Recovery and detection in twelve uneasy steps

When we first meet Scudder (Liam Neeson) it’s 1991. Back then he was NYPD, with dyed moustache and goatee. He drinks a breakfast of coffee and two shots of whiskey in a bar that gets robbed. The robbers ice the barkeep. Scudder chases them down and disposes of them one at a time with a remarkably steady hand. There’s more to this part of the story but we don’t learn about it until later, when it’s 1999, Scudder’s handed in his badge, started up as an un-licenced private detective, given up booze and shaved off the ’stache and goatee, that combo having migrated to the faces of several heavies, among them millionaire criminal Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) and sadistic sociopathic serial killer Albert (Adam David Thompson). The 90s were difficult years for facial hair legitimacy. 

Yet, if A Walk Among the Tombstones is anything to go by, they were good years for literacy rates. This film, based on a 1992 novel by Lawrence Block, features a drug lord who chills on the sofa with some Nabokov, a homeless boy who hangs out in libraries and is well versed in his Dashiell Hammett, a cemetery groundskeeper toiling away at a novel, and another drug lord who names his dog Watson, no doubt in honour of Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved narrator. I’m poking fun, but the truth is that it’s a perfectly pleasant conceit in a perfectly watchable, if gruesome, detective yarn, whose narrative style, for the record, is modelled most closely after Raymond Chandler: like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Scudder is usually one step ahead of us and rarely stops to explain what he’s doing. Like Marlowe, Scudder is also something of a romantic. Though evidence of the internet’s usefulness in detection is made obvious to him, Scudder, perhaps buying into the Y2K hype creeping into every third scene, is a devout technophobe, preferring old school methods. Besides, early on in Tombstones Scudder befriends and quasi-deputizes TJ (Astro), the aforementioned homeless child bookworm who knows his way around a search engine and helps save the day, not to mention his own skin, by dint of his early adoption of the mobile phone. 

The plot is about as complicated as gruesome detective yarn plots tend to be, but, in short, it involves a series of kidnappings of the loved ones of affluent criminal kingpins who, for the usual reasons, don’t want to go to the cops—so they go to Scudder, who doggedly tracks down the culprits between AA meetings, which come to assume a curiously ominous tone during the film’s protracted climax, which employs a liturgical reading of the 12 steps as a sort of underscoring for much bloodletting and comeuppance. This is veteran screenwriter Scott Frank’s second feature as director and he plays it fairly straight, though you get the impression he wishes the setting was 1979 instead of 1999, or that he was actually making the film in 1974 instead of 2014. Shades of William Friedkin loom. There are worse shadows you could huddle under for two hours.

                            

Mute, but not to be silenced

She’s introduced only at the end of the opening sequence, when her paternalistic douchebag employer dismisses her with a pat on the head. Thana (Zoë Tamerlis Lund) is a seamstress working in Manhattan’s garment district, her beauty woman-childish, her doe-eyes and pouting lips arresting but do not express confidence or wantonness or any interest in the superabundance of crudely catcalling lechers who form ogling hedgerows everywhere she goes. The epitome of a woman without a voice, Thana is mute. In no way is she “asking for it.” But she gets it. In fact, she gets it twice in the first ten minutes of Ms. 45 (1981), Abel Ferrara’s low-budget rape revenge cult classic, a definitive portrait of pre-Giuliani New York, a feminist exploitation film, if such a hybrid can be reconciled. Drafthouse has re-released the film in theatres (it plays Edmonton's Metro Cinema next Wednesday night) and on home video.

