First Cow

 Kelly Reichardt's First Cow is an exercise in cinema minimalism.  The picture, a kind of abstract Western, scrupulously suppresses information and perversely avoids dramatizing its subject matter.  The narrative proceeds by implication and suggestion.-- the viewer is forced to the labor of putting together the plot from bits and pieces.  Reichardt's minimalist approach to her material may seem highly realistic, except that she doesn't really bother to provide enough information to create an illusion of verisimilitude.  I don't want to give the impression that Reichardt is lazy or takes a slack approach to her material -- to the contrary, she is ruthlessly intentional about paring away context, back story, and explanation.  Most of what you will read about First Cow suggests that the picture is set in Oregon in the 1820's.  However, there is really nothing in the movie that fixes the location or period definitively -- the movie takes place somewhere in nondescript forests in the Pacific Northwest near a river at a time when a man can say confidently about the fur trade:  "The beaver here will last forever."  Reichardt has obviously researched period details to within an inch of their lives -- but she recognizes that it would not be hip to foist this information on the viewer and, so, we are left to develop our own theories about the events that the film documents.  

The plot is spare to the point of vanishing.  A young man is working as a cook for a group of fur traders.  They are lost and hungry and threaten the young man, Cookie; unless he finds them food, they will beat him up or worse.  Foraging in the woods, Cookie picks some mushrooms and, even, nets a salmon.  (The salmon scene is exemplary of Reichardt's approach to narration -- one of the thugs has made a dire threat that Cookie may be killed or abandoned unless he finds them food.  In this movie, this sort of thing always leads to some kind of brawl.  While the trappers are fighting, Cookie goes into the woods, sees a stream and notices salmon jumping.  He returns to the camp where the trappers are still fighting in a desultory way, locates a net, and, wading into the stream, catches a big fish.  At that point, the scene just ends -- we don't see him return to camp; the delight of his comrades at his catching the fish is never shown.  We don't see the fish eaten or cooked.  All of this is left to our imaginations -- an interesting strategy but a bit misguided, I think:  after all, we've bought a ticket to this movie because we believe Ms. Reichardt's imagination is significantly better and more developed than ours.  Therefore, it's a bit of a cheat to leave so many narrative strands implied but just dangling).  On one of his forays into the woods, Cookie finds a Chinese man hiding in his white union suit.  The Chinese man is called King Lu and he is fleeing from some Russians who have murdered his friend.  Cookie gives the man his coat and hides him under a bundle of furs on a travois that the men are dragging.  When they come to a river, King Lu jumps out from under the furs and swims across the stream vanishing into the woods.  Later, the fur traders reach a sort of fort, actually a fur-trading post, called a Factor.  (Chief Factor is also the name given to the British commander of this place.)  At the Factor, there's more brawling and Cookie encounters King Lu again.  He goes to King Lu's shanty, drinks whiskey with him, and becomes his close friend.  The Chief Factor, played by Toby Jones, has brought a beautiful Jersey cow to the trading post.  King Lu is an optimist and go-getter -- he dreams of setting up a hotel in San Francisco.  King Lu encourages Cookie, who is an accomplished baker, to steal milk from the Chief Factor's cow and use it to make "oily cakes", some kind of buttermilk biscuit.  The cakes are a big hit and the two men make lots of money selling them at the fort.  The Factor is impressed by the cakes and doesn't recognize that they are made from milk extracted from his cow.  He invites a sea captain to his house and engages Cookie to make a special berry tart for the gathering, a sort of cake that requires lots of milk.  The Factor is a nasty fellow who believes in cruel corporal punishment -- he has calculated that a severe flogging, although it destroys the laboring capacity of its victim, is more than recompensed by the increased production of others terrified by the punishment.  The Factor and his henchmen discover that Cookie and King Lu have been stealing milk by moonlight from his cow.  He sends out armed men to detain them, apparently for execution.  King Lu again escapes by swimming across the river.  Cookie (seemingly -- all of this is shot in the dark and unclear) falls off a cliff and is injured.  King Lu returns to the Factor to retrieve his profits, hidden in a tree.  Cookie is convalescing in some strange wood hutch where it is always dark and an elderly Indian seems to be performing some kind of slow-motion Tai chi just on the other side of the window.  The images are smeared and dark and it is hard to see where he is located or what is going on there.  (A documentary about making the film calls the place the "dream cottage" and notes that the lenses of the cameras were smeared with vaseline around their edges to secure the strange, blurred images in the shack.)  King Lu and Cookie are reunited and they flee through the night.  Cookie is clearly badly injured.  They are pursued by a young man with a gun, a customer disappointed when they ran out of the oily cakes and now working for the villainous Factor.  When Cookie is too weak to continue his flight, King Lu lays down beside him and the movie abruptly ends.  However, the film begins with a prologue set in the present.  In that short sequence, a woman with her dog is traversing a scrub land next to a big estuary.  (We see barges moving up and down the river.)  Her dog uncovers a skull and she ultimately disinters two skeletons lying side-by-side -- that is, bones arrayed in the general posture of King Lu and Cookie as they lay together in the woods in the night.)  From this, we conclude that the Factor's minions caught up with the men and killed them where they lay -- although, it's possible that Cookie, who may have sustained a skull fracture, has already died.   (The film's prologue seems an appendix from Reichardt's previous film Wendy and Lucy, a movie about a homeless girl who loses her dog.  The girl's discovery of the relatively intact skeletons, of course, is unrealistic -- I think most people who uncovered a skull in a midden heap would likely immediately call the authorities.)

