Making amendments

It’s tilted Lincoln, which makes it sound like a bio-pic, but this newest Steven Spielberg film, written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner and based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 bestseller Team of Rivals, does something far more interesting and timely than condense a great life into cinematic bullet points. Lincoln dramatizes the build-up in Washington to the end of the Civil War and the House of Representatives’ vote over the 13^th Amendment, which would abolish slavery. So it’s perhaps best to describe this as a political procedural, a portrait of the democratic process during a pivotal moment in American history.

Of course it’s also a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in his final months, played here by Daniel Day-Lewis, the Anglo-Irishman who’s made something of a career of embodying larger than life emblems of American masculinity (see The Last of the Mohicans, Gangs of New York, There Will Be Blood). A refreshing shift away from the terror and bombast of Bill the Butcher of Daniel Plainview, Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is more Peter Fonda than John Huston, gentle in gesture and reedy in voice, prone to unhurried anecdotes, mischievous uncle jokes and deceptively sly parables, the Colombo of presidents, content to play things relaxed and unthreatening, until the moment comes to show a firm hand and a clear, determined vision. Day-Lewis is well complimented by Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, who swings from near-hysteria to charisma and control, David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward, a man charged with realizing and finessing some of Lincoln’s thornier ambitions, and Tommy Lee Jones as Republican congressional leader and outspoken abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, ornery but articulate, formidable in congress, an author of inspired public insults with two old fried eggs for eyes.

Kushner’s taken a wildly complex, multi-character political narrative and given it a shrewd structure, though he could have lost some peripheral threads, such as one involving Lincoln’s eldest son, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the superfluous denouement. Kushner’s given his characters some wonderfully eloquent jabs and big, obvious speeches that aren’t inordinately showy. He’s also written some absolutely deadly expository dialogue, yet thankfully John Williams, that most ham-fisted of composers, largely refrains from underscoring all of this dialogue with the sort of soaring schmaltz one might be bracing for. Maybe he was following his old pal Spielberg’s lead, since Lincoln generally finds the director working in a pleasingly reserved mode.  He seems to understand that what’s gripping and fascinating about this story requires and rewards our careful attention; to beat us over the head with the gravity of every scene would only distract from the delight of the details.

For all its flaws, Lincoln feels like the important historical epic it strives to be. And while it’s fundamentally an ensemble picture, I can’t really bear any grudges against the film for orbiting around Lincoln, who’s certainly the closest thing here to a genuine hero. But please don’t bear any grudges against me if I confess that I’d love to see the same story told from the perspective of the three stooges—played by John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson and a zesty, porky, moustachioed James Spader— Seward hires to persuade fence-sitting voters by any means (more or less) legally necessary. Such hedonistic hucksters can also hold history’s dice. And they’re a hell of a lot of fun to explore a few months in 1865 America with. 

    

Society and the Spectacles

An Allegory of the Cave for the age of conspicuous consumption? Or a genre throwback that opens one’s eyes up to little more than the director’s faux-paranoid resentment of the dismissive elite? The terrain mapped out in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) is broad enough, and politically incoherent enough, to accommodate such seemingly incompatible readings. Its central conceit—that global power is being sneakily usurped by alien creatures Jonathan Lethem, in his excellent monograph on the film, pithily describes as “monsters from the yuppie id,” thanks to a consciousness-altering television signal that blinds us to oppressive subliminal commands and to the usurpers’ carcassy ugliness—might seem far too obvious a metaphor to be “read” at all. But among the many reasons that They Live still lives as a cult film is because that central conceit, along with the director’s peculiar approach to storytelling and social commentary, congeal into thick stew of blurred intentions, mixed conventions and gleefully dumb entertainment, hitting a sweet spot somewhere deep in the collective psyche.  

A strapping guy wearing plaid, denim, leather, a backpack and a mullet strides into Los Angeles. He’s looking for work and means business—he even has his own tools. “I believe in America,” he says, though he’s suspicious of its unions, or at least Chicanos. He’s our hero and surrogate, not an American everyman exactly—he’s played by a pro wrestler, after all, and a Canadian to boot—but a neutral, a mind-yer-own-business type, an insignificant—the credits reveal his name to be Nada, Spanish for Nothing—a guy who doesn’t rock the boat. Until the boat rocks him. Nada finds a place to sleep in an inner-city hobo campsite called Justiceville. (These days it would called Occupy Hollywood.) But while the cops barge in and tear Justiceville up, Nada begins to sniff out an underground movement with a pretty wild conspiracy theory. The revolutionaries try to alert others to their claims, but everyone, yuppie and prole alike, is too busy watching lobotomizing TV broadcasts to care. Long story short, Nada comes to see what the underground is on about. He acquires a pair of shades that look like Ray-Ban knockoffs—which look kinda funny with his worker gear—and allow him to see things as they really are: billboards and print media ordering us to OBEY, CONSUME and PROCREATE, and those carcassy creatures, called “ghouls” in the credits, who look like us without the glasses, and are assuming all positions of power and influence. Nada sees the monsters for what they really are—and Nada’s going to take action. “I’ve come here to chew gum and kick ass,” he declares. “And I’m all out of gum.” 

