Head in the cloud

One of the things that irked me about Spike Jonze’s Her was its failure to consider any number of consequences generated by its eerily close-to-reality science fiction premise. By contrast, Transcendence, which shares a key narrative element with Her—its protagonist’s beloved is an omnipresent immaterial being who exists solely via the supernatural realm known as the Internet—bends over backward to consider all sorts of grandiose consequences of living in a world where such love is possible. The problem is that consider is all Transcendence does. The film, written by Jack Paglen, checks off a lot of big ideas that we should probably all be thinking about, but is ultimately just as soft-headed as Her, while bearing little of that film’s distinctions. Her sacrificed coherence in favour of some resonant knowingness about the nature of love and possession. Transcendence sacrifices coherence for the veneer of intellectual and/or spiritual heft—and for a nonsensical third act full of big-ass explosions and sundry special effects.

The portentously named Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Deep), a genius in the realm of artificial intelligence, gets shot by radical anti-AI activists. At first it seems he’s going to be okay, but then a doctor with an astonishingly poor bedside manner informs him that the bullet was laced with isotopes and he’s going to die from radiation poisoning in a matter of weeks. A devastatingly brief window of time, but just enough time for Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), Will’s partner in love and science, to encode Will’s memories, ideas, emotions—in short, his consciousness—and upload the whole package into PINN, or Physically Independent Neural Network, the Casters’ revolutionary AI program. So Will’s flesh perishes, but his mind, or some facsimile, lives on in the cloud. He’s everywhere, all the time, and, it seems, all-powerful. He makes a bunch of money fast, and sets up Evelyn with an entire desert town, and, apparently, all its inhabitants, to continue their research, which, needless to say, has the capacity to take over the world!

Evelyn is our Dr. Frankenstein, her hubris driven equally by grief and scientific vision, her fundamental innocence underlined by the fact that she wears Keds with every outfit. Will is her disembodied monster, HAL 9000 with a handsome synthetic visage, a novel spin on the abusive, controlling spouse, Big Brother as bad husband. There are other characters to complicate and crowd Transcendence: a soundly sceptical neurobiologist pal (Paul Bettany) who conspicuously wears a cross around his neck, a wise old former colleague (Morgan Freeman), and a fed (Cillian Murphy) who keeps a watchful eye on the Casters’ mad science, which could one day prove useful to the Department of Defence.

The first hour is very intriguing, if poorly paced—so many scenes are a few lines too long, and there’s a great deal of padding—but then the script devolves into ungovernable plottiness. First-time director Wally Pfister, already famous as Christopher Nolan’s regular cinematographer, opts to emphasize spectacle, whether it be clouds of infectious nano-dirt reaching up out of the earth or a diamond-like drop of dew sliding off a sunflower in slow-motion, the former being an empty conceit designed solely to look freaky and thrilling, the latter being an empty stab at profundity.  

                      

Faces and names: Johnny Handsome on DVD

Dark Passage

There’s this point in the wonderfully dream-like, and, to my mind, widely underrated Dark Passage (1947) when the movie casts off the single point-of-view through which the entire first third is rendered, and the protagonist, Vincent Parry, finally appears before the camera. We knew all along it was Humphrey Bogart, but it’s only from this point on that Parry looks like Bogart. After escaping from prison, Parry has surgery that transforms him from some beefy guy with a moustache into Bogart, and I’ve always been fascinated by this process through which the protagonist suddenly becomes the movie star, by the implication that the face we all know was only hiding, that it had to be arrived at, to be earned, in order to be introduced into this bizarre crime story.

Though I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, the thing I always remembered about Johnny Handsome (89) was that it operated on this same principle. Mickey Rourke was a big star at the time, a different sort of actor than Bogart, yet one who’d inherited something of Bogart’s persona. Johnny Handsome doesn’t hide Rourke from view for its first third, but it does obscure Rourke’s visage behind prosthetic bone distortions and tumours. Johnny’s a career criminal who gets nabbed when his cohorts in a New Orleans coin shop heist betray he and his best friend, the only person who ever loved him. Once incarcerated, an attempt is made on Johnny’s life. While in hospital, Johnny meets Forest Whitaker’s benevolent Dr. Fisher, who has a theory that “surgical rehabilitation can be a deterrent to criminal recidivism.” He’s trying to tell Johnny that giving him a normal face might change him into an upstanding citizen.

