself has admitted does not endear him to the bean-counters. It's possible that Mann was brought on for his massive ego as much as for any commercial or aesthetic cachet, with the bosses supposing that this was just the guy to shape the brilliant but disorderly Milch's material into something coherent, marketable, and "iconic." Speculation aside, the arrangement was what it was, with a clean breakdown between writing and everything else, and for me at least, the results were pretty varied.
In a way, the tension between the words and their execution should be no great surprise. Milch, despite his claims to the contrary, is an auteur. You need only view some of the behind-the-scenes footage from the Deadwood DVDs to understand that he was intimately involved with every detail of the show, up to and including the performances, which were shaped and re-shaped through his interaction with the performers. I've no doubt that Milch is a great collaborator - plenty of actors have spoken to that effect. But usually, there's room for only one creative mastermind on any set, and this is where the aesthetic problems of LUCK might have originated. Mann is himself an auteur of some repute, and one of a very different kind.
Probably the most direct example of Milch's and Mann's stylistic diversions lies in their treatment of characters. Milch's characters drive the narrative, or rather his stories are driven by the character's development over time. Mann's characters deal with change too, but their stories aren't driven by it. Put simply, Mann's work is pitched in a mythic register, with archetypes and familiar story arcs. You could also call Mann's characters existential, as several writers have; in either case, nuanced psychology and an intense focus on behavior is not the main concern. Milch's approach is on the other hand more novelistic, chock-full of colorful characters of every stripe, who bluster and scheme and bump into each other in all kinds of interesting and unexpected ways. Mann's work is linear and sleek, like a bullet train, while Milch's work is crooked and rambling, like a knotty oak tree. I probably don't need to emphasize that I think Milch's work is in general richer and more rewarding, and feels truer to life. Mann's work is exhilarating on a fantastical level, but it doesn't quite stir me the way Milch's does. And with LUCK, these two different approaches clashed.
Too often, there were directorial flourishes - slow motion, swelling music, fancy shots and cuts - that, while clearly intended to underscore and support the action, just ended up overselling it. Milch's characters are riveting enough without having a synth cue insisting that what's happening is Of Great Importance. Nothing is less rewarding for an audience than being told how to feel, and too often this was the effect of the filmmaking on LUCK. Part of his has to do with Milch's use of humor, which is generously dispersed throughout his work. Mann, on the other hand, while not humorless, tends to be more consistently serious, and I don't think he always knew what to do with the comic beats in LUCK. It was clear that he was most at home dealing with the existential yearnings and fugue-like mystery of the environment; the grubby details and everyday idiocy of life just didn't engage his imagination as much.
Was there a solution? Milch isn't Oz, and I don't think he can be a cinema-style auteur, with his constant rewriting of the scripts. It is good to have a director with a strong visual sensibility to abet the workings of the text, but perhaps not one as willful and independent as Mann. Still, with all that said, the show was, at least on a creative level, quite successful. I didn't love it, again, the way I wanted to love it, which really means that it wasn't Deadwood, and I should just reconcile myself to the fact that nothing will be Deadwood ever again, and get over it already. LUCK gave us angles and permutations of Milch's work, and Mann's, that never would have arisen independently of one another, and for that I'm grateful. It was thrilling to watch such a first-rate cast work with such elevated material, as it always is to watch talented professionals enjoy what they are doing; such enjoyment invariably manifests itself in the quality of the performances. As much as LUCK never quite seem to establish itself stylistically, it does build very effectively to a satisfying conclusion. Would it have only improved in another season? Probably. The last few episodes indicated lots of promise, but we won't ever now for sure. That's as much as we'll get, and that's enough for now.
Among the horse lovers is David Milch, for whom LUCK was clearly a passion project. Through Milch's writing, the horses emerged as a central motif and unifying symbol. They represented something real amidst the shell-games of late capitalism. They were something onto which the characters - being Milch-world, these people were vibrantly flawed and broken - could project their hopes and dreams. They brought joy and exaltation; as Milch has often remarked, the substance and purpose of art, a raising of the spirit from all that weighs it down.
I'll go on the record here and say that I didn't love LUCK as much as I wanted to. It's been a long time since DEADWOOD was prematurely axed, and for those of us who had come to love that star-crossed but immensely satisfying show, LUCK seemed full of promise. (For another post is the ill-fated JOHN FROM CINCINNATI, which was unfairly maligned but problematic, burdened with inconsistent performances and pedestrian filmmaking.) LUCK's relatively modest flaws are difficult to nail down, exactly, but I suspect it had something to do with a fundamental creative disconnect between Milch and Mann. This pairing certainly had its benefits, but even from the beginning there was the whiff of over-development - why have just one prestigious mega-producer when you can have two? - being the kind of thing that studio execs tend to go all mushy over. Milch clearly has a long-lasting relationship with HBO, but he's known for his, shall we say, unconventional methods, of which he himself has admitted does not endear him to the bean-counters. It's possible that Mann was brought on for his massive ego as much as for any commercial or aesthetic cachet, with the bosses supposing that this was just the guy to shape the brilliant but disorderly Milch's material into something coherent, marketable, and "iconic." Speculation aside, the arrangement was what it was, with a clean breakdown between writing and everything else, and for me at least, the results were pretty varied.
