The Dying Animal

The final moments of The Wrestler find Mickey Rourke’s Randy “the Ram” Robinson lifting himself off the canvas, crawling to the corner post, climbing wearily atop his makeshift altar, and, to the adoring clamour of his fans, jumping off the top rope into nowhere. That Randy never lands, that the moment we’re left with is one of empty space and suspended breath, speaks to Darren Aronofsky’s shrewdness, his understanding of what this movie’s really about. The basic narrative structure of Robert D. Siegel’s script is rather formulaic, the Sundance-friendly down-and-out redemption tale, if you will, with a number of threadbare contrivances, particularly when dealing with Randy’s attempted reconciliation with his estranged daughter Stephanie, who’s played at too consistently high an emotional pitch by Evan Rachel Wood.

Aronofsky seems aware of the story’s limitations and places his emphasis elsewhere. Coming after the director’s almost oppressively spectacular Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain—a film famous for being booed at the very same festival where The Wrestler later took the top prize—the visual style adopted here seems shockingly low-key, as un-flashy as the wintry Jersey locales. The camerawork, by Maryse Alberti, is hand-held, almost purely observational, willing to doggedly follow its protagonist, a technique that, echoing the Dardenne brothers, leads to an unusual number of shots of the back of Rourke’s head in the opening scenes, as though Aranofsky wants to delay our looking this wounded old animal in the eyes. It’s a brilliant tactic, because this animal, as well as the milieu he moves in, is the true subject of our fascination and our empathy.

While The Wrestler overall feels admirably workmanlike, Rourke’s performance is by contrast a masterwork, though his collaborators deserve credit for helping to cultivate it. On one level the movie’s a sort of documentary, not only about the bizarre world of exhibition wrestling, from the congenial backstage orchestrations of flamboyant combat to the drug culture to enormously entertaining scenes of beefy guys shopping for shit to smack each other with in dollar stores, but about the ways in which our bodies betray us and our movie stars age. Randy the washed-up wrestler who was a star in the 80s is played by Rourke the washed-up actor who was a star, not to mention a pretty brilliant actor, in the 80s. How character and actor align here is transfixing, disarming, and at times affectingly grotesque.

It may sound incongruently highfalutin to speak of a movie as marginal as Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget in the same breath as The Wrestler, but the two films have something remarkable in common: each one allows us to closely view a man’s once beautiful body wearied if not positively ravaged by time and experience. Rourke’s face has been worked on in more ways than one. His frame is engorged strangely. His flesh has assumed the ruddy glow of an over-roasted turkey. Yet through this battered shell an old charisma achingly radiates, as does a desperation that’s almost palpable. I don’t mean in any way to slight Rourke’s performance or label it artless by drawing so much attention to mere presence. On the contrary, everything Rourke brings to the film is in the service of building a complex, highly specific character and telling this particular story.

Likewise, Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy, the stripper and single mother with whom Randy attempts to forge a relationship once he realizes that health issues are conspiring to end his career—and, most unnervingly, that he’s utterly alone in the world—is at once vulnerable, physically and emotionally, and sharply defined. In a sense Tomei’s efforts are even more laudable since her character is underdeveloped, a deficiency Aronofsky tries in vain to remedy with a prolonged, purposeless scene of her performing at the club. Tomei’s best moments are the ones devoted toward deepening our sense of Randy’s plight, like the scene in which Randy and Cassidy go to a bar in the afternoon and proudly declare their nostalgia for the hair metal days of their youth. Tomei fearlessly embraces the silliness of this shy bit of courtship, and Rourke, doing a little dance to the canned Ratt in his plaid shirt and duct-taped puffy coat, hair extensions swinging, is absurdly endearing.

But there’s another scene these two share that pretty much announces the most troubling theme of The Wrestler in a manner that’s in perfect sympathy with the characters’ relative lack of sophistication. Cassidy raves to Randy about The Passion of the Christ, about the unholy battery of abuse heaped upon Mel Gibson’s gladiatorial incarnation of Jesus, and Randy, though he hasn’t seen the movie, takes its appeal as a matter of course. Both Cassidy and Randy have devoted their professional lives to the exhibition and exploitation of their flesh, and theirs is a masochistic glory that delivers rewards in diminishing returns.

In the movie’s single funniest, most appalling moment, an ecstatic fan, some kid with no legs, begs Randy to beat his opponent with his artificial limb. Randy shrugs and dutifully complies. It’s proposed then that each of us craves this contact with punishment. Each of us wants to participate in the grinding down of our bodies made into theatre. And this might also explain why so many people who might not normally pay tickets for a wrestling match will part with their cash to see The Wrestler and, in some way that can’t quite be put into words, walk away satisfied, and feeling a little more alive.

Roman à clé: Marina Zenovich probes deeper into the Polasnki scandal

It is a subject that’s no doubt ruined a lot of dinner parties over the years, chained as it is to one of those bottom lines that inspire such knee-jerk responses as to block out rational discussion. The subject is Roman Polanski, to some a filmmaker with an outstanding legacy accompanied by a biography rife with dynamicism, romance and tragedy, to others a pedophile. Period. Well, for those disposed to pursuing the subject a little further, who might appreciate some detailed analysis cultivated away from the heat lamps of unshakable moral righteousness, you’d do well to consult Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a smart, unfussy, engrossing documentary that examines the farcical trial which finally led to Polanski’s fleeing the US in 1978 before its conclusion.

