Avengeance can be tiring

Gathering together a diverse crew of Marvel Comics all-stars—some already well into their respective movie adaptation franchises—to collectively combat the threat of intergalactic totalitarianism, The Avengers, helmed by Joss Whedon, is something of a super-hero clearing house: Want some more of that witty Iron Man? How about we throw in a little Hawkeye with that? Remember him? But the result of more bang for your buck can feel an awful lot like a monster truck rally that just never seems to end, a parade of virtually indestructible big dudes in funny suits beating the shit out of each other for 143 minutes, a marathon of dazzling fights that will leave you punch-drunk and exhausted. At least there are indeed some funny lines. And yes, Scarlett Johansson does wear latex well.

Should I describe the plot? Do you have an hour to spare? Got your super-encyclopedia handy? No? Okay, here’s the haiku version:

                        Spooky energy

                        Makes portal for aliens.

                        Super folk unite!

It begins with the flamboyant arrival of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) at a secret S.H.I.E.L.D. base where they house the Tesseract, a glowing cube that may or may not be aiding the development of weapons of mass destruction. In case you don’t know who Loki is, there’s some expository dialogue to help you out: “Loki,” gasps Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård), “brother of Thor!” (If you don’t know who Thor is, you should probably just give up now.) “Freedom is life’s great lie,” says Loki, who wants humanity to kneel before him, forcibly, if necessary. So S.H.I.E.L.D.’s one-eyed director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) tracks down Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to trap Loki and recover the Tesseract. Complications ensue, various feisty alpha-males learn to play nice, half of Manhattan is destroyed, et cetera.

That clever dialogue I mentioned is accompanied by much dumbness: a token gay character (Clark Gregg) who never stops reminding you that he’s the gay one; a presumably staggering civilian death count without a single image of anyone getting hurt; Iron Man’s boasting of his skyscraper powered by self-sustainable energy, while Iron Man’s jetpacks suck up more juice than a fleet of Hummers, his girlfriend regularly takes her private jet along the eastern seaboard, and the entire S.H.I.E.L.D. team whips all over the world in an invisible flying fucking aircraft carrier. Of course there are nice details, like the S.H.I.E.L.D. engineer who plays Atari when no one’s looking, a cameo by a certain beloved character actor, and Ruffalo’s pleasingly incongruent nuance, but the bulk of the pleasures to be found here are brute ones, mostly featuring Hulk ripping apart alien aircraft with a mighty roar. I’m not being facetious; Hulk ripping shit apart can be hugely entertaining. All I want to say is that there’s a point when this sassy, busy, carefully designed, emotionally shallow, mega-budget Wrestlemania pummels the viewer’s senses in such a way that it makes he or she want to transform into their own raging green Id-monster, screaming, “Okay, okay, I got my $13 worth! I don’t care if the Chitauri leader comes back after the end-credits. Let me out of here already!”

Cultivation theory

The titular damsels of writer/director Whit Stillman’s new movie, his first in 14 years, are in each pretty, preppy, poised and alert to the world in their highly selective way. Each are named after flowers, each are odour-sensitive, each strives to use their ostensibly superior ethical, intellectual and interactive skills to fortify the quality of student life at Seven Oaks College. Their tactics include suicide prevention through tap-dancing (the handmade poster on wall of the suicide prevention center reads COME ON, IT’S NOT THAT BAD!) and going out with boys who are neither handsome, nor charming, nor smart. (One of them is so dumb he doesn’t even know his colours.) By rewarding the male doofi (that’s plural for doofus) of Seven Oaks with their companionship, these damsels feel they can usher these doofi from the life of aimless idiocy to which they seem surely destined to a more enlightened and socially meaningful place. Of course, dating doofi also prevents the damsels from experiencing such annoying unpleasantries as heartbreak.

Herein lays the very special comic tone that Stillman aspires to and frequently apprehends in Damsels in Distress: whether or not his characters are actually from privilege they each work arduously to cultivate both the airs and the sense of altruistic vocation they associate with privilege, and such airs and ambitions constitute both the damsels’ folly and their persistent charisma. Most are well-intentioned emotional cowards, but Stillman knows that there’s more to be gained from sympathizing with them and their quixotic pretentions than looking down his nose at them. You might have hated these damsels from a distance when you went to school with them, but viewed through Stillman’s generous, stylized, idiosyncratic gaze, they become people you want to spend more time with.