In a way, the tension between the words and their execution should be no great surprise. Milch, despite his claims to the contrary, is an auteur. You need only view some of the behind-the-scenes footage from the Deadwood DVDs to understand that he was intimately involved with every detail of the show, up to and including the performances, which were shaped and re-shaped through his interaction with the performers. I've no doubt that Milch is a great collaborator - plenty of actors have spoken to that effect. But usually, there's room for only one creative mastermind on any set, and this is where the aesthetic problems of LUCK might have originated. Mann is himself an auteur of some repute, and one of a very different kind.
Probably the most direct example of Milch's and Mann's stylistic diversions lies in their treatment of characters. Milch's characters drive the narrative, or rather his stories are driven by the character's development over time. Mann's characters deal with change too, but their stories aren't driven by it. Put simply, Mann's work is pitched in a mythic register, with archetypes and familiar story arcs. You could also call Mann's characters existential, as several writers have; in either case, nuanced psychology and an intense focus on behavior is not the main concern. Milch's approach is on the other hand more novelistic, chock-full of colorful characters of every stripe, who bluster and scheme and bump into each other in all kinds of interesting and unexpected ways. Mann's work is linear and sleek, like a bullet train, while Milch's work is crooked and rambling, like a knotty oak tree. I probably don't need to emphasize that I think Milch's work is in general richer and more rewarding, and feels truer to life. Mann's work is exhilarating on a fantastical level, but it doesn't quite stir me the way Milch's does. And with LUCK, these two different approaches clashed.
Too often, there were directorial flourishes - slow motion, swelling music, fancy shots and cuts - that, while clearly intended to underscore and support the action, just ended up overselling it. Milch's characters are riveting enough without having a synth cue insisting that what's happening is Of Great Importance. Nothing is less rewarding for an audience than being told how to feel, and too often this was the effect of the filmmaking on LUCK. Part of his has to do with Milch's use of humor, which is generously dispersed throughout his work. Mann, on the other hand, while not humorless, tends to be more consistently serious, and I don't think he always knew what to do with the comic beats in LUCK. It was clear that he was most at home dealing with the existential yearnings and fugue-like mystery of the environment; the grubby details and everyday idiocy of life just didn't engage his imagination as much.
Was there a solution? Milch isn't Oz, and I don't think he can be a cinema-style auteur, with his constant rewriting of the scripts. It is good to have a director with a strong visual sensibility to abet the workings of the text, but perhaps not one as willful and independent as Mann. Still, with all that said, the show was, at least on a creative level, quite successful. I didn't love it, again, the way I wanted to love it, which really means that it wasn't Deadwood, and I should just reconcile myself to the fact that nothing will be Deadwood ever again, and get over it already. LUCK gave us angles and permutations of Milch's work, and Mann's, that never would have arisen independently of one another, and for that I'm grateful. It was thrilling to watch such a first-rate cast work with such elevated material, as it always is to watch talented professionals enjoy what they are doing; such enjoyment invariably manifests itself in the quality of the performances. As much as LUCK never quite seem to establish itself stylistically, it does build very effectively to a satisfying conclusion. Would it have only improved in another season? Probably. The last few episodes indicated lots of promise, but we won't ever now for sure. That's as much as we'll get, and that's enough for now.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
The Descendants
(Alexander Payne, USA, 2011)
After seven years, Alexander Payne has finally come in from the cold. I know I'm not alone in missing him in these intervening years. As wonderful as his contribution to "Paris Je T'aime"was, Payne is one of the few filmmakers that I'd consider "essential" to American cinema, and his proper place, if he doesn't mind me saying so, is working consistently on feature films. So now we have The Descendants, and we're told that more is on the way - that he is eager to make some more movies, and soon - which is great news. If the latest is any indication, he's still as vital as before, if a little rusty; he's also still taking risks.