For those just tuning in: in March of 1977, Polanski met with Samantha Geimer at Jack Nicholson’s house on Mulholland Drive. They were to take photos. Geimer was interested in a career as a model, perhaps an actress. Polanski had already helped the “arrival” of the teenage actress Nastassja Kinski, with whom he’d also had a notorious affair. The informal photo shoot, at which neither Nicholson nor anyone else was present, quickly turned into something far more tawdry, if not exactly shocking. Polanski gave drugs to Geimer and had sex with her. She was only 13-years-old. Polanski was subsequently arrested and changed with a litany of offences, including rape and sodomy, eventually pleading guilty only to having consensual sex with an under-aged person when evidence, ie: soiled panties, made it clear that a plea bargain would be highly advisable. But the case developed in such a way that closure was to prove far more complicated and elusive than either Polanski, Geimer or their respective attorneys had hoped for. Geimer, who has publicly forgiven Polanski and even advocated for his being given the Academy Award for The Pianist, has said that in the end she felt like both of them got stuck with life sentences, so relentless was the aftermath and media frenzy.

Zenovich’s agenda with Wanted and Desired necessarily divorces itself from sermonizing over Polanski’s unquestioned culpability as an instigator in an unlawful and immoral sexual act. The concern of the film rather is to shed light on the audacious miscarriage of justice to which Polanski and, in effect, Geimer were both subjected to at the hands of the presiding judge, Laurence Rittenband. Judge Rittenband was himself a known ladies’ man and, more to the point, a tireless seeker of media attention. Having died in 1994, he’s unable to defend himself here, and it’s a pity, because he is so thoroughly lambasted by everyone involved, not only those working for Polanski’s defense, but by Geimer and her own attorney, Roger Gunson, who was so outraged by the degree of indecision, manipulation and outright stage management imposed on the case by Rittenband that, in a memorable closing interview, he confesses that he actually sympathizes with Polanski’s choice to flee justice under the given circumstances.

It’s at once a great story and precisely the sort that everyone only thinks they know. Zenovich works through the material methodically, utilizing fresh and mostly insightful testimony from a wide variety of subjects with diverse or opposing stakes in Polanski’s reputation—even Mia Farrow, who clearly has her own opinions about older men giving unwholesome attention to young girls. With an elegant interweaving of archival photographs and home movies, Zenovich manages to account for the almost unimaginable hardships of Polanski’s life—his survival of the Holocaust, the slaughter of his wife and unborn child and the horrific implications made by the press in its wake—without ever using these facts as an excuse for Polanski’s own aberrant behaviour. And of course the wealth of contextualizing fragments from Polanski’s own often very dark films—especially The Tenant, in which Polanski starred, and whose trailer promises that “no one can do it to you like Roman Polanski!”—is exploited to considerable effect by Zenovich and her editor P.G. Morgan, whose contribution to the film’s shape was great enough to merit his own writing credit.

“For as far back as I can remember, the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred.” So goes the opening sentence of Polanski’s 1984 memoir, Roman. His life and its scandals, nearly as much as his body of work, which includes some of the most simultaneously seductive and grotesque American films ever made, embodies both our collective fantasy life and its shadow side as few others do. We may just understand both of these things a little better for peering into the nitty-gritty of how it all came to be.

Youth gone vile: Eden Lake

They set out for the weekend to some remote locale, where the placid water snuggles up against a beach that’s good for camping. The realization, only upon arrival, that this favourite spot from years ago has since been appropriated as stomping grounds for the rowdy teenage offspring of local yokels fails to dissuade them from pursuing their romantic getaway. But Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) are handsome middleclass Londoners—dare this horny young couple park their luxury Jeep and set up their tent amidst the unmistakably hostile country trash, marble-mouthed folk who don’t take kindly to outsiders, who above all look out for their own? Such actions are of course rarely advisable in horror flicks.

I rented it for the cover, which was slightly throwback in a good way, suitably gaudy, with the vague promise of atmospherics. The recent weeks haven’t yielded a whole lot of solid options for this column, so I did what I guess most people do, or at least those who still patronize video stores. With so many movies to see for work and a never-ending list of titles I’m hunting down based on my own nerdy obsessions, I don’t browse blind like I used to, but when I do I often wind up in the horror section, wondering to myself who the hell makes all these movies. In theory I love horror movies. I grew up on them. But there are so relatively few good ones, and only one way to find the genuine diamond in the rough. 

I won’t fool you. Eden Lake, the debut of British writer/director James Watkins, is no great shakes. It’s not one of these if-you-don’t-normally-go-for-horror crossover films. But it is quite interesting in its way, especially in the first third or so, and it is impressively creepy, especially in the middle, and though it does get really, really, dumb, it saves most the dumbest parts for the end, where coincidences pile up so high that this basically realistic narrative seems to be striving in vain to become boundless nightmare.

(A notable exception to the way I’ve divvied up the movie is a super-dumb moment that falls right smack-dab in the middle—and consider this a spoiler. It’s perhaps the most ludicrously bathetic scene of marriage proposal in history, with a beat-to-hell Steve sputtering on about honeymoons to India while a wound the size of an egg roll vomits little burps of blood from his side.)

