Parental misguidance: Mother and Child

Now in her early 50s, Karen (Annette Bening) still lives with her mom, a reticent woman with vacant eyes, housebound and it seems not long for this world. Karen works as a physical therapist for the elderly. We know Karen had a child at 14 whom she gave her up for adoption. We hear the maudlin unsent letters Karen still writes to this daughter she never knew, and we sense that there’s something terribly sad about this woman who forfeited her opportunity to care for a child so that she could spend her life caring for the aged. Karen is socially impaired, lonely, angry, and wears dumpy clothing. She’s unkind to her housekeeper. Still, she’s weirdly sympathetic. You wish her the best.

Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) by contrast has turned her own difficult, controlling nature into something of a social asset. She’s a reputable lawyer, fiercely independent, without any familial ties, very self-assured, beguilingly attractive, sensual without sentiment. She’s seduces her not-easily-seduced new boss (Samuel L. Jackson) in a heartbeat, and nabs her dopey married neighbour as a side dish. It’s no mystery that Elizabeth is Karen’s daughter, and the fact that they both inhabit Los Angeles, that they both inhabit this movie, conspicuously titled Mother and Child, prompts us to speculate how they’ll eventually reunite. That such expectations are never fulfilled in any sort of obvious or predictable way is a testament of sorts to the storytelling skills of writer/director Rodrigo García.

But García’s feats of plot-twisting slight of hand also constitute all that’s finally most frustrating and annoying in Mother and Child. Much like the work of its executive producer, Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu, the movie betrays it’s finer qualities in an over-extended final act riddled with blasts of dramatic irony that feel as contrived as so many earlier scenes feel honest, thoughtful, and highly attuned to the peculiar and unnerving ways we negotiate our relationships. There’s a third storyline here, involving Lucy (Kerry Washington) and her attempts to adopt a child, and the presence of this seemingly unrelated thread should, I suppose, be a major tip-off to the sort of Paul Haggisy, too-neatly tied-up ending we’re slowly moving toward.

The restraint exhibited in certain exchanges between characters, exchanges that often resemble interrogations, is striking. The bits of dialogue whittled down to the bone, sometimes down to simple declarations, are intriguing. Editor Steven Weisberg has an immaculate sense of when to exit a scene, which is to say he always leaves as early as possible, yet never too soon. The performances are uniformly inviting while never being ingratiating. Bening and the exceptionally perfectly cast Watts are never more watchable than when seemingly trying to push others away. Jackson, in bow-tie and glasses, with graying beard, and Jimmy Smits, who plays a cuddly, baffled love interest for Bening, are effortlessly endearing in their inability to resist these pushy, off-putting women, the sort of flawed but resilient mother figures who form the core of García’s world view. There’s so many appealing aspects to Mother and Child, so many items to lure us in, that the over-calculated series of last act revelations, all timed to go off in rapid, numbing succession, to ostensibly give the audience its big emotional release, become a major let down even if you see them coming a mile away. I just lauded Weisberg for his judicious trimming, but there’s one additional cut he could have made that might have saved the whole movie, one that would have occurred right at the end of that scene were Watts drops off a letter at the adoption agency, the scene that assures us that everything is changing, when there still remained a balance of ambiguity and conclusiveness in keeping with all that’s most eloquent and memorable in Mother and Child.

Worldly goods, worldly bads: Clive Owen follows the money in The International

“I’m from the Bronx, so you gotta make it simple,” says a soon to be disposed of INTERPOL agent. Discreetly poisoned, he collapses only moments after his Berlin rendezvous with a representative of the evil International Bank of Business and Credit. As fellow agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) rushes to his rescue—only to himself collapse after being knocked upside the head by a truck’s side mirror—we quickly reckon that the intrigue we’re about to be plunged into will be anything but simple. Yet The International, written by Eric Singer and directed by Tom Twyker, wants to cater to those intellectually self-effacing Bronx-dwellers and other ostensibly dopey audience members, so while the plot becomes more wildly convoluted with each passing scene, the glut of platitudes and expository dialogue will attempt counterbalance.

The IBBC trades in more than cash. They’ve cut deals with just about every multinational, hold ties with multiple government agencies, and are single-handedly backing an armed revolution in Liberia. Apt pupils of the shock doctrine, their goal is to cultivate conflicts and control incurred debt. Along the way they’ll force a few hands, if not cut them off. From a previous post at Scotland Yard to his current gig with the apparently ineffectual INTERPOL—the other International of the title—Salinger’s long been crusading to bring these jackals to justice. With the help of a Manhattan DA lawyer (Naomi Watts), Salinger may finally be closing in, valiantly following a series of brutal incidents that could lead to the top: an IBBC VP dies under questionable circumstances, an Italian arms manufacturer and presidential candidate is assassinated, a tailing operation leads to a major shootout in the Guggenheim.