Written by Ferrara’s frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John, the well-calibrated Ms. 45 strikes a compelling balance between artifice—goopey fake blood, outlandish coincidence—with gritty realism—the brilliant location work—and bracing sociological critique—the ubiquity of rapacious males, not limited to but encapsulated by the pair who perpetrate Thana’s consecutive rapes, the first premeditated, the second performed as an afterthought when a robbery is interrupted. The narrative reason for the double-rape is utilitarian: it pushes Thana over the edge and into some fugue state. The rest is opportunity: Thana is able to stun her second rapist before spotting her hot iron—itself a gendered implement, an icon of homemaking—and beating him with it in a shot that would be quoted and grossly expanded upon in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000). Thana then appropriates her assailant’s firearm: the voiceless finds a vehicle for expression. She becomes a ventriloquist, the .45 her dummy. She quietly goes about employing it in a campaign that might initially seem guided by vigilante vision but gradually proves driven by pure misandry. Thana is only able to kill men, so even when a woman picks up a knife, wielding it conspicuously at cock-level, and moves to attack, Thana can’t fire in self-defence. Like the tragically programmed titular animal in Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982), transformative trauma renders Thana single-minded in her deployment of violence.

As noted, Ms. 45 has been quoted, and it is itself riddled with quotes, from the obvious—Thana mirror poses with her gun recall Taxi Driver (1976)—to the curious—one shot recreates the poster tableau from Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)—to the provocative—scenes of dead body disposal and blood swirling down the drain recall Psycho (1960), and make us wonder if Thana isn’t to be regarded as some variation on Marion Crane, who this time around survives her attack but never recovers her wits. The film is a composite of politics, cinephilia and an almost documentary sense of place: the shit-faced panhandlers, the trash-strewn alleys and abandoned boxes butted up against aluminium fences, the bat-shit busybody landlady, the pimps shaking down their ladies for ostensibly hidden reserves. Young Ferrara—who, incidentally, has a cameo as Thana’s first rapist (!)—exhibits remarkable control over all of these resources while fully surrendering to the inherent trashy outrageousness of the material—a meat-grinder will make a memorable appearance. The striking Tamerlis Lund, meanwhile, is perfect, her fear near-palpable, her character sympathetic but not to be identified with. Tamerlis Lund had a woefully abbreviated career, one that included co-writing the script for Ferrara’s sleaze masterpiece Bad Lieutenant (1992). She died in 1999, at age 37, from heart failure prompted by cocaine use. She appeared on screen precious few times, but Thana is enough to burn her face into your memory forever. 

                       

Chewing scenery, human flesh

Her name is Clarice, which seems like a masterstroke of foresight on the part of novelist Thomas Harris—once you hear Anthony Hopkins utter this name, with customized twang, putting equal weight on both syllables, hovering over the slipperiness of the final consonant, you realize why there are some movie character names you never forget. Which, needless to say, goes double for Dr. Hannibal—rhymes with “cannibal”—Lecter, one of two psycho-killers who feature prominently in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), directed by Jonathan Demme and adapted by Ted Tally from Harris’ eponymous bestseller. Clarice (Jodie Foster), is about to graduate from FBI school. This smart, disciplined young woman trying to make it in a world of condescending older men, is our heroine. But Hannibal (Hopkins) is not her antagonist. He becomes an intimate ally.

Clarice is sent to a Baltimore maximum security prison/luxury dungeon where she’s aggressively hit on by a warden with big hair (Anthony Heald), gets some nutcase’s splooge flung at her face—easily the most disgusting moment in a movie riddled with disgusting moments—and has her first meeting with Hannibal, an encounter that in the most perverse way possible feels like the start of a love story—one without any touching. Hannibal is a psychiatrist put away for eating his patients. While ostensibly helping the feds to catch another killer—dubbed Buffalo Bill for his penchant for skinning victims—he and Clarice develop a quasi-therapist-patient relationship. Despite Clarice’s efforts, the tables never turn. Hannibal reads her like a book, spotting her vulnerable points. But he’s also the only man in the movie who respects her.

Hopkins is all high theatre, mesmerizing, no blinking, a lot of Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931), maybe a little Joel Grey in Cabaret (1972) too. His timing’s immaculate, frequently going for the laughs while somehow never compromising the integrity of this wildly artificial yet totally coherent character. Foster is also remarkable. She was still young enough to convey innocence, or rather, an overachiever’s spunk. She’s acting hard and it shows, but that eagerness perfectly fits with the character.