Cinephiles will quickly see some or all of the bold-writ filmic precedents for Eden Lake’s narrative, and I figure they’re meant to. Before they even get into the woods to encounter the brats from hell, Steve begins to suffer a string of slights to his manhood. Jenny’s sweet about the whole thing, but really, shouldn’t he stand up to the rude hicks and impertinent punks and defend the honour of his extremely fetching female? The echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) resound loudly, and pleasingly, too, as it’s a story begging for renovation. I started to wonder if, once she inevitably assumed the role of protagonist—after all, that’s her, nubile and covered in muck, hiding behind a tree like Barbara Steele on the disc’s cover—would Jenny gradually take up the gauntlet of defender of property and bourgeois dignity in a clever gender reversal? The answer: Mmmm, sorta.

The other obvious model for this story is Deliverance (72), emphasized in the unabashedly classist depiction of rural folk as vicious xenophobes. Yet a peak sequence of sexual violation, so central to the hillbilly horror of Deliverance, and so seemingly inevitable in this equally tawdry scenario, is conspicuously absent, even when the teens actually have Jenny tied up and unconscious. Perhaps this is because Watkins sees these kids, whose leader is so completely vile, sadistic and devoid of any psychology as to be a sheer monster, as being so contaminated with violence that their hormones have actually been stunted into submission. Yet, rest assured, juvenile antics nonetheless rise to the fore, with the teens, apt and uncritical pupils of the modus operandi of Abu Ghraib, making videos with a phone of their acts of torture. This abstraction of aberrant behaviour through voyeuristic technology—and that technology’s capabilities for erasing or revising events after the fact—ultimately aligns the film, perhaps surprisingly, with either of the interchangeable versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (97/07), which shares with Eden Lake the peculiar quality of being at once truly terrifying and grotesque and silly, academic and numbing.

It’s worth pointing out that Reilly is pretty fearless. Even when the film demands that she slip at the drop of a hat to being a crazed animal hell-bent on revenge to a trembling griever for the retribution that befalls her tormentors—the film’s first scene lets us know that Jenny’s got a soft spot for kids—Reilly, who you might recognize from Mrs Henderson Presents (05) or Pride and Prejudice (05), dutifully fills out each moment with some sort of emotional logic. It’s really quite something. There should be some sort of Academy Award for valiant efforts toward salvaging the integrity of stuff like this. 

The war at home: Gran Torino

Gran Torino can be read as a sort of western, and not just because of the immense presence of its iconic director and star. Maybe Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is an old soldier looking for a new war. He served in Korea, worked most of his life at a Ford plant, raised kids who are now middle class twerps and virtually estranged. He’s newly widowed, but continues to live alone, save his pooch, in the family house in some corroded suburb in the industrial wasteland of Detroit, where he mows the lawn, does small repairs, sucks back can after can of Pabst Blue Ribbon on the porch, and works hard to keep others away, sometimes with a snarl and a growl, sometimes with a gun. Always with a string of racist slurs.

But Gran Torino, written by Nick Schenk, is among other things the story of Walt’s redemption. Thanks partly to the awkward machinations of the script, but thanks to a greater degree to Eastwood’s particular integrity, this redemption will not come easily. Walt’s encounters with his Hmong immigrant neighbours, the kids especially, will force him to bust his cloistered existence. Teenage siblings Sue (Ahney Her, who tends to swallow her words but is so utterly the character) and Thao (Bee Vang) engage Walt, the former through smart talk, a preternatural insight into curmudgeonly psychology and offerings of delicious Hmong chow, the latter by trying to steal Walt’s prized Gran Torino under pressure from his gangbanger cousins. Walt finds new purpose as Sue and Thao’s protector and will ultimately stop at nothing to ensure they get a fighting chance to wriggle free of the ghetto. He’s an old hand at intimidation, so why should some stupid punks with tattoos and guns worry him? I can’t claim that I buy how it all goes down, but that doesn’t meant it’s not a story worth telling.

Eastwood manipulates his star image brilliantly. He knows the audience sees Dirty Harry up there, that we associate him with vengeance and vigilantism, and he lets all these extra-filmic elements hover around him and feed the tension. Though his directorial work can sometimes slip into implausibility and half-baked sentiment, Eastwood likes his stories tough. And he’s that rare mainstream American filmmaker who tries to make movies about what it means to live in America today. This alone is a reason to if not treasure at least respect his body of work. Rather than mindlessly celebrate his country’s puffed-up triumphalism, Gran Torino surveys a corner of the US that resembles a third world shit hole more than some glorious embodiment of ambition and affluence.

Whatever promise of a better world can be gleaned in Gran Torino must be found in the margins, in the implication that even the least tolerant of us, the disdainful dinosaurs who cling to antiquated notions of masculinity and tribalism, might be lured back into active engagement with others. The film trades in cliché. It cheats here and there to get Walt to the finish line. But Walt himself, which is to say Eastwood the conservative closet humanist, is never less than riveting, and it’s the throwaway moments he shares with his unexpected new friends that are the film’s finest and most affecting. There might just be hope for my cranky old uncle Rick yet. I just hope the movie plays in Gananoque, Ontario, so he can see it. 

2008: the year in movies

When you’re freelancing for publications with filmgoing cultures as distinctive as New York City and Edmonton, not to mention when you’re attending festivals where movies screen sometimes years in advance of their release proper, trying to sort out what counts as a 2008 release can be mind-boggling. In the end I decided to simply go with this rule: I live in Canada, so if it had a legitimate theatrical release somewhere in Canada during the calendar year, it could be considered. And the considering was surprisingly tough. There are indeed more than ten films listed in my below best of, but I did manage at least to contain them all in ten groupings. Thus it is with some fondness that I bid adieu to the most mesmerizing movies of 2008, all of which I hope to see again sometime soon.

