Catching up with a singular, hard-working prince

David Gordon Green has had one of the more prolific and peculiar careers in 21^st century movies. Born in Arkansas and raised in Texas, he made George Washington (2000), his feature debut, after graduating from the North Carolina School for the Arts. Green was still in his mid-20s, yet his craftsmanship, film literacy, attention to landscape and behaviour, and ability to draw captivating naturalistic performances from a cast comprised largely of non-actors indigenous to his rural location seemed preternaturally mature while running on pure instinct. Somewhat entranced with its own awkwardness, an unkind viewer could call it precious, but George Washington is a film I find impossible to be unkind to; it’s gorgeous, warm, curious, race-blind and age-blind, inherently timeless and flowing with tenderness. It remains Green’s strongest work, though many of its successors make such an appraisal easy.

Your Highness

All the Real Girls (2003), Undertow (2004) and Snow Angels (2007) retained the authentic regional flavour, sensitivity to character and obvious affection for the maverick directors of the 1970s (Altman, Ashby, Malick, et cetera), but they also used genre and semi-famous actors in ways that felt self-consciously quirky. By the end of Green’s string of box office-oriented, high-concept comedies Pineapple Express (2008), Your Highness (2011) and The Sitter (2011), it was easy to forget that he might be one of his generation’s most distinctive filmmakers. (Though it would be misleading to limit an assessment of Green’s career to his feature directorial credits; he’s also the producer of a numerous independent films and produced and directed episodes of Eastbound and Down.) When praising Green amongst discerning film buffs I’ve often received glances of incomprehension, but I can’t shake the integrity or promise of his early work. I don’t believe for a moment that anyone trying to forge a steady and diverse career in the industry is necessarily going to remain in full control of everything they work on, nor do I believe that Green has ever knowingly sold out. I’ve interviewed him twice, and, for what it’s worth, I don’t detect a cynical cell in his grey matter.

Prince Avalanche

Which brings us to the present and two reasons to feel vindicated for keeping faith in Green’s cinematic vision. With some luck, Joe (2013), Green’s absorbing adaptation of the eponymous Larry Brown novel, which stars an excellent Nicolas Cage, will find its way to local screens soon. Prince Avalanche (2013) meanwhile has already had its brief, limited theatrical run and is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. Loosely based on the Icelandic film Either Way (2011), Avalanche—the title an endearingly goofy amalgamation of its twin protagonists names, Alvin and Lance—stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as two guys—one older and engaged, the other younger and preoccupied with getting laid—who spend the summer painting lines on a remote stretch of highway, camping along the way and forging an unlikely but perfectly plausible bond.

Prince Avalanche, again, obviously

The film was prompted by the Texan band Explosions in the Sky, who proposed collaborating with Green on a project to be made in Barstop State Park, which was recovering from a massive fire. Avalanche was then hastily developed and put into production, and the urgency seems to have brought out Green’s inventiveness and his capacity for crafting story and character from the simplest ingredients. (The film also exhibits Green’s enduring affection for pre-digital culture, since I can’t figure out any other reason for setting the story in 1988.) The focus is squarely on the rhythms of work and downtime, on the funny way time has of transforming misunderstanding into its opposite, or the way men can be oblivious to their own bullshit. Alvin is uptight and pompous and poor Lance is, well, a few quarts short, but it’s adorable, not to say frequently hilarious, to observe their struggles to communicate, to express vulnerability and imagine their respective futures. As for Green, Joe and Avalanche give us plenty of reason to believe that his future holds many more works of idiosyncratic beauty. 

                    

The old man down the road

The old man walks as though his torso belongs to someone else. Body and mind seem tenuously coordinated at best. Sheer will power—another term for stubbornness—goads him as he traverses the shoulder of the road leading out of Billings, Montana. His destination is Lincoln, Nebraska, which even a cursory glance at a map will tell you is a hell of a ways. His velocity makes the lawn mower in The Straight Story seem like a concord in comparison. But that film’s old-timer had his wits about him, whereas Woody (Bruce Dern) appears touched by dementia, its creeping inwardness a blessing, perhaps, for a man who never said much and habitually took refuge in alcohol. Dementia is the token explanation for Woody’s insistence on traveling to Nebraska to collect what he claims is an enormous windfall but for the rest of us is obviously a Publisher’s Clearing House-type scam. Only later in Nebraska does Woody’s son, David (Will Forte), suggest that dad “just needs something to live for.” 