But first he has to kick his friend’s ass. The best/worst (but mostly best) scene in the movie, and the most wildly homoerotic: Nada, aka Rowdy Roddy Piper, tries to convince his buddy Frank (Keith David) to don the shades. Frank refuses and refuses and refuses, so… get ready to rumble! The buddies fight in an alleyway, punching, kicking, pile-driving, kneeing in the balls—for six minutes! “Put the glasses on!” Nada demands. And really, why won’t Frank just put the glasses on? Why is he so resistant? Is it because, subconsciously, he already knows, already sees the ghouls? Because the glasses are a mere prop, granting us granting permission to “see” what was always in plain sight, ie: the apparatus of ideology? Is this gloriously ridiculous movie trying to tell us something? Of course it is. But don’t take it at its word. There's more going on than even the movie itself knows. Look deeper. Look long. Seeing is believing—so long as you’re wearing the right glasses. 

Hitting an optical nerve

As we descend deeper into the rabbit hole of our increasingly intimate relationship with screens, this crepuscular realm where more of our interaction with the world can be done in physical privacy, while privacy itself has become more public and interactive, a movie shot in Toronto 30 years ago, about a exploitation cable executive who dabbles in obscure pornography and winds up using a stomach vagina as a weapons storage device, has emerged as one of our seminal reference texts.

Videodrome (1983) is both prescient and personal. Along with The Fly (1986), it’s among the most idea-saturated and emblematic works from the singularly imaginative David Cronenberg. Yet it’s anything but ponderous; fleet and funny, perverse and propulsive, it’s a genre buffet: speculative fiction fused with horror fused with neo-noir, at times downright pulpy in its heavily underlined portent. Think of the moment where Nikki Brand (Blondie’s Deborah Harry) brands her breast with a burning cigarette, and Max Renn (James Woods), her lover and our anti-hero, repeats, “Don’t, Nikki, don’t,” as he reaches hungrily out to take a pull. 

If what transpires after the taboo TV image-induced hallucinations override Max’s mind and body resists breezy synopsis, the set-up is relatively straightforward. Weary of soft-core costume porn, Max, president of Civic TV, “the one you take to bed with you,” is looking for “something tough” to give his struggling network an edge. (An amusing bit of overstatement: Max uses the word “something” five times in one short speech to his fellow execs while a movie poster with the word “SOMETHING” in gooey letters hangs right behind his head.) Max finds that special something in a pirated signal showing fuzzy, chillingly unadorned scenes of torture and murder. The show’s called Videodrome. “It has a philosophy,” says one of its characters, “and that’s what makes it dangerous.” Max catches a glimpse and wants more, but the makers of the broadcast seem to want not to be found. At least, not easily.

The signal’s sourced to Pittsburgh—home, incidentally, of George Romero and Night of the Living Dead (1968)—but it turns out access to Videodrome might be found right in Max’s backyard. He seeks out the enigmatic shut-in media philosopher Brian O’Blivion (a character explicitly inspired by Marshall McLuhan), who pontificates about the power of television exclusively from a television—even when O’Blivion appears on a talk show he only does so as a disembodied head on a television. Once Max makes (indirect) contact with O’Blivion, his mind and body begin to succumb to Videodrome’s more troubling, if exhilarating, effects. He discovers a subterranean criminal broadcasting conspiracy. He recognizes his body as a malleable shell and becomes an advocate/terrorist for something called “the New Flesh.” At one point he penetrates a bulging TV screen with his head. Later a guy explodes with pulsating tumours. There are also a lot of dancers in silver unitards and moustaches performing at an optician convention. Things get a little weird.

As influenced by William S. Burroughs as Naked Lunch (1991), Videodrome, whose many progeny includes the hypno-TV conspiracy of They Live (1988) and the killer videotape of The Ring (1998/2002), keeps gazing into the future even now, blurring fantasy and reality, questioning the role of the body in an increasingly digitally manipulated existence. So much the better that the film unfolds in what is so recognizably a Canadian city in the decidedly analogue 1980s, reminding us that its ideas are not indebted solely to Steve Jobs and YouTube. The New Flesh has been creeping up on us for a very long while.  

   

M is for Mother

It hits the ground running—and driving, and riding, and leaping and pummeling—this 23^rd entry into the James Bond franchise, currently celebrating its 50^th anniversary. Throughout the Turkey-set opening sequence, Bond (Daniel Craig) and fellow MI6 agent Eve (Naomie Harris) chase a murderous mercenary in possession of a stolen hard drive loaded with the names of NATO agents in terrorist organizations. Bond pursues his target—mostly on motorbike—through a busy marketplace, along the rattling spine of tiled roofs, over a bridge’s edge and onto a moving train, where the dudes duke it out until Eve fires a rifle and brings the melee to a sudden halt. It’s an absorbing aperitif, superbly executed and generic in the best sense of the word—evidence that perhaps director Sam Mendes should stop trying to plumb domestic dismay for pseudo-profundities (see American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) and stick to highbrow actioners. (Collaborating with cinematographic genius Roger Deakins doesn’t hurt.)

