The music never ends

The title of A Late Quartet holds at least two meanings, one to do with Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131, written during the final year of the composer’s life, and one to do with the musicians at the film’s center, celebrated collaborators for some 25 years who suddenly find themselves splintering apart due to a mixture of illness, professional dissatisfaction and marital strife. From a cool distance, much of the drama looks fairly conventional, even soapy. The script, by director Yaron Zilberman and co-scenarist Seth Grossman, is a tidy arrangement of rising tensions and carefully graded complexities, of betrayals, struggles and fresh alliances. The four protagonists (plus one—there is a young budding musician added to the mix) allows for a tasteful, not too busy amount of shifting between narrative threads. But I think A Late Quartet transcends its conventions in more ways than one. It’s the product of a filmmaker who clearly believes in the integrity of great music and of the musicians who devote their lives to bringing great music to fierce, fluid, glorious life. It doesn’t hurt that the actors are uniformly superb.

Peter (Christopher Walken), the cellist, is the Fugue Quartet’s eldest member, a widower who learns he’s experiencing the early stages of Parkinson’s. For Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the news of Peter’s condition functions as a reminder of life’s bracing brevity; Robert’s weary of being second violinist, of being an underappreciated husband to violist Juliette (Catherine Keener), of having the group constantly take its cues from Daniel (Mark Ivanir), the rather stodgy first violinist, who always chooses perfection over passion—though his passions seem set to be awakened by Alexandra (Imogen Poots), his attractive, assured young student, who also happens to be Robert and Juliette’s daughter. Despite Peter’s affliction the group chooses to forge ahead with a planned performance of the Opus 131, a challenging, gorgeously detailed piece of approximately 40 minutes which demands that each of the musicians play at a brisk pace, without pause even to retune. There’s an engaging, relaxed scene in which Peter tells his class an anecdote about a misunderstanding he once had with Pablo Casals; the moral of the story is to never underestimate the potential for innovation or freshness in what seem in the moment like mistakes. But Peter’s too long in the tooth to allow himself to fumble his way through a piece of music he reveres, or to diminish the power of what he and his colleagues have worked so hard to develop.

The final scene of A Late Quartet, very nicely cut together by Yuval Shar (from coverage shot by the great Frederick Elmes), is thus very moving not only for the beauty of Beethoven’s music or the actors’ performances or our familiarity with the characters and their individual problems, but because, whether or not we know anything about music, we’ve also been led to understand what at stake artistically. This is a film about what it means to be an artist, the sacrifices made, the heights that can be reached, the discoveries made along the way. None of this is a revelation, but it is wise. And Walken most especially is at his best here. His strange cadences and embodying of jumbled emotions are a kind of music all their own. Walken alone is reason to see (and hear) this film. 

      

Glimpsing Christ on the mean streets of Abel Ferrara's New York: Bad Lieutenant returns

There are films—we sometimes call them character studies—we’re best advised to watch and re-watch without concern for continuity or sweep, suspense or forward-motion. We marvel at, or are at least compelled by, the individual moments that hover somewhere in the haze of the whole, suspended like some fleeting exhibit. I hadn’t seen Abel Ferrara’s cult film Bad Lieutenant (1992) in at least a decade, and I returned to it with one wave of fascinated, slightly nauseated familiarity after another. It concerns a haggard, brazenly corrupt middle aged cop (Harvey Keitel) and his tentative, confused emergence from what seems a very long tour—going back as far, perhaps, as Taxi Driver (76)—through the special internal inferno that awaits god’s lonely men when dwelling in the crowded, sordid Petri dish that is, or was, New York City. To my surprise the film resonated more with me now that when I was younger and inclined to feel impressed by anything affecting a post-Scorsese, gritty, skuzzy, rock and roll verisimilitude. Bad Lieutenant is audacious, somewhat pretentious, perhaps excessive. It’s also harrowing, genuinely crazy in its construction, slyer than it at first seems, and facilitates one of the great raw, only partially comprehensible, out-on-a-limb star performances.

Some of those moments: Keitel’s unnamed Lieutenant stumbling, stoned out of his mind, listening to Johnny Ace croon ‘Pledging My Love’ in some strange woman’s apartment, eyes shut, his bulldog torso naked, his arms extended in some Christ-like pose or perhaps an attempt to fly, emitting this weird whimpering sound like my dog used to make when he wanted something and knew he wouldn’t get it if he barked; Keitel hunched over the driver’s side window of a car, two big haired sisters from Jersey in the front seat, a misty rain rendering the three of them seemingly isolated in the night, while he gets one of them to expose her ass and the other to perform a pantomime fellatio; Keitel, already buzzing with the possibility of his own redemption, getting high with two already severely incapacitated crackhead rapists on a crack house couch. Save the last of these, you might have to work to remember where such scenes fall in the course of the narrative. But you’re unlikely to forget the scenes themselves. They stain your brain, like those traces of certain drugs that we’re told never really go away.