David needs something too, to escape the deadening routine of selling stereos and from the heartache stemming from the recent failure of a romantic relationship. So, in spite of the inherent absurdity of Woody’s itinerary, David decides to drive Woody to Lincoln, though they wind up spending most of their time in the fictional town of Hawthorne, where Woody grew up. Many who remain there still remember Woody from the old days. The farmhouse in which Woody spent his childhood still stands—if barely. Nebraska is really David’s journey. It’s about a son wondering who his father is or was, about how time seems to render our parents fundamentally unknowable. It’s too late for David to get close to Woody in any meaningful sense, but it isn’t too late for him to learn something about Woody that might help him map a route through his own life.

Alexander Payne’s sixth film is the first on which he takes no writing credit. It is also his most fully realized since abandoning satire (i.e.: Election) for somewhat less prickly studies in characters and regions (About Schmidt). Phadon Papamichael’s ashen, monochromatic cinematography mirrors both the vintage and fogginess of Woody; it also reflects new, welcome gradations of nuance in Payne’s characters and offers nod to certain traditions in American landscape photography. (Nebraska’s stark highways and turnpikes also echo the image on the cover of Bruce Springsteen’s album of the same name.) Imagery, character complexity, rhythms and regionalism: in so many ways Payne’s latest strikes me as a vast improvement from its widely acclaimed predecessor, The Descendants, which in many respects settled for the corniest take on its Hawaiian setting (the musical score, most annoyingly), and featured the rare George Clooney performance that feels at once oddly leaden and false, most notably in the overly sombre way the star reads the prosaic opening voice-over. (Payne says that no matter how his films end up he always thinks he’s making a comedy—I think he forgot to mention this to Clooney, in so many other films a deft comic actor.) A road movie without the excesses of local colour that often clog the genre, Nebraska’s story is simple, its themes straightforward and its ambitions modest, but the degree to which Payne, working from a script by Bob Nelson, realizes these ambitions make the film richly rewarding both as an aesthetic and emotional experience. 

Which is where I should finally address the enigmatic heart of the film. After cutting his teeth in Roger Corman exploitation counterculture flicks in the ’60s, Dern became one of those marginal legends of the New Hollywood of the ’70s—the very definition of “character actor” for an entire generation. Substantial roles in quality films were rare, as was recognition, though Dern did get an Oscar nomination for his role as a Vietnam veteran in Coming Home. So much of his work is memorable for being singularly hysterical (that’s a compliment—no one does high-pitched flip-outs like Dern). After a career of going off the rails it’s thus that much more fascinating and strangely moving to see Dern reach this autumnal triumph, playing a role that demands he remain remote, apart from the others, not so much confused as slowly dissolving into the film’s aluminium siding, wood panelling and flat vistas. Forte, an actor known for comic roles, perfectly compliments Dern with patience, approachability and kindness—his David is an easy-going guy who needs some way to shatter his own passivity. What David discovers by being forced to confront the mystery of his father is something of a value that one usually needs half a lifetime to come to terms with. Thankfully, Nebraska is made with such heart and craft we needn’t wait that long to know that something very special has transpired. The feeling is right there, waiting, as we reach the end of this particular road. 

                  

Actual Miles

Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) is among the greatest, most audacious, most truly individual studio-backed movies that could probably only have been made in the 1970s, one that feels like myth from a distance but when you’re actually in it, behind the wheel of it, is really a string of loving detail with no apparent concessions to grand design. It’s about a deal made at some seldom-patronized country service station, a cross-country race for pink slips, with stops only for cheeseburgers, gas and small repairs. One car is a slick yellow GTO, the other a hulking old Chevy, a car that’s all performance, no glamour—it doesn’t even have a heater since a heater might slow it down—and Hellman’s backseat camera shakes with the Chevy’s surges in speed. The movie’s universe is soaked in restlessness, but not the romantic sort. The purity absorbs you without explaining a thing. 