The film is too abstract to engender any strong feelings although I will say that, in  retrospect, there's a powerful element of tragedy in the picture -- King Lu and Cookie are both appealing characters and the Chinese man, in particular, is a real hustler; he's full of clever schemes to make money and, undoubtedly, would have had a bright future except for the contretemps with the Chief Factor.  Despite it's rigorous and highly disciplined mise-en-scene, the film is full of oddities that defy explanation:  for instance, why wouldn't the baker and his friend simply have asked permission to milk the cow for buttermilk for the pastries?  (The profits could then have been shared with the Chief Factor.) This would have made far more sense than the nocturnal visits to the cow tethered only a hundred yards from the Factor's house.  In one scene, Cookie is brought out to the cow by the Factor and inexplicably comes close to the beast -- the handsome cow is pleased to see him and, of course, nudges him with her head:  shouldn't Cookie have known that the cow would give some signs that she knew him, traces of enthusiasm that the Factor and his thugs would have noticed?  The two skeletons are found on a beach near a big tidal estuary.  But we last see the two men resting on a hill above a picturesque mountain river.  Has the landscape changed that much in the last 200 years?  There are all sorts of little implausibilities:  for instance, Cookie gets some nice boots (of which he seems very proud) but later at the fort we see him heedlessly walking through a mud puddle.  Would he really not take some care to protect his boots?  Normally, this sort of incongruity would be invisible but Reichardt's minimalist style, a way of film making that requires that you attend to every nuance of the image, foregrounds these sorts of mistakes.  

The movie is obviously a homage, at least in part, to McCabe and Mrs. Miller.  In both movies, an aggressive, if dullwitted, entrepreneur develops an enterprise that makes him wealthy on the remote frontier.  (McCabe ran a brothel; Cookie runs a bakery).  Both men run afoul of the powers that be and are killed. Reichardt in the "making of" documentary that accompanies the film on the Blu-Ray disc notes that she hired Rene Aubernojois,  a prominent figure in McCabe and Mrs. Miller to appear in a cameo (he's a gruff old curmudgeon with a raven on his shoulder) to invoke Altman's great Western.  The film also adopts some of the pictorial style of Altman's movie -- more than half of the film is shot in the dark (some of it "day-for-night") and many of the images are so dim as to be unintelligible.  The scenes in the "ghost cottage" in particular are very shadowy and full of oozing green blur.  Reichardt's tactic of suppressing information extends to the way the movie is made.  There are never any establishing shots.  The camera remains very tightly clasped to those things that it shows.  When there is a brawl, Reichardt cuts away -- she's not interesting in any sort of physical violence.  The Factor apparently lives in an impressive house, but we never see it except fragmentarily and the position of the house vis a vis where the cow is tethered is unclear.  The Factor is full of exotic people but we don't learn anything about them -- it turns out (I discover from the credits) that both the sea captain and the Factor are married to Hawaiian women and there are a number of "Sandwich islanders" in the camp.  (The camp is also full of Scotsmen in berets, Irishmen, freed slaves and Tillamook Indians.)  Reichardt's actors mumble and are frequently very hard to understand -- she is an alumnus of the "mumblecore" school of directing.  Landscape elements that are fundamental to the action are obscure:  for instance, we can't figure out whether a canoe is going upstream or downstream in several shots showing the vessel.  Reichardt's camera focuses intently on people performing quotidian tasks -- weaving baskets or cooking biscuits in hot oil.  King Lu has a wicker mat on which he lies when he and his friend sit by the river dreaming of the future.  