There are so many beautifully selected details in Bad Lieutenant: the Jesus blanket and plastic cover on the sofa of the polite Puerto Rican dealer’s apartment; the door that always gets stuck in the tiny, wallpapered apartment of Keitel’s pretty, intermittently articulate junky pal Zoë (played the film’s co-writer, the late Zoë Lund); the gum that Keitel asks the Jersey girl to spit into his hand. Yet the choice of ‘Pledging My Love’ is especially inspired. Johnny Ace killed himself back in ’54 playing Russian roulette, and such recklessness is perfectly aligned to what’s presented as the status quo for the Keitel character. Within the first 15 minutes we’ve seen him drinking, snorting, screwing, stealing, harassing and gambling himself into oblivion. Another actor might have tried to make the character ingratiating or, even worse, confused his self-destruction with diabolical glee. But Keitel makes everything he does seem more pathetic than fiendishly cruel. He somehow lets us know that this creature possesses a soul. He pours his heart into it, without judgment, and his abandon can result in bizarre black humour, which works too—take the moment where he gets so upset listening to a baseball game while driving his car that he shoots his radio. Ferrara says he originally conceived the film as a comedy anyway—lots of movies have protagonists with one vice, why not make one where the he has every vice?

I emphasize the fragmentary nature of Bad Lieutenant, but it does actually have a sort of rudimentary story, which was based on a real 1981 incident. A young, pretty nun is viciously raped by two young thugs, and the investigation is thwarted by the nun’s refusal to give police any information about her assailants. Yet Ferrara—who always was half exploitation filmmaker, half would-be Pasolini—is barely interested in the investigation’s dramatic potential. What matters to him is the nun’s Christ-like feat of forgiveness, which Keitel has such a hard time believing yet is clearly inspired by—if such utter scum can be forgiven, there may still be hope for him. This leads to some wincingly cheesy Jesus apparitions, but what’s more memorable are the actions it prompts in Keitel, ramping up to a brilliantly stark, poetic finale.

Abel Ferrara

Lion’s Gate’s new special edition of Bad Lieutenant features a rambling but frequently informative commentary track by Ferrara and cinematographer Ken Kelsch. It also features a superb half-hour documentary about the making of the film, which is something in itself: the guerilla tactics of the shooting sound truly insane; Christopher Walken, who’d just starred in Ferrara’s King of New York (90), was originally slated to play the lead, but dropped out because he didn’t think he could deliver; fellow actor Victor Argo had to convince Keitel to do the role, and Keitel was apparently going through some severe personal turmoil that fed his performance. Yet for all the chaos in both its content and genesis Bad Lieutenant survives as something sharp, focused and brutal, direct and rigorous. It deserves to be seen again, and not just by the faithful.

The Walken mind: Brainstorm on DVD

Christopher Walken’s brain got worked over an awful lot in the late 70s and early 80s. He was the guy from the industrial heartland who became severely traumatized as a prisoner-of-war, wound up a sort of gladiator in high stakes Russian roulette in Saigon, and won an Oscar for it. He later survived a car crash, woke from a coma after several years to find his girl had moved on, developed telepathic abilities that seemed to be draining his spirit, inching him closer to death with every use, and helped to fuse the seemingly irreconcilable sensibilities of Stephen King and David Cronenberg. It would not be long before he became an alien abductee.

What made that brain so captivating when in peril? His head did seem to weigh a lot, an effect accentuated by hair that, as years passed, seemed to want to leap off his head. The head, and those pale eyes, made him always appear off-balance, and vulnerable. He went by names as familiar as Nick, Mike and Johnny, yet he never quite registered as a recognizably normal person—admittedly, not an unusual trait amongst the new stars back then. Yet, whether breaking down or lashing out, Walken could convey a woundedness that, as with his flights of nervous charisma, could catch you off guard and become tremendously moving.