What I most loved about revisiting Silence of the Lambs for the first time in years was my realization that, despite the presence of esteemed stars and the multiple Oscars it eventually garnered, it really isn’t a “prestige” picture. Demme’s coverage isn’t especially glossy or sweeping; it’s solid meat-and-potatoes directing. The story is in many ways—mostly very good ways—utterly trashy, and the movie adheres to the source material’s tone. Really, it’s almost a (very expensive) B-movie, and the cameo from Roger Corman—the producer of Demme’s early exploitation flicks Caged Heat (1974) and Fighting Mad (1976)—seems like a sly acknowledgment of this. How refreshing to see a Best Picture-winner that doesn’t seem calculated or compromised by a desperate need to win Best Picture. On the contrary, Silence of the Lambs is first and foremost deeply creepy, character-driven entertainment. That’s why we’re still captivated more than two decades later. 

      

The inexhaustible poetry of Malick's murder song

They cross paths in a sleepy Texas town. He throws trash, she twirls baton. He’s a figure that seems to have walked out of a dream, or out of the movies, an orphan, without ties; she’s a child still, living with her widower father, waiting to be formed. Dressed in denim and a white tee stretched across his chest, he’s the handsomest man she ever met. He’s also very polite. And what is it that attracts him to her? Her gawky beauty? Her awe? Perhaps it is a matter of pure innocence—though in the end his naïveté seems even greater than hers, sustained by a peculiar solipsism which is unnervingly endearing, is perhaps a distinctly American, and leads to murder and folk-celebrity.

Terrence Malick’s feature debut remains so wondrous and strange—it never releases its mysteries, and it never gets old. Yet Badlands (1973) can also seem straightforward, almost a genre piece, a story of lovers on the run drawn from recent U.S. history: the senseless killing spree undertaken by Charles Starkweather and his captive/lover/possible collaborator Caril Ann Fugate in 1958. Malick’s couple falls far short of the violence and depravity of their models; violence is almost incidental to them, happening outside of their agency, largely bloodless or something that can be set fire to and feel dazzled and warmed by. Both are searching for roles to inhabit. Kit (Martin Sheen) is always acting, playing with some vague idea of the misguided antihero. Hands in his pockets, he declares, “I got some stuff to say. Guess I’m lucky that way.” But how to get anyone other than Holly (Sissy Spacek) to listen? Killing people always draws attention. They start with Holly’s father (a cameo role for the great Warren Oates), before moving elsewhere, living outdoors for a spell, stealing cars, crossing state lines. Kit’s kill-list seems bafflingly random; he’s making it up as he goes along, and preparing his public statements for his inevitable moment of capture. And all the while we hear Holly’s voice, floating dreamlike on the soundtrack, narrating their adventure as though it’s to be read in the pulpy pages of some variant of True Romance with a mildly surrealistic streak: “He wanted to die with me and I wanted to be lost in his arms forever… I spelled out entire sentences on the roof of my mouth where no one could find them.” Both characters focus themselves on speaking to posterity, not living in the moment but rather observing the moment from afar. Maybe that’s what makes it so easy to kill folks.

Immaculately crafted, imbued with music that never emphasizes dread (most notably the Carl Orff piece performed by children), suffused with the sort of images of nature’s glorious indifference that would become part of its director’s signature (see The Thin Red Line [1998] et al), Badlands plays like a propulsive narrative as you watch it but hovers forever in memory as a scrapbook of images and sounds: the wedding cake that spent a decade in the ice-box, the launching of a balloon, the little house on an arid plain filled with a life’s collection of curious useless objects whose meaning is lost with the death of its sole inhabitant. A most welcome addition to the Criterion Collection, Badlands new DVD and Blu-ray edition features a marvelous series of interviews with Malick’s steady production designer Jack Fisk and editor Billy Webber, and with Sheen and Spacek, so extraordinary both, speaking of how Malick saw something in them that no one else did, changed their careers as a result—and changed film history, too.