Reichardt uses long takes and the film is very slow.  I found it interesting but I think the picture would try the patience of many viewers.  There are some scenes that I thought very suspenseful -- some of the sequences involving milking the cow in the dark and the scene in which the animal shows her pleasure at meeting Cookie in the daylight are actually thrilling in a low-key kind of way.  The movie flourishes better in your memory than while you are watching it.  In fact, to paraphrase a criticism of Wagner, the movie is quite a bit better than it looks.     

The Ripper

 The Ripper is an excellent British crime documentary made for Netflix in 2020.  The program has an interesting feminist perspective and, in my estimation, is an almost perfectly realized example of this genre. Produced in four 47 minute segments, the show covers territory that an American documentary (for instance The Vow) would expand to eight hours or, even, more.  In fact, the documentary has an effect that is rare with respect to these kinds of shows -- it seems too short and, in fact, omits important parts of the story.  (For instance, one of the Yorkshire Ripper's 13 murder-victims isn't even mentioned on air and is identified only in a title at the end of the program.)  The program is feminist and, therefore, victim-oriented:  it shares some of the ideology of the Black Lives Matter movement; the show posits it as crucially important to name the women who were killed by the Ripper and show us their pictures.  This is particularly important because these victims were, by and large, unfairly maligned at the time that they were slain.  Documentaries that are honest about human affairs are, of course, catalogues of folly and this show is relentless in its exposure of police negligence approaching criminal dereliction of duty.  However, The Ripper's approach is subtle -- the director doesn't provide any perspective on how horribly the police miscalculated their investigation (thereby, certainly, allowing several murders to occur that could have been preventable) until the last episode.  The final 47 minutes show effects a reversal that causes the viewer to completely re-evaluate what we have been earlier shown.  

The Yorkshire Ripper committed his atrocities between 1974 and 1981, although he may have been active as an assailant for several years before the first killing.  His first known victim was a woman named Wanda McCann who was killed on the outskirts of a red light district in Leeds.  (She had left her small children behind in her flat and had been drinking when the murderer smashed her skull with a claw hammer and, then, gutted her.)  Disastrously, the police interpreted her mutilation as the work of a "prostitute-killer" like Jack the Ripper -- a murderer whose identity has never been established.  After a half-dozen killings, all implemented in the same way, the Ripper sent an audio cassette to the hapless investigating detective.  In the U.K., accents are a primary marker of class and prestige.  The Ripper had a so-called "Geordie" accent showing that he came from a small city in the Midlands called Sunderland.  A linguistic expert, further, asserted the he could place the accent within a square mile in Sunderland.  In addition, the Ripper sent a letter to the investigating gendarmes although this was disregarded, ultimately, due to the fact that the diction in the document was directly cribbed from the notorious letters by which Jack the Ripper taunted the police.  Various other clues existed:  the murderer's blood-type was a very rare AB (less than 6% of the population) and the man had very small feet -- he wore an 8 shoe-size.  The tread of his car was found at one murder scene and so the type and age of his tires were known.  One of the dead women was found with a 5 pound note on her body -- 5 pounds, at that time, was the going rate for sex with a prostitute.  The note was brand-new and had recently been issued and it, also, could be readily traced.  Despite all of this information, the police were stymied and didn't make any arrests.   And the Ripper kept killing women.  In a couple of cases, the women survived and there was a "photokit" (a composite picture) showing his appearance.  But still the cops were baffled.  When the Ripper turned from murdering prostitutes to school-girls, there was general alarm -- the prostitutes were thought to be generally disposable and no one cared too much about their slaughter.  Single women were put under a sort of curfew.  The feminist movement was just getting under way at that time and the police failure to capture the Ripper caused wide-spread rage.  The feminists, quite reasonably, wondered why they were being told to stay off the streets after ten p.m.  It was obvious that a man was murdering women and there were demonstrations in which women demanded that all men be kept off the streets instead.  Ultimately, a young cop observing a car parked in an odd location, ran the license-plate and discovered that the owner of the vehicle didn't match the registration.  The car drove off and the woman in the vehicle survived.  The cop came back, and searching the waste area where the vehicle had been parkedm found the Ripper's tools -- his hammer and some knives.  And, so, after 13 known killings over 5 and 1/2 years, an arrest was made.  The killer turned out to be Peter Sutcliffe, a married truck driver.  Sutcliffe admitted the crimes but claimed that he should be convicted of manslaughter on the basis of "diminished capacity" -- that is, madness.  Sutcliffe was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.  However, later he went insane in jail (or feigned insanity)and was sent to mental institution.  