The Descendants isn't Payne's best film. That remark begs for qualification, because one of the reasons for the "essential director" designation is the fact that even at his worst, Payne is a cut above the rest; at the same time, expectations, especially given seven years to ripen, inevitably become very high. And he mostly meets them. The Descendants has lovely performances from an exquisitely chosen cast (Payne is a maestro with actors), and it has that meticulously controlled tone that Payne is famous for. But it's also here that he falters a little bit. The Descendants is by far his most serious film; it's the first one that's recognizable as primarily a drama, and yet oddly, unlike his more comedic efforts, it doesn't quite pack the same dramatic punch as the previous films. This goes some way in indicating both Payne's strengths and weaknesses. Up until now, you could roughly label his movies Comedies, even though they were, at heart, philosophically serious. This is Payne's trademark - a funny man with serious preoccupations - and he's widely praised for it. But there's an important distinction to observe, and it makes all the difference. His movies aren't comedies with serious parts, or dramas leavened with comedy. His brilliance lies is creating moments, and an underlying mood, that is both sad and funny at the same time. Here's just one example - in Election, the character played by Matthew Broderick cheats on his wife with his neighbor. They're planning on having another assignation, but she doesn't show; defeated and confused, Broderick returns home, only to find his wife and his neighbor in the living room. They've been talking - it's clear in a moment that the neighbor has spilled the beans to his wife - both are red-eyed with anguish, and both stare at him with a terrible stew of pathos - betrayal, rage, injury - that's almost unbearable. Broderick just sort of slowly backs up and quietly intones, almost to himself, "okay...okay...". It's an excruciating moment of almost Sophoclean proportions. His wife is holding their baby when she giving him the how-could-you stare. Everything he knows has just been irrevocably fucked. And even so, it is, on some very proximate level, hilarious. Not that you'd laugh out loud. But funny because it's so awful, so absurd, considering how he anticipated the course of his afternoon. One minute, you're reveling in the carnal glories of small-town America. The next, your marriage is over. Oops.
If you think about it one way, you could see Payne as a prime example of the "smuggler" paradigm, which holds that serious filmmakers make certain concessions - they hew to a genre convention of some kind - in order to surreptitiously bring in certain ideas, tropes, etc. that otherwise wouldn't be acceptable in the high-stakes realm of mainstream movies. There's some pretty clear limits to this metaphor, obviously, but it's useful as far as it goes. With Payne, it's less about any ideas as it is about emotions, and their messiness. What his movies are after, it looks like to me, is dealing with the fucked-upness of life in a way that honors life's complexity, rather than denying it. They are, at heart, films about failure (and he's said as much in interviews). Failure, of course, is an unacceptable topic for mainstream films. You can make a film in which people fail, but you must offer some kind of antidote; it must always be risen above. In Payne's movies, that doesn't happen. They fail, and they fail hard. Think About Schmidt, which deserves massive credit for successfully humbling one of the the most virile presences in American cinema. Here, Nicholson is a doddering retiree who loses the one person in the world who can really stand him, and then, in an attempt to reclaim his past, he tries to break up his daughter's marriage to a nimrod, a task at which he fails. Broderick in Election; another nebbish, another failure. You get the picture. And yet they aren't depressing movies; they don't linger on the failures they depict. And here's where Payne is really sneaky - he does offer redemption, just not the kind we've come to expect. Rather than giving us the event of redemption, or recovery, or correction, he gives us the feeling of it. Instead of showing us the girl and guy finally getting together, he implies that even if they never do, something survives that moment. That we do not struggle, and fail, in vain. It's really not that complicated, but I suspect it is exceedingly difficult to pull off - to uplift our spirits, even as our minds perceive things not working out. Hidden beneath the characters' mistakes is the long march of persistence. That's the secret message of Payne's oeuvre - life goes on. Stated plainly, it barely rises above platitude. But expressed artfully it takes on a certain emotional authority. It tugs on our heartstrings, it lifts our spirits, it sweeps clean, for some fleeting time, our disordered minds.
The Descendants isn't an exception to this, but it doesn't quite reach the same depths as Payne's other movies. I'm not sure why this is, but I have a theory: Payne's films succeed through the manipulation of a dynamic. This dynamic, unlike the oft-observed admixture of funny and sad, has to do with outlook, has to do with the previously stated "life goes on." Payne, through his movies, strikes me as kind of a pessimist in the classic sense, meaning a frustrated optimist. He's someone who wants to believe in the good things we all secretly hope for - that people can change, that life has meaning, that there is enough goodness in the species to justify its continued existence. But, burned as we've all been by evidence to the contrary, he couches such optimism (or hope, if you like) in cynicism. Except that it's not a protective stance, since it's expressed as humor - it manages to sublimate the smallness of the characters, their venality, because we laugh at it. Laughter strips the moment of its bitterness, and leaves behind the humanity.
Here, without as much recourse to the exhaust valve of flippancy, Payne gets serious. In this seriousness, he is at a slight disadvantage, since he isn't used to getting the same kind of mileage out of his cries as out of his smiles. He has to address the awful heaviness of the subject matter straight on, and his uninflected style doesn't quite do him the favor he needs. This isn't all that surprising, since the weakest moments of his previous films had to do with their more direct tackling of the upbeat - vide the coda of About Schmidt, which is just a bit too tidy to resonate as strongly as it needs to. After all the scenes of George Clooney dealing with his wife's death - before and after the actual event - there is a quietness that smacks of uncertainty. It's a director a little outside of his comfort zone, and it shows. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In many ways, Sideways, his last picture, was an apotheosis; it was the comedy of that historical moment, hitting almost every beat just right. It felt like the end of something, a farewell to the sunny days and hysteria of an America trying to dig itself out of post-9/11 despair. It was the moment we loosened up a little, before the wicked hangover of the Economy Meltdown really hit. Now, we have grief, we have death, and with it a chance at starting over. This has been a pretty damn good year for movies, and Payne's film seems like an appropriate marker, signalling new territory to be explored. Life is still going on.