The characters have no names. The Chevy has a Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and a Driver (James Taylor), a Beach Boy and a famous singer-songwriter, though neither talk much, much less sing—they can’t afford to waste the energy. Even Taylor’s leanness seems calibrated for speed. So these stoic, long-haired hustlers, who are they? Certainly not the counterculture emblems of Easy Rider (1969). Are they young men of their generation or of something much deeper in the American mindset, or maybe that of the late 19^th century European novel? The movie, scripted by Rudy Wurlitzer, opts to keep their mystery intact, while leaving much room for the actors’ low-key charisma to unfurl.

They’re joined by a girl (Laurie Bird, who was pretty mysterious even in real life), a tousled tomboy nymphet vagabond. Her entrance is spied entirely through the window and doorway of a diner; she transfers her body and belongings from one vehicle to another—the Chevy. Driver and Mechanic get in the car as she nests in the back. They drive off without so much as a word, as though her appearance in their car was not planned per se but a perfectly ordinary occurrence. She’s the first to speak. She just wants to make sure they’re not the Zodiac killer. 

Driver and Mechanic, the two-headed lone wolf, are most often seen from the front or behind, while the pilot of the GTO (Warren Oates) is most often seen from the side, the most appropriate point-of-view for a compulsive conversationalist. Few actors in history can be so endearing while being so baldly ingratiating, and Two-Lane Blacktop supplied us with one of Oates’ finest performances. Oates’ affectations are lovingly honed: the stiff collar and cashmere V-necks, the driving gloves with the knuckle-holes, the scarf or ascot or whatever that is round his neck, the tape collection perfectly cued-up so that he can play, say, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ just as a pretty girl slides into his passenger seat. He claims he’s scouting locations for a “down-home movie on fast cars,” which is doubtlessly total bullshit. He tells the girl he wants to take her away, says they can go to Miami or Montreal or Mexico—he’s a one-man Wild Bunch. (That Oates shares a scene with Harry Dean Stanton, the other greatest character actor of the 1970s, should constitute some special section of cinephile heaven, though the truth is that theirs isn’t one of the film’s best bits, with Stanton playing a hitchhiker who gets weepy when Oates won’t accept his unsolicited affections. “I got no time for sidetracks,” he explains apologetically.)

The racing opponents are also companions, helping each other out along the way, taunting each other playfully, exchanging hard-boiled eggs and hooch or drugs as peace offerings. Like the movie itself, which was shot in sequence in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, they’re in for the long haul—there is nothing else. So it’s no surprise that it all ends with the movie itself seemingly burning up on-screen. Everything is obliterated in the slipstream.

The body, in Time

It begins with a slow push-in through a smudgy service station window on men sitting low, conversing, eating round a small table, their voices muffled. Maybe it’s only hindsight that renders this scene conspiratorial. As it closes we hear distant thunder, which feels like a prompt for this metaphysical road movie police procedural to begin. Thunder is also a calling card of sorts for Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey’s most internationally renown contemporary filmmaker (Distant, Climates, Three Monkeys) and a guy who never met an ominous weather system he didn’t like.

A police convoy traverses the countryside of the film’s titular peninsula, the cars carrying men looking for a dead body. An entire scene plays out in extra-wide shot, the undulating dusky landscape and tiny figures in it a fine example of the film’s painterly beauty. Dryly comical small talk about yogurt and prostate trouble nearly recalls Tarantino (as does the grizzled senior cop’s ring tone: the theme from Love Story), but all the while the camera favours the ostensible killer sandwiched in the backseat, looking drowsy, an anxious, underfed animal. He can’t remember where the corpse is, claims he was drunk when he buried it. We surmise that it’s going to be a long night. Indeed, it’s going to be a long movie (157 minutes worth), but one in which something’s always happening, one that deftly lures you into its rhythms.

