Bad language, bad glory, bad memory, bad movie

Based on Marcus Luttrell’s eponymous memoir, this recreation of 2005’s failed Operation Red Wings, in which Navy SEALs got stuck on an Afghan mountain while attempting to capture or kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah, is itself a failed attempt to honour those men who died or nearly died on said mountain. The closing montage displaying photos of Red Wings’ (exclusively American) casualties is immensely moving. The problem is the preceding two hours, which begin like a recruitment video, build up to the war movie equivalent of torture porn, and end with an oversimplified resolution that’s willfully oblivious to any larger context.

During the opening teaser, Lutrell (Mark Wahlberg) explains in voice-over that “there is a storm inside” SEALs, “a burning, a river, a drive, an unrelenting desire,” and a lot of other stuff. Once the shit hits the fan, most of what’s spoken in Lone Survivor varies between “Goddamn motherfuckers,” “Fuck you,” “Ow, fuck,” “Fuckin’ fuck,” “Fucker,” “Fuck,” and “Fuuuuuck!” Carnage, chaos and imminent death will stifle the poet in any of us, but such expletive-laden dialogue seems designed foremost as a way of bluntly heightening the rat-a-tat and crunch of bones, which seem to be the key point of interest for director Peter Berg and his collaborators, who strain verisimilitude not only by reportedly grossly exaggerating the number of Taliban involved in the film’s central firefight, but also by hurling our already shot-up heroes down the mountain at high speed, smashing their torsos and skulls into pointy rocks, and having them continue to walk, talk and fight afterward.

Reverence for the dead shouldn’t make this film bulletproof—it should make us that much more concerned with truth and consequence. This is a serious movie, ostensibly dealing with serious questions about war, strategy, policy, and ethics. When discussing whether to eliminate or set free a trio of civilians who accidentally blow their cover, among the four SEALs (Wahlberg, Emile Hirsch, Taylor Kitsch and Ben Foster) only Lutrell speaks passionately about the imperative to be humane. Which leaves us with an uneasy feeling since—hardly a spoiler—he’s the only one who lives to tell the tale. And in the moral causality of Lone Survivor he’s rewarded for his humanity, by having his life fearlessly defended by an entire Afghan village—though in the closing voice-over he thanks only his brothers. The issue isn’t about what Lutrell feels or says in moments of trauma or mourning; it’s what’s said by this movie, which has the advantage of time and distance, and the burden of memory. 

                      

High finance

A white-collar criminal from a blue-collar background with a monstrous appetite for red light commodities, broker/entrepreneur-turned-ex-con/motivational speaker Jordan Belfort is nothing if not colourful—he’s positively gaudy. Had he not authored two memoirs, his tabloid-epic life story would surely seem too preposterous/libellous to translate into credible based-on-a-true-story cinema. It’s only sensible that The Wolf of Wall Street opens with teasers of high-stakes dwarf tossing and an inebriated helicopter ride; we need a taste of what high-flying lowbrow transgressions the next three hours have in store.

Scripted by Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, directed by Martin Scorsese, and featuring a name ensemble cast fronted by Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s difficult to think of another film combining such appalling behaviour with such A-list pedigree that’s played, above all, for grotesque, balls-out, amoral entertainment. That so much of The Wolf of Wall Street is actually entertaining is some kind of feat: its characters are hard to care about, its narrative is baggy, its star can be as tedious as he is admirably shameless, and its septuagenarian director seems both on his game and off his rocker. Riddled with continuity errors, lacking a consistently coherent chronology, and intermittently oblivious as to what constitutes the heart of a scene, Wolf is one of the generally meticulous Scorsese’s sloppiest works. Maybe he was having too much fun. The upshot is that the fun is onscreen, pulsing, like a raw nerve jacked up.

Anyone familiar with Scorsese’s large canvas rise-and-fall epics of rabid American ambition will feel perfectly oriented within Wolf’s adrenalized storytelling strategies. The disaffected voice-over, equal parts confession and braggadocio; the rock connoisseur’s soundtrack; the injection of freeze-frames or slow-motion into frenetic montages offering guided tours of the given milieu: we’ve been here before. But a pleasing thing about Wolf is that its tone echoes The King of Comedy almost as much as Goodfellas or Casino. What drives Belfort isn’t just greed, hubris or spite—he’s a showman! (Again, Belfort’s already written two memoirs—he’s only 51.) Wolf is about performance, incorporating hi-jinx with slapstick, mirth with mayhem. Once his brokerage/penny stock boiler room, Stratton Oakmont, is rocketing toward millionaire mega-success (and multiple counts of fraud), Belfort gives daily, drug-addled pep talks to his colleagues—mostly thugs he came up with in Queens—rocking the mic like a rowdy wrestler or stand-up comic. He hires show-hookers, marching bands, and, as promised, tossable dwarves. One of Wolf’s most absurd sequences finds Belfort and his business partner Donnie (Jonah Hill) ODing on Quaaludes to the point of near-catatonia and getting into a wrestling match involving a phone chord that needs to be seen to be believed. Stratton Oakmont was too much an outlier to serve as a stand-in for finance sector fraudulence in general, so don’t think of Wolf as social commentary except in the broadest sense. This is, above all, busy, teeth-grindingly giddy high wire comedy.

