(Ridley Scott, 2012, USA)
Damnably stupid. The chasm of quality that separates Alien, Scott's space-bound monster movie masterpiece, and this bloated, slipshod, desultory pot of sci-fi gumbo, must be measured in light years. Scott is perhaps the laziest filmmaker working in Hollywood. While his considerable talents as a visual craftsman haven't deserted him, any sense of exertion, any flash of intelligence or perspective, is utterly lacking from his recent work. He coasts like no other.
The biggest problem with Prometheus isn't the script, which is depressingly inept, but in the fact that Scott - again, a truly talented craftsman, which is not meant as faint praise - allowed it to be filmed as such. You can't blame Lindelof, who apparently doesn't know any better, for writing trash. But Scott should at least be able to spot trash when he sees it, and either reject or try to fix it. It's clear that he had some interest in the idea of expanding on the Alien universe mythology; even if it represents a rather opportunistic return to the well, he at least was willing to approach it from an angle other than the formulaic wasteland of sequeldom.
Prometheus, then, serves as a quasi-prequel, in which the mystery of the alien planet from the original Alien is, well, not really solved, but riffed upon. It doesn't matter. Things start off in the register of the silly, as we see a white-skinned, hairless, utterly ripped humanoid thingy imbibe some oily goo, after which he undergoes a CGI disintegration and winds up spilling his DNA all down a waterfall. It's awkward and wholly unengaging, and things don't improve much from there. For about the first forty minutes, the film at least manages to make sense, story-wise, even if the characters quickly reveal themselves to be B-television stereotypes. And it's worth noting that Scott and Lindelof aim to leave certain aspects of the mythology (as it were) unresolved. This would be admirable, even in its ineptitude, if it didn't reek so obviously of being groundwork for more sequels. But after those forty minutes, even basic coherence goes out the window, as Scott apparently submits to Lindelof's kitchen-sink conceit, in which everything from zombies to face-huggers to Clash of the Titans is thrown in for good measure, while the story and characters, which aren't much to being with, are discarded completely to make room for the dippy, wholly unsuspenseful "action."
I can't think of another contemporary film that was so impressed with itself while simultaneously being so embarrassingly short on ideas. Prometheus doesn't play as mere pandering entertainment, so it doesn't have any of the transparent, mercenary money-chasing of a Transformers sequel. It's a pretentious film in the worst kind of way, presuming to impress an audience who it clearly has little respect for, doing so by making a series of halfassed feints at depth and vigor, but possessing neither quality.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
The Counselor
(Ridley Scott, USA, 2013)
A trainwreck, but not without some curious elements. It's possible to see what some of the film's few champions appreciated about the picture, but they're still giving it far too much credit. Scott, per usual, directs with impersonal professionalism, sleekly but without insight or genuine verve. I'm intrigued by the thought of better director's handing of the same script, but most of the best would surely have steered clear. The only way to have made McCarthy's flabby, portentous screenplay into something manageable would have been radical revisions, including lopping off several of the spiraling monologues. It isn't as though there's nothing worthwhile beneath all of the portentous heft; McCarthy knows from menacing atmosphere, and a serious condensation by a genuinely inventive director (it's useless to name names) could have been a thing to behold.
But the script was snapped up and sent directly into production by a very credulous and prestige-starved Hollywood. Apparently, the weight of McCarthy's name, combined with the recent critical and box-office success of No Country was enough to blind pretty much everybody - including several people who should have known better, such as Sir Ridley and most of the cast - to the fact that this hot commodity was a turgid mess.
Remarkably, the film aspires to tragedy. There's very little action, and almost none that involves the main characters. As is usual with McCarthy, the world is one of bleak determinism, spiced up with gaudy acts of evil. While certainly a flawed man, we're meant to see that the titular Counselor is undeserving of his abject destiny, like pretty much everyone else who meets an ugly demise. The only people who make it to the credits unscathed are the true villains, who are somehow exempt from the miserable fates of the less ruthless. But we are meant to pity the poor Counselor, watching helplessly along with him as his best-laid plans go bust and everything he ever loved is mercilessly destroyed.
Again, this is primarily the fault of McCarthy. There is something sadistic about his worst fictions, which seem to revel in the despair of their characters, constantly upping the ante to prove there is nothing so dark or depraved in the world that his imagination cannot best. I've no idea if the Mexican drug cartels have diversified into snuff film production, and I don't really care to find out. But McCarthy delights in rubbing my face in my own aversion; there's always the nagging suggestion that if I look away, I'm just another coward who can't face the Hard Facts of the World. I know, because I've been lectured by McCarthy in his prose, and now, he's even roped Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt into delivering his spiel.
For spiel it is, and it's grown awfully tired. The problem with McCarthy's personal brand of cynicism is finally that its wholly hermetic. He seeks to overpower our objections with the weight of his rhetoric, and given that he's endowed with enormous rhetorical gifts, its not a bad strategy. But, even if successful, the final result is only exhaustion. In The Counselor, his imagination is muddied by his relentless obsession with Fate as a cruel, capricious, and inescapable power. The consistent implication is that we have no better angels in our nature; even if we did, they would be helpless to save us from reality's Inquisition-like punishments. McCarthy long ago perfected this brand of Predestination Horror fiction, but it's grown stale, and his constant upping of the ante has increasingly diminishing returns. There are better, more interesting ideas out there.
A trainwreck, but not without some curious elements. It's possible to see what some of the film's few champions appreciated about the picture, but they're still giving it far too much credit. Scott, per usual, directs with impersonal professionalism, sleekly but without insight or genuine verve. I'm intrigued by the thought of better director's handing of the same script, but most of the best would surely have steered clear. The only way to have made McCarthy's flabby, portentous screenplay into something manageable would have been radical revisions, including lopping off several of the spiraling monologues. It isn't as though there's nothing worthwhile beneath all of the portentous heft; McCarthy knows from menacing atmosphere, and a serious condensation by a genuinely inventive director (it's useless to name names) could have been a thing to behold.
But the script was snapped up and sent directly into production by a very credulous and prestige-starved Hollywood. Apparently, the weight of McCarthy's name, combined with the recent critical and box-office success of No Country was enough to blind pretty much everybody - including several people who should have known better, such as Sir Ridley and most of the cast - to the fact that this hot commodity was a turgid mess.
Remarkably, the film aspires to tragedy. There's very little action, and almost none that involves the main characters. As is usual with McCarthy, the world is one of bleak determinism, spiced up with gaudy acts of evil. While certainly a flawed man, we're meant to see that the titular Counselor is undeserving of his abject destiny, like pretty much everyone else who meets an ugly demise. The only people who make it to the credits unscathed are the true villains, who are somehow exempt from the miserable fates of the less ruthless. But we are meant to pity the poor Counselor, watching helplessly along with him as his best-laid plans go bust and everything he ever loved is mercilessly destroyed.