The officials on this search form a diverse crew of masculine types and an impressive gallery of moustaches. With his thinning hair and lanky form, the pensive doctor, Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), invokes certain figures from Tarkovsky films, most especially when we hear his thoughts as he stands before a windswept field, while the prosecutor, Nusret (Taner Birsel), is a husky, middle-aged, olive-skinned Clark Gable. Cemal and Nusret’s conversations are among Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s most captivating detours. At one point Nusret tells the story of a woman who prophesied precisely the date of her own death. He wants to know if Cemal, a man of science, can explain her morbid foresight. This topic is dropped and returned to several times, building itself along the way, constituting one of many incomplete parables in this film whose title suggests that storytelling itself is one of its themes.

When the body is finally found it almost feels incidental. Its grave is shallow. An ear pokes up from the dirt like driftwood, as though listening for something (perhaps the echo of frenzied ants from Blue Velvet, which featured an analogous dead man’s ear discovered in a field). The men huddle round the body, the prosecutor dictates a report. The body is clumsily rolled up in a carpet when they realize no one brought a body bag. This entire sequence is darkly funny and surprisingly entertaining. But once the search is wrapped and the men enter the village where the victim lived and where an autopsy will take place, things somehow become more mysterious rather than less. The accumulation of facts only compounds the enigmas surrounding the murder, raising as many philosophical questions as it does legal ones. Like the body, those questions emerge inconspicuously, in their own good time. They leave us not merely puzzled, but pierced by the feeling that so much of life is like this, existing in that broad terrain between the known and the unknown.

Memory lane to Lund

Coming after Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and The Seventh Seal (1957), Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (also ’57) was the product of someone who’d fully arrived as an internationally acclaimed auteur. In terms of gravity it splits the difference between Smiles, a sex comedy of the highest order, and Seal, a medieval existential ensemble drama about futility and death; like the latter, it’s a road movie through which numerous supporting characters pass while our protagonist, septuagenarian professor Isak Borg (legendary Swedish director Victor Sjöström), travels to Lund for an honorary degree and along the way reviews his life’s regrets. The film, appearing not too long after Akira Kurosawa’s beloved and not dissimilarly themed Ikiru (1952), instantly became one of Bergman’s most beloved works.

I’ve been a Bergmaniac since my teens and must confess that Strawberries has never even cracked my top ten (bearing in mind that Bergman directed over 60 films). There are memorable dream sequences—the sun-blasted houses with their butcher paper curtains; the carriage carrying the coffin carrying the professor; the professor’s wife being ravished in the woods—but none as memorable or imaginative as dream sequences in several other Bergmans. The long flashback section at the summer house is a little boring (or anyway as boring as any sequence featuring both the delicious Bibi Andersson and the delectable Gunnel Lindblom can be). And those two self-serious young men in ultra-short shorts that the professor picks up are more annoying than anything else.

On the other hand, there’s the ingenious notion of having Marianne, the professor’s daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin, of the incredibly sensual mouth and quiet, captivating intelligence), tag along for the ride after having temporarily left her husband Evald (Gunnar Björnstrand). One of the film’s strongest sequences is the flashback to the moment Marianne confesses to Evald that she’s pregnant and intends to keep the baby; Evald tells her if she does they’re through; the last cut is brilliantly, brutally timed. There’s that endearing rural gas jockey (Max Von Sydow) who reveres the professor so much he won’t accept remittance for topping up his tank. “There are things that can’t be paid back,” he says. “Not even with gas.” And there is, of course, Sjöström, so relaxed yet so vulnerable, so elegant and somehow chilly. His performance is reason enough to see Wild Strawberries. That and those final two close-ups (courtesy of Gunnar Fischer in one of his last Bergmans) of Sjöström's tired, pale face, which, seemingly effortlessly, convey the sense of a whole life having passed before it, and the possibility of finding peace with that life’s drawing to a close.