After seven years, Alexander Payne has finally come in from the cold. I know I'm not alone in missing him in these intervening years. As wonderful as his contribution to "Paris Je T'aime"was, Payne is one of the few filmmakers that I'd consider "essential" to American cinema, and his proper place, if he doesn't mind me saying so, is working consistently on feature films. So now we have The Descendants, and we're told that more is on the way - that he is eager to make some more movies, and soon - which is great news. If the latest is any indication, he's still as vital as before, if a little rusty; he's also still taking risks.
The Descendants isn't Payne's best film. That remark begs for qualification, because one of the reasons for the "essential director" designation is the fact that even at his worst, Payne is a cut above the rest; at the same time, expectations, especially given seven years to ripen, inevitably become very high. And he mostly meets them. The Descendants has lovely performances from an exquisitely chosen cast (Payne is a maestro with actors), and it has that meticulously controlled tone that Payne is famous for. But it's also here that he falters a little bit. The Descendants is by far his most serious film; it's the first one that's recognizable as primarily a drama, and yet oddly, unlike his more comedic efforts, it doesn't quite pack the same dramatic punch as the previous films. This goes some way in indicating both Payne's strengths and weaknesses. Up until now, you could roughly label his movies Comedies, even though they were, at heart, philosophically serious. This is Payne's trademark - a funny man with serious preoccupations - and he's widely praised for it. But there's an important distinction to observe, and it makes all the difference. His movies aren't comedies with serious parts, or dramas leavened with comedy. His brilliance lies is creating moments, and an underlying mood, that is both sad and funny at the same time. Here's just one example - in Election, the character played by Matthew Broderick cheats on his wife with his neighbor. They're planning on having another assignation, but she doesn't show; defeated and confused, Broderick returns home, only to find his wife and his neighbor in the living room. They've been talking - it's clear in a moment that the neighbor has spilled the beans to his wife - both are red-eyed with anguish, and both stare at him with a terrible stew of pathos - betrayal, rage, injury - that's almost unbearable. Broderick just sort of slowly backs up and quietly intones, almost to himself, "okay...okay...". It's an excruciating moment of almost Sophoclean proportions. His wife is holding their baby when she giving him the how-could-you stare. Everything he knows has just been irrevocably fucked. And even so, it is, on some very proximate level, hilarious. Not that you'd laugh out loud. But funny because it's so awful, so absurd, considering how he anticipated the course of his afternoon. One minute, you're reveling in the carnal glories of small-town America. The next, your marriage is over. Oops.
If you think about it one way, you could see Payne as a prime example of the "smuggler" paradigm, which holds that serious filmmakers make certain concessions - they hew to a genre convention of some kind - in order to surreptitiously bring in certain ideas, tropes, etc. that otherwise wouldn't be acceptable in the high-stakes realm of mainstream movies. There's some pretty clear limits to this metaphor, obviously, but it's useful as far as it goes. With Payne, it's less about any ideas as it is about emotions, and their messiness. What his movies are after, it looks like to me, is dealing with the fucked-upness of life in a way that honors life's complexity, rather than denying it. They are, at heart, films about failure (and he's said as much in interviews). Failure, of course, is an unacceptable topic for mainstream films. You can make a film in which people fail, but you must offer some kind of antidote; it must always be risen above. In Payne's movies, that doesn't happen. They fail, and they fail hard. Think About Schmidt, which deserves massive credit for successfully humbling one of the the most virile presences in American cinema. Here, Nicholson is a doddering retiree who loses the one person in the world who can really stand him, and then, in an attempt to reclaim his past, he tries to break up his daughter's marriage to a nimrod, a task at which he fails. Broderick in Election; another nebbish, another failure. You get the picture. And yet they aren't depressing movies; they don't linger on the failures they depict. And here's where Payne is really sneaky - he does offer redemption, just not the kind we've come to expect. Rather than giving us the event of redemption, or recovery, or correction, he gives us the feeling of it. Instead of showing us the girl and guy finally getting together, he implies that even if they never do, something survives that moment. That we do not struggle, and fail, in vain. It's really not that complicated, but I suspect it is exceedingly difficult to pull off - to uplift our spirits, even as our minds perceive things not working out. Hidden beneath the characters' mistakes is the long march of persistence. That's the secret message of Payne's oeuvre - life goes on. Stated plainly, it barely rises above platitude. But expressed artfully it takes on a certain emotional authority. It tugs on our heartstrings, it lifts our spirits, it sweeps clean, for some fleeting time, our disordered minds.