Again, this is primarily the fault of McCarthy. There is something sadistic about his worst fictions, which seem to revel in the despair of their characters, constantly upping the ante to prove there is nothing so dark or depraved in the world that his imagination cannot best. I've no idea if the Mexican drug cartels have diversified into snuff film production, and I don't really care to find out. But McCarthy delights in rubbing my face in my own aversion; there's always the nagging suggestion that if I look away, I'm just another coward who can't face the Hard Facts of the World. I know, because I've been lectured by McCarthy in his prose, and now, he's even roped Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt into delivering his spiel.
For spiel it is, and it's grown awfully tired. The problem with McCarthy's personal brand of cynicism is finally that its wholly hermetic. He seeks to overpower our objections with the weight of his rhetoric, and given that he's endowed with enormous rhetorical gifts, its not a bad strategy. But, even if successful, the final result is only exhaustion. In The Counselor, his imagination is muddied by his relentless obsession with Fate as a cruel, capricious, and inescapable power. The consistent implication is that we have no better angels in our nature; even if we did, they would be helpless to save us from reality's Inquisition-like punishments. McCarthy long ago perfected this brand of Predestination Horror fiction, but it's grown stale, and his constant upping of the ante has increasingly diminishing returns. There are better, more interesting ideas out there.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
(Alain Resnais, France, 2013)
A magnificently odd film by the 90-year old Resnais. Clearly, a more thorough investigation of his work is in order (I've seen Marienbad and Hiroshima, but it's been many years, and I my initial verdict was ambivalence. The guy has undeniable brilliance, but I struggled with the reliance on theatrical artifice.)
Part paean to the actors and their art, part puckish experiment in cinema-theater dialectics, and part serious treatment of love, mortality, and various other verities, Resnais's most recent work, same as it ever was, defies categorization. As with Jia Zhangke, his use of digital-as-digital - embracing the medium in all of its flawed novelty - is transcendent. Much of the action takes place in front of digitally-painted backdrops, which highlights the artifice of the medium, while simultaneously providing a powerful, even unsettling immediacy to the action.
Resnais brazenly invests himself in a highly tenuous concept, and his actors - several of France's best - follow him without hesitation. It's a remarkably tender work, overflowing with affection for the people who appear onscreen. Somehow, what resonated most is the notion of acting as generosity; in scene after scene, the actors throw themselves into the performances, and we sense that Renais, also, is delighted in being able to offer them such an opportunity to practice their art.
For a film so fixated on death, both willed and unwilled, the overall effect is exhilarating, and I couldn't help but picture Resnais as working from a place of almost serene belief in his art, and in art in general. The notion of art as almost magical in its powers, transcending space and time, is brilliantly related. A 20th century play (two plays, actually) based upon a myth from antiquity, transmuted by cinema into a 21st-century experience, somehow manages to feel stunningly alive, relevant, and contemporary. It's an enactment of faith, not just in cinema but in art, to make sense of the senseless, to render time and history in an intimate, human scale. The play, itself an extension of the ancient world, will continue to be performed, not just through repertory theater but now through the pixellated movement of the digital image. The life that art gives, for those willing to give themselves to art - whether it is for a single performance, as an audience member, or as a professional, five nights a week (or forever, depending on the archive capabilities of digital) - is revealed as a sacred power.
There's a lot to unpack in this film, and it will certainly benefit from being revisited. Things get especially weird at the end, with the inclusion of a couple epilogues that feel abrupt, if deliberately so. What was Resnais after? He seems perfectly content to let such questions linger.
A magnificently odd film by the 90-year old Resnais. Clearly, a more thorough investigation of his work is in order (I've seen Marienbad and Hiroshima, but it's been many years, and I my initial verdict was ambivalence. The guy has undeniable brilliance, but I struggled with the reliance on theatrical artifice.)
Part paean to the actors and their art, part puckish experiment in cinema-theater dialectics, and part serious treatment of love, mortality, and various other verities, Resnais's most recent work, same as it ever was, defies categorization. As with Jia Zhangke, his use of digital-as-digital - embracing the medium in all of its flawed novelty - is transcendent. Much of the action takes place in front of digitally-painted backdrops, which highlights the artifice of the medium, while simultaneously providing a powerful, even unsettling immediacy to the action.
Resnais brazenly invests himself in a highly tenuous concept, and his actors - several of France's best - follow him without hesitation. It's a remarkably tender work, overflowing with affection for the people who appear onscreen. Somehow, what resonated most is the notion of acting as generosity; in scene after scene, the actors throw themselves into the performances, and we sense that Renais, also, is delighted in being able to offer them such an opportunity to practice their art.
For a film so fixated on death, both willed and unwilled, the overall effect is exhilarating, and I couldn't help but picture Resnais as working from a place of almost serene belief in his art, and in art in general. The notion of art as almost magical in its powers, transcending space and time, is brilliantly related. A 20th century play (two plays, actually) based upon a myth from antiquity, transmuted by cinema into a 21st-century experience, somehow manages to feel stunningly alive, relevant, and contemporary. It's an enactment of faith, not just in cinema but in art, to make sense of the senseless, to render time and history in an intimate, human scale. The play, itself an extension of the ancient world, will continue to be performed, not just through repertory theater but now through the pixellated movement of the digital image. The life that art gives, for those willing to give themselves to art - whether it is for a single performance, as an audience member, or as a professional, five nights a week (or forever, depending on the archive capabilities of digital) - is revealed as a sacred power.
There's a lot to unpack in this film, and it will certainly benefit from being revisited. Things get especially weird at the end, with the inclusion of a couple epilogues that feel abrupt, if deliberately so. What was Resnais after? He seems perfectly content to let such questions linger.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
A Touch of Sin
(Jia Zhangke, China, 2013)
I caught this film during a run of "Overlooked and Underseen" films, a series at the excellent CineFamily theater (my first time there, and I was impressed and pleased.) As a fan of Jia's since viewing his visionary Still Life, I'd been meaning to see A Touch of Sin after hearing that it would receive US distribution, but had missed it the first time around. Saturday evening, I got lucky. The film is a trove of wonders, a symphony of strange yet fruitful juxtapositions: ethereal beauty and gory violence, lapidary realism and rich symbolism, anguish and humor.
It was also my first truly satisfying theater experience of a digitally shot and projected movie. As with any medium, it takes an artist to make what is new seem timeless; never before (in my experience) have the idiosyncrasies of digital image capture been taken to such poetic heights. Jia uses what usually amount to limitations - the stilted, too-sharp crispness, the stinginess in range and depth of light, and the slight queasiness of digital's motion blur - to produce a panoply of moods and effects. Jia's visual taste - in terms of color, composition, movement, and space - is, for my money, unparalleled in contemporary cinema, so it's no surprise that he can summon such nuance from the technology.
The film comprises a series of semi-connected vignettes, all of them variations on a theme: the extent to which conditions in modern-day China have created such rampant dehumanization that violence has become endemic. Jia's vision is driven by fury; his sympathy for the downtrodden, forgotten, abused, and disenfranchised of China is palpable, as is his rage at the systemic corruption that's led to such an abject state of affairs. But the film is no revenge fantasy. Jia keeps his feet planted firmly in a moral stance. He retains a certain detachment throughout; a fluid awareness that deftly moves between the political, spiritual, aesthetic, sexual, and symbolic realms.