Senna: Life in overdrive

Though it rather daringly confines its visual trajectory to nothing but archival footage—most of which feature its hero, Brazilian racing superstar Ayrton Senna, traversing tracks the world round at dizzying speeds—it could hardly be said that Senna simply goes around in circles. Its narrative, which skims the surface of Senna’s personal life in favour of his professional one, is burnished down to its mythical contours, rendering Senna’s meteoric rise to World Champion and tragic death at 34 in a mid-race crack-up as an Icarus tale, not one of hubris exactly—Senna spoke with great humility about his gift and his sense of debt to the god who endowed him with it—but of a deep faith in speed and glory that transcends reason. One memorable interview clip finds Senna describing a major turning point in his career arriving when he found himself behind the wheel and feeling as though he was no longer conscious. But this yearning for ecstasy was balanced by a fierce intellect, one trained to make split-second risk assessments. Senna was a champion because he was ruthless on the track, and his record for accidents was nearly as exceptional as his winning streak. Some thought him reckless, but the thrill of his greatest feats are undeniable: he won the Brazil Grand Prix with his car stuck in sixth gear for multiple laps; his fingers had to be pried from the wheel afterward.

Senna the film, now available on DVD, directed by Asif Kapadia, edited by Chris King and Gregers Sall, and written by Manish Pandey, understands very well that adrenaline is key to its appeal, whether the audience is full of racing enthusiasts, those who crave a solid sports documentary, or those who are simply drawn to high-stakes stories of ambition. Things move fast, excitement accumulates, and we’re often treated to views of the action from Senna’s on-board camera. But it should be said that this need for speed ultimately obscures everything else, and the absence of talking heads makes it tough to distinguish between the various commentators we hear speaking almost constantly on the soundtrack. So by the time Senna is over, you might feel as though you missed a great deal in the blur.

TIFF '11: We we came from

My first report from the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival is coming shamefully late. My only excuse is that I’ve been traveling, sort of all over the place—Tijuana, San Diego, Denver—and not every stop was strictly voluntary. Yet this sense of steady movement was not inappropriate for what constituted one of yesterday’s highlights, the Mavericks session at the Princess of Wales Theatre that included the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Journeys, followed by an onstage discussion between programmer Thom Powers, Demme and Young, whose endearingly dry humour and utterly relaxed demeanor charmed the hell out of everybody.


Neil Young Journeys is both a concert movie and a road movie. It shifts between pleasingly unfussy coverage of Young’s pair of recent solo performances at Massey Hall—just a few blocks away from the Princess—and Young’s journey in a Crown Victoria from Omemee (“...a town in North Ontario...”), where he spent part of his childhood, to Toronto for the show. Along the way are amusing recollections of youth, like the one about the kid named Goof who gave Young a nickel to eat tar or tell an old lady she had a fat ass, some very pretty scenery, and Young’s confession that, despite his career-long obsession with maximum sound quality, the car is still his preferred place to listen to music.


No car stereo has anything on the sound system at the Princess however, which Young tweaked so that we listened to Journeys at 96 kilohertz—the first time in history a film was exhibited so thunderously. Given his subject, Demme most often smartly opts to hold images a long while rather than try to impose excitement through a lot of needless cutting. So we get extended shots of Young’s little beak of an upper lip perched on the edge of his harmonica and the tear in the pinch of his beat-up white fedora, or, just as memorably, Young’s face as seen through a psychedelically lit gob of spit clinging to his microphone micro-cam. The songs were mainly culled from Young recent Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise and from his breakthrough period of 40 years ago. Young’s murder ballad ‘Down By the River’ ends with a wonderfully spooky and hushed “There is no reason for you to hide...” There’s a stirring rendition of ‘After the Gold Rush’ performed on pump organ and harmonica, and an industrial-strength ‘Ohio’ on a Les Paul. The show ends with a terrifically feedback-operatic ‘Walk With Me.’ But among the newer material the song that made the biggest impression on me was ‘You Never Call’—a song that cries out to be covered by Willie Nelson—in which Young repeats a line that evokes death as “the ultimate vacation with no back pain,” and spots a dead friend’s car in the parking lot outside a hockey game.

