Recovery and detection in twelve uneasy steps

When we first meet Scudder (Liam Neeson) it’s 1991. Back then he was NYPD, with dyed moustache and goatee. He drinks a breakfast of coffee and two shots of whiskey in a bar that gets robbed. The robbers ice the barkeep. Scudder chases them down and disposes of them one at a time with a remarkably steady hand. There’s more to this part of the story but we don’t learn about it until later, when it’s 1999, Scudder’s handed in his badge, started up as an un-licenced private detective, given up booze and shaved off the ’stache and goatee, that combo having migrated to the faces of several heavies, among them millionaire criminal Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) and sadistic sociopathic serial killer Albert (Adam David Thompson). The 90s were difficult years for facial hair legitimacy. 

Yet, if A Walk Among the Tombstones is anything to go by, they were good years for literacy rates. This film, based on a 1992 novel by Lawrence Block, features a drug lord who chills on the sofa with some Nabokov, a homeless boy who hangs out in libraries and is well versed in his Dashiell Hammett, a cemetery groundskeeper toiling away at a novel, and another drug lord who names his dog Watson, no doubt in honour of Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved narrator. I’m poking fun, but the truth is that it’s a perfectly pleasant conceit in a perfectly watchable, if gruesome, detective yarn, whose narrative style, for the record, is modelled most closely after Raymond Chandler: like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Scudder is usually one step ahead of us and rarely stops to explain what he’s doing. Like Marlowe, Scudder is also something of a romantic. Though evidence of the internet’s usefulness in detection is made obvious to him, Scudder, perhaps buying into the Y2K hype creeping into every third scene, is a devout technophobe, preferring old school methods. Besides, early on in Tombstones Scudder befriends and quasi-deputizes TJ (Astro), the aforementioned homeless child bookworm who knows his way around a search engine and helps save the day, not to mention his own skin, by dint of his early adoption of the mobile phone. 

The plot is about as complicated as gruesome detective yarn plots tend to be, but, in short, it involves a series of kidnappings of the loved ones of affluent criminal kingpins who, for the usual reasons, don’t want to go to the cops—so they go to Scudder, who doggedly tracks down the culprits between AA meetings, which come to assume a curiously ominous tone during the film’s protracted climax, which employs a liturgical reading of the 12 steps as a sort of underscoring for much bloodletting and comeuppance. This is veteran screenwriter Scott Frank’s second feature as director and he plays it fairly straight, though you get the impression he wishes the setting was 1979 instead of 1999, or that he was actually making the film in 1974 instead of 2014. Shades of William Friedkin loom. There are worse shadows you could huddle under for two hours.

                            

The expensive explosives that failed to blow up

The protracted prelude to Sorcerer (1977), William Friedkin’s remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), which itself was an adaptation of George Arnaud’s 1950 same-named novel, whisks us on a world tour of criminal activity, starting in Veracruz, Mexico, before making stops in Jerusalem, Paris, and New Jersey. What Friedkin’s film takes great pains and many minutes to show us is something the Clouzot efficiently and effectively dealt with in a handful of lines: we’re about to be told a story of sundry scumbags who wind up in an unnamed but fairly miserable-looking Latin American purgatory and take a gig transporting extremely sensitive nitroglycerin across 320 kilometres of shoddy jungle and mountain road; Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green want to know just what kind of scumbags we’re dealing with, so they frontload Sorcerer with backstory that reveals our quartet to consist of a hitman (Francisco Rabal), a terrorist (Amidou), an embezzling investment banker (Bruno Cremer), and the driver (Roy Scheider) for a gang who rob a church. In every case something goes amiss that forces the characters to flee and hide where their pursuers will hopefully never look for them.

To be sure, these backstories function more as colour than as essential narrative materials, but maybe Friedkin and Green just figured that knowing how people got into a mess will make the mess itself more interesting. That’s certainly the tack that Friedkin and everyone else involved in the restoration and re-release of Sorcerer are taking in trying to get audiences to engage with this cursed production. I don’t think that any amount of New Hollywood mythmaking is going to make Sorcerer into the lost masterpiece it’s being touted as, but the context is fascinating: Friedkin was coming off of the massive success of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), and considered Sorcerer a personal project destined to cement his status as a genuine auteur, but his misadventures in the wilds of a developing country, his running way over budget, and the film’s misfortune to open the same year as a little space opera called Star Wars doomed its prospects. Sorcerer is in a sense, Friedkin’s Apocalypse Now (1979) or Heaven’s Gate (1980), though, really, it isn’t nearly as ambitious or artistically successful as either of those legendary films made by his peers. It’s a confused movie with fumbling existential visions and half-hearted political statements. Having said that, it’s also extremely watchable, captivatingly seedy, mesmerizing in its use of locations, and features an excellent Tangerine Dream score. It has some spectacular and expertly executed suspense set-pieces and a handful of wonderful, almost throwaway details that indeed speak to something that could be deemed almost singularly Friedkinian.

While Scheider’s gang is storming the backroom of the Jersey church—and senselessly killing a priest while doing so—we get cutaways to the (presumably shotgun) wedding between completely incidental characters transpiring in the chapel—and a close-up of the bride’s black eye! Later a cop will open a bottle of Coke with an automatic. Later still we watch our antiheroes trying to cross a collapsing bridge and blow-up a tree. All of this, and, of course, the pleasures of watching Scheider, make Sorcerer very much worth rescuing from obscurity. The new print premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and has since been making the rounds in the major centres. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray.  