There Will Be Blood
P.T. Anderson’s portrait of Daniel Day-Lewis’ oil baron, a lonely man of some ferocious, near-Satanic ambition, was so intensely focused as to feel like a one-man show. But think about what ingredients truly bring this strange masterwork to life, and Day-Lewis, however ingeniously outsized, becomes only the frontman for numerous superlative craftsmen: production designer Jack Fisk, cinematographer Robert Elswit, composer Johnny Greenwood. The crazy finale, the commentary on our Faustian contract with the earth’s resources, the emphasis on savagery and, indeed, bloodletting—it all adds up to something bizarre and haunting that should keep us arguing, reconsidering and celebrating for years.

Silent Light
Carlos Reygadas’ third feature, which concerns a love triangle in a Chihuahua Mennonite community, is at once a study in the most primal moral struggles and a gentle acceptance of the miraculous, whether it be found in love’s defiance of mortal boundaries or in something as quotidian as the sun’s ascent and departure. A touchingly non-judgmental film teeming with natural wonder and arresting human connections. And the question is begged: what will this guy do next?

My Winnipeg, Synecdoche, New York
The world as reflected through he self, and vice versa. In his first “docu-phantasia,” Guy Maddin profiles his hometown in audaciously hyperbolic flights of imagination and winds up contemplating the impossibility of truly breaking with his own past, embodied most potently in the late, indomitable Ann Savage, who plays Maddin’s mom. In his first time out as director, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman creates a surrogate version of himself, played with gravity and great humour by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who attempts to make a piece of theatre that contains the world, though the world it contains is of course only his, a vast simulacrum of unfulfilled desire and tenuous human connections. Both films are funny, moving, and at times sublimely surreal.

Encounters at the End of the World
While Maddin evoked cursed psychic traps mystically a-flowing beneath Winnipeg’s snowy crust, Werner Herzog whisked us to very the bottom of the world, the place where so many of its misfits gradually slip down toward as they try to find a place in the world. The title’s more than a pun—everyone working in Antarctica, watching ice caps melt up close and personal, seems acutely aware of the looming devastation of global warming—yet somehow we simultaneously get one of the warmest portraits of human nature Herzog’s ever made, a group portrait of a very oddly assembled family.

Paranoid Park
Gus Van Sant’s beguiling portrait of bewildered youth and accidental death moves in mesmerizing circles as its teen hero starts and stops his written testament. The skateboard sequences quietly dazzle and the teen performances catch you utterly off guard in this, yet another fresh variation on the director’s death trip.

Happy-Go-Lucky, Rachel Getting Married
These are sensitive, vital and enormously entertaining stories about the more elusive aspects of personal responsibility. Sally Hawkins’ unshakably perky Poppy is forced to consider the limitations of hoisting cheerfulness upon the world—or, at least, upon grumpy Londoners—while Anne Hathaway’s Kym, freshly released from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding, becomes the catalyst, or sin-eater, once again for her family’s collective neuroses. If these aren’t two of the finest female leads of 2008 then I don’t know anything about movies. And it’s equally thrilling to see both directors Mike Leigh and Jonathan Demme especially at the very top of the game.

Flight of the Red Balloon
Juliette Binoche is vivaciously batty as a single mother and voice actor living comfortably in perpetual chaos, while her son introduces his Chinese babysitter/filmmaker to Paris and to the mischievous drifting globe of the title. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first movie in French is a sublime homage to Lamorisse’s 1956 classic La Ballon Rogue and makes sweeping cinema from the most simple ingredients.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
A procedural, of sorts, in which writer/director Christian Mungiu traces the steps required by a young woman to procure an abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania. It’s gruesome, suspenseful, fascinating, and more stimulating for not actually being overtly polemical. Among other things, it’s a story of friendship’s end, with the truly remarkable Anamaria Marinca enduring some grueling trials for the sake of her drearily too-pregnant roommate.  

Man on Wire
James Marsh’s reconstruction of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers is ultimately an emotionally overwhelming experience. There’s something nearly ineffable in Petit’s feat, though the attempts made by his colleagues to recall the wonder of that day and its never-to-be-repeated crime of spectacle are deeply compelling. And Petit himself is such a marvelous storyteller that, even if there weren’t such terrific archival materials to pull from, a movie of just him talking probably would’ve been nearly as good.

La France, The Band’s Visit, Still Life
Why did I automatically think of these films as kindred spirits? Serge Bozon’s wonderful cross-dressing musical about French soldiers wandering far from their proscribed path in war-torn Europe exists in a world all its own. Meanwhile, Eran Kolirin’s tale of an Egyptian classical music group stuck in some Israeli backwater seems a million miles away from Jia Zhang-ke’s chronicle of people trying to tie up loose ends with estranged family members in villages becoming slowly submerged by China’s colossal Three Gorges Dam project. Yet there’s something about the landscapes and the desolation, the at times uneasy interaction between strangers and acquaintances alike, and the sense of, well, stillness, that binds such stories in their subtle comedy, admiration for small gestures of dignity and bone-deep dislocation. And there is finally a nomadic spirit at work in all of these that speaks to the communal spirit that can bring together wanderers astray on life’s unruly roads.

If only I could also fit: Before I Forget, Standard Operating Procedure, The Last Mistress.