Violence, in A Touch of Sin, is everywhere, and yet remains an aberration, a flaw in the design of the universe. The body count could rival that of a slasher film - I lost count of how may characters are dispatched over the running time. But in Jia's view, the violence is symptomatic of a deeper history of abuse. He shows us with the camera: there is the violence that cuts roads through the mountains, that sets high-speed trains on a collision course with each other, than strains familial bonds to the breaking point, that crowds young men and women into factories and dormitories like cattle in a feedlot. Animals, here, are used to resonant symbolic ends - from obvious touchstones such as the abused mule (a nod to Au Hazard Balthazar,) to live oxen being driven to market in the back of a pickup truck, to snakes as part of a traveling roadshow. (Other members of the Chinese Zodiac - a monkey and a tiger - appear in key moments). What's suggested, most importantly, is the destruction of humanity; tradition, history, community, and even love aren't spared. The China of today, Jia avers, is a perfect storm of widespread regression. And yet the animals also reflect what is lacking in this world. They serve as a rebuke: strikingly alive and aware in comparison to the downward gazes and muted gestures that seem to characterize so many of the people.
In A Touch of Sin, the sin has roots, and they can be traced. The violence, when it erupts in bloodshed, is an expression of something long repressed. It harkens back to old conflicts, grievances that have gone unredressed. Elemental forces of destruction have been awakened, unleashed on the world. A breaking point has been reached - people have been punished for being people. The sin of oppression, of the denial of justice, always concentrates at the bottom of a society. And eventually, after enough has been collected, the dam breaks. Jia, in his subtle, undeniable way, has fashioned a revolutionary film. Not a call to action, but a cri de cœur, a chorus of righteous anger, crafted with incendiary artistry.
I caught this film during a run of "Overlooked and Underseen" films, a series at the excellent CineFamily theater (my first time there, and I was impressed and pleased.) As a fan of Jia's since viewing his visionary Still Life, I'd been meaning to see A Touch of Sin after hearing that it would receive US distribution, but had missed it the first time around. Saturday evening, I got lucky. The film is a trove of wonders, a symphony of strange yet fruitful juxtapositions: ethereal beauty and gory violence, lapidary realism and rich symbolism, anguish and humor.
It was also my first truly satisfying theater experience of a digitally shot and projected movie. As with any medium, it takes an artist to make what is new seem timeless; never before (in my experience) have the idiosyncrasies of digital image capture been taken to such poetic heights. Jia uses what usually amount to limitations - the stilted, too-sharp crispness, the stinginess in range and depth of light, and the slight queasiness of digital's motion blur - to produce a panoply of moods and effects. Jia's visual taste - in terms of color, composition, movement, and space - is, for my money, unparalleled in contemporary cinema, so it's no surprise that he can summon such nuance from the technology.
The film comprises a series of semi-connected vignettes, all of them variations on a theme: the extent to which conditions in modern-day China have created such rampant dehumanization that violence has become endemic. Jia's vision is driven by fury; his sympathy for the downtrodden, forgotten, abused, and disenfranchised of China is palpable, as is his rage at the systemic corruption that's led to such an abject state of affairs. But the film is no revenge fantasy. Jia keeps his feet planted firmly in a moral stance. He retains a certain detachment throughout; a fluid awareness that deftly moves between the political, spiritual, aesthetic, sexual, and symbolic realms.
Violence, in A Touch of Sin, is everywhere, and yet remains an aberration, a flaw in the design of the universe. The body count could rival that of a slasher film - I lost count of how may characters are dispatched over the running time. But in Jia's view, the violence is symptomatic of a deeper history of abuse. He shows us with the camera: there is the violence that cuts roads through the mountains, that sets high-speed trains on a collision course with each other, than strains familial bonds to the breaking point, that crowds young men and women into factories and dormitories like cattle in a feedlot. Animals, here, are used to resonant symbolic ends - from obvious touchstones such as the abused mule (a nod to Au Hazard Balthazar,) to live oxen being driven to market in the back of a pickup truck, to snakes as part of a traveling roadshow. (Other members of the Chinese Zodiac - a monkey and a tiger - appear in key moments). What's suggested, most importantly, is the destruction of humanity; tradition, history, community, and even love aren't spared. The China of today, Jia avers, is a perfect storm of widespread regression. And yet the animals also reflect what is lacking in this world. They serve as a rebuke: strikingly alive and aware in comparison to the downward gazes and muted gestures that seem to characterize so many of the people.
In A Touch of Sin, the sin has roots, and they can be traced. The violence, when it erupts in bloodshed, is an expression of something long repressed. It harkens back to old conflicts, grievances that have gone unredressed. Elemental forces of destruction have been awakened, unleashed on the world. A breaking point has been reached - people have been punished for being people. The sin of oppression, of the denial of justice, always concentrates at the bottom of a society. And eventually, after enough has been collected, the dam breaks. Jia, in his subtle, undeniable way, has fashioned a revolutionary film. Not a call to action, but a cri de cœur, a chorus of righteous anger, crafted with incendiary artistry.
Monday, January 13, 2014
The Wolf of Wall Street
(Martin Scorsese, USA, 2013)
A comedic saga, full of mania and absurdity and excess, that builds, by way of Scorsese's singular cinematic imagination, into a kind of majesty.
Accusations that the film endorses or condones the behavior exhibited are nothing more than well-meaning nonsense. Scorsese does enjoy the revelry, to a great extent, and extends that enjoyment to us; it provides a frame, and a fuel source, for his vision. All that Marty loves, he is free to indulge in; scads of music cues, whip pans and tilts, tracking shots, zooms, pounding smash-cuts: it's all there for the taking.
And yet it isn't a movie without restraint. It has a shape - long, delirious, twisted, but still a shape, a momentum, and an unmistakable rhythm.
It's not quite right to think of this film as topical. As has been repeatedly pointed out, Belfort, though he stole millions, was a small fry in comparison to the real plutocrats. The film's resonance with our current troubles is significant, deliberate, and worth noting. It should make us feel uneasy, and it does. But this isn't a grand statement about the rot on Wall St, which, if we're paying attention, ought to be painfully obvious. It's about a much more general - dare I say universal - topic: the seduction of power. Unlike Oliver Stone's Wall Street, which is basically a kind of glossy fable, telling a simple story with a moral, Scorsese's opus is more elusive, more artful, and more brilliant.
Scorsese's great theme has always been power, in all of its guises. Power as a drug, power as a manifestation of the will, power as a bulwark, however impermanent, against the awareness of mortality. He is obsessed with characters that take what they want, regardless of the consequences. Characters who dare to betray and transgress, who feel themselves exempt from the fetters of civilized life. Jordan Belfort, as imagined by Scorsese and his collaborators, might be the purest iteration of this character, boiled down to a crust of rapacious appetite.