The Descendants isn't an exception to this, but it doesn't quite reach the same depths as Payne's other movies. I'm not sure why this is, but I have a theory: Payne's films succeed through the manipulation of a dynamic. This dynamic, unlike the oft-observed admixture of funny and sad, has to do with outlook, has to do with the previously stated "life goes on." Payne, through his movies, strikes me as kind of a pessimist in the classic sense, meaning a frustrated optimist. He's someone who wants to believe in the good things we all secretly hope for - that people can change, that life has meaning, that there is enough goodness in the species to justify its continued existence. But, burned as we've all been by evidence to the contrary, he couches such optimism (or hope, if you like) in cynicism. Except that it's not a protective stance, since it's expressed as humor - it manages to sublimate the smallness of the characters, their venality, because we laugh at it. Laughter strips the moment of its bitterness, and leaves behind the humanity.
Here, without as much recourse to the exhaust valve of flippancy, Payne gets serious. In this seriousness, he is at a slight disadvantage, since he isn't used to getting the same kind of mileage out of his cries as out of his smiles. He has to address the awful heaviness of the subject matter straight on, and his uninflected style doesn't quite do him the favor he needs. This isn't all that surprising, since the weakest moments of his previous films had to do with their more direct tackling of the upbeat - vide the coda of About Schmidt, which is just a bit too tidy to resonate as strongly as it needs to. After all the scenes of George Clooney dealing with his wife's death - before and after the actual event - there is a quietness that smacks of uncertainty. It's a director a little outside of his comfort zone, and it shows. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In many ways, Sideways, his last picture, was an apotheosis; it was the comedy of that historical moment, hitting almost every beat just right. It felt like the end of something, a farewell to the sunny days and hysteria of an America trying to dig itself out of post-9/11 despair. It was the moment we loosened up a little, before the wicked hangover of the Economy Meltdown really hit. Now, we have grief, we have death, and with it a chance at starting over. This has been a pretty damn good year for movies, and Payne's film seems like an appropriate marker, signalling new territory to be explored. Life is still going on.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Hadewijch
(Bruno Dumont, France, 2010)
A surprising turn for Dumont, in the sense that it at least feels more subtle, tender, and even-tempered than his previous films. For all the heartfelt sincerity of his work, he has been at least equally interested in provoking his audience, daring us to look away, to reject his seriousness. This double-edged sword is what fascinates me about Dumont - his moral gravity is inspiring, especially in light of frequently oblique and skeptical attitudes among artists in all mediums, but he has an undeniable streak of the bad-boy artiste that seems deliberately repellent.
So I'm not sure how I feel about this latest, mild-mannered version of Dumont. I like that he's being totally upfront about investigating the varieties of religious experience, from the vicious to the sublime, but I found myself only half-invested for much of the movie. It opens magnificently; Julie Sokolokowsi is fantastic from the first frame, and the early scenes in and out of the convent work especially well. But once we are introduced to Yassir's brother, who is swiftly revealed as a jihad-wager, things become overly schematic. Celine's "conversion" from gentle-if-overly-ardent novice to willing terrorist is done at the drop of a hat, seemingly, and it doesn't convince. The subtext is clear enough - we overhear, in Celine/Hadewijch's prayers, remarks on God's love being "violent," and other ruminations on the ambiguity of faith. Dumont is concerned with the mercurial nature of religion, in which a philosophy of love can so easily degenerate into a monstrous doctrine of hatred, and Celine/Hadewijch is his test case. But in refusing to delve into the messy and (and mostly passe) world of psychological realism, he leaves the audience no way to access Celine's inner life. In Bresson (an obvious touchstone of Dumont's), who was ever rigorous in his minimalism, this wasn't much of an issue. I actually like that Dumont lets his characters appear more tangibly human - for me, paving this middle path between Bressonian minimalism and more traditional storytelling was one of the things that made his first two features so exciting. Hadewijch shows even more progress toward the dramatic, but in too many instances, the director seems to hesitate. It's as if he wants us to empathize with Celine, but also consider her as a metaphysical idea - an avatar of pure religious devotion. Unfortunately, these two impulses don't easily coexist, at least not in this film. We either encounter her as a poorly-written dramatic "character" or as an amorphous religious conceit. Clearly, Dumont is interested in illustrating her humanity - why else would he cast a girl who is so naturally talented at being on camera? Unlike some of his previous protagonists - Pharoan in l'Humanite, or the menacing lug in Flanders, who were cut from similar cloth to Bresson's impassive and statuesque "subjects," Celine is delightfully alive. She's quiet but intense, vulnerable yet strong, a fairly typical teenage girl (which is to say, complexly immature) who just happens to prefer Jesus to other boys. So when we see her recede from rationality into full-blown fanaticism, it doesn't wash. To be fair, the challenge Dumont tackled is a massive one - how do you depict the appeal of fanaticism? How does one persuasively argue for acts of violence that will harm the innocent? Of course, we're all capable of imagining the conditions that produce many terrorists - poverty, repression, lack of education, violence - but Dumont makes it abundantly clear that he isn't interested in sociological explanations. Celine has everything - she's the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man - and she still decides to become a killer. The point is pretty clear - the origins of evil are deep, mysterious, and intermingled with the origins of love. They might even be the same thing. That's a subtle and fascinating idea, but Dumont doesn't effectively dramatize it. He instead reverts to his native minimalism, preventing Celine's character from developing, while the audience is left cold.