2008: the year in DVD

It’s one of my favourite parts of my job, discovering some treasure long forgotten, previously hard-to-find or crying out for reassessment. Looking over the past year’s standout DVDs I see two interesting trends: a steady stream of compelling westerns and fresh opportunities to appreciate the astonishing presence and emotional dexterity of the great actresses of Hollywood’s studio era—sometimes both in the same title.

The Furies, Day of the Outlaw
Barbara Stanwyck’s magnificent performance in Anthony Mann’s fascinatingly perverse 1950 western, a web of incest, gender reversal and land ownership, is alternately terrifying—keep your eye on those scissors—and moving. Equally scary and nearly as affecting is Robert Ryan, heartsick, vengeful and rivetingly repressed, in Andre De Toth’s wintry 1959 western, in which grotesque outlaws, led by Burl Ives, take over a farming community. 

Kid Galahad, Daisy Kenyon
The long road of high stakes and good times shared by the no-longer-young Bette Davis and Edward G. Robinson reaches its terminus in this superb 1937 boxing flick. She falls for a naïve fighter but only winds up steering him toward another woman with a fraction of her easy-going charm. Joan Crawford however can’t decide between crazy WWII vet Henry Fonda and adulterous lawyer Dana Andrews in Otto Preminger’s 1947 women’s picture—yet watching her try makes for something of profound emotional textures.

Blast of Silence
Writer/director/star Allen Baron’s ultra-low budget 1961 noir is a stark portrait of a neurotic, lonesome hitman, as well as one of the movies’ most striking portraits of New York City. Criterion's supplements heighten the film's unique position as both an inspired one-off from an unusual and little known talent in American movies, as well as supplying a sense of how the city has changed.

Dr. Renault’s Secret, Dragonwyck
Gene Tierney’s the innocent country girl swept off to Vincent Price’s lordly lair of aristocratic rot in Joseph Mankiewicz’s excellent 1946 gothic melodrama. Yet Tierney’s not as fundamentally innocent as the amazing J. Carroll Naish, who plays both the brute, inarticulate hero and monster in Harry Lachman’s 1942 post-Darwinian horror film, which was truly my B-movie discovery of the year, brimming with strangeness and fascinating supporting performances, including one from the inimitable Mike Mazurki.

Moontide, Road House
Ida Lupino is the suicidal waif who pierces the heart of Jean Gabin’s wandering longshoreman amidst murder, booze and plumes of fog in this atmospheric, creepily homoerotic 1942 proto-noir half directed and then abandoned by Fritz Lang. Lupino then manages to turn just about everybody on, including Richard Widmark and Cornell Wilde, as the traveling take-no-shit singer and pianist in this sexy, very adult 1948 noir. Both came from Fox as part of their continuing series of noir releases, a series that hopefully keep up its annual yield in 2009.

Death of a Cyclist
Juan Antonio Bardem exposes the lower depths of classism in Franco’s Spain in this 1955 noir. A secret affair is threatened with exposure after an accidental killing on a bleak country road.

Mon Oncle Antoine
There’s something ridiculous in labeling what’s been deemed the greatest Canadian film of all time a discovery, but, sadly enough, there you have it. I confess, I never saw it until Criterion, and American company, put it out. But I don't think I'm alone in undervaluing the classics of my own country. Claude Jutra’s richly evocative 1971 masterpiece captures a moment of transition in rural Quebec and a child’s developing awareness of sex, death and the trail of hidden compromises that lead to adulthood.

Larisa Shepitko, Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy, The Films of Budd Boetticher
Three multi-title director showcase boxes of tremendous value. Shepitko’s films were poetic explorations of troubled Soviet memories; Kaurismäki’s are marked by a highly distinctive, minimalist comic deadpan and affection for crime stories about losers; Boetticher helmed some of the best westerns of the 50s, five of which are included here.


The Small Back Room, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1949 wartime drama features an alcoholic demolitions expert who has to both diffuse a bomb and keep alive an old flame. Martin Ritt’s 1964 spy story plunges us headfirst into the Cold War and the chilling lengths governments traverse for the sake of secrecy. It features a terrifically brooding turn from Richard Burton that seems like it must have been study material for Daniel Craig. Two brilliant British films about the toll of war on ordinary lives.

The Ballad of Narayama, Mishima
With the death of Ken Ogata last October, Japan lost one of its great film actors. In Shohei Imamura’s 1983 epic Palme d’Or-winner, set in a backward rural community, Ogata played the son of an old woman who must be taken up a mountain to die. In Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic, Ogata embodied legendary writer Yukio Mishima, who suicided in 1970 after a failed military coup, and remains a controversial figure to this day... Okay, so Mishima was anything but a discovery for me, but it deserves extra recognition here as some sort of milestone in the biopic, as a beautifully put together DVD package with commentary from the always articulate Schrader and as an extraordinary showcase for Ogata.  

Spiritual vacancy

The fantasy is hardly new, but there’s a novelty to its veneer that holds a certain initial thrill. The hero, a murdered cop raised from the grave, exists beyond death. The villain, too, is invincible. There’s the suggestion they could fight for all eternity, like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, with no limit to the cartoony extremes of meaningless violence they can exact on each other. The women are uniformly astonishing objects, every one untouched by age, imperfection, gravity. Even the rookie cop wears a uniform revealing luscious cleavage. There’s a climactic four-way showdown in some part of town called “the projects,” yet not a single person seems to live there. So we have a world without poverty, pain or unattractive women. Or death. Or even, it would seem, colour, beyond red. Yet there’s no limit to the diversity of weaponry, so rest assured we get plenty of noise. Yes, it’s beautiful in its limited way. But is that enough?