Perhaps idiosyncratic is putting things too mildly. The movie’s chief damsel, Violet, is always, even in casual conversation, speaking lines like, “Must we tether ourselves from comment because we ourselves are human too?” She sounds out each word carefully, ensures that each sentence is complete, and doing so bears little resemblance to the sorts of characters found in virtually any contemporary American youth comedy. Fortunately she’s played by Greta Gerwig, the actress (and occasional writer and director) probably most closely associated with such (if you’ll excuse my use of this very stupid genre title) “mumblecore” movies as Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead and House of the Devil. Gerwig’s definitely not mumbling here. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that in Gerwig Stillman’s found his ideal actor, one who intuits the cadences of his anachronistic comic style and embodies the delicate imbalance of his quirky, sometimes fabulous character conceits.

Which isn’t to say that everything in Damsels flies. The meandering quality of the narrative eventually catches up with itself, and a closing musical sequence is neither awkward enough nor elegant enough to keep from falling flat. But it does have the funniest suicide attempt I think I’ve seen in a movie, its use of motel-issue soap as an agent of soul-healing is hilariously absurd, and, more importantly, its central characters are never given anything less than a slew of contradictions, conflicting desires and other compelling complications. They are, to be sure, comic constructs, but they also resonate with lived experience, which is what good comedy is all about. 

"...it's a story for victims. It's a film for them": Lee Hirsch on his vital, yet deeply problematic, Bully

“This was a really hard film to make. A fundamentally hard film to make. It never stopped following me around. The emotional navigation of this is something you’re never prepared for.”

That’s filmmaker Lee Hirsch, describing the process of making Bully, the new documentary that profiles a number of children and families in various, mostly rural US communities who have suffered from unchecked abuse both verbal and physical at their respective schools. Bully was for some weeks overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the Motion Picture Association of America’s initial insistence on giving the film an “R” rating for coarse language, thus making it inaccessible to precisely those viewers who might need its consoling message most; it’s since been edited slightly and given a “PG-13”. Which hopefully means that we can now move onto troubling questions regarding the film itself. I urge you to see Bully. I also urge you to consider it carefully.

filmmaker Lee Hirsch

Hirsch’s access, his obvious facility with earning trust, has rendered Bully a truly extraordinary, frequently alarming work, with scenes alternating between high emotion (from grieving parents, for starters) and shocking callousness (from a certain high school vice principal most especially). (It's also very well photographed, by Hirsch himself.) Seated at the head of the table, surrounded by writers assembled for a group interview, Hirsch seemed so gentle in demeanor I was almost worried we might wind up bullying him. When asked about how he achieved such easy rapport with his subjects, Hirsch claimed it was easy. “All I had to do was tell these kids that I was bullied and I want to tell your story and I care. I’m a warm guy. I was very candid about what the film was, about why I wanted to tell their story, and asked for their partnership.”

That sense of camaraderie, of a shared vision, is exuded by, for example, Kelby, an Oklahoma teen who either received threats or was viciously attacked by local kids and adults both after she was brave enough to make her homosexuality public. Her determination to hold her ground, to not let the bullies win, is tremendously moving, if worrisome in its possible consequences. Hers is one of four vignettes woven around Bully’s central narrative, that of Alex, an Iowa teen whose brutal daily harassment Hirsch captures repeatedly on camera, thanks to the generous cooperation of Alex’s school, even though the end result does much to condemn the school’s apparent neglect if not total indifference toward its students’ complaints.

Yet as you’re watching Bully, which builds towards activism, and thus must be regarded as polemic, you might find yourself wondering what’s missing from its equation—the titular character’s been left out of the movie. This despite the fact that Alex himself at one point says he wishes he could be a bully, while another child who was friends with someone who was a victim of bullying says that he used to be a bully. More dramatically, the film also profiles Ja’Meya, a bullied Mississippi teen who wound up pulling a gun on a busload of kids. Clearly, the relationship between the bullies and the bullied is far from being as cut and dried as the film implies.

“I tried to talk to the bullies, but couldn’t,” Hirsch replied to my questions about this conspicuous absence. “When you talk to the kids who bullied Alex they look like little angels. It’s the weirdest thing. And if you start talking to bullies then you’re getting into trying to explain the pathos of a bully, and there’s all kinds of conflicting views of who is a bully and what drives that. So it’s a story of victims. It’s a film for them. It’s not a perfect piece of journalism. When I threw away the notion of doing a rigorous, expert-driven documentary I found the heart and soul of the film, which was being with these families. Bully steps into the world of people dealing with this and tells their stories.” But even if we share Hirsch’s reductive view of the oppressor/victim relationship, can we really say that Bully honestly tells the victims’ stories?