It's still the case that nobody casts non-actors like Dumont, and that nobody can spot a compelling face like Dumont; but compelling faces alone can't carry a film. This latest work shows an increased emphasis on straightforward storytelling, a form that Dumont isn't entirely comfortable with - at least not yet. It's hard to tell if Hadewijch is a spiritual film infused with secular skepticism, or a secular film with spiritual yearnings. Either way, the inherent tension is fitful at best. I will admit to being pleasantly surprised by the final action of the film, although it didn't resonate the way Dumont's previous conclusions tended to - it's a nice, effective set piece that casts the preceding events in the glow of a religious parable, but it can't make up for the film's shortcomings. Overall, Hadewijch is worth seeing, but it doesn't match the unsettling power achieved by some Dumont's previous efforts.
A surprising turn for Dumont, in the sense that it at least feels more subtle, tender, and even-tempered than his previous films. For all the heartfelt sincerity of his work, he has been at least equally interested in provoking his audience, daring us to look away, to reject his seriousness. This double-edged sword is what fascinates me about Dumont - his moral gravity is inspiring, especially in light of frequently oblique and skeptical attitudes among artists in all mediums, but he has an undeniable streak of the bad-boy artiste that seems deliberately repellent.
So I'm not sure how I feel about this latest, mild-mannered version of Dumont. I like that he's being totally upfront about investigating the varieties of religious experience, from the vicious to the sublime, but I found myself only half-invested for much of the movie. It opens magnificently; Julie Sokolokowsi is fantastic from the first frame, and the early scenes in and out of the convent work especially well. But once we are introduced to Yassir's brother, who is swiftly revealed as a jihad-wager, things become overly schematic. Celine's "conversion" from gentle-if-overly-ardent novice to willing terrorist is done at the drop of a hat, seemingly, and it doesn't convince. The subtext is clear enough - we overhear, in Celine/Hadewijch's prayers, remarks on God's love being "violent," and other ruminations on the ambiguity of faith. Dumont is concerned with the mercurial nature of religion, in which a philosophy of love can so easily degenerate into a monstrous doctrine of hatred, and Celine/Hadewijch is his test case. But in refusing to delve into the messy and (and mostly passe) world of psychological realism, he leaves the audience no way to access Celine's inner life. In Bresson (an obvious touchstone of Dumont's), who was ever rigorous in his minimalism, this wasn't much of an issue. I actually like that Dumont lets his characters appear more tangibly human - for me, paving this middle path between Bressonian minimalism and more traditional storytelling was one of the things that made his first two features so exciting. Hadewijch shows even more progress toward the dramatic, but in too many instances, the director seems to hesitate. It's as if he wants us to empathize with Celine, but also consider her as a metaphysical idea - an avatar of pure religious devotion. Unfortunately, these two impulses don't easily coexist, at least not in this film. We either encounter her as a poorly-written dramatic "character" or as an amorphous religious conceit. Clearly, Dumont is interested in illustrating her humanity - why else would he cast a girl who is so naturally talented at being on camera? Unlike some of his previous protagonists - Pharoan in l'Humanite, or the menacing lug in Flanders, who were cut from similar cloth to Bresson's impassive and statuesque "subjects," Celine is delightfully alive. She's quiet but intense, vulnerable yet strong, a fairly typical teenage girl (which is to say, complexly immature) who just happens to prefer Jesus to other boys. So when we see her recede from rationality into full-blown fanaticism, it doesn't wash. To be fair, the challenge Dumont tackled is a massive one - how do you depict the appeal of fanaticism? How does one persuasively argue for acts of violence that will harm the innocent? Of course, we're all capable of imagining the conditions that produce many terrorists - poverty, repression, lack of education, violence - but Dumont makes it abundantly clear that he isn't interested in sociological explanations. Celine has everything - she's the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man - and she still decides to become a killer. The point is pretty clear - the origins of evil are deep, mysterious, and intermingled with the origins of love. They might even be the same thing. That's a subtle and fascinating idea, but Dumont doesn't effectively dramatize it. He instead reverts to his native minimalism, preventing Celine's character from developing, while the audience is left cold.