I suppose The Spirit, written and directed by Frank Miller, inspired by Will Eisner’s comic, shot on the same digital backlot that produced the stylistically akin Sin City, represents the future, or maybe just the sluggish-to-catch-on present, of movies. But I dearly hope it’s not the only future, this hermetically sealed world that eschews what some of us love about movies: actual places, sunlight, spontaneity, interaction, evocations of sensual experience. The titular super hero (Gabriel Macht) is a ghost of sorts. Fittingly, he inhabits a city where everything’s the vaguest suggestion of something that might have once breathed. It’s a twist on the texture of film noir, but this twist squeezes out all of noir’s pathos and sweat.

“My city needs me,” the Spirit soliloquizes. “She is my love. She is my life.” There’s no mistaking this for anything but unabashed melodrama, and that’s fine—there’s plenty of room in the movies these days for alternatives to the standard of supposed naturalism. But characters speak exclusively in shopworn hard-boiled patter, expository monologues, or declamatory statements that extinguish subtext. There are flourishes of visual expressionism: an automaton created by evil genetic scientist the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) commits ritual seppuku, and the background’s consumed with the blood-red rays of the Japanese flag; characters swim in waters so murky they could be drifting through gaseous portals in space. But all the eye candy, from the misty skies of fluttering snow to Eva Mendes’ immaculate ass, begins to wear as the story proves itself bereft of feeling. The characters are stereotypes. Their stories get very boring.

There’s not much point in talking performances here, though Jackson seems to have a good time. And I am kind of fascinated by the Octopus’ emphatic dislike of eggs, which seems counterintuitive given that, besides being a beloved breakfast staple, eggs are a symbol of rebirth, and Octopus is singularly obsessed with immortality. And they’re luminescent white, one of few colours Miller permits. They’re also as thin and fragile as Miller’s story, which threatens to grow into a franchise where hero and villain just keep beating the, er, living shit out of each other in the presence of fawning babes, against a backdrop of absolutely nothing.

Mountains, war, vocation: three by Herzog

Central to the ongoing thematic concerns of Werner Herzog’s cinema is the question of vocation, of what activities, often wildly ambitious, seemingly pathological or downright peculiar, call out to certain, often-eccentric individuals, giving their lives a sense of almost divinely inspired purpose. It’s one of the things that allows the not un-eccentric Herzog to connect to so many subjects he might otherwise feel unable to relate with, from the tyrannical conquistador in Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) to the delusional would-be bear savior Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man (05).

Legendary mountain climber Reinhold Messner—whose ‘My Quest for the Yeti,’ much to my friends’ amusement, occupies a permanent spot on my bookshelf—is surely not a guy Herzog would find completely simpatico, given the filmmaker’s outspoken aversion to all things New Age. But Messner possesses at least one characteristic with which Herzog’s in complete alignment: a fierce impulse to test both the limits of human endurance and the benevolence of nature. And it surely scores points in Messner’s favour that he openly acknowledges the loopiness of his pursuit, calling the desire to climb mountains a “degeneration” of the human psyche.

Herzog’s ‘The Dark Glow of the Mountains’ (85) profiles Messner before and after he and Hans Kammerlander’s unprecedented excursion over a pair of 8000-metre high Himalayan peaks. The strength of Messner’s resolve is beyond doubt—he confesses that he has only four toes left, the remainder presumably lost to frostbite. He continues to climb even after the death of his brother on a previous ascent. Herzog clearly reveres Messner’s obsessiveness, something Messner refers to as a form of creativity. Yet one of the most fascinating moments in the film comes when Herzog questions Messner about what else he could imagine doing with his life besides climbing. Messner confesses that he’s love to walk, without itinerary, “until the world stops.” Herzog, off-camera, admits to maintaining precisely the same fantasy: “I like the idea of just disappearing, walking away, turning down the path and carrying on until there is no path to follow. I would like to have huskies with leather saddle bags and just walk and walk until there is no road left.”

This desire to slip away into the infinite is beautifully mirrored by the camerawork: the tracing of majestic peaks in the upward gaze of a pilgrim, circling a full 360º as if to announce full enclosure in this forbidding environment; the tracing of a narrow, equally jagged crevasse with its rushing waters frothing far below; the static image of Messner and Kammerlander slowly vanishing into a field of rock and snow. Not that every scene in ‘The Dark Glow’ is composed solely of reverie and awe. There’s a sublimely comic interlude where Messner gets this unusually expressive massage from one of his porters, a little guy wearing giant mirror aviator shades, who dances his hands all over Messner’s head while Messner goes on about something I couldn’t concentrate on for doubling-over in laughter.

‘The Dark Glow’ can be found on New Yorker’s Herzog Shorts Vol. 2, a nice collection of relatively obscure works, and a package for which I have only one, albeit sizable, complaint. ‘The Dark Glow’ has no subtitles! Instead it offers supremely lame English-language dubbing over of both the narration and Messner and Kammerlander’s comments. Anyone familiar with Herzog’s distinctive oratorical style will surely be distracted by this, though if for some reason the original German soundtrack was unavailable I guess I’m just grateful to be able to see the film at all, as well as the other two others featured here.