There are splendid bits of character work, such as Salinger’s tendency to have his ears injured, this man who hears too much. There are riveting set pieces, the one in the Gug being especially bracing. There is a surprisingly sinister resolution implying that vigilantism maybe the only way of dealing with powers higher than governments, and there's something weirdly assuring in how it proves that criminal networks will ultimately take care of their own. There’s also an inspired cell phone gag, though elsewhere Twyker’s attempt to wring tension out of text messaging falls flat. And there’s a lot of dragging scenes out, with padded entrances and exits or yet another show-offy bird’s eye shot, even when the scenes in question aren’t very exciting or essential to the story. When it all comes together it’s a great coulda-beena-Bond part for Owen and a decent stab at exposing the perils of globalization, but the state of the dialogue doesn’t bode well for Singer’s prospects and Twyker has yet to recover from Perfume. He made his mark with Run Lola Run over a decade ago, and some—I for one haven’t kept up—argue he’s been smudging it ever since.

The Promise of future collaborations: tracing the progress of the Cronenberg Mortensen merger

Right from its opening moments, Eastern Promises flows with painful, unruly rites of parturition, initiation, desecration and earthly departure. It opens with a gruesome killing, a premature birth and the tragic, confused expiration of the girl whose diary will come to haunt the film and its personae. It features bodies being branded, decapitated, displayed and disguised, as well as an attempted assassination in which the intended victim fights for his life while stark naked, a bravura sequence worth the asking price alone.

If the above reads as a particularly body conscious series of images, it’ll come as little surprise to savvy filmgoers that the director of Eastern Promises is David Cronenberg. But what’s so fascinating about Cronenberg’s progress is the way in which his films virtually always reveal something of his distinctive approach and ongoing preoccupations even when their milieus seem virtually antithetical to his established horror/sci-fi background. Set amidst London’s Russian underworld, Eastern Promises would appear even farther from Cronenberg’s comfort zone than A History of Violence, yet he brings to the proceedings more than confidence –he brings the careful gaze of one of the most passionately curious and unusual minds in movies.

Hospital midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) has in her care a newborn without a mother or even a name. All Anna has to assist her in identifying the child is a diary written in Russian and a business card that leads her to a fatherly, blue-eyed restaurateur named Seymon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). The more sinister aspect of Seymon makes itself known soon enough, not the least through Anna’s increasing familiarity with Seymon’s obnoxious, alcoholic and reckless son Kirill (a particularly flamboyant Vincent Cassel) and the family’s stoic chauffer Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). The diary and its inflammatory contents serve as a sort of Pandora’s box, functioning both as Anna’s entrée into a dark, socially cloistered realm of immigrant crime, and as a way of flushing Nikolai out of this darkness and into a conundrum of urgent moral dilemma.

Written by Stephen Knight, Eastern Promises is a taut, layered thriller akin in many regards to his terrific script for Dirty Pretty Things. Cronenberg’s points of connection are so varied and surprising, his reigning in of the material so clean that, as with Spider in particular, the places where the screenwriter’s hand departs and the director’s takes over are untraceable. Pleasingly, Cronenberg’s work of the 2000s is consistently characterized by this honing his own voice through fruitful collaboration rather than strict –and potentially stifling– traditional hyphenate autuerism.

Yet Cronenberg’s most notable partner-in-crime these days is surely Mortensen, who gives a flawlessly committed performance here as an intriguing variation on the man who can’t escape his violent past he already inhabited so deftly in A History of Violence. Though he’s introduced as a vampire-groomed thug who unflinchingly butts out smokes on his tongue before going about his duties snapping frozen digits off a corpse like so many fish fingers, his Nikolai is a collage of masks and interior conflicts that emerge gradually as his allegiance to Seymon and his involvement in Anna’s quest become mutually compromised. More even than Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, Mortensen has become Cronenberg’s ideal alter ego, an impressively pliable, imposingly muscular junction of raw physicality, prowling anxiety, complicated sexuality and shrewd intellect. And, in any case, he’s just amazing in this film.