The onstage Q&A was a little too brief. It featured a very funny story from Demme about how he and Young first met, the happy revelation that Young is writing a memoir, and one-too-many old schoolchums in the audience who just wanted to say hi. Still, the atmosphere was palpably affectionate, imbued with the feeling that each of us has a road of differing lengths behind us, and we were all of us sharing a very memorable stop.

The Future is Now!: So think positive!

Who is the Man of Today? Someone “pessemistic and practical,” says he. A “libertarian,” says another. Someone who just needs a few days wholly devoted to rediscovering the sense of wonder that stubbornly continues to exist in our troubled world, says the Woman of Tomorrow, who then promptly sets about fascilatating that rediscovery, through poetry readings, drinks with anarchists and helicopter tours of the Chrystler Building and the Great Wall of China, followed by meetings with several renowned optimists in North America and Europe. Man of Today met Woman of Tomorrow while the latter was doing a video street survey, asking strangers what their biggest fears are. (My favourite answer was “mystery moisture,” that phenomenon that occurs when you’re just walking along and you get hit by a drop of liquid of no apparent origin.) Woman is impressed by Man’s resolute I-do-no-harm, nor-do-I-give-a-shit-about-others attitutde. Man is impressed by Woman’s perky attractiveness. The adventure begins.

Alain de Botton

This fateful encounter between Woman and Man forms the foudnation of Gary Burns and Jim Brown’s The Future is Now!, a sort of fantasy date-a-thon that takes its cues from Nicole Védrès 1949 film La vie commence demain, in which two people with similarly conflicting sensibilities meet and swap ideas with French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel Agache, Jean Rostand, Le Corbusier, Pablo Picasso and André Gide. Burns and Brown’s cast of big-brained conversationalists are a little less famous but also a little more diverse in background, they include Toronto poet Christian Bök, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, artist Marlene Dumas, philosopher Alain de Botton and novelist Rivka Galchen (whose Atmospheric Distrubances was one of the best debuts of the last decade). Oh, and the ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre. The tone and format feels somewhat akin to Richard Linklater’s talkier films (Waking Life espeically) and, to a lesser extent, Mindwalk, that slightly goofy movie where Liv Ullman, John Heard and Sam Waterston just walk around and talk about ultruism.


Burns and Brown previousy collaborated on the terrific Radiant City, which took a similarly irreverent approach to the documentary format in its exploraiton of Calgary’s apocalytic urban sprawl. The Future is Now! is also somehow a very Calgarian movie, in that it feels like the work of artists who are enormously frustrated with their hometown’s rabid conservatism yet come to terms with it not through attacking it but rather through giving certain dominant conservative attitudes a plausible, intelligent voice. Man of Today isn’t one to easily buy into liberal idealism, and thus makes a nice foil to Woman of Tomorrow’s incessant cheerfulness (she’s played by Liane Balaban). Man is played by bald-headed Quebecois Paul Ahmarani, who is nothing if not persistent. The film is full of reaction shots that find him doing this “I’m dubious” face, which made me laugh out loud nearly every time. I found myself occasionally wishing Burns and Brown had allowed their Man character to have a little more, well, character, but the truth is that both Man and Woman’s cipher-like personas fit neatly into the film’s conciet, which essentially takes the premise for a children’s movie and grafts it onto a film for grown-ups. I think it’s a lot of fun. But maybe I’m a natural optimist.

Rolling sunder: Rubber on DVD

What reason does a tire need to quiver to life in the middle of the Mojave Desert and undertake a killing spree? What reason do a dozen spectators need to gather in that same desert with binoculars and sleeping bags and comment on the tire’s actions as though they were (like us) watching a movie? What reason does a pantless man need to share a cheap motel room with a wild turkey? Before we even have a chance to posit such queries to Rubber, one of its central characters, a Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella), addresses the camera (and us) with questions of his own. “In the Steven Spielberg movie E.T., why is the alien brown?” Chad asks. “In The Pianist, by Polanski, how come this guy has to hide, and live like a bum, when he plays the piano so well?” The answer: “No reason.” (Unless of course you consider something like systematic Nazi antiSemitism to be a reason.) Every movie, Chad assures us, has an integral element of “no reason.” Which is perhaps another way of saying that the movie is the reason. So what’s the reason to see the movie—this movie? It certainly isn’t to ask more useless questions.