But here’s the thing about Skyfall’s opening: fast-paced and gripping as it is, the whole time I kept thinking, How can these agents possibly do their job properly with the voice of M (Judi Dench) constantly beaming into their skulls the whole time, checking up on them, demanding details, issuing commands from the safety of an office a continent away? Let’s not forget that M stands for Mum, among other things, and it seems to me that this Mum’s not granting her grown children the anonymity they deserve or even require, given the unfathomable pressure they’re under. Even in the case of Bond—an archetype of sophisticated, lone wolf machismo if ever there was one—the man’s actions are still conditioned by the boy’s need for mom’s permission. That Bond was orphaned at an early age—something that will play a pivotal role in Skyfall’s final act—only makes this condition more acute. M is Bond’s surrogate mother, a chosen mother, both loved and loathed, and all the more dominant because of it.

This isn’t just me applying amateur psychology to the minutia of an otherwise straightforward entertainment; the surrogate mother/surrogate son dynamic will gradually shift from subtext to foreground. Skyfall’s is a very sly script, written by Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade and playwright-turned screenwriter John Logan, probably most famous for The Last Samurai, his Scorsese collaborations and for Red, his play about Mark Rothko. As Skyfall clips along he mother-son dynamic will be expanded and then doubled with the entrance of the film’s shamelessly campy but very entertaining villain, one Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem, perhaps channeling Udo Kier), a former MI6 agent exacting improbable and elaborate revenge on M. Silva’s got some colossal abandonment issues, and if he has to decimate vast chunks of London to have it out with his neglectful Mum and the man he perhaps deems to be her favoured son, so what? Empathy for innocent bystanders isn’t high on the list of values imparted upon Her Majesty’s killer minions.

By the time the smoke clears, Bond—or to be precise, Craig’s refreshingly complex, damaged Bond—will have been rendered at once more vulnerable and more invincible than ever before, having endured new heights of physical and psychic scrutiny. He emerges older but stronger, more traumatized and more alone. All in all not the worst state to be in when you’re turning 50. 

   

Flying high

A carefully executed, impressively unnerving set-piece occurs early in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight: when the jet under his command suddenly undergoes cataclysmic mechanical failure, seasoned commercial airline pilot Whip Whittaker (Denzel Washington) drains the fuel tanks, flips the plane upside-down and glides it into an emergency landing in a field behind a rural Georgia church. The sequence is rendered that much more suspenseful by our knowledge that Whip’s wasted: he woke that morning in an Orlando hotel with the help of some beer, a blunt, some coke and a couple of single-serve vodkas. While everyone else onboard panics, Whip keeps his cool and, as a result, saves a hundred lives; only six perish.

So an interesting question develops over the course of Flight’s first third: was Whip’s state of intoxication actually some sort of aid in his virtuoso, virtually miraculous feat of airmanship? In his resolutely cool, calm and contained performance, Washington—whose recent work has molded him into the top gun of all forms of American transportation (see Unstoppable and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3)—would seem to support this thorny theory of grace under pressure. But we know where this is going. Soon as Whip gets home from the hospital he’s flushing all the dope down the toilet and dumping all the beer down the sink (it’s mostly Corona, but still). The union hires a whip-smart Johnny Cochrane (Don Cheadle) to ensure that Whip’s Toxicology report gets dismissed from the investigation. Meanwhile, Whip hooks up with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a junkie who undergoes a nearly fatal overdose in perfect concert with Whip’s own nosedive. Nicole opts for cold turkey and AA meetings, but Whip’s resistant to join her. Stressed out by the investigation and the news groups constantly assembling outside of every building he enters, he swiftly jumps off the wagon.

The crash’s proximity to church, the omnipresent crucifixes, the lawyer’s motion to enter “Act of God” into the possible causes of the accident: Flight is taking the high, even holy, road to redemption. Screenwriter John Gatins (Real Steel) builds an intriguing and morally complex story about the weird confluence of instinct, control, circumstance and body chemistry. We know that Whip’s in trouble and needs help. We also know he’s a genuine hero and was clearly not responsible for the loss of life on Flight 227; on the contrary, it’s repeated several times that no one else could have saved the lives that he did. In the film’s final third, Whip is given two tests of will. He fails one utterly and—by the moral logic of Gatins’ script—he passes the other with flying colours. But consider this: when Whip’s willpower fails, he’s sober; when, during a hearing regarding the crash, Whip finally does the ostensibly right thing, he’s drunk! And I mean, super-stinko-drunk. And high on coke. And consider this: that “right thing” that Whip does helps no one, distracts the public and industry alike from the very serious mechanical failures responsible for the crash, and essentially ruins Whip’s life. It’s a peculiar confusion of purposes: Whip’s an Icarus figure, to be punished for (literally) flying too high, yet he’s granted what is, in politically correct, 12-step program terms, a Hollywood ending. However you try to make sense of it, it’ll make you seriously consider taking the train.