Vanishing act

Few films put us on edge so quickly. Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) already seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the opening scenes of Seconds (1966), which follow the weary middle-aged bank executive on his train journey from Grand Central Station to his suburban Scarsdale home. He may be followed. The images seem taken from ankles or shoulders. Every space feels cavernous. The organ score seems lifted from a Vincent Price horror picture. The opening credits appear over images of gaping maws and distorted eyeballs, and if that first eyeball close-up makes you think of Marion’s face on the bathroom floor in Psycho (1960), you won’t be surprised to learn that this credit sequence was, like Psycho’s, designed by Saul Bass. 

The director of Seconds was John Frankenheimer. The film is regarded as the cap on his “paranoia trilogy,” following The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964). The Cold War was at the forefront of those pictures, which dealt explicitly with brainwashing and political assassination. In Seconds, that same claustrophobic atmosphere is bleeding out of the seemingly everyday. Based on David Ely’s eponymous novel and scripted by Lewis John Carlino, this story is exceedingly intimate, even if it too alludes to something akin to a vast conspiracy. Arthur’s nervous because he’s received a phone call from a friend he thought dead. The friend is trying to help Arthur change his life—by changing his face, his body, his voice, his name and occupation. By killing off Arthur. All it takes is money, which Arthur has, and a corpse, which the company whose services he will be obliged to solicit will take care of. This company seems to know what Arthur wants, even if he doesn’t. Arthur is ushered to their headquarters after being led through a meat packing plant, an all too apt analogue for the company’s business of transfiguration. By the time they’re done with Arthur he’ll look like Rock Hudson. Which is to say they change Arthur Hamilton into a painter named Tony Wilson, played by Rock Hudson. It’s the heartthrob movie star’s most startling and impressive performance. (Another interesting parallel to Psycho: where that film had its star vanish 40 minutes in, the star of Seconds doesn’t appear until 40 minutes in.) Our hero makes a go at this new life. He even finds himself a gorgeous younger lover (Salome Jens) to wipe out the memories of the wife he could barely kiss anymore. But something about Tony doesn’t quite take. Inside, he’s still Arthur. And this makes the company uneasy.

The collective desire for renewal at work in Seconds had been made into story before—there is some crossover between it and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Marionettes Inc.’—but Ely’s exploration of this perhaps specifically American idea of total self-reinvention took this desire to a sinister extreme. The film perfectly synthesizes the novel’s trajectory with the tools of cinema. Brilliantly employing wide-angle lenses, James Wong Howe’s endlessly inventive cinematography makes the familiar eerie, and the casting of Hudson was a stroke of genius—thank god Frankenheimer didn’t get his first choice of Laurence Olivier, whose performance would surely have felt studied and possessed none of the despair and, ultimately, harrowing hysteria on display here. Frankheimer’s casting of numerous blacklisted actors contributes to a meta-reading that only increases a sense of condemnation of American falseness and fear-driven values. As Alec Baldwin describes it in one of the supplements on Criterion’s new edition of Seconds, the film doesn’t invite you in—“it takes you hostage.”

The colour of no money

A series of sea changes in class position have made Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) blue. Or is her rattled state symptomatic of something more fundamentally flawed in her psyche? Maybe it’s just early dementia? We see her nattering away to a fellow passenger in first-class; traumatized and narcissistic, she has a serious handicap when it comes to over-sharing. But Jasmine needs to share—the bad thoughts creep up when she’s all alone—and it seems anyone will do. She was not so long ago filthy rich. By the rather devastating end of Blue Jasmine, she’s mostly just filthy.

This is the work of the serious Woody, which is a good Woody in that seriousness can bring out a focus and discernment sometimes lacking in Allen’s recent comedies. Woody on the economy might sound like a dubious tag, but Blue Jasmine is pretty smart, if cynical by default, about the pitfalls of privilege and the ways that desires for class ascension corrupt everyone. As the film begins, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco. She’s hopeless, penniless and needs to crash at the modest home of her cashier sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Jasmine is self-absorbed and snobby, and Ginger seems set up as her salt-of-the-earth, pure-hearted foil, but Allen isn’t one to sentimentalize any class, so as the plot thickens Ginger will also spy an opportunity to better herself, however slightly, in the arms of a much classier man than her current beau, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), and stoops to deception—both of Chili and herself—to accelerate the new romance. The Ginger subplot may seem predictable, but it also feels alive, thanks in part to the nuance and urgency brought to it by Hawkins and Cannavale, and by Andrew Dice Clay giving a shockingly strong performance, and Louis C.K., who’s wonderful, not emphatically funny but a welcome breath of fresh air at the film’s musty midpoint. He’s one of those actors who should be working with Allen as much as possible.