On that note, I have to single out Hill, Wolf’s own king of comedy. A paragon of the supporting actor, Hill deftly gauges DiCaprio’s gradations of hysteria at every turn and devises the best possible manner of matching it. There’s a brilliant early scene where he explains how he came to marry his cousin, and another where he introduces Belfort to crack cocaine. Only 30 (as of today, in fact), Hill is only gradually revealing his range and abilities. Between this and Moneyball, you start to wonder if the kid can do anything. Of course, over the course of Wolf’s taboo-thrashing carnival show, you’ll see him and DiCaprio do just about everything. That might be worth the ticket price and protracted run-time alone. 

                  

A walk to remember

“In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work…” So goes the first of many elegant sentences describing, among many other things, a walk; sentences paced like walking, chronicling thoughts, discoveries and investigations that emerge from walking, that make up W.G. Sebald’s famously unclassifiable book The Rings of Saturn, first published in German in 1995, and in English translation in 1998. The book engenders its own pilgrimage, complete with occasional, enigmatic, caption-free illustrations, and immerses the reader in its author’s melancholic yet endlessly curious mental landscape, in his many attempts to preserve the memory of endangered themes, such as the industrialization of silk and the writings of 17^th-century English polymath Thomas Browne. Sebald was born in Bavaria near the close of the Second World War, but he made his academic career in England, and died there, in a car accident near Norwich in 2001. Sebald has remained in print and beloved, beguiling and endlessly blurbable for certain publicists seeking haute literary cred. He remains a writer’s writer, but he is also a vast wood where any patient reader can wander, remember, and then forget many things so carefully memorialized.

Which is also to say that Sebald is ripe for fresh exegesis—there is both a genuine desire and a market. But I suppose it is a niche market, which would explain why even the fevered readers among you mightn’t have heard about Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald), which follows the footsteps of Saturn. It first appeared in select cinemas in 2011 and has since been released on DVD by Cinema Guild. It is nearly as resistant to category as the book it’s inspired by, bearing traces of biography, criticism, homage, travelogue and atmosphere-piece. Much of the film consists of slow dissolves between stark black and white landscapes, while rarely seen commentators address Sebald’s life and work in voice-over. As a way of invoking The Rings of Saturn for the uninitiated, I find Patience a little misleading: such a muted, limited visual field doesn’t reflect the calm yet constant cascade of data, narrative and conjecture on offer in the book (or, for that matter, any Sebald book). Not that we should expect Patience to be mimetic—if we want a film that feels more like reading Sebald, perhaps we should watch Sans Soleil (1983) or Buñuel’s The Milky Way (1969). Better to regard Patience as a valuable accessory rather than a parallel artwork, and to enjoy it as a sort of meditation object in its own right.

Some highlights: software developer Barbara Hui sharing her brilliant digital map of the Saturn walk, which includes footnotes explaining what digressions each spot prompted in Sebald; poet Andrew Motion on the Orford Merman; a consideration of the similarities between Suffolk and the Zone from Stalker (1979); visual artist Tacita Dean on itinerary maps one can “follow” without ever leaving home; psychologist and essayist Adam Phillips on how Sebald’s is the kind of Holocaust writing we need; and the voice of Sebald himself discussing the use of fog in literature. Patience marked the first time I’d ever heard Sebald’s voice; how ghostly when placed amidst all these other living voices. But living and dead intermingle always in Sebald, so how fitting, then, that Patience allows this particular ghost to linger, and to wander with us a while longer. 