In a recent piece for Slate, of which I can only make the briefest summation here, Emily Bazelton writes of her investigation into the suicide of Georgia teen Tyler Long, whose parents’ testimonies occupy a sizable portion of Bully. Every piece of information provided in Bully leads us to believe that Long’s suicide was the result of bullying, yet, as a brief from the school district—written in response to a lawsuit filed by Long’s parents—asserts, Long had been diagnosed with ADHD, bipolar disorder and Asperger’s, while his suicide note makes no mention of bullying whatsoever. Which isn’t to say that bullying didn’t contribute to Long’s suicide, but given the relationship between suicide and mental illness, the glaring elision of such facts in Bully is at least misleading, if not deeply irresponsible. My heart goes out to everyone connected with this devastating loss, but I can’t sympathize with the decision to oversimplify Long’s story for the sake of fortifying a one-sided argument.

Hirsch with Kelby (left) and Alex (right)

So, arguably, Bully risks doing harm while it so clearly aspires to do good. But I’ll leave you with some of the good. We asked Hirsch about what’s happened with his subjects since Bully wrapped filming.

“Alex is doing so amazing right now,” says Hirsch. “He says he feels like he’s a teacher. He wants to teach everybody to get along better. He’s found his voice. His lip doesn’t shake anymore. He’s gregarious. You guys would all be laughing if he were sitting here with us. His transformation is probably the thing I’m most proud of.”

Images '12: Weather time solitude collective

Jacqueline Goss’ The Observers chronicles a year in the life of a weather station located at the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, beginning in deep winter, everything frosted with snow, rendering the architecture a desolate wedding cake. Teeth are brushed, sit-ups are performed, tricky knots are tied, a recorder is played (badly). There are weather charts that look an awful lot like bowling scorecards. A metal box is found on the mountain during an especially punishing blizzard. It has a combination lock that refuses to be opened, infusing routine and solitude with the subtlest promise of mystery. In one scene the station’s sole climatologist is found doing some leisurely sketching outdoors in mega-mittens and goggles that cover half her face, which may be an example of Goss’ deadest of deadpan comic sensibility, which meshes nicely with The Observers rigorously, well, observational MO.

The Observers screened as part of Images 2012 last Saturday night, just two nights after John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, which also features a lot of parka and snow and unpeopled vastness. But Goss’ film is as mercilessly spare as Akomfrah’s is dizzyingly baroque. It seems driven by the director’s fascination with the impulse to accumulate data, perhaps for its own sake, the trust that data will always be inherently important. It made me think of my 92-year-old grandmother, who some years back started writing down the exact times of the sunrises and sunsets every single day, without ever explaining to anyone why. She shows me her figures when I come to visit, that scrawled handwriting that somehow touches me. She never expects a big reaction, but she seems to want me to know.  

More minimalist still is James Benning’s Two Cabins, which screened on Tuesday night, and which might just as accurately be called Two Windows for all we’re able to see of Benning’s reconstructions of dwellings inhabited by Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, respectively. Thoreau’s window is vertical, extended beyond the upper and lower borders of Benning’s fixed frame, the view of a knoll and jumble of grass, leaves and tree, broken up by horizontal lines, the whole composition recalling certain Rothkos. As far as sound goes, the general buzz of forest pervades. Somewhere a dog barks, but only once. A large vehicle lumbers past—we’re close to a highway? Really? The scene goes on and on and on and so we watch and watch and watch and soon become aware of the peculiar coexistence of these feelings: you’re looking out the eye-level window of a cabin in a sunny wood, alone, at peace, perhaps after a long trip; you’re in the middle of a city, looking at a raised glowing screen in a big dark room with people in it. This is a way of being alone with one’s self while sitting amid a crowd of silent strangers.

Kaczynski’s window is, by contrast, claustrophobic, a square contained easily by the parallel framing, the woods beyond resembling a miniature impressionist painting. I kept thinking of this window as a sphincter—was it because of the darkened knots in the wooden walls? Thoreau’s cabin feels like freedom and perspective; Kaczynski’s like entrapment and paranoia. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition, a space for dreaming of civil disobedience and a space for planning attacks on civilization, and its duration, 30 minutes in total, feel just about right to absorb what it has to offer, to slip off into reverie and then slip right back in, drawn to details, and to that weird effect of stasis slowly becoming something alive and nearly mobile. A deeply inspired, immersive work.