‘Ballad of the Little Soldier’ (84) begins with the image of a child in a jungle singing merrily along to ‘La Niña de la mochila azul,’ a Mexican ranchera playing on a portable cassette player. He’s also wielding what if I’m not mistaken is an AK-47. Co-directed with Denis Reichle, who was himself a soldier in the German national militia at the age of 14, this investigation into the proliferation of Miskito child resistance fighters in Nicaragua seems at first blush the most didactic work in Herzog’s oeuvre.

But while Herzog’s sober voice-over strives to educate viewers on the plight of the Miskitos, who allegedly suffered tremendous losses at the hands of Sandinistas, leaving countless children without parents and hungry for justice, ‘Ballad’ clearly divorces itself from any polemical arguments for or against the Sandinista cause. It’s a truly heart-rending, nerve-wracking film—with Herzog himself apparently filming under fire—that, like Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (64), reveals just how disturbingly devoted children in warfare can be. Robbed of family, familiar with death yet regarding their future as something altogether abstract, they lack the sort of fear that can paralyze adults in certain decisive moments.

The final short on the disc is ‘Precautions Against Fanatics’ (69), a wonderfully bizarre, 11-minute film sculpted like an avant-garde poem. There is a man—perhaps a precursor to Treadwell—who’s appointed himself a guardian of racehorses. He demonstrates his capabilities by karate chopping pieces of wood. There is another man, older, moustahced, with one arm tucked inside his clothing, who says only he understands the horses and demands that the first man should go away. Which of these is the real guardian of the horses is a genuine mystery, though I must say I never sensed the horses were in any grave danger.

Church and state of uncertainty

If, like me, you’ve never seen John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, you may want to avoid learning too much about Doubt, the new film version adapted and directed by Shanley himself. Set strictly within the confines of a Bronx Catholic School in 1964, it’s a dramatic meditation on the dichotomy of ambiguity and faith, or as two characters put it, proof and certainty. There’s pleasure to be had in watching the events unfold blind, learning the facts to be debated only as they arise, piece by carefully doled-out piece.

Having said that, many of you will catch on to where this is heading from the outset, in a scene where each of the central players are present and the conflict, in its way, is spelled right out for us. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives a sermon on the theme of doubt and how it might bring us together rather than leave us in lonely despair. As Flynn gives examples of internal sources of unease, little things “no one knows” about us, Shanley cuts to individuals in the congregation, listening with rapt attention and recognition. It’s as though Flynn’s speaking directly to them, as though he’s somehow looked into their souls and diagnosed their unspoken suffering. But when Flynn offers his last example of secret turmoil—“No one knows I’ve done something wrong”—the camera rests firmly on Flynn himself. The moment is not exactly subtle, but it is elegant.

The evidence against Flynn, in a superbly amiable, layered performance from Hoffman, racks up swiftly. Flynn smiles a lot, and offers physical affection to his kids. He takes an unseemly amount of sugar in his tea, makes unseemly jokes with his fellow priests. He likes his nails kinda long. He keeps little flowers in his Bible. Most importantly, he singles out Donald Miller (Joseph Foster, perfect), the school’s only black student, and an alter boy, for special attention. He becomes, in the words of one character, Donald’s “protector.” When Sister James (Amy Adams) eventually sees something that suggests an “unhealthy” bond being forged between Flynn and Donald, she brings the issue to the attention of Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the fearsome, ultra-stern school principal half-jokingly referred to by Flynn as a dragon. Very quietly and methodically, a campaign’s undertaken to get rid of Father Flynn, preferably following a full confession.

Much has been made about Shanley’s tip-toeing around the truth with regards to what unfolds behind closed doors in Doubt, but in all honestly I think the truth’s pretty damned clear, though more time with Donald, who’s conspicuously absent for much of the movie, might have shifted our reading of the scenario either way. The exact actions Flynn is guilty of are not so important to the story as the disturbing polarities of entitlement and genuine compassion he exudes. Admittedly, my reading probably says as much about my regard for the priesthood as it does Shanley’s intended subtext.

Personally, I’m more than fine with ambiguity—hell, Rashomon’s one of my favourite movies—if it yields something resonant or provocative about the subject being considered, and Doubt is absolutely engaging in this sense, thick with portent, psychological struggle, dynamic characterizations, uncomfortable questions. Yet, if anything, Shanley’s directorial style isn’t ambiguous enough. His is a strained sort of classicism, with ostentatiously skewed angles in moments fraught with paranoia. (A chamber drama about spiritual unease and all-too earthly temptations that relies on tight shots of faces negotiating how much can or cannot be reveled: we are very much in Ingmar Bergman territory here, and there were moments while watching Doubt that I really missed the late master.) Shanley’s approach is an odd mix of conservatism and flamboyance, and feels neither here not here. Still, the dialogues really grab you, the silences chill you, the photography, courtesy of Roger Deakins, is crisp, contained and magnificent. And the actors are most often brilliantly nuanced, even if one in particular, for better of for worse, really stands out from the others.

Streep’s is a fussed-over performance, featuring the broadest accent and most severe facial mask of the ensemble, a pale pinched pout under red-rimmed eyes that peers out from under that black bonnet in a way that renders Aloysius a spinster sucking on some holy lemon that she proudly refuses to reject. Yet I don’t think Streep’s detractors are going to convince anyone who’s actually seen this movie that her performance is anything less than riveting, driving every scene right to its precipice of tension—you can call her affected, but every affectation is loaded with purpose, and nothing is wasted.