As is Alec Baldwin, very funny in an incoherent role in To Rome With Love and very slimy here as Hal, Jasmine’s ex, a Bernie Madoff-type whose imprisonment for running a Ponzi scheme leaves Jasmine—who may or may not have been onto him—broke and humiliated. “I sign everything,” Jasmine claims. “I’m very trusting.” Hal was a millionaire, a philanthropist and serial philanderer—we see him chatting up a nipply confection at what seems like an otherwise deadly boring party full of rich old people during one of Blue Jasmine’s many flashbacks. The line separating past and present in this film is diaphanous. For Jasmine, as her confusion burgeons, it occasionally dissolves altogether. At times the camera itself (Vicky Christina Barcelona’s Javier Aguirresarobe returns as Allen’s cinematographer) seems to float, disembodied, in time with Jasmine’s spells of dislocation. That these fugues finally work as well as they do are a testament to Blanchett’s daringness, collaborative intuition and clarity of choices. Amazingly, Allen claims to have not seen her in Liv Ullman’s 2009 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—amazing because Blanche Dubois is so obviously a template for Jasmine, whose mind keeps escaping to some idealized past. She too is always relying on the kindness of strangers, and is usually lying as a way of soliciting that kindness—a recipe for small, personal tragedies of the sort that Allen, however old-fashioned his sensibility may remain, is still very good at evoking. 

                   

Friends, Romans, country bumpkins

To Rome, With Love begins already in motion, the camera curving around a roundabout until it lands on a statue-like traffic cop who confesses that he speaks poor English but is nonetheless eager to introduce us to some of his fellow Romans and their stories. It’s a corny bookend device of the sort we’ve seen in Woody Allen’s films before, the sort of throwaway cliché he enjoys employing, hopefully in the service of something more adventurous and unexpected. And To Rome, With Love is adventurous, though, more to the point, after more than 40 years and I don’t know how many movies, this may be the most unapologetically, deliriously, busily, messily nonsensical Woody Allen comedy ever. It is also frequently very, very funny.

To make an anagram of the film’s titular city, the operative word in Rome is more: more characters, more stories, more goofiness. We got a middle-aged bureaucrat (Roberto Benigni) who wakes up one day to discover that he’s a celebrity. He’s attacked by paparazzi, is whisked off to a morning show where he describes his breakfast, is given an office of his own and a giraffe in a tight dress who’s job detail involves “attending to his needs all day long.” We got an unhappily retired novelty opera director (Allen, in his increasingly ridiculous looking oversized chinos) and his psychiatrist wife (Judy Davis) who’ve come to Rome to visit their daughter (Alison Pill) and the family she’s about to marry into, a family whose patriarch is a mortician who sings like Caruso, at least in the shower. But how is Woody going to get him to realize he’s a star waiting to be exploited, I mean, discovered? (I can never tell if Woody gives himself the best lines or simply delivers them better than everybody else. While discussing his proletariat-championing son-in-law-to-be, he quips, “I was Left when I was his age too, but I wasn’t a communist. I couldn’t even share a bathroom.”

We got a couple of newlywed country bumpkins in the big city for the first time. She gets lost in the streets—for days! He’s unexpectedly visited by a prostitute (Penelope Cruz)! His wealthy Roman relatives walk in to his hotel room just as he and the prostitute and entangled on the bed, and in a moment of panic he pretends she’s his wife. The false couple are taken on a private tour of the Vatican and to a garden party brimming with Rome’s bigwigs of business—most of whom are Cruz’s clients. (A hooker who gets to hobnob with society: Davis isn’t the only thing resurrected from Deconstructing Harry.)

We got a young American architectural student (Jesse Eisenberg) enjoying a pleasant life abroad with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) until the girlfriend’s beguiling actress friend (Ellen Page, excellent as the fille fatale) comes to visit. “There’s something attractive about a man who’s sensitive to the agonies of existence,” she explains en route to a torrid affair with the hapless Eisenberg, who meanwhile receives romantic advice from an elder version of himself (Alec Baldwin, his brooding deadpan perfect for the film’s most absurd character). Baldwin’s introduced as an apparently normal guy, ie: not a phantom, returning the city where he spent his 20s, yet soon he meets Eisenberg and winds up tagging along on the kid’s adventures. Sometimes only Eisenberg can see and hear Baldwin; sometimes others can see and hear him. It’s totally inconsistent, ridiculous, and one of the best parts of the movie.

What’s it all about? Thrills are fleeting, fame is fickle, nostalgia is inherently false, romance is illusory. The usual Woody themes, but delivered with brio by a wonderful cast. Leave the monster truck rally superhero blockbusters to somebody else; this is my idea of silly summer fun.