It's still the case that nobody casts non-actors like Dumont, and that nobody can spot a compelling face like Dumont; but compelling faces alone can't carry a film. This latest work shows an increased emphasis on straightforward storytelling, a form that Dumont isn't entirely comfortable with - at least not yet. It's hard to tell if Hadewijch is a spiritual film infused with secular skepticism, or a secular film with spiritual yearnings. Either way, the inherent tension is fitful at best. I will admit to being pleasantly surprised by the final action of the film, although it didn't resonate the way Dumont's previous conclusions tended to - it's a nice, effective set piece that casts the preceding events in the glow of a religious parable, but it can't make up for the film's shortcomings. Overall, Hadewijch is worth seeing, but it doesn't match the unsettling power achieved by some Dumont's previous efforts.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Manhunter
(Michael Mann, USA, 1986)
The latest stop on my Mann retrospective. A thoroughly engrossing serial killer film, as well as a well-wrought story about obsession and identity. It's also incredibly visually rich. You can see a lot of the tropes of serial killer films getting their start with this picture - the psychological profiling, the arch-mastermind villain of Hannibal Lecktor, the evil misfit of Francis Dollarhyde - who is offered a near-miss shot at redemption. It's far more impressionistic and analytic than most of Mann's oeuvre, playing with subjectivity in a way that feels totally unique and comes across as pretty damn unsettling. As usual, Mann has a tendency to overplay his hand in the atmosphere department, pushing some of the scenes too far into the stylistic and emotional stratosphere. But the overall impression is deeply affecting - a very scary and suspenseful movie. Philosophically, it doesn't delve as deeply as it could - another Mann limitation, but it does successfully toy with the opposition between the American ideals of Normal and Aberrant. This time, the criminal archetype is beyond the pale; we're talking pre-De Niro existential sexiness. Noonan's Dollarhyde is a portrayed as a monster, but due care is given to his potential for redemption, even if he never achieves it. This is in keeping with Mann's social and legal outsiders, who share a commonly tragic fate. The tragic paradox, for Mann's characters, is that they only feel truly alive while outside the trappings of the social contract, but they are always tempted to return to it, and this is the impulse that inevitably leads to their undoing. Mann's temptation is to Romanticize his characters, but ultimately he finds their fate tragic, not heroic. Here, the protagonist is the hero and the villain, with Dollarhyde being a kind of stand-in for the darker impulses he keeps well hidden when he's not chasing serial killers.
The latest stop on my Mann retrospective. A thoroughly engrossing serial killer film, as well as a well-wrought story about obsession and identity. It's also incredibly visually rich. You can see a lot of the tropes of serial killer films getting their start with this picture - the psychological profiling, the arch-mastermind villain of Hannibal Lecktor, the evil misfit of Francis Dollarhyde - who is offered a near-miss shot at redemption. It's far more impressionistic and analytic than most of Mann's oeuvre, playing with subjectivity in a way that feels totally unique and comes across as pretty damn unsettling. As usual, Mann has a tendency to overplay his hand in the atmosphere department, pushing some of the scenes too far into the stylistic and emotional stratosphere. But the overall impression is deeply affecting - a very scary and suspenseful movie. Philosophically, it doesn't delve as deeply as it could - another Mann limitation, but it does successfully toy with the opposition between the American ideals of Normal and Aberrant. This time, the criminal archetype is beyond the pale; we're talking pre-De Niro existential sexiness. Noonan's Dollarhyde is a portrayed as a monster, but due care is given to his potential for redemption, even if he never achieves it. This is in keeping with Mann's social and legal outsiders, who share a commonly tragic fate. The tragic paradox, for Mann's characters, is that they only feel truly alive while outside the trappings of the social contract, but they are always tempted to return to it, and this is the impulse that inevitably leads to their undoing. Mann's temptation is to Romanticize his characters, but ultimately he finds their fate tragic, not heroic. Here, the protagonist is the hero and the villain, with Dollarhyde being a kind of stand-in for the darker impulses he keeps well hidden when he's not chasing serial killers.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
The Social Network
(David Fincher, USA, 2010)
- Fundamentally, not about Facebook: well, yes and no. It isn't about Facebook per se, but about the implications of Facebook re. our culture - a mirror, and not a very flattering one.
- Zuckerberg's motivation being prestige, most importantly. Power. Which leads to money, which he never wanted - he wanted something money can't buy.
- Facebook as being, structurally, hierarchical. Whether or not Z was ever interested in money (as the movie emphasizes, more than once, he was not) is immaterial; the very institutional logic of the corporation means that power will be concentrated overwhelmingly at the very top. As Slaverin says, it's like a Final Club, except they're the president.
- Again, a repeated trope is the nebulousness of Facebook - "all we know is that it's cool;" and the subsequent resistance to monetize it through advertising. A) this raises all sorts of fascinating questions about how we assign value in contemporary (late-capitalist) culture, the ambivalence toward advertising, and the final truth that Facebook now does have ads. It was - again, looking at the institutional structure of Facebook, as a for-profit, hierarchical organization, inevitable that it incorporate ads at some point.
- Exclusivity: Perhaps the most central point. It isn't about Z as a jilted lover, or even as a social climber; but the entire culture's obsession with exclusivity; again, reflected in Facebook, the way in which value must be assigned according to what is left out, cast aside. That's what makes Facebook cool - the fact that only certain people make the big decisions about who's in and who's out. This is, in some ways, the one aspect that has changed most about Facebook - it is no longer so exclusive, but it really is, it has just changed forms - it is Z's dream that Facebook will be indispensable to all.