Ironies abound. It is clear that his subjects are by-and-large a lot of contemptible assholes, but they never loose their humanity - not entirely. There is a strange, fascinating, and ultimately, terrifying innocence about Jordan. Partly this is due to DiCaprio, who, despite his considerable talents as an actor, is unable to completely extinguish his movie-star charm. This serves the movie well, in that he never looses the look of the kid in the candy store; wide eyed and consumed with desire, utterly captivated by all that can be had. For Jordan, it's all in good fun. He jokes that he feels justified in fleecing his clients because he knows better how to spend it - on drugs, women, and cars. It's also telling, and psychologically astute, that he exhibits such contempt for those he swindles; in the twisted, darkly hilarious demonstration he gives to his new cadre of budding stockbrokers, while on speakerphone with a dupe, Belfort repeatedly flashes the bird, mimes anal penetration, and generally makes it clear that this person is, to him, less than human. This is classic emotional distancing, a well-known slipperly slope of dissociation that starts with lies and ends with murder. To be a predator, which label Jordan proudly self-applies, it's of paramount importance to deny your victim any feelings. Dehumanize them, and it quickly becomes possible to whatever you please.
We see, in hints and glances, that Jordan isn't entirely sui generis; his father, for all of his raging disapproval, is ultimately an enabler of his son. One gets the sense that Jordan's energy, and his insatiable appetite, are partly the product of his upbringing.
And then there's the irony of Belfort's epiphany on the boat: in a flash of insight, he goes from trader to motivational speaker, essentially degenerating into self-parody. He never stops selling - when they take away his broker's license, he begins to sell the only thing he has left, and the thing that has, ultimately, been selling all along: himself. His final iteration, ushered on stage by his real-life basis (who seems, despite it all, to have retained something of his unhinged frenzy) is not flattering - this is the paunchy, swollen, blotchy-faced husk of the former Jordan. Life has finally caught up with him.
The last shot is indeed among Scorsese's most affecting, eloquent, poetic, and mysterious. Are these people meant to reflect us? Are they representative of his victims - earnest, striving, desirous people, somehow hoodwinked into thinking that this broken-down former lunatic swindler has anything of value to offer us?
The chaos and mania of unbridled appetites: there is plenty of revelry, but not much genuine fun. Belfort is an adept huckster and prolific self-abuser, but he's ultimately an amateur hedonist. He shows no aptitude for connoisseurship - it's all about quantity over quality. His indulgences are haphazard, reckless, sloppy, and ultimately desperate; he is a man numbing pain, as all addicts eventually become. He does the drugs that he thinks he's supposed to do - cocaine and Quaaludes chief among them - because that's what master-of-the-universe types are supposed to do. He never really comes out from under the shadow of the Mephistophelean character played to sublime comic perfection by the great Matthew McCaughnehey. Coached in the ways of the world by a self-described depressive (not in so many words) who uses all manner of distractions, from masturbation to binge drinking, to sand off the edges of the central fact of his life: he creates nothing, he merely takes. He is a purveyor of lies, which gradually eats away at one's soul.
There is also all of the very dark, no punches pulled (literally) final quarter-or-so of the film.
But yes, it is an exhilarating, and very fun ride. Scorsese has his natural flair for capturing the fascinating variety of human behavior, with a special eye to the antic and the illicit. Yes, he understands, and makes us understand, the appeal of such indulgences, of living as if one could not die. Amazing comic chops from a never-better cast.
Some scenes do seem to outlive their welcome, but that's part of the desired effect; the extended 'lude overdose is a prime example of excess in form, tone, and content. No, we don't need to see all that crawling around, but it does take the piss out of what could otherwise be a mere comic beat. Same with the scene between Donnie and the drug dealer/money courier. As the comic value decreases, the patent insanity of the characters grows.
Likewise the chilling asides about the broker who married the office associate and later killed himself, and about the dealer who winds up dying suddenly from a heart attack, which information we hear over visuals of him being treated to money, whores, and booze.
The specter of death haunts the whole film - the sudden deaths of some of the characters (such as the aunt, the dealer, etc.)
More ironies - the naked striving of the Stratton Oakmont boys, too much never being enough, and the constant renunciation of their selves; Donnie's ridiculous presumptions of WASP respectability, down to his loafers and bright sweaters. The ridiculous sight of his masturbation in such a get-up, nicely mocking both the character and the banal edifice of the rotting moneyed-elite of America.
Jordan's no better - his house, on the Gold Coast of Long Island, with pretensions of old-world money, sending his kids to get riding lessons, etc.
For Marty, the drug is cinema. In The Wolf of Wall Street, he is flying high all day.
And yet, there is the creeping quality of the rough-hewn, even unto messiness, that is generic to Scorsese's films. Granted, there is a fine line between genuine inelegance and the idiosyncratic messiness of Scorsese's imagination. He is never imprecise; but his tendency towards overlap, towards hurrying, and towards an embrace of artifice in all of its bordering on shoddiness, that have never sat completely well with me. Don't get me wrong - there is a wonderful thrill to be obtained from this libidinous expressiveness. It would be correct to say that Marty's stuff is deceptively messy, that he manages to accomplish a great deal in what appears to be dissonant; an analogue would be certain kinds of Jazz and Rock music. There are wonderful moments in Marty's film that feel like happy accidents, serendipitous occurrences. The best artists are best at responding to the original as it is revealed to them in the moment. This is a process that must happen faster than analysis, so a keenly developed instinct is necessary.
And yet, what about the images themselves? This has long been a bugbear of mine, and may be expressed as a kind of polarity: the cinema of images, and the cinema of montage. These two need not be mutually exclusive, but very film filmmakers manage to make both of them work at all times. Scorsese does so fitfully here; the last shot comes to mind as a pristine example of imagistic integrity. But so many others are slapdash - the exteriors are often graceless, flat, and digital-looking. Of course, the art of the cinema is the art of the montage; various film artists have strived mightily, in as many ways, to maintain integrity of the image.
The shell game of salesmanship in America, as illustrated by Belfort. Levels and levels of deception. Jordan sells his clients shit that they not only don't need, but that will actually harm them. He sells his friends on the scheme, so they'll come to work for him. Ultimately, of course, he's selling himself, too - on the idea that all of this excess is fun, that it can offer fulfillment.
UPDATE:
Some considerations here, and a re-viewing of the film, prompt additional rumination on Scorsese's latest.
What fascinates me about this film? Why do I like it? A second viewing confirmed its pleasures, but also deepened the sense of malaise I associate with the film - a consistent strain of disgust, like a faint queasiness.
There is a plot, but its episodic and often repetitive, in terms of the action depicted. When we, the audience, ask the classical-structure Q of What Happens Next, it seems that the answer to the corollary Q (why do/should I care?) seems to be: what new frontier of debauchery will Belfort embark upon? What taboo will he violate next? How much longer can he keep this binge of a life going? But is this enough to account for the pleasure I derive from the film? It seems insufficient, echoing the complaint of the film's detractors, who decry what they see as pointlessly excessive and repetitive.