The film makers save the shocks for the last show.  As it turns out, Sutcliffe wasn't a "prostitute killer" -- his crimes were those of opportunity; it happened that prostitutes were simply easy to lure to lonely locations where they could be murdered.  In fact, he was a sex-murderer or thrill-killer who targeted women in general.  The police, hastening to characterize Sutcliffe as a Jack-the-Ripper avatar, that is a whore-murderer, completely misunderstood what he was doing.  As one of the talking heads in the show says:  the Midlands cops were still trying to solve the Victorian era murders committed by "saucy Jack." Sutcliffe wasn't from Sunderland and didn't speak with a "Geordie" accent -- the audio cassette was a hoax.  Furthermore, the police had interviewed Sutcliffe, who otherwise met the profile of the murderer, not once but nine times.  Detectives had interviewed him so frequently that his co-workers had nicknamed him "the Ripper".  The five pound note had been paid to him by his employer at the truckdriving firm where he worked -- something well-known to the police investigators.  The "photokit" composite depicted a man who was the "spitting image" of Sutcliffe.  The Yorkshire Ripper, in fact, had been hiding in plain sight for, at least, four years.  Because the cops had characterized him as a "prostitute killer", they missed, at least, seven other assaults that he had committed with hammer before actually murdering and mutilating his victims -- the cops ignored those assaults because they had involved school girls or respectable women.  It is the show's theme that the division of victims into prostitutes or women of "loose character" and respectable women, essentially, mystified the investigation and confounded its results.  There was a modicum of justice:  the smirking detectives who managed the investigation were disgraced and, at least, one of them was demoted to "dog catcher."  (However, the most negligent of the group sold his story to Britain's tabloid press and ended up owning a nice vacation villa in Spain.)  

The show is fascinating.  Compared to American serial killer programs, it's relatively discrete.  Although the Ripper mutilated his victims in horrific manner, these details are left undescribed.  The program's orientation toward the victims creates an interesting perspective on the Ripper's crimes. The program is visually sophisticated, although most of the imagery is unobtrusive -- we see the desolate areas of field and waste-land where the bodies were found, often placed as if on display.  The only corpses that the film shows are some of Jack the Ripper's victims.  If you like this kind of stuff, The Ripper is economically made, unemphatic, and, ultimately, a devastating indictment of a particular kind of bureaucratic idiocy.

(Sutcliffe died in custody in November 2020, a victim of Covid.)

The Midnight Sky

 Apparently considering George Clooney as scrumptious as a Xmas cookie, Netflix has made a holiday gift of the actor's new film The Midnight Sky to its viewers, dropping the film on the air two days before Christmas.  The movie is wholly misbegotten and profoundly depressing as well.  The picture simply doesn't work and the performers are entrapped in a predictable and dimwitted script.  It's hard to figure out what Clooney and company were thinking when they made this movie -- it's pretty bad on all accounts.  The movie embraces a number of science fiction cliches including one of the most time-honored, the motif of the doomed African-American astronaut.  On Star Trek, Captain Kirk was often beamed down to the surfaces of alien worlds, sometimes accompanied by an efficient and handsome Black crew-member -- the Black astronaut's plot-function was simple:  the poor guy's mission was to be killed or eaten or vaporized by whatever malign life-force inhabited the planet.  The Midnight Sky has a scene in which a perky Black woman is sent on a space-walk with two White colleagues -- who do you think the oncoming asteroid is going to hit?  