- Roll of the Winkelvi - competition (the rowing race sequence); their apology to their father - the divided face of the Elite: naive "we're all gentlemen here" affectations of honor, and cut-throat, mercenary viciousness, but also a terrible sense of pride, a woundedness coming from the inevitable reckoning of a game they helped engineer, in which the winner takes all, and all that matters is the first one to the finish line.
- Fundamentally, not about Facebook: well, yes and no. It isn't about Facebook per se, but about the implications of Facebook re. our culture - a mirror, and not a very flattering one.
- Zuckerberg's motivation being prestige, most importantly. Power. Which leads to money, which he never wanted - he wanted something money can't buy.
- Facebook as being, structurally, hierarchical. Whether or not Z was ever interested in money (as the movie emphasizes, more than once, he was not) is immaterial; the very institutional logic of the corporation means that power will be concentrated overwhelmingly at the very top. As Slaverin says, it's like a Final Club, except they're the president.
- Again, a repeated trope is the nebulousness of Facebook - "all we know is that it's cool;" and the subsequent resistance to monetize it through advertising. A) this raises all sorts of fascinating questions about how we assign value in contemporary (late-capitalist) culture, the ambivalence toward advertising, and the final truth that Facebook now does have ads. It was - again, looking at the institutional structure of Facebook, as a for-profit, hierarchical organization, inevitable that it incorporate ads at some point.
- Exclusivity: Perhaps the most central point. It isn't about Z as a jilted lover, or even as a social climber; but the entire culture's obsession with exclusivity; again, reflected in Facebook, the way in which value must be assigned according to what is left out, cast aside. That's what makes Facebook cool - the fact that only certain people make the big decisions about who's in and who's out. This is, in some ways, the one aspect that has changed most about Facebook - it is no longer so exclusive, but it really is, it has just changed forms - it is Z's dream that Facebook will be indispensable to all.
- Roll of the Winkelvi - competition (the rowing race sequence); their apology to their father - the divided face of the Elite: naive "we're all gentlemen here" affectations of honor, and cut-throat, mercenary viciousness, but also a terrible sense of pride, a woundedness coming from the inevitable reckoning of a game they helped engineer, in which the winner takes all, and all that matters is the first one to the finish line.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Men With Guns
(John Sayles, US, 1997)
I'm a big booster of Sayles's movies, but this one was something of a disappointment. It's a well-made film by any objective standard, but it doesn't feel particularly vital or urgent, which has at least something to do with the urgency of the subject matter. Rather than making the world of the film come alive, it feels too often like Sayles was conducting an academic exercise, scrupulously reporting the tragic woes of South and Central America; it brims with solemnity but mostly feels inert. Flat-footed pacing and an arid tone aren't new features of the Sayles canon, but when he's really cooking, he makes his simplicity and earnestness work for him, slyly evoking emotion from unpredictability even as he seems to be the picture of classicist storytelling.
Some of the blame could probably be leveled at the premise; John Sayles, the indie-man's indie director, makes a film in South America (the locale is never specified exactly), with a South American cast, and with an almost exclusively Spanish script. There's a whiff of do-it-because-you-can attitude to such a proposition, and in the end, it doesn't deliver on the gambit. The scenes are often plodding and disconnected from each other, the flashbacks feel forced and superfluous, and the overall impact is one of weary respect, but for me, lacked admiration. The strongest element by far is the acting, which gives rise to some flashes of beauty and lyricism that are otherwise largely absent. In Sayles quietly epic folktale, he stumbles in his attempt to meld quiet gravity with the inevitable enormity of Latin American hardship, but I can't bring myself to fault him for trying.
I'm a big booster of Sayles's movies, but this one was something of a disappointment. It's a well-made film by any objective standard, but it doesn't feel particularly vital or urgent, which has at least something to do with the urgency of the subject matter. Rather than making the world of the film come alive, it feels too often like Sayles was conducting an academic exercise, scrupulously reporting the tragic woes of South and Central America; it brims with solemnity but mostly feels inert. Flat-footed pacing and an arid tone aren't new features of the Sayles canon, but when he's really cooking, he makes his simplicity and earnestness work for him, slyly evoking emotion from unpredictability even as he seems to be the picture of classicist storytelling.
Some of the blame could probably be leveled at the premise; John Sayles, the indie-man's indie director, makes a film in South America (the locale is never specified exactly), with a South American cast, and with an almost exclusively Spanish script. There's a whiff of do-it-because-you-can attitude to such a proposition, and in the end, it doesn't deliver on the gambit. The scenes are often plodding and disconnected from each other, the flashbacks feel forced and superfluous, and the overall impact is one of weary respect, but for me, lacked admiration. The strongest element by far is the acting, which gives rise to some flashes of beauty and lyricism that are otherwise largely absent. In Sayles quietly epic folktale, he stumbles in his attempt to meld quiet gravity with the inevitable enormity of Latin American hardship, but I can't bring myself to fault him for trying.
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