Rubber, out on DVD tomorrow from Mongrel Media (or on the 14th from Magnolia in the US), seems like a playful essay on artifice. (The audience-chorus, who at one point collectively launch into a feeding frenzy right out of a Living Dead movie, is reminiscent of devices seized by the American avant-garde theatre of the 1960s.) Thing is, there’s not much thesis (beyond, say, the notion that the things we discard will rise up from our collective anxiety and slaughter us in our ironic bewilderment), but there is a whole lot of playfulness. Recalling both Scanners (1981) and numerous Stephen King narratives, Rubber is a meta-horror about a telekinetic tire named Robert. His first victim is a plastic bottle, quickly followed by a scorpion, before moving on to larger and messier mammals. The tire’s got something on its mind, it seems. It’s got feelings. It’s infatuated with a lone traveler played by the pretty older sister from Fat Girl (2001). It even has memories: there is an allusion to some smoky tire genocide.

Quentin Dupieux, aka Mr. Oizo

Rubber is the second feature from French writer/director Quentin Dupieux, aka: Mr. Oizo, recording artist for Ed Banger Records, following the little seen Steak (2007). There’s much to recommend Rubber on a bit-by-bit basis, though it runs out of fuel long before the end of the road. Regardless, its audacity, resourcefulness and propulsive silliness convey an appealingly distinctive sensibility. You’re left with the impression that there’s plenty of tread left on Dupieux’s goofball imagination.

In high Gere, with nowhere to go: Breathless

There’s this scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) where Jean Seberg holds up a reproduction of a Renoir for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s approval. “It’s not bad,” says Belmondo. “Renoir’s a really great painter,” says Seberg. Belmondo doesn’t budge: “I said it’s not bad.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a little like my feelings about Breathless itself. It formed the crest of the French New Wave. It’s a landmark on several fronts. Godard’s one of our true geniuses. But once you know more of Godard’s work and comprehend his debut’s historical significance, Breathless is finally, by the high standards set by Godard and his peers, not bad. In any case it’s no horrifying sacrilege to me that it was remade some years later, in Hollywood, with way more money, and Richard Gere. Worse things have happened to the movies. And Godard's Breathless is still there for us to see whenever we want.

The other Breathless (1983) was directed by Jim McBride, whose David Holzman’s Diary (1967), was not without its own postmodern ambitions. McBride co-wrote it with Holzman star Kit Carson, who wrote significant parts of Paris, Texas (1984). This Breathless reverses a number of Godard’s configurations: the girl’s a Parisian in America, rather than an American in Paris; the mise en scène’s characterized by flamboyant, art-directed artifice (rear projection, gels that swath entire scenes in one primary colour) rather than guerilla-style filmmaking (which yields its own sort of artifice); it attempts (rather laughably) to justify its characters’ actions, to psychologize them, rather than chalk their violence and betrayals up to genre dictates. Yet it shocked and sort of fascinated me just how faithful the other Breathless is to the story (if not the spirit) of the original, with Gere’s compulsive criminal, now very clearly a sociopath, killing a cop, living on the lam, and even resurrecting several of Belmondo’s gestures, such as his uses for newspapers. Instead of Bogart, he idolizes the Silver Surfer, which I like if for no other reason than every time he reads a Silver Surfer comic Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s magical, woozily beautiful Evening Star bubbles up on the soundtrack. These are for me the best moments in the movie.