The gloomy premise of The Midnight Sky is that earthlings have so befouled the home planet that a mysterious "event" has occurred resulting in the annihilation of every one except George Clooney.  Clooney's character, who has an elaborate guffaw-inducing name -- it's something ;like Alexander Lofthouse --is the sole inhabitant of a high Arctic observatory.  Everyone else has been evacuated, presumably to perish at home.  The irony is that Clooney is dying of some form of cancer that requires daily dialysis, a process that the movie depicts in disturbing detail.  After the other scientists have left, Clooney who drinks whiskey morosely and listens to sad hillbilly music, discovers that a mysterious child has been left behind at the Station -- it's called Barbeau.  This little girl is mischievous but doesn't speak.  (Spoilers will follow.)  To anyone who is even slightly alert it is obvious that the little girl is a figment of the hero's dying imagination.  Lofthouse, as we are shown in flashbacks, was a fanatically driven astrophysicist who has misplaced his own soul somewhere along the way.  (We seem him rejecting his beautiful girlfriend who announces, dishonestly, the she was pregnant but is no longer -- in fact, she apparently has Clooney's child:  whether he is aware of this or not is uncertain. If he is aware of the child's existence, the film engages in a long-con and the reveal at the end is really just a cheat.)  Young Lofthouse is  played by a Byronic-looking fellow who is vague match for the young George Clooney, but lacks his huge, melting bedroom eyes.  Lofthouse reminds  himself that there is a mission to a moon of Jupiter, Planet K23, a place that apparently has a breathable atmosphere.  This mission is called Aether.  (Exactly why Lofthouse would have to be reminded of this mission is mysterious -- as it turns out,. he engineered the mission, discovered that K23 was a good site for human colonization, and was the impetus behind the attempt to establish a base on that planet.)  Aether is returning to earth, a very bad idea because the planet is now swathed in fecal-looking clouds of poison gas.  Accordingly, Clooney sets out to contact Aether and warn them away from the home planet that is now a death-trap.  