Regarding the Q of Character, it also seems as though there isn't enough there for us to claim that any of these characters are well-developed. Certainly, their behavior, from the loopy to the grotesque, is captivating. But there is no real development or change; we don't see much of their inner lives at all, unless we count Belfort's aspirations of getting as fucked up (and fucked) as possible. It could be argued, as some have (most notably Richard Brody), that it is the pure, primal drives on display - the appetites, be they monetary, sexual, pharmacological - is what we can identify with. Even if we know that such indulgences are dangerous and in some cases morally wrong, and eventually kind of gross, we can (if we permit ourselves) live vicariously through the ambition on display.
I accept that this is partly the case, but I also think something else is going on. For me, a big pleasure of any Scorsese movie - any movie that I wind up enjoying, for the most part - is aesthetic. I love the way Scorsese shoots the film - I love his stylistic choices, his use of music, the way he edits together scenes. I love the serene velocity with which he tells his stories. But it would be incorrect to say that I'm enjoying the film on a formal level only - clearly, there is a connection between the form and the content, with one deriving energy from another, which then seems to feed back into the other.
A comedic saga, full of mania and absurdity and excess, that builds, by way of Scorsese's singular cinematic imagination, into a kind of majesty.
Accusations that the film endorses or condones the behavior exhibited are nothing more than well-meaning nonsense. Scorsese does enjoy the revelry, to a great extent, and extends that enjoyment to us; it provides a frame, and a fuel source, for his vision. All that Marty loves, he is free to indulge in; scads of music cues, whip pans and tilts, tracking shots, zooms, pounding smash-cuts: it's all there for the taking.
And yet it isn't a movie without restraint. It has a shape - long, delirious, twisted, but still a shape, a momentum, and an unmistakable rhythm.
It's not quite right to think of this film as topical. As has been repeatedly pointed out, Belfort, though he stole millions, was a small fry in comparison to the real plutocrats. The film's resonance with our current troubles is significant, deliberate, and worth noting. It should make us feel uneasy, and it does. But this isn't a grand statement about the rot on Wall St, which, if we're paying attention, ought to be painfully obvious. It's about a much more general - dare I say universal - topic: the seduction of power. Unlike Oliver Stone's Wall Street, which is basically a kind of glossy fable, telling a simple story with a moral, Scorsese's opus is more elusive, more artful, and more brilliant.
Scorsese's great theme has always been power, in all of its guises. Power as a drug, power as a manifestation of the will, power as a bulwark, however impermanent, against the awareness of mortality. He is obsessed with characters that take what they want, regardless of the consequences. Characters who dare to betray and transgress, who feel themselves exempt from the fetters of civilized life. Jordan Belfort, as imagined by Scorsese and his collaborators, might be the purest iteration of this character, boiled down to a crust of rapacious appetite.
Ironies abound. It is clear that his subjects are by-and-large a lot of contemptible assholes, but they never loose their humanity - not entirely. There is a strange, fascinating, and ultimately, terrifying innocence about Jordan. Partly this is due to DiCaprio, who, despite his considerable talents as an actor, is unable to completely extinguish his movie-star charm. This serves the movie well, in that he never looses the look of the kid in the candy store; wide eyed and consumed with desire, utterly captivated by all that can be had. For Jordan, it's all in good fun. He jokes that he feels justified in fleecing his clients because he knows better how to spend it - on drugs, women, and cars. It's also telling, and psychologically astute, that he exhibits such contempt for those he swindles; in the twisted, darkly hilarious demonstration he gives to his new cadre of budding stockbrokers, while on speakerphone with a dupe, Belfort repeatedly flashes the bird, mimes anal penetration, and generally makes it clear that this person is, to him, less than human. This is classic emotional distancing, a well-known slipperly slope of dissociation that starts with lies and ends with murder. To be a predator, which label Jordan proudly self-applies, it's of paramount importance to deny your victim any feelings. Dehumanize them, and it quickly becomes possible to whatever you please.
We see, in hints and glances, that Jordan isn't entirely sui generis; his father, for all of his raging disapproval, is ultimately an enabler of his son. One gets the sense that Jordan's energy, and his insatiable appetite, are partly the product of his upbringing.
And then there's the irony of Belfort's epiphany on the boat: in a flash of insight, he goes from trader to motivational speaker, essentially degenerating into self-parody. He never stops selling - when they take away his broker's license, he begins to sell the only thing he has left, and the thing that has, ultimately, been selling all along: himself. His final iteration, ushered on stage by his real-life basis (who seems, despite it all, to have retained something of his unhinged frenzy) is not flattering - this is the paunchy, swollen, blotchy-faced husk of the former Jordan. Life has finally caught up with him.
The last shot is indeed among Scorsese's most affecting, eloquent, poetic, and mysterious. Are these people meant to reflect us? Are they representative of his victims - earnest, striving, desirous people, somehow hoodwinked into thinking that this broken-down former lunatic swindler has anything of value to offer us?
The chaos and mania of unbridled appetites: there is plenty of revelry, but not much genuine fun. Belfort is an adept huckster and prolific self-abuser, but he's ultimately an amateur hedonist. He shows no aptitude for connoisseurship - it's all about quantity over quality. His indulgences are haphazard, reckless, sloppy, and ultimately desperate; he is a man numbing pain, as all addicts eventually become. He does the drugs that he thinks he's supposed to do - cocaine and Quaaludes chief among them - because that's what master-of-the-universe types are supposed to do. He never really comes out from under the shadow of the Mephistophelean character played to sublime comic perfection by the great Matthew McCaughnehey. Coached in the ways of the world by a self-described depressive (not in so many words) who uses all manner of distractions, from masturbation to binge drinking, to sand off the edges of the central fact of his life: he creates nothing, he merely takes. He is a purveyor of lies, which gradually eats away at one's soul.
There is also all of the very dark, no punches pulled (literally) final quarter-or-so of the film.
But yes, it is an exhilarating, and very fun ride. Scorsese has his natural flair for capturing the fascinating variety of human behavior, with a special eye to the antic and the illicit. Yes, he understands, and makes us understand, the appeal of such indulgences, of living as if one could not die. Amazing comic chops from a never-better cast.
Some scenes do seem to outlive their welcome, but that's part of the desired effect; the extended 'lude overdose is a prime example of excess in form, tone, and content. No, we don't need to see all that crawling around, but it does take the piss out of what could otherwise be a mere comic beat. Same with the scene between Donnie and the drug dealer/money courier. As the comic value decreases, the patent insanity of the characters grows.
Likewise the chilling asides about the broker who married the office associate and later killed himself, and about the dealer who winds up dying suddenly from a heart attack, which information we hear over visuals of him being treated to money, whores, and booze.
The specter of death haunts the whole film - the sudden deaths of some of the characters (such as the aunt, the dealer, etc.)
More ironies - the naked striving of the Stratton Oakmont boys, too much never being enough, and the constant renunciation of their selves; Donnie's ridiculous presumptions of WASP respectability, down to his loafers and bright sweaters. The ridiculous sight of his masturbation in such a get-up, nicely mocking both the character and the banal edifice of the rotting moneyed-elite of America.
Jordan's no better - his house, on the Gold Coast of Long Island, with pretensions of old-world money, sending his kids to get riding lessons, etc.