     

"...if you can touch the skin you can touch the spiritual...": Tran Anh Hung on Norwegian Wood

A story of sexual discovery, devastating loss, self-realization and all kinds of love in various geometries, set amidst the political unrest of Tokyo university life in the late 1960s, Norwegian Wood is the fifth feature from Tran Anh Hung, who’s works include The Scent of Green Papaya and The Vertical Ray of the Sun. Tran’s films possess a sensual languor, a vivid fecundity, a certain tenderness and grace that, despite the fact that he was born in Vietnam, lives in France, and doesn’t speak Japanese, made Tran an ideal filmmaker to adapt Haruki Murakami’s beloved 1987 heartbreaker-breakthrough, the author’s sole novel that contains no elements of the fantastical, in which the shy yet charismatic Toru Watanabe wrestles with irrepressible youthful desires, ambiguous relationships, an innate resistance to the youth movements enveloping him, and the suicides of more than one of his closest friends.

The lead performances by Kenichi Matsuyama, Kiko Mizuhara and Rinko Kikuchi, who most of you will probably recognize from her Oscar-nominated turn in Babel, balance varied degrees of physical or social awkwardness with glimpses of inner turmoil and sudden sparks of preternatural wisdom. The photography by Mark Lee Ping Bin, best-known for his collaborations with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai, would seem almost too sublimely pretty if it weren’t so utterly precise, governed by the dictates of narrative and close attention to the actor’s impulses. The music by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, who previously scored There Will Be Blood, seems born of a bubbling caldron of romantic-modernist strife. And the sweaters are to die for. (Costume credit goes to Tran Nu Yên-Khê, the writer/director’s wife and frequent star.)

I think we cover a fair amount of ground in the conversation transcribed below, so I’ll refrain from whipping up much in the way of analysis here. I spoke with Tran while he was visiting Toronto last October.

Tran Anh Hung during production on Norwegian Wood

JB: Norwegian Wood is arguably Murakami’s most overtly personal work. Certain elements seem almost autobiographical. Do you feel any kind of similarly personal connection?

Tran: Yes, but only because of the broad themes. Someone finds first love and then loses it, someone is first confronted with grief, or first has to accept the consequences of major life decisions—all this is universal. On a certain level it could have happened to anyone. I think the international success of the book comes from this.

JB: But there’s also this specific theme of suicide and its effect on those left in its wake, the suggestion that when you encounter suicide at a young age it throws a shadow over everything in your life from that point on. All of the choices Watanabe makes after coming into contact with suicide seem influenced by that contact.

Tran: This is true, but we have to recognize that suicide is also a narrative mechanism. The suicide of Kizumi at the beginning of the movie is traumatic for Naoko, and the mechanism starts to work on her when she has sex with Watanabe. Suddenly she doesn’t understand why she couldn’t make it with Kizuki yet now she can make it with a boy she doesn’t love. This mechanism is at work throughout the story. Life is just experience. You can only harness the beauty of experience through art. As an artist you have to find out how to express experience so that the audience can draw the beauty from it. You want the audience to leave the theatre carrying some trace of that beauty with them.

JB: Norwegian Wood closes on quite a bracing note, just the black screen and those final words spoken about how Watanabe’s friends will be 17 and 21 forever, while he has to continue to grow older.

Tran: Yes, I’m quite proud of that. [Laughs] Those words exist somewhere in the book, but to pluck them out and place them at the end feels very right, better than anything I would have created by myself.

JB: I imagine Norwegian Wood demanded a very different development process for you. Your preceding films are rather spare in incident and you give a lot of room for scenes to breathe; with Norwegian Wood you have a great deal of plot to manage. Did you find that process enjoyable? Or was it frustrating?

Tran: Everything that is difficult in the creative process is enjoyable. I like having problems to solve. When you move from one form to another, you have to build emotion from the devices specific to the new form. For example, you have this sequence where you see Watanabe mourning by the sea, then in the next scene he’s making love with a woman, then in the next scene he calls another woman and says, “I love you.” It’s disturbing. Normally such behavior is not acceptable. But when you’ve surrendered to this story it seems acceptable. My challenge is to make an audience intuit this without fully understanding exactly what happened. When Reiko asks Watanabe to make love to her, it’s a rescue scene. Meaning that by making love to her he would give back to her what she has lost—her sexuality. By saving her he feels his guilt towards Naoko lighten. Which means he can reclaim his life and tell Midori that he loves her.

JB: The book has a framing device: a man—the narrator—sits on a plane, hears some music, and is drawn into the past. So it’s all channeled through memory. In the movie that framing device survives only through a very sparing use of voice-over. Did you ever think of structuring the movie similarly, as a memory collage?

Tran: No. Structures relying on flashbacks feel too mechanical. I don’t really like them. But there’s a more important reason. Normally when you move back and forth between present and past you need to show how the past changed or influenced the present somehow. In the book there’s nothing like that. It’s just a voice. So for me to follow this structure I would need to create other events happening in the present. I prefer to focus on the past. To show the wound when it’s fresh. Using a little voice-over was just a way of bringing the melancholy out of the story.