So the moment finally arrives when the cruelly dubbed Johnny Handsome becomes the genuinely handsome Rourke. Of course, it’s less shocking than it’s perhaps meant to be—the brilliance of the collaboration between Rourke and the movie’s talented make-up artists winds up making Johnny nearly as charismatic and expressive when deformed and ugly as when he looks like Mickey Rourke. No matter, Johnny Handsome is an efficient and gripping neo-noir, one of the best such works from Walter Hill’s most active decade as director. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Maple.

The characters in Hill’s earlier The Driver (78) are only ever identified by their vocations, ie: “the Detective,” as though actual names would be too sissy. This conceit served to emphasize archetype over personality, and, accordingly, the characters’ actions adhered strictly within the dictates of their roles. Johnny Handsome is only slightly looser in this regard. The cast is amazing, but their characters are essentially resigned to the very determinism that Dr. Fisher is crusading against. Thus an extra-mean Lance Henriksen and a colossally haired Ellen Barkin are really bad bad guys and stay really bad until the end. Johnny was always a man of honour drawn to crime and stays a man of honour drawn to crime. Morgan Freeman has the only role that’s trickier to discern, playing a laid-back, rather Satanic cop who wants to nail all the crooks, Johnny included, and wants let the crooks themselves do all the heavy lifting. He basically just hangs around, massaging the wheels of fate until he gets precisely what he wants—and man, does he look good in a hat.

The pleasures of Johnny Handsome are in watching fatalism run its course in the most dynamic way possible. There’s style without any fancy stuff, brute violence without gratuitous gore, sex without skin. Like the surgeons who carve the unwanted flesh and sinew from Johnny’s face, Hill sculpts the movie down to pure muscle, until it’s the leanest Don Siegel movie Don Siegel never made. Who knows? Maybe if you shaved off Hill’s beard, did a little nip ‘n’ tuck, and sent him to the gym for six weeks, he’d turn out to actually be Don Siegel.

I Live in Fear: Kurosawa's underrated portrait of a country with better reason to worry than most

Another forgotten work by one of the great auteurs is Akira Kurosawa’s 1955 troubled social portrait I Live in Fear, now available in Eclipse’s Postwar Kurosawa box. As is often the case with Kurosawa, the film has been grossly underrated over the years on account of its didacticism –as though earnestness alone can kill a movie with otherwise compelling, dynamic, chilling and even touching qualities. I propose that I Live in Fear is actually something quite special, rich in atmosphere and in certain regards as revealing of the mood of the mid-50s as, say, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life or Rebel Without a Cause, films that also feature familial disintegration in a milieu of modernity and progress, as well as Cold War apocalyptic paranoia.

Elderly patriarch Kiichi Nakajima, portrayed by a heavily made-up, yet surprisingly effective Toshiro Mifune, is so consumed with anxiety over the seemingly inevitable nuclear holocaust that he’s resolved to move his entire clan –mistresses and illegitimate kids included– to a farm in Brazil, which he considers to be the safest possible locale to avoid fallout or direct attack. More concerned with the destiny of Kiichi’s finances than with the mortal destiny of Japan, the majority of his kin attempt to have a local court deem Kiichi incompetent and thus unfit to invest the family’s collective wealth in this venture that almost none want part of. As it becomes uncomfortably obvious that those pursuing the claim are chiefly concerned with their inheritance, the explosive Kiichi, whose convictions are as well-intentioned as they are impractical, wins the sympathies of one of his jurors, a dentist portrayed by Takashi Shimura, once again playing the reasonable counterpart to Mifune’s unruly protagonist. (The more I watch Shimura in these roles, the more he comes to resemble a Japanese Morgan Freeman. He’s got that aura of wisdom and kindness, yet can readily possess a daunting edge.)

Though sections are admittedly excessively talky, there are numerous scenes in I Live in Fear that, in their blend of sinuous camerawork, striking composition and percolating tension, deserve alignment with Kurosawa’s finest moments. In one, hot wind blows the pages of a book, while streetcars boom along the avenue outside: this “spooky weather,” attributed to H-bomb testing at sea, creates an unnerving air around Kiinchi as he cradles an infant grandchild while a son-in-law, drink in hand, casually goes on about the effects of radiation and the latest research into the ongoing trauma in Hiroshima.

The transfer on Eclipse’s no-frills disc is very good, and I’m grateful to finally have the film available on DVD. My only regret is that Criterion didn’t hold out for a more prestige-packaged release, because Japanese cinema expert Donald Ritchie would likely have provided a stellar commentary track.