For Marty, the drug is cinema. In The Wolf of Wall Street, he is flying high all day.
And yet, there is the creeping quality of the rough-hewn, even unto messiness, that is generic to Scorsese's films. Granted, there is a fine line between genuine inelegance and the idiosyncratic messiness of Scorsese's imagination. He is never imprecise; but his tendency towards overlap, towards hurrying, and towards an embrace of artifice in all of its bordering on shoddiness, that have never sat completely well with me. Don't get me wrong - there is a wonderful thrill to be obtained from this libidinous expressiveness. It would be correct to say that Marty's stuff is deceptively messy, that he manages to accomplish a great deal in what appears to be dissonant; an analogue would be certain kinds of Jazz and Rock music. There are wonderful moments in Marty's film that feel like happy accidents, serendipitous occurrences. The best artists are best at responding to the original as it is revealed to them in the moment. This is a process that must happen faster than analysis, so a keenly developed instinct is necessary.
And yet, what about the images themselves? This has long been a bugbear of mine, and may be expressed as a kind of polarity: the cinema of images, and the cinema of montage. These two need not be mutually exclusive, but very film filmmakers manage to make both of them work at all times. Scorsese does so fitfully here; the last shot comes to mind as a pristine example of imagistic integrity. But so many others are slapdash - the exteriors are often graceless, flat, and digital-looking. Of course, the art of the cinema is the art of the montage; various film artists have strived mightily, in as many ways, to maintain integrity of the image.
The shell game of salesmanship in America, as illustrated by Belfort. Levels and levels of deception. Jordan sells his clients shit that they not only don't need, but that will actually harm them. He sells his friends on the scheme, so they'll come to work for him. Ultimately, of course, he's selling himself, too - on the idea that all of this excess is fun, that it can offer fulfillment.
UPDATE:
Some considerations here, and a re-viewing of the film, prompt additional rumination on Scorsese's latest.
What fascinates me about this film? Why do I like it? A second viewing confirmed its pleasures, but also deepened the sense of malaise I associate with the film - a consistent strain of disgust, like a faint queasiness.
There is a plot, but its episodic and often repetitive, in terms of the action depicted. When we, the audience, ask the classical-structure Q of What Happens Next, it seems that the answer to the corollary Q (why do/should I care?) seems to be: what new frontier of debauchery will Belfort embark upon? What taboo will he violate next? How much longer can he keep this binge of a life going? But is this enough to account for the pleasure I derive from the film? It seems insufficient, echoing the complaint of the film's detractors, who decry what they see as pointlessly excessive and repetitive.
Regarding the Q of Character, it also seems as though there isn't enough there for us to claim that any of these characters are well-developed. Certainly, their behavior, from the loopy to the grotesque, is captivating. But there is no real development or change; we don't see much of their inner lives at all, unless we count Belfort's aspirations of getting as fucked up (and fucked) as possible. It could be argued, as some have (most notably Richard Brody), that it is the pure, primal drives on display - the appetites, be they monetary, sexual, pharmacological - is what we can identify with. Even if we know that such indulgences are dangerous and in some cases morally wrong, and eventually kind of gross, we can (if we permit ourselves) live vicariously through the ambition on display.
I accept that this is partly the case, but I also think something else is going on. For me, a big pleasure of any Scorsese movie - any movie that I wind up enjoying, for the most part - is aesthetic. I love the way Scorsese shoots the film - I love his stylistic choices, his use of music, the way he edits together scenes. I love the serene velocity with which he tells his stories. But it would be incorrect to say that I'm enjoying the film on a formal level only - clearly, there is a connection between the form and the content, with one deriving energy from another, which then seems to feed back into the other.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Frances Ha
(Noah Baumbach, USA, 2013)
Seen by some as an elder statesman's correction to Mumblecore, Baumbach and Gerwig's movie is very much it's own beast. Equal parts classical cinema and Nouvelle Vague, it paints a layer of freewheeling abandon over a sturdy, if squat, substructure of character study.
Working from a script they co-wrote, Gerwig and Baumbach take their formal cues from stumbling, gregarious, impulsive Frances, treating us to a brisk succession of (mostly) comic set pieces. The best stuff effectively nails the heady stew of ambition, anxiety, and sentiment that exemplify the lives of New York based aspiring artists. Careening between desire and ennui, between security and risk, gives Frances' life plenty of momentum, even if it's lacking in direction.
Gerwig, a performer of increasingly impressive dexterity and depth, has never been better. It's easy to sense a personal proximity between the actress and the character, but I suspect that's a result of her skill. Baumbach's presence here is marked by the absence of the spleen that's usually in abundance, leaving a lighter, more palatable expression of his wit. There's no climactic meltdown, no truly antisocial misbehavior, from any of the characters (although there is some sloppy drunkenness.) The film is perhaps most impressive in its elision of a plot that hinges upon the romantic stakes of the main character. Frances is, as she and her friend often joke, "undatable." And yet she's refreshingly unperturbed by this fact, as is the film, which finds plenty of story material not contingent upon romantic crises.
Instead, the true subject of the film is friendship. Frances' connection to her best friend, Sophie, is shown to be tender and fragile. Despite their intimacy, the incursions of romance, economic insecurity, and "lifestyle" seem everywhere to loom, threatening what both obviously cling to as a sense of stability and grounding in a fast-moving, uncertain world.
Overall, the film's deliberate lightness can at times feel a bit thin. Gerwig's character remains more on the side of sketch than of a portrait, and there is a tendency to rely on comedic shorthand, rather than careful evocation, to depict her. While the breeziness is refreshing, especially to those of us familiar with Baumbach's usual stuff, there remains a strong undercurrent of sadness. Neither of the filmmakers seem to quite know what to do with this, and it leaves the character of Frances in a kind of formal limbo. She's treated as a hero, albeit a bit of a klutz. But there are unexplored dimensions to her carelessness, both in it's reckless passion and in it's more childish fleeing from responsibility. It's a minor bug for a very pleasing movie.
Seen by some as an elder statesman's correction to Mumblecore, Baumbach and Gerwig's movie is very much it's own beast. Equal parts classical cinema and Nouvelle Vague, it paints a layer of freewheeling abandon over a sturdy, if squat, substructure of character study.
Working from a script they co-wrote, Gerwig and Baumbach take their formal cues from stumbling, gregarious, impulsive Frances, treating us to a brisk succession of (mostly) comic set pieces. The best stuff effectively nails the heady stew of ambition, anxiety, and sentiment that exemplify the lives of New York based aspiring artists. Careening between desire and ennui, between security and risk, gives Frances' life plenty of momentum, even if it's lacking in direction.
Gerwig, a performer of increasingly impressive dexterity and depth, has never been better. It's easy to sense a personal proximity between the actress and the character, but I suspect that's a result of her skill. Baumbach's presence here is marked by the absence of the spleen that's usually in abundance, leaving a lighter, more palatable expression of his wit. There's no climactic meltdown, no truly antisocial misbehavior, from any of the characters (although there is some sloppy drunkenness.) The film is perhaps most impressive in its elision of a plot that hinges upon the romantic stakes of the main character. Frances is, as she and her friend often joke, "undatable." And yet she's refreshingly unperturbed by this fact, as is the film, which finds plenty of story material not contingent upon romantic crises.
