Tanks for nothing

Repeat after me: “War is hell.” Now keep repeating that for over two hours and by the time you’re finished you might have some idea as to the cumulative insights gathered in David Ayer’s turgid World War II tank drama. It opens with U.S. tank commander Sergeant Collier (Brad Pitt) stabbing a man in the eyeball, which, I suppose, is some kind of clever performance of the title of Ayer’s preceding directorial effort, End of Watch. But I had to review Fury, so I kept on watching, as bodies were crushed to pulp under tank tread, as men on fire blew their brains out, as prisoners of war were repeatedly executed, as women are humiliated and surrender their bodies to invading soldiers because they know they have no choice. (I’ll let you decide how that differs from sexual assault.) Mayhem without energy, these dour scenes don’t even have the crassness to be perverse. What it has instead and in droves is this appalling, pretentious mixture of misanthropy and sentimentality, with endless peanut-brained justifications for superfluous raping and killing. There’s a scene in which a newbie (Logan Lerman), already traumatized by having to clean to clean up the bloody interior of the tank and discovering a sizable chunk of someone’s face, is escorted by Collier into a room littered with Nazis who suicided in anticipation of the Allies’ arrival. As though speaking on our behalf, the newbie asks, “Why are you showing me this?” And Collier, as though speaking on Ayers’ behalf, answers, “Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.” This is the zenith of what passes for wisdom in Fury.

If Ayer’s aim is to remind us of the infernal horrors of what many consider a just war (something that, for the record, countless, infinitely superior films have accomplished before this), I suppose he’s succeeded, but he deflates whatever value such a statement may possess by simultaneously constructing scenarios in which his characters are made to seem heroic, striking heroic poses, saying heroic things to the strains of heroic music. Which is to say, Fury is a dunderheaded apologia for war crimes, a morally inept work of grotesque nonsense exploiting historical suffering for the sake of pulpy so-called entertainment.

Fury is a fairly appropriate title (American Tank might have served just as well), but Ayer’s definition of fury has much overlap with stupidity or blunt nihilism. Collier proudly declares that he once promised to keep his crew alive, yet the film ends with an act of utterly gratuitous violence, a quasi-Wild Bunch climax that’s sure to get everyone butchered for absolutely no good reason. It’s April 1945, the war is nearly over, a mechanical failure stalls Collier’s tank at a country crossroads somewhere in Germany, hundreds of Nazis are spotted coming their way. Outnumbered and outgunned by a colossal margin, Collier’s crew of five could easily hide out in the woods, but instead choose to hold their ground for no apparent reason other than to keep killing and keep getting killed, to get that body-count as high as possible even when the war’s outcome is all but secured. 

That Ayer has managed to make a film even stupider than End of Watch is some kind of achievement. That he manages to exacerbate that stupidity with snatches of scoring from The Omen is almost, but not quite, impressive. Misguided in the extreme and weirdly boring, there is no genuine audacity here, and certainly no nobility. Of interest to tank enthusiasts and Shia LaBeouf completists only.

                        

The story of ()

In some suitably indeterminate period, in a suitably theatrical alley-crossroads, our bloodied and bruised heroine is roused from her death-like slumber by an elder Good Samaritan, offering only tea, a cosy bed, an ear. The pair retires to the Good Samaritan’s hovel. She has a story to tell and he has all the time in the world, or at the very least the next four hours. We are one foot in the realm of erotic fable, a form that invites tautology and exhaustion, objectification as route to oblivion. Our other foot? It’s stepped into a hall of mirrors, and every reflection reveals Lars von Trier.

Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), “I’m just a bad human being.” But Seligman—from the German, literally, “blessed man”—doesn’t believe in sin and he doesn’t believe in bad people. This is an invitation. She’s a nymphomaniac, he’s an asexual: you could not ask for more ideal listener. And so she begins her story, the father (Christian Slater) she adored and the mother (Connie Nielsen) she didn’t, the preternatural interest in her genitals, the burgeoning sense that she is destined to live in contradiction of society’s love fixation. By adolescence, young Joe (Stacy Martin) embarks on a journey of self-actualization whose itinerary is the indiscriminate accumulation of sex partners—“lovers” would seem far too sentimental a word. She describes the loss of her virginity to a po-faced cockney mechanic named Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) who approaches intercourse like he’s changing a spark plug. She learns the finer points of aggressive seduction while cruising on a passenger train with a girlfriend. She briefly flirts with being part of a group of like-minded girls—“Mea vulva, mea maxima vulva,” goes their motto—before resigning herself to the inherent solitude of her single-minded lifestyle choice. She has no apparent interest in women, multiples or kinks unless dictated by another, so Joe’s story has little to do with sexual exploration or any sort of joy that extends beyond the time it takes to orgasm. Which should give you fair warning that Nymphomaniac, despite its provocative title and promise of explicit sex, is not at all a sexy movie. Its titillation is of the intellectual or formal or aesthetic variety. And like nearly every such exercise from von Trier, all of Nymphomaniac’s most compelling elements—and, to be sure, they are numerous—get us hot and bothered for what is finally a most shallow sort of satisfaction, and the dumbest ending in his filmography. 

Von Trier has always been far stronger as a conceptualist or crafter of bold images than as a storyteller or filmmaker per se, but complex structures serve him well. Nymphomaniac finds its narrative models in 18th century literature, unfolding as picaresque confession, and the truth is that the film’s protracted duration just flies by.* There is no shortage of incident or novel variation. There is a truly remarkable sequence in which a character identified only as Mrs. H. (Uma Thurman) unexpectedly arrives at Joe’s apartment after learning that her husband, duped into believing that his promiscuous mistress wants him for herself, is leaving her and shacking up with Joe. There’s a curious if not entirely convincing episode in which a man named K (Jamie Bell) accepts Joe’s application to take a regular beating. There is Joe’s late vocation as a debt collector, her sexual experience giving her unusual insight into people’s repressed desires. And there is, alas, the eternal return of Jerôme, a fairly tiresome character to whom Joe is inexplicably attached—the first cut is the deepest, I guess—though that constant sense of LaBeouf being totally overwhelmed as an actor serves the character. All the while we are always returning to that hovel where Seligman listens and discusses with Joe a smattering of oddly related subjects, such as the uses of a cake fork, fly fishing, polyphonic music and Zeno’s paradox. These digressions are pretty delightful. All the while we are also treated to veiled allusions to von Trier’s greatest hits: there are plot developments or images that distinctly recall Breaking the Waves, The Kingdom, Dogville—see Joe laying in a coffin of grass—and, no doubt, other von Trier titles that I missed. Von Trier has said that he is closest to his female protagonists, and indeed, he is a bit like his nympho narrator, giving himself a vehicle through which he can relive his past glories. I read a tweet in which film historian Mark Cousins complained that Nymphomaniac should have followed Joe into old age, and I thoroughly agree, but von Trier is still in his 50s. Perhaps in the coming decades we’ll be granted a Nymphomaniac Volume III. Until then, we’re stuck with this feeble climax, and that empty feeling that follows fits of excitement.  

*Nymphomaniac Volumes I & II are being released simultaneously in Toronto as two separate tickets, which strikes me as a bit unfair since neither Volume stands on its own.

The wrong side of the law

Set in Prohibition era rural Virginia, Lawless marks the fourth feature film collaboration between director John Hillcoat and musician, writer and occasional actor Nick Cave; it’s their second collaboration with Cave in the role of scenarist. Like Hillcoat’s The Proposition, which came from an original Cave script, Lawless, adapted from Matt Bondurant’s historical novel The Wettest County in the World—itself based on Bondurant’s own family history—follows the fates of three brutish brothers pitted against corrupt authorities. But The Proposition was a western set in Hillcoat and Cave’s native Australia, and was a far more distinctive and relevant piece of revisionist genre cinema. Much of what transpires in Lawless, by contrast, is as boilerplate as its title: the fraught fraternal hierarchy, the super-evil chief villain, the female characters neatly divided into Madonna and whore—even Cave’s score sounds kinda generic. The film is disappointing; whatever you thought of Hillcoat’s previous feature, The Road, which Cave scored, you couldn’t fault it for lack of ambition or aesthetic vision. Yet I can’t call Lawless a complete failure either.