JB: I guess if you tried to weave in the present then you’d be stuck shooting a lot of coverage of some guy on an airplane, thinking.

Tran: [Laughs] Yes. Airplane, then hotel room... Not really interesting.

JB: Murakami’s characters tend to be very composed, at least externally. Your rendering of Norwegian Wood features at least two elements that seem to counter that. One is your allowance of Naoko to succumb to these tempests of convulsive weeping. The other is Johnny Greenwood’s music, which expresses a lot of high emotion.

Tran: Murakami’s characters are always meant to be normal people. Given the romantic nature of this story he could have created moments where the characters go really crazy, do spectacular things. But he always stays with normal people. That’s a great strength. Everyone can identify with his characters. So I had to maintain that aspect while at the same time give voice to the romantic side of things. Johnny Greenwood has a special talent for creating very serious, very dark music that has this captivating beauty. I don’t like the idea of creating so many variations in music. I wanted it to speak to the deep, dark parts of the characters.

JB: I like that you say that, because the movie strikes me as having a very bold sort of sonic division. The diegetic sound serves one purpose, the popular music serves one purpose, and the score serves one purpose.

Tran: Yes. I’m happy about that.

JB: I was also very drawn to your use of landscape, the specificity brought to looking at the geography of living spaces, the fact that the camera, in my memory at least, seems to be moving almost constantly. There’s the sense that these characters and their intimate story are always set within a larger, very particular landscape.

Tran: I think this is very important. You need to have the physical feeling of a movie. Watanabe’s life is suspended, floating, so you need to find a way to shoot every scene to create a sense of that instability. Every set that we built, every space that we used needed to allow us to move a certain way. Every landscape needed to give wings, somehow, to the emotions of the characters. To be lyrical. That mourning sequence by the sea, for instance. Because what Watanabe is feeling is very primitive, something inside all of us, something that was probably inside the first man on Earth, I needed to find a place that resembled the beginning of life. Only rocks and the violence of the water and the wind. It’s all very essential. All this violence needs to be forceful enough to break through Watanabe’s reserve, to let loose the tears. You cannot explain this to the audience—they just need to feel it. And they way we did this, with this combination of elements, is something that you can do only with movies. When I wake up in the morning it’s precisely this kind of challenging that I’m seeking, that I’m looking forward to as a filmmaker.

JB: Are you familiar with the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto?

Tran: No.

Mediterranean Sea, Hiroshi Sugimoto

JB: Because he has this very famous series of photographs of the sea that have been gleaned from all over the world but in each case the composition is identical.

Tran: Ah, yes! Now that you describe it, of course.

JB: His whole rationale behind that series is very similar to what you were saying about finding a landscape that erases all traces of history, that reflects an idea of landscape—or rather seascape—that exists in some primordial part of the brain.

Tran: Yes, I’ve seen some of these. They are very beautiful.

JB: I want to ask you a little more about camera movement, because it seems like no matter how much activity is transpiring within a scene—I’m thinking specifically about the bit where Watanabe moves through the university campus, with demonstrators passing by—the camera seems to give this feeling of isolation and loneliness to Watanabe that I don’t think we would have found if the camera remained fixed. I don’t know if your approach to camera movement or mise en scène has any sort of overriding philosophy behind it…

Tran: No. It’s only about emotions. The camera in this movie needs to give you the feeling that things are unsettled. You cannot seize the moment easily. Yet, though you may not remember it, there are a lot of scenes where the camera is still… Well, still but not really. [Laughs] Okay, it’s usually moving a little bit.

JB: Something distinctive about your films, something that’s become increasingly precious as we interact more and more with digital media, is their emphasis on sensuality. In the weather, the objects, the way you frame hands and faces and bodies, there’s this sense that we’re being asked to really feel what it’s like to touch things.

Tran: Yes. My idea is that you cannot touch the spiritual directly, but if you can touch the skin you can touch the spiritual, so let’s give the skin to the audience. Everything I’m dong with costumes, lights, locations, everything needs to be there to make the skin more palpable. I don’t need everything to be natural, but I don’t like it when it’s purely symbolic either. Like in The Tree of Life, when you see movement that’s too symbolic I don’t like it. But the movies need to be sensual. People need to feel things. Rain, wind, other people, everything that makes contact with the skin is very important. Paradoxically, I use digital cameras to capture the right feeling of skin. Celluloid has these grains in it, and somehow it puts a layer on top of the skin. With digital cameras you don’t have that anymore. So now I’m shooting all my movies with digital cameras. I don’t want that layer. I want always to touch.