Instead, the true subject of the film is friendship. Frances' connection to her best friend, Sophie, is shown to be tender and fragile. Despite their intimacy, the incursions of romance, economic insecurity, and "lifestyle" seem everywhere to loom, threatening what both obviously cling to as a sense of stability and grounding in a fast-moving, uncertain world.
Overall, the film's deliberate lightness can at times feel a bit thin. Gerwig's character remains more on the side of sketch than of a portrait, and there is a tendency to rely on comedic shorthand, rather than careful evocation, to depict her. While the breeziness is refreshing, especially to those of us familiar with Baumbach's usual stuff, there remains a strong undercurrent of sadness. Neither of the filmmakers seem to quite know what to do with this, and it leaves the character of Frances in a kind of formal limbo. She's treated as a hero, albeit a bit of a klutz. But there are unexplored dimensions to her carelessness, both in it's reckless passion and in it's more childish fleeing from responsibility. It's a minor bug for a very pleasing movie.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Nebraska
(Alexander Payne, USA, 2013)
In a recent interview, Alexander Payne referred to his first six movies - including this one - as "études." That's classic Payne - humble, even self-deprecating, but with a whiff of sophistication, and the subtle implication of rather large ambitions. Payne might be my favorite misfit director, although I'm not sure who else I'd include in such a group. His body of work is one of the most consistently satisfying in contemporary American cinema, but there's a sense, in the man and in the films, of a certain dissatisfaction. Certainly, the stories he tells deal explicitly with disappointment. His heroes are sadsacks and losers. Their few triumphs are pathetically minor and are often bleakly overshadowed by their failures. But on an aesthetic level, Payne the cineaste exudes confidence, intelligence, wit, and feeling. He's managed to sustain a career in the unforgiving climes of Hollywood, where you're only as good as your last movie, and "independent" has become a largely meaningless term. By any sane measure, then, considering what he's up against, Payne's story has been one of resounding success. He's one of a virtual handful of directors who gets to make his movies, his way, for decently sized budgets (in the low-to-mid ten millions).
So why the remark about études? Why is he so quick to characterize his life's work (so far) to a string minor exercises, given the relative creative freedom and success that he's been afforded? What, to him, would qualify as a symphony? As a fan of the director, these questions strike me as urgent. While I applaud his apparent ambition, I'm troubled by his willingness to minimize the accomplishments he's made so far. Election, besides being hilarious, was a magnificently sharp satire of the American tendency to substitute pageantry for politics, illuminating beautifully (and brutally) the way in which public life is driven, and distorted, by private desires. The same could be said about Citizen Ruth. About Schmidt was remarkably clear-sighted about aging and regret, just as Sideways was about friendship, disappointment, and sex. It was only with The Descendants that Payne seemed to actually earn his aw shucks attitude towards his own work. While still a smart, carefully crafted film, it seemed toothless and tame - not deep enough to rise above passable drama, and not sharp enough to match his former satiric edge. And still, I had to give it to him - the performances were great, and he was able to pull heartstrings with the best of them.
All the same, when it comes down to it, I can't entirely disagree. They're not great movies, in the capital G sense. There is an element to his approach that is undeniably admirable, in the sense of the cineaste as smuggler - how much intelligence and nuance can somebody squeeze into a movie that still has to play well in major markets? And yet this is precisely the wrong way to look at it. And I wonder if Payne's attitude - his willingness to equate scale with significance - is to blame for the works' shortcomings. Even at his best, there is a sense of Payne playing it safe - of deliberately applying the brakes, dampening the more mercurial, dark, and dangerous aspects of himself for the sake of safety, or worse, propriety. It's not as if Payne's work doesn't suggest greater things. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if he were to one day release a magnum opus of social commentary - no other director is as acutely aware of the way most Americans live and behave as Payne. His realism, while tinged with a certain theatricality, is often brilliantly lucid.
Nebraska allows Payne to depict, in a manner that is both direct and diffuse, his homeland. He's set his movies in the Midwest before, but here he shows the landscapes in all of their glory, lovingly capturing the way that the even light plays upon people, trees, streets, and houses. But he's also interested in the ugliness: strip malls, roach motels, the indifferent and inhuman edifice of industry, the chilling monotony of a land gridded with highways. And more than ever, what we notice is absence - of memory, of community, of comfort, of purpose, and even of hope. Payne's Nebraska, like his Billings, Montana, is a place of ruined dreams.
Part of this is appropriate for the story. Beneath the comic bumbling of Bruce Dern's Woody, who ambles through his life in a cloud of half-coherence, is a man who is stunned by how little he has amounted to. He affects indifference, hiding behind his age and the apparent indifference of others, but secretly, as we find, he does have an inner life, and it's choked with anger and sadness. He hasn't been totally drained of yearning. His quixotic quest for the bogus winnings is about more than a truck and an air compressor - he sees what might be his very last chance at a legacy, at something to leave his sons after he's gone. Much of the movie's plot is concerned with an excavation of Woody's past, as seen through the eyes of those people who have been peripheral to him, up to and including his own sons, for whom he never had much in the way of affection or responsibility. Unconsciously, Woody has found himself drawn into his own history, and what was supposed to be a last ditch attempt to alter the future turns into a walk backwards in time, much to his chagrin.
Dern throws himself into the role, and the results are wonderful. His flowing nimbus of hair, his wet, wide, pleading eyes, his glowering voice, and the burdened, unsteady gait - it's a brilliant performance. But it's done a disservice by Payne's unwillingness, or inability, to locate the heart of Woody's pathos, and by extension, the pathos of the world that he so sharply photographs. There is mention of Woody's benevolence as a younger man, and the toll taken by his experience in the Korean War. But this remains frustratingly tangential, a sideline to the more blatant tendencies in Payne's stylistic playbook: insistent musical cues, casual close-ups, the feeling of staginess in many of his scenes.
Although the entire premise of the movie rests upon the illusion of sudden wealth, it's in the issue of money that the film seems most deficient. It's not that economics is the hidden, missing subject matter of the film. But money represents the context in which the cultures being depicted have been formed. Payne is too quick to paint his characters as stooges.
I have never held with those who've accused Payne of condescension to his characters. But now I'm beginning to wonder if the affection he professes for them isn't tinged with just that quality. To condescend implies a mistaken sense of knowing; we condescend to children because we've forgotten what it's like to be a child. For all of his closeness to Nebraska, I came away doubting that Payne really understood these people. Sure, he might like, them, might even admire them for their cordiality, their simplicity, their good humor and fortitude in the face of seemingly difficult conditions. But does he really understand them? Does he know where they came from, what they lost along the way? After all, these are people in a kind of poverty. Some of them get by all right, but the bigger deficit in their lives is spiritual. Does Payne understand that? Or does he simply shrug it off, like so many modern would-be artists, as an unavoidable fact of life?