The movie operates according to a five-part narrative paradigm.  In Act One, the depressing situation is set up and we learn that Lofthouse is dying and everyone on earth is doomed.  Act Two involves Lofthouse's interactions with the little girl, a figure that we suspect to represent the hero's own innocent soul long lost under shrouds of workaholic bitterness.  In Act Three, Lofthouse decides that his best chance of contacting Aether and warning them away is to trek north to the Lake Hazen weather station, a place where there is a "bigger antenna."  Act Four involves the Aether mission and its difficulties in reaching home -- the space vehicle has to traverse an unknown part of the Solar System and ends up getting hammered by clouds of asteroids.  Act Five is the reveal as to the identity of the little girl and Lofthouse finally rescuing Aether by warning them to stay away from Earth.  (The star-ship uses the old "gravitational sling shot" stratagem to zoom around Earth back to K23, a planet psychedelic with luxuriant fields of yellow grain and brilliant scarlet tendrils growing like ivy among deep pinnacles and slot canyons -- embodying a perfect landscape in which human beings can flourish, one of the characters rapturously declares that "it's just like Colorado.")  On the way to Lake Hazen, Lofthouse and his anima, the little girl, encounter a crashed plane with picturesquely mutilated corpses and a dying man whom the hero puts out of his misery.  The sequence is a complete non sequitur and exists merely to fill up time -- it has nothing to do with the rest of the plot and doesn't contribute to the film's themes that have something to do with the revival of Lofthouse's noble aspirations after his embittered hermitage alone at the Barbeau weather station.  Some wolves attack Lofthouse -- this is totally implausible:  what would wolves be doing in a completely vacant, glacial landscape?  (In fairness to the film, the movie suggests that the wolves may be a hallucination experienced by the dying hero.)  Lofthouse and the child also take refuge in a storage trailer inexplicably lying on the glacier.  The pack-ice breaks up and the storage container fills up with water.  Clooney loses his dialysis machine which dooms him.  He spends a lot of time diving in water under the ice.  Movies are made by people who live in southern California, that is, a Mediterranean climate, and the director (and scriptwriter) obviously have no experience with the cold at all -- Lofthouse's exertions in the frigid sea water would, of course, kill him through hypothermia in about ninety seconds.  In fact, he comes out of the icy drink and the little girl helps him put on his Arctic gear, quite a trick since she doesn't really exist at all.  Meanwhile in interplanetary space, the Aether, with its cargo of humans (the last of our kind) is getting bombarded by asteroids.  There are some spectacular Gravity-style sequences of mayhem on the exterior of the space-craft and the poor Black girl gets lanced by an asteroid and bleeds to death in a brutal and gory scene involving clouds of zero-gravity gore floating around her body.  The White woman on the crew is pregnant.  Probably, the black Captain Kirk commander is the father.  Clooney and his writers, presumably, feeling guilty about their use of the tired old doomed Black astronaut trope imply that the child (a girl) will be the future Mother of Mankind -- it would be White supremacist nonsense to wipe out the Negroid race and, therefore, the child is half-Black.  The film, of course, skirts the question as to the incest that will be necessary to repopulate planet K23 with handsome mixed race people -- is the Black starship commander going to have to impregnate his own child or will the surviving woman bear a brother who can, then, have sex with his sister to keep humanity alive?  The audience inevitably considers these questions -- the same problem arose with Noah and his daughters (and with Lot and his daughters as well):  when you're down to a man and a woman and her daughter, it's pretty obvious that the way to the future runs right through incest-valley.  The two other men on the Aether inexplicably decide to commit suicide by returning to the home planet all swathed in nasty-looking butterscotch-colored clouds.  Having warned Aether to get out of Dodge, Lofthouse can drop dead.  A final flashback shows us that the little girl, who never really existed, was Lofthouse's own daughter.  As an adult woman, she's the last human womb:  the pregnant lady on the Aether.  By this point, Clooney looks awful, like a Santa Claus with the DT's, and he dies.  The film's ending is majestically terrible:  the Black space captain and Clooney's daughter fiddle with their computers  on the Aether for about a minute, then, the man gets up and wanders away --  perhaps, he's going to the toilet.  (There's no dialogue).  The pregnant woman, whom we now know to be Lofthouse's daughter (although grown-up), tinkers with her computer for awhile -- is she watching You-Tube videos?; then, she gets up and wanders off, rubbing the small of her back to remind us that she is pregnant.  Maybe, she's going to the toilet too or, perhaps, will take a nap.  The camera lingers for another minute on a still life of the computers and the sleek nouveau-Scandinavian chairs and tables:  it's not an ending of any kind at all, just some kind of mistaken failure to shut off the camera.  

There's so much wrong with this movie that it's inexplicable that the film was ever made.  Surely, the star and his crew knew that the script was irredeemably awful.  The whole thing is a complete bummer.  Christians insist upon the resurrection of the flesh because it's not satisfying to  be reborn as a ghost -- for the resurrection to be satisfying, we have to get our bodies back.  There's a similar problem with the ending of this film -- so the human race will survive and, even, perhaps thrive and prosper on K23.  But K23, even though it's apparently better than Estes Park or Boulder, isn't Earth and Earth and its pleasures are all we know and all we can conceive and so the destruction of our planet in this film just leaves the audience with a profound and enduring sense of misery, depression that would be well-nigh unendurable if the film weren't so risibly awful.  