But man, there’s something unnerving about Gere talking to himself (sometimes in funny voices, sometimes vaguely ethnic), or singing (Jerry Lee Lewis), or dancing, with such utter, blazing conviction. I mean it. You have to admire it. Gere's on fire here, and it can be tough to watch. You might say that something in his performance, along with aspects of the narrative itself, looks forward to Nicolas Cage and his Elvis-loving Sailor in Wild at Heart (1990), though the latter film is obviously far more focused and confident in its stylistics, even if its particular mania has proved equally divisive. It’s amazing how much of Breathless Gere manages to spend shirtless, the character’s narcissism dovetailing nicely with what would appear to be the actor’s. “I know I’m crazy,” he says. “I can’t help it.” Poor guy. But here's the sticky question: are we actually supposed to like him? It’s hard to tell, and it only gets harder as thing go on. And on, and on. There’s a bit where Gere and the girl get busy in a movie theatre while Gun Crazy (1950) plays behind them. I found myself wishing they’d get out of the way so I could just watch Gun Crazy. At one point we see a bus stop advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum. It’s very apt. McBride’s adoration of cinema’s past lacks the same level of critical inquiry or playfulness we find in Godard (that's a lot to live up to, I know), so his Breathless, however curious an artifact, however weirdly entertaining, feels only intermittently breathless and rather often lifeless.

Traveling Light: Kelly Reichardt: New Auteurs

River of Grass

The pair meet at a bar, shortly after the guy nearly hits the girl with his car on a dark rural road. “You’re not from around here, are you?” asks the girl. “Nope,” the guy replies, “I’m from Dade.” A seemingly unremarkable exchange, until you consider that the bar these lonesome souls occupy lies somewhere in Broward County, somewhere apparently very close to the Broward/Dade County line. The exchange then becomes ironic, except that the girl and the guy don’t seem to find it all that funny. These lovers on the run in Kelly Reichardt’s debut River of Grass (1994) inhabit what many viewers would deem a decidedly small world, but to them their immediate surroundings feel just as vast and difficult to traverse as any sea or continent. This is a road movie where the protagonists can’t get past the first tollbooth, having embarked on a crime spree with very little in the way of actual crime. At one point the girl (actually a woman, probably in her early 30s) mentions how every place seems the same. This may be a subtle wink to Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), in which a similar sentiment is expressed when it’s New York-based protagonists find themselves in Florida, which just so happens to be the setting of River of Grass. (Reichardt’s vision of Florida, dingy, eccentric, a place for wanderers, seems somewhat akin to that of novelist Joy Williams). But in this context, the sentiment assumes new hues, because the person who expresses it has hardly gone anywhere.

Ode

River of Grass feels very much like a first film (albeit one by an unusually gifted maker of exceedingly personal films) in that it carries the traces of an artist trying out as many things as she can (the camera movements, the cutting, and the use of voice-over would be tempered or eschewed altogether in her future work) and still craft something with an unmistakable signature. That word, signature, calls to mind things written by hand, and things handmade. The first word expressed in Reichardt’s newest film, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) isn’t spoken but rather traced upon a stone: “LOST.” There could be no better single-word summary of Reichardt’s body of work thus far, stories about people trying to get somewhere and having a tough time of it, unassuming, quiet films made with the bare minimum of participants and equipment. A record gets played in River of Grass: a rendition of ‘Traveling Light.’ A theme song perhaps. Reichardt has often spoke in interviews about her refusal/inability to “move up” to larger scale productions (something that helps explain the decade’s hiatus between her first and second features). This should not be mistaken for lack of ambition. On the contrary, one of the things that make her one of the finest, most distinctive, rigorous American filmmakers alive is her ability to cultivate so much feeling, atmosphere, narrative, character development, and even polemic out of the simplest of stories (many of them coming from collaborations with Jonathan Raymond) and humblest of materials.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s mesmerizing western about homesteaders lost in 19th century Oregon, seen largely through the eyes of women, opens today at TIFF Bell Lightbox, and I urge you to see it. The film’s Toronto premiere has also prompted a most welcome retrospective of Reichardt’s work. They’re showing everything save the short-shorts. (1999’s Ode, a mid-length work, shot on Super 8, which I’ve been waiting years to see, screens on Sunday afternoon.) River was last night, but still to come are multiple screenings of Meek’s, two screenings of Old Joy (2005), two of Wendy and Lucy (2008), and one screening of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952), which was selected by Reichardt for TIFF’s Carte Blanche series. The retrospective is part of TIFF’s New Auteurs series.