What I'm asking for is a sense of history. This isn't entirely missing from Nebraska, which is what makes it all the more frustrating as a film. It's there, in the reference to Korea, in the reference to older generations. But it's relegated to the background; it never grows in resonance. Too many of the characters are presented as rubes. I'm grateful that we have a filmmaker who is so willing to go out into flyover country and tell stories about people, using some of those actual people, who live in the great forgotten middle of this country, a land of unimaginable fecundity that has been so terribly worn down by two solid centuries of abuse. But just showing up isn't enough. There is much more to tell, and Payne has only begun to scratch the surface.
In a recent interview, Alexander Payne referred to his first six movies - including this one - as "études." That's classic Payne - humble, even self-deprecating, but with a whiff of sophistication, and the subtle implication of rather large ambitions. Payne might be my favorite misfit director, although I'm not sure who else I'd include in such a group. His body of work is one of the most consistently satisfying in contemporary American cinema, but there's a sense, in the man and in the films, of a certain dissatisfaction. Certainly, the stories he tells deal explicitly with disappointment. His heroes are sadsacks and losers. Their few triumphs are pathetically minor and are often bleakly overshadowed by their failures. But on an aesthetic level, Payne the cineaste exudes confidence, intelligence, wit, and feeling. He's managed to sustain a career in the unforgiving climes of Hollywood, where you're only as good as your last movie, and "independent" has become a largely meaningless term. By any sane measure, then, considering what he's up against, Payne's story has been one of resounding success. He's one of a virtual handful of directors who gets to make his movies, his way, for decently sized budgets (in the low-to-mid ten millions).
So why the remark about études? Why is he so quick to characterize his life's work (so far) to a string minor exercises, given the relative creative freedom and success that he's been afforded? What, to him, would qualify as a symphony? As a fan of the director, these questions strike me as urgent. While I applaud his apparent ambition, I'm troubled by his willingness to minimize the accomplishments he's made so far. Election, besides being hilarious, was a magnificently sharp satire of the American tendency to substitute pageantry for politics, illuminating beautifully (and brutally) the way in which public life is driven, and distorted, by private desires. The same could be said about Citizen Ruth. About Schmidt was remarkably clear-sighted about aging and regret, just as Sideways was about friendship, disappointment, and sex. It was only with The Descendants that Payne seemed to actually earn his aw shucks attitude towards his own work. While still a smart, carefully crafted film, it seemed toothless and tame - not deep enough to rise above passable drama, and not sharp enough to match his former satiric edge. And still, I had to give it to him - the performances were great, and he was able to pull heartstrings with the best of them.
All the same, when it comes down to it, I can't entirely disagree. They're not great movies, in the capital G sense. There is an element to his approach that is undeniably admirable, in the sense of the cineaste as smuggler - how much intelligence and nuance can somebody squeeze into a movie that still has to play well in major markets? And yet this is precisely the wrong way to look at it. And I wonder if Payne's attitude - his willingness to equate scale with significance - is to blame for the works' shortcomings. Even at his best, there is a sense of Payne playing it safe - of deliberately applying the brakes, dampening the more mercurial, dark, and dangerous aspects of himself for the sake of safety, or worse, propriety. It's not as if Payne's work doesn't suggest greater things. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if he were to one day release a magnum opus of social commentary - no other director is as acutely aware of the way most Americans live and behave as Payne. His realism, while tinged with a certain theatricality, is often brilliantly lucid.
Nebraska allows Payne to depict, in a manner that is both direct and diffuse, his homeland. He's set his movies in the Midwest before, but here he shows the landscapes in all of their glory, lovingly capturing the way that the even light plays upon people, trees, streets, and houses. But he's also interested in the ugliness: strip malls, roach motels, the indifferent and inhuman edifice of industry, the chilling monotony of a land gridded with highways. And more than ever, what we notice is absence - of memory, of community, of comfort, of purpose, and even of hope. Payne's Nebraska, like his Billings, Montana, is a place of ruined dreams.
Part of this is appropriate for the story. Beneath the comic bumbling of Bruce Dern's Woody, who ambles through his life in a cloud of half-coherence, is a man who is stunned by how little he has amounted to. He affects indifference, hiding behind his age and the apparent indifference of others, but secretly, as we find, he does have an inner life, and it's choked with anger and sadness. He hasn't been totally drained of yearning. His quixotic quest for the bogus winnings is about more than a truck and an air compressor - he sees what might be his very last chance at a legacy, at something to leave his sons after he's gone. Much of the movie's plot is concerned with an excavation of Woody's past, as seen through the eyes of those people who have been peripheral to him, up to and including his own sons, for whom he never had much in the way of affection or responsibility. Unconsciously, Woody has found himself drawn into his own history, and what was supposed to be a last ditch attempt to alter the future turns into a walk backwards in time, much to his chagrin.
Dern throws himself into the role, and the results are wonderful. His flowing nimbus of hair, his wet, wide, pleading eyes, his glowering voice, and the burdened, unsteady gait - it's a brilliant performance. But it's done a disservice by Payne's unwillingness, or inability, to locate the heart of Woody's pathos, and by extension, the pathos of the world that he so sharply photographs. There is mention of Woody's benevolence as a younger man, and the toll taken by his experience in the Korean War. But this remains frustratingly tangential, a sideline to the more blatant tendencies in Payne's stylistic playbook: insistent musical cues, casual close-ups, the feeling of staginess in many of his scenes.
Although the entire premise of the movie rests upon the illusion of sudden wealth, it's in the issue of money that the film seems most deficient. It's not that economics is the hidden, missing subject matter of the film. But money represents the context in which the cultures being depicted have been formed. Payne is too quick to paint his characters as stooges.
I have never held with those who've accused Payne of condescension to his characters. But now I'm beginning to wonder if the affection he professes for them isn't tinged with just that quality. To condescend implies a mistaken sense of knowing; we condescend to children because we've forgotten what it's like to be a child. For all of his closeness to Nebraska, I came away doubting that Payne really understood these people. Sure, he might like, them, might even admire them for their cordiality, their simplicity, their good humor and fortitude in the face of seemingly difficult conditions. But does he really understand them? Does he know where they came from, what they lost along the way? After all, these are people in a kind of poverty. Some of them get by all right, but the bigger deficit in their lives is spiritual. Does Payne understand that? Or does he simply shrug it off, like so many modern would-be artists, as an unavoidable fact of life?
What I'm asking for is a sense of history. This isn't entirely missing from Nebraska, which is what makes it all the more frustrating as a film. It's there, in the reference to Korea, in the reference to older generations. But it's relegated to the background; it never grows in resonance. Too many of the characters are presented as rubes. I'm grateful that we have a filmmaker who is so willing to go out into flyover country and tell stories about people, using some of those actual people, who live in the great forgotten middle of this country, a land of unimaginable fecundity that has been so terribly worn down by two solid centuries of abuse. But just showing up isn't enough. There is much more to tell, and Payne has only begun to scratch the surface.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)