                      

Reunited and it feels so crude

The two most appealing characters in August: Osage County are, alas, barely in the movie, but they’re both in the first scene, in which poet and patriarch Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) provides Johnna (Misty Upham), his new housekeeper, with some vital details regarding her employers’ sundry idiosyncrasies and preferred sources of inebriation, along with a volume of T.S. Eliot. Very soon after this exchange Beverly will disappear and all his adult children and their respective families will descend on the Weston’s sepulchral rural Oklahoma home. The ostensible purpose of this dysfunctional family reunion is to put collective wits together and discern where “old unfathomable dad” has run off to. Yet rather early in August you get the suspicion that what passes for story here is little more than a platform upon which a great deal of acting is to be displayed and admired. At least Johnna has something to read. She has her work cut out for her.

Headlining August’s august ensemble is Meryl Streep as Violent, Beverly’s wife and mother to his kids, a woman known for cruelty and garrulousness. She has cancer of the mouth, and while what exits her mouth may not actually be cancerous, it isn’t hard to imagine how extended exposure to her tirades may contribute to long-term illness. The excess of meds probably doesn’t help. She blitzed half the time and stoned the other half. Unsurprisingly, her kids (Julia Roberts, Juliette Lewis, Julianne Nicholson) don’t much like her, though they’ve got problems of their own, mostly involving men, one of whom is a first-cousin.

The script was adapted by Tracy Letts from his own play. There are intermittently riveting, venomous moments in the extended groups scenes which help those who haven’t seen August on stage (myself included) imagine its darky comic appeal. But the needless transitional scaffolding surrounding such moments dampens the impact and emphasizes the general air of phoniness. Letts’ characters invite the sort of expansive performances that might fill a theatrical space, but in a movie as deeply conventional as this one, they mostly come off as wearyingly showy. Streep is, to be sure, as fully immersed in this character as in anything she's done, but it’s rare to see her legendary chops used as such a blunt instrument.

August was helmed by television titan turned feature director John Wells, a tasteful ham, if you know what I mean. He takes a fundamentally middlebrow approach to material that pleads to be deeply unsettling. Where director William Friedkin was only too eager to exploit the grotesque in Letts (see Killer Joe), Wells seems not to have registered it at all. The cocktail of abuse, incest, racism, adultery, suicide and madness at the story’s core are softened at every turn. Wells clearly likes actors but fails to let them dominate; he overwhelms their work with inserts, reaction shots, ostentatiously poignant framing and, most of all, Gustavo Santaolalla’s gentle, deeply conventional musical score, which gets papered over anything that might have otherwise made us uneasy, such as Violet vomiting by the side of the road or the eerie deployment of Eric Clapton’s cheerful ‘Law Down Sally.’

It’s hardly a spoiler to say that the search for dad, like August as a whole, goes nowhere. (This, I think, is intentional.) There are some excellent moments, and Margo Martindale is very good as Violet’s sister, but mostly this is no country for nuanced performances or earned catharsis. You can’t really blame Beverly for walking away from it all.

                

Undercover Al goes down the Mine Shaft

“How’d you like to disappear?” The question is posed by NYPD’s Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) to Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), whom he wants to go undercover, to flush out an apparent serial killer preying upon young men who frequent the city’s hardcore leather and studs scene. Edelson chooses Burns because Burns fits the profile of the killer’s victims. Edelson flatly enquires into Burns’ homosexual experience; Burns insists he’s never had any. Yet as Burns burrows deeper into the S&M underworld, that initial question—specifically that word, “disappear”—assumes various shades of meaning. Something in Burns—in fact something in Cruising (1980), the movie he inhabits, one very much a case of outsiders looking, or rather peering, in—wants to become lost in that underworld, to disappear into it, to not only taste but to devour the unknown pleasures once taboo and now, thanks to occupational circumstance, permitted. As a crime thriller, Cruising has its points of interest, but as a study in flamboyant masculine sexual-criminal curiosity—not to mention as a glimpse of a New York that no longer exists—it’s an exceptionally fascinating document. 

Though made from an original screenplay written by its director William Friedkin—who seemed drawn above all to the milieu; there is a genuine, if very seedy sociological focus at work here—Cruising had its roots in the true story of Randy Jurgensen, a New York City patrolman who took an assignment very similar to Burns’ more than a decade earlier. The based-on-a-true-story clause would eventually be taken up by the film’s producers when New York’s gay community learned of the film’s premise and violently objected to what they regarded as its demonizing representation. They began to stage large-scale protests and acts of sabotage, making loud noises and flashing mirrors during location shooting. Yet however dubious the film’s political agenda may have been—and I strongly suspect that Friedkin had no political agenda whatsoever—time has made the notion of Cruising as being slanderous to gays seem fairly obtuse: as Pacino himself said, he didn’t regard the subculture depicted in Cruising as representing the entire gay community anymore than he regarded the mafia family in The Godfather as representing all Italian-Americans.

Still, things get hazy when one begins to consider the note of ambiguity the film lands on. I don’t want to give everything away if you haven’t seen Cruising, but let’s just say that the identity of the film’s killer remains elusive—elusive in such a way that it could be any number of the leather boys Burns encounters in the Ramrod or the Mine Shaft. Which kind of implies that the evil is perhaps ubiquitous, even inherent in the very desire to seek sexual thrills and camaraderie among vigorously liberated men in aviator glasses and buttless chaps. So, viewed from a certain stance, Cruising a troubling film. But it’s also, I argue, regardless of the filmmakers’ intentions, all the more valuable for it.