In Brainstorm (1983), newly available on DVD, he was again breaking barriers of mental communication, again testing comfortable proximities to death. But in this case he was eager to do it, in the name of science and glory. He was Dr. Michael Brace, a hyperactive, maverick scientific genius of the post-hippie variety, like William Hurt in Altered States (80). And Brainstorm was a movie that, like Altered States, spoke to a new post-hippie caveat on the psychic fallout of excess experimentation on the more nebulous zones of the mind. Along with Dr. Lillian (Louise Fletcher), Dr. Mike develops a technology that records a person’s sensory experience so that others can share it by wearing a sort of headset and pressing replay.

Of course the nefarious US military doesn’t skip a beat, already exploiting the device before it’s even finished, salivating over possibilities running the gamut from flight simulation to torture. And Mike’s coworkers, too, dig in to sample the Pandora’s box of psychedelic chocolates, with one of them finally collapsing from the equivalent of an Internet porn binge. So this is in essence a story about the price of dreaming in the Promethean sense.

Directed by Douglas Trumbull, who made Silent Running (72) and worked effects for 2001 (68), and taken from a story by Bruce Joel Rubin, who’d later script Ghost (90) and Jacob’s Ladder (90), Brainstorm becomes self-consciously trippy and intellectually flabby. It probably seemed too hokey in its time, but reading it with the benefit of hindsight, one of the ways in which it’s aged surprisingly well is in its relationship with numerous movies spawned in its wake. Its promise of artificially reconstructed experience, a virtual reality into which an individual’s memories and other sprays of subjective psychic foam can infiltrate, looks forward to the technologically-enhanced nostalgia of Strange Days (95), the virtual reality addicts in eXistenZ (99), the memory control as romantic catalyst in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (04), and the pseudo-schizophrenic epidemic of A Scanner Darkly (05). We can trace in such films a dialogue on perception whose resonance with our ongoing plunge into electronic everything is so acute it hardly needs stating.

But I got us into this talking about Walken, and the pleasing array of nuance he brings to Brainstorm is surely one of the best reasons to see it. He’s an actor whose little choices intrigue. At one point he blows a fuse and rants while suddenly gobbling from a bag of Ruffles. And I find it extremely interesting that the filmmakers chose to imbue Mike with a very complicated romantic life. Perhaps this man obsessed with the cataloguing of experience has a thing for older women because they simply have more of it then he does. At the movie’s outset, he’s breaking up with Karen (Natalie Wood), his wife and the mother of his child. He seems to be romantically entangled with Lillian. Fletcher would have been pushing 50 at the time of filming, while Wood was 43. True, Walken was already in his late 30s, but he looks strikingly younger than both women on screen, and given that this is a Hollywood movie the difference makes a hell of an impression. Mike’s relationship to these women, and Walken’s different ways of expressing affection and admiration for both, deepens our sense of the character’s conflicting desires, his ruthless drive toward success and his undeniable attraction to woman of intelligence and integrity.

And, yes, Wood was beautiful. Those dark eyes stop Walken in his tracks. The finale has Wood urging Walken back from the brink of death through the sheer intensity of her love, and the scene is made poignant by extra-filmic circumstances. In November of 1981, near the end of principal photography, Wood died when she fell overboard of the yacht she shared with her husband, the actor Robert Wagner. Wagner and Walken were both on board at the time. The yacht was named Splendour.

Christopher Walken: genetically predisposed to imbalance?

Christopher Walken has this condition called heterochromia iridis. His screen presence is typically described as unbalanced: does this uneven distribution of pigment in the irises, resulting in his two different coloured eyes, one blue, one hazel, hold the key to his uncanny, singular abilities with convincingly embodying unbalanced characters? 

I think through my mental catalogue of images of Walken on screen, and he's never grounded, never standing evenly and calmly on both feet. He bounces and sways. He's a compulsive dancer. His speech patterns are never what you could describe as evenly measured. He likes to throw in a little surprise emphasis or spike the end of a sentence. He's a master of catching you off guard, and when combined with a sense of vulnerability and tenderness, such as in the scene where he tells Isabelle Huppert about his wallpaper (one of my all time favourites) shortly before his violent death, or when he utters his final words to Brooke Adams after Geza Kovacs plugs him full of lead, the outcome is unusually touching, always odd, and arguably unlike anything else in movies. 

Walken turns 65 today. He looks fit, agile like a man half his age, still plowing indiscriminently through several dubious projects. I understand he's supposed to play Ozzy Osbourne in some movie about Mötley Crüe. He seems like he could go on like this forever. I'm confident that there are still great roles ahead, but either way he's still so enjoyable in the lousy ones.