The sole moment where Streep genuinely falters would have to be the film’s final one, a brief, sudden emotional thaw pitched to function as the sort of transcendental release perfected by Robert Bresson in Pickpocket (1959), and emulated in numerous movies since, most notably, and most effectively, in American Gigolo (80) and L’Enfant (05). But I think Shanley should probably be the one to ultimately take the heat for this limpid finale. Where he could have left us with a devastating whisper and fade, with another disarming close-up, he’s opted for weepy collapse, rising music and crane shot. Instead of drawing us in he casts out of the emotion, giving us no room to feel anything on our own. He may argue that he’s simply giving the audience the sort of big closing uplift they need, but what can I say? I have my doubts.

Devil in the details: Margaret Atwood's Payback

Margaret Atwood is nothing if not an irreverent polemicist. In the final days of a federal election so abysmally superfluous, inconsequential and lacking in dynamic options that fewer Canadians bothered to vote than during any previous election in history, Atwood announced her advocacy for the Bloq Québécois, a party that, besides not actually appearing on the ballots of the vast majority of the country’s ridings, including Atwood’s, is fundamentally committed to removing the entire province of Quebec from Canada. The point? At least they gave a shit about the arts.

To be sure, as complimented by her intelligence, curiosity and wit, Atwood’s irreverence is something to be grateful for. Her sounding off on whatever is a welcome element in the national discourse, her particular irreverence speaking to a healthy skepticism not only on the author’s part but also on that of her readers, who are encouraged to consider the merits of each of Atwood’s arguments and arrive at their own conclusion. This is especially the case with the eerily well-timed Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (House of Anansi, $18.95), Atwood’s contribution to the CBC Massey Lecture Series. It is a relatively slim volume, jam-packed with facts, proposals and surprising, insightful connections between extant myths and notions on its central topic. But if it’s final chapter feels a bit slight after all the hearty build-up, I think it’s mainly because the ball has finally been tossed in our court. It is difficult to look at a ball just sitting there, inert and waiting to be picked up.

Payback goes way back. In searching for the origins of debt, of balances and exchanges, Atwood ultimately suggests that it may be primal, citing experiments on monkeys that reveal innate tendencies resembling credit and trade negotiations. With an inevitable emphasis on literary sources however—Atwood is above all a novelist and poet, and she’s ever mindful of the practical uses of literature—she gets the best mileage out of the Devil and the myriad Fausts who’ve accepted his always popular buy-now, pay-later schemes over the years. Mephistopheles has a knack for bookkeeping, it would seem, and a dependence on the sort of binding legalities that’s been mystified everyone from illiterate farmers suffering a bad yield to gambling addicts on the lam to ordinary homebuyers from time immemorial. Debt requires an account, which is to say a narrative, and the accumulation of debt, Atwood posits, is so precariously seductive because it helps give our lives a story. Debt is drama. We are what we owe, and our stories are sometimes defined by the settling and unsettling of accounts. The great body of 19th century Western literature, as Atwood smartly observes, was always very much concerned with money and class, and in a memorable survey of some of its most famous protagonists Atwood declares that Emma Bovary in the end wasn’t punished for sex but “shopaholicism.”

It’s important to note that in exploring the idea of debt in stories, ones often featuring transactions involving spiritual, supernatural or in any case non-monetary properties, money itself is never the real issue. Currency, as the “current” part of that word implies, is fluid and merely representational. Considerations of what items we place fundamental value on are thus duly approached, especially in the final, most problematic chapter, which finds a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge realizing how closely his fortunes, both literal and figurative, are dependent on the dictates of environmental devastation. But Atwood’s engagement with the more shaded characteristics of debt collectors and their clients reaches its most satisfying depths in her analysis of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which takes into account religious and ethnic differences—Antonio, she points out, didn’t charge interest on his loans not because he was a good guy but because as a Christian interest was actually outlawed at the time—and views Antonio and Shylock as uncomfortably codependent in the development of their own stories. Antonio “has projected onto Shylock—as his Shadow—the malice and the greediness that he himself possesses but can’t acknowledge. He’s made Shylock his whipping boy.” It’s a major highlight.

Looming over Payback is the question of debt as sin, and who of the two parties it requires is the more sinful. I’m not sure this is resolved, but the question is most interestingly complicated by Atwood’s discussion of sin eaters, with Christ’s martyrdom embodying one grandiose redemption of the huge Original Sin debt. It takes time, but by the final chapter this does all slowly bring us to the fraught idea of forgiving debts, of social justice, and of one of the most troubling conundrums of the globalized economy. Atwood wastes few words on the issue, directing our attention to the “shadow side” of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose money-lending practices have fostered such abominable overspending by irresponsible leaders, leaving their desperate citizens with a bill they have no hope of being able to pay off. In the end Atwood actually says very little about the big issues we expect, mostly because the conclusions to be drawn from her study are so self-evident.

But many readers will still feel let down by Atwood’s parting tale, that new, corporate Scrooge taken on a magical mystery tour by the Spirits of Earth Day Past, Present and Future. Seriously, Earth Day. The frustrating part of this little revamp on Dickens isn’t that Atwood goes all hippy-dippy on us—her sense of humour remains firmly intact when dryly describing Scrooge’s coveting of hemp suits—but that her only prescription for resolving our economic-ecological crisis lies in dreams of sweeping, rather idealistic social change. The cynicism can be read quite easily between the lines, and our hopes of leveling our massive collective debts are left in danger of feeling all the more in vain. I guess it depends on how you read the last lines, as challenge or resignation: How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?