We can only hope for more from this pairing, though the truth is that where Cronenberg might go from here is delightfully unpredictable and may or may not include further suitable roles for Mortensen. Perhaps he’ll borrow a page from the Scorsese-De Niro book and allow Mortensen to mature into a genuine chameleon –a feat which in itself would fit nicely into Cronenberg’s ongoing study of malleable identity and the monster within.

Know what? Not that funny...

Peter and Paul, the young antagonists in Funny Games, Aryan, clad in stark white, exuding a sort of studied, robotic idea of politeness, seem to spread through the isolated world of the film like some chillingly disaffected infectious disease. These boys move from one country house, one family, to another, each time seeking to exact a more or less identical program of horrifically violent disaster. They begin by penetrating the home through feigning innocence and asking an innocuous favour. They then disarm the resident patriarch and engage the entire clan in a game of terror whose rules are childishly simple yet hopelessly fixed in the assailants' favour. Watching their campaign unfold is like bearing witness to a nightmare of such deadening inevitability as to be, above all, wearying.

For those who’ve followed the work of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, watching Funny Games will also provoke considerable, perhaps undesirable, déjà vu. Haneke is not only remaking his own 1997 Austrian film of the same name, but delivering a shot-by-shot duplication: the story, characters, even the lighting, props and layout of the house and surroundings where it all takes place, everything has been lovingly recreated, only this time in English and with English-language actors. The duplication is so precise that while watching the new film the viewer can’t help but become distracted by the most incidental shift in detail. (Hey, there’s soymilk in the fridge this time!)

With regard to the performances, as someone who doesn’t speak German it’s hard to gauge what’s largely a matter of linguistic familiarity. While the characters are virtually unrecognizable as human beings, even sociopathic human beings, Peter and Paul, here played by Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt, do seem slightly more textured. Their victims, Ann, George and little Georgie, likewise have one or two moments that caught me off guard. Executive producer Naomi Watts, who seems to possess a special interest in horror/fantasy remakes (see The Ring, The Ring 2, King Kong and, coming soon, The Birds) is certainly committed, and begins the film with a bit more vulnerability than Susanne Lothar, her 1997 counterpart. Tim Roth, in a role previously played by the late Ulrich Mühe, creates what for me is by far the film’s most affecting moment, the scene in which George, suffering unimaginable shock, barely able to stand, asks his wife to forgive him for not being able to somehow prevent the catastrophe that’s beset their family. Overall however, both versions prompted exactly the same response in me: intrigue, followed by a period of extreme anxiety and repulsion, followed by utter, exasperating boredom, and, once the film was through, a degree of grudging intellectual appreciation.

The ostensible point of Funny Games, in both versions, is to function as a critique of the commodification of violence in movies. The critique filters into the film through numerous, highly calculated attempts at subverting audience expectations. We might expect to see exciting, dynamic violence; we might expect suspense; we might expect to see the antagonists undone by some mixture of ingenuity on the part of their adversaries and unpredictable forces from the world beyond this house under siege: Haneke denies us all of these things. The problem is that what he’s put in their place are the sort of winky alienation techniques you might expect from some annoyingly smarty-pants film student, such as having the antagonists condescendingly talk directly to the camera or, in the film’s most tiresome scene, pick up a remote control and rewind back a few minutes so they can correct events in a way that suits them better. There are simply no identifiable rules, no interior logic, to Funny Games, a fact which no doubt upsets our bourgeois notions of cathartic drama, but nonetheless does little to implicate us any further in what’s unfolding, because to implicate us we’d need to care a lot more.

Let me be clear: I greatly admire the films Haneke’s made since the first Funny Games. Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché all seem to succeed where both versions of Funny Games fail: they make a deeply troubling spectacle of violence and withhold certain pieces of what would normally be crucial information as a way to coerce our more active participation with the narrative and the many layers of significance inherent in it. In his Cineaste review of the film, Robert Koehler suggests that Funny Games “is best addressed not in terms of whether it actually works on screen, but as an object that spews out ideas.” I agree that you do indeed need to actually see Funny Games to be able to appreciate the ideas it has to offer. But do you need to see it in two languages? Do you even need to see it twice? And furthermore, does a thriller or horror film need to be so loftily schematic and relentlessly cold in order to engage us in questioning how we consume and/or become disaffected by violence? If viewers are required to be self-reflexive anyway, could they not be just as provoked by a smart genre film, say one by Hitchcock, Verhoven or Cronenberg, that’s infused with ideas, auto-critiques and still delivers the goods with regards to emotional investment in story and characters?