The Bondurant brothers, Forrest (Tom Hardy), Howard (Jason Clarke) and Jack (Shia LeBeouf), are hillbilly bootleggers whose business is encroached upon by outsiders, led by Chicago-based special agent Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), looking to get in on the profits. The story is told from Jack’s point-of-view, which is unfortunate given LeBeouf’s overworked earnestness, but Jack is indeed the one undergoing the most radical shifts in character: we see the boys as kids in an overfamiliar prologue in which wimpy little Jack can’t work up the gumption to kill a hog, something his stoic elder brothers do without hesitation. Forrest is the most enigmatic character; at a young age he claimed he and his brothers were immortal, and Forrest Bondurant’s uncanny real-life biography, peppered with a series of injuries that most of us would never survive, feels like the best reason to tell this story in the first place. I wish it was more about Forrest and his strange life, and that Hardy was more central to the film since he also gives what is by far the most compelling performance.

Lawless’ most flamboyant performance however would easily be Pearce’s. His Rakes is an improbable dandy: eyebrows plucked, hair slicked and dyed to an ebony sheen, wearing delicate gloves and pearly waistcoats. He looks like Satan’s golf tee. Sneering and preening and gleefully sadistic, Pearce’s choice to hurl himself right over the top is a perfectly reasonable response to this character’s absurdly overstated villainy; the character also reads as a closeted homosexual monster, a fairly lazy, offensive, outdated paradigm.

While I’m a huge admirer of Cave’s work in most other circumstances, I recognize that the script for Lawless is the sum of Cave’s weakest tendencies. Nonetheless I could still imagine a more appealing realization of that script helmed by a director with more of humour, sense of place and affection for character, however archetypical, than Hillcoat displays here with his ceremoniousness, overstated brutality and overly cutty violence. It’s been nearly ten years since David Gordon Green made anything even close to worthy of the promise of his debut, George Washington; I wish someone like Green, the kind of filmmaker we used to label “regional,” could get this kind of a gig. Even with all its clichés, it would still have felt more shook alive and lived-in and curious about the world and the mysteries of the past. 

Poor investments: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Taken as a diptych, 1987’s Wall Street and the new Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps form a kind of documentary about New York City, computers, phones, suits, the music of David Byrne and Brian Eno—whose collaborations provide the soundtrack for both movies—and the enduring appeal of Michael Douglas, who returns as nefarious financial shark Gordon Gekko, a role for which he won an Oscar and which, to me at least, most strongly invokes the screen persona of Douglas’ legendary father. Unfortunately, watching Wall Street and its sequel back-to-back gives you the sense that as technology became faster and smaller and markets more vulnerable, the financial sector became a lot less fun, not just for Gekko, who spent many of the intervening years behind bars for insider trading, but also for director Oliver Stone and his collaborators, who seem so intent on pitching their own theories about exactly why the 2008 economic meltdown melted, on ensuring that we understand that greed is actually bad—in short, on preaching to the choir—that they forgot to invest their story with any compelling new characters.

While not a complete failure, this feels like a waste of a pretty brilliant opportunity to interrogate recent history through high stakes drama. To say that Douglas is the best thing in Money Never Sleeps isn’t much of a compliment. Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff have written an overly talky, cliché-laden script with too many blustery speeches, and the frustrating truth is that even Douglas gets stuck with bum lines, though he handles them with a lot more grace that Shia Labeouf, the idealistic young protégé/adversary and ostensible protagonist, a character barely coherent and most often dissolving into the scenery. Carey Mulligan meanwhile has to play not only LeBeouf’s fiancée but also Gekko’s very angry daughter, which means she spends most of the movie crying. It’s never explained how exactly a young woman who runs a successful Leftist news site and loathes her arbitrageur father fell in love with this money-obsessed young trader, which makes their inevitable break-up and reunion all the more puzzling. About the only actor who gets any mileage out of Money Never Sleeps is Eli Wallach, who’s 94, which means his Federal Reserve Board executive actually lived through the crash of’29. He’s barely in the movie yet encapsulates an awful lot of Stone’s thesis simply through the creepy shifts in attitude he brings to his final two scenes. Survival on Wall Street, this old pro implies, is about knowing when to stomp someone into the carpet and when to put on a big smile for the guy with the keys to the bank.