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

In the Gospels, Christians are enjoined to love their enemies.  There may be a self-defensive aspect to that admonition:  hatred is corrosive and destructive and, often, turns inward.  It's probably better not to hate, not so much for the sake of our enemies, but for our own sake. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020, Netflix) is single-minded in its focus on hatred -- indeed, it is an anatomy of hate, demonstrated with the persuasive force of a theorem, though the two main characters in this handsome film version of August Wilson's play.  Levee, the gifted cornet player in Ma Rainey's Blues band, squanders his future by committing a murder that the world will adjudge as senseless although there is plenty of good reason for the man's fury.  Ma Rainey presents a different picture of rage -- she feels perpetually undervalued, disdained by the White businessmen that she must rely on her for her wages, and seems happy only when singing (although then she seems transcendentally pleased with herself); hatred is her sustaining energy -- but it doesn't make her happy and blights her life and the life of those around her.  Ma Rainey's fate, in some ways, is the more tragic -- Levee, at least, is out of his misery; she's condemned to life.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is powerful, but depressing.  The acting is first-rate, particularly incandescent performance by Chadwick Boseman (as the doomed Levee) and Viola Davis (Ma Rainey) -- this actors transform themselves through their performances:  Viola Davis is a sacred monster, a Medusa, with her huge moist eyes encircled by midnight eye-shadow, most of  her enormous bosom bare and heaving, resting like some kind of imperious Queen of the Night on a chair that becomes a throne under her weight, legs spread wide like an old, fat man.  Boseman skillfully modulates his performance from casual jive to hair-trigger rage:  he seems likeable enough at first, but, pretty soon, it's evident that a strong undertow of menace threatens everyone around him:  he flails around, but he's obviously going under, and his spasms of fury are the dying gasps of a drowning man.  The play is a typical product of its time -- the "well-made" play of the 1970's.  It has tight unity of place, a small ensemble cast, and is designed to allow each of its major players one or two showy monologues.  The language soars, but is, sometimes, a bit unconvincing,  Nonetheless, when Wilson wants to make a point, he does so with a sledge-hammer.  There's no ambiguity here and nothing much to interpret:  Wilson depicts Black people so convulsed by hatred that they turn their rage against inward with calamitous effects.  The tragedy, of course, is that the rage is fully warranted, a rational response to the violent racism imposed upon these characters -- therefore, justifiable anger becomes, in the end, the vehicle for the destruction of these characters:  Wilson's protagonists don't really have a "fatal flaw" -- their anger is justified:  the problem is there is no viable means to express this anger that isn't fatal to the enraged person.  Levee murders the best and kindest musician in his band and will no doubt be imprisoned for the rest of his life; Ma Rainey's soul is dead except when she is performing -- otherwise, she's a kind of viciously selfish automaton. Wilson, who was a separatist and, probably, a Black supremacist, indulges in a little racism of his own -- the movie has a couple of scenes in which African Americans indulge themselves in shop-worn mysticism about the Blues and deny that White people can even understand the music, let alone perform it.  (This would be like arguing that Blacks can't perform opera and shouldn't even attempt Schubert).  Wilson's earned his prejudices, of course, and it may be unseemly for me to even mention them, but the mystical notion that the Blues (and Jazz) are uniquely the birthright of Black Americans seems to me a little pernicious.

The director George C. Wolfe opens up Wilson's claustrophobic, essential;y one set, mise-en-scene, but just a little. Of course, the sense of confinement, even, carcereal enclosure, that Wilson's play engenders is crucial to its meanings and, therefore, Wolfe does well by not attempting to make the movie too "cinematic."  There's an opening scene of two Black kids running through a forest that toys with our expectations -- we think the boys are fleeing from a White lynch mob, but instead they're hurrying to see Ma Rainey perform at a rural juke joint.  A couple of spectacular Blues scenes at the outset of the movie set up the stakes in the film -- that is, the glory of the music as opposed to the squalor visited upon those who perform it.  There's a car wreck scene in which Rainey's limousine is damaged featuring a nasty Irish cop and a mob of menacing White people and a scene in which a couple of band members go into a delicatessen full of mean-looking Caucasians adds to the general sense of racial dread oppressing the characters.  Wolfe is a good director of actors and his scenes exploit the snap, fizzle, and pop of Wilson's dialogue -- Wilson is always compelling on a line by line basis.  Like Wilson, Wolfe works in a heavy-handed and obvious way:  Levee is continuously fiddling with a locked door in the recording studio -- when he finally busts it open, the door simply leads to another equally confined and dead-end space. (The film also features a montage of noble-looking and oppressed Black folks, a kind of portrait gallery -- this device has been used in Spike Lee's last two films and in about a dozen other movies as well and, to be honest, it's time to give this technique a rest.) 

Wilson engineers a number of conflicts in the play.  Levee seduces Dulsey Mae, Ma's girlfriend.  This sub-plot doesn't go anywhere -- Ma plans to fire Levee for messing around with her squeeze when they get back from Chicago to Memphis, but Levee self-destructs before then.  Levee wants to play hot jazz of the sort that Louis Armstrong pioneered -- he disdains what he calls "jug band" music.  But everyone conspires against that ambition:  Ma won't let him spice up her Blues performances (like many Blues artists, she's a purist); the White record executives exploit Levee -- they buy his new tunes at $5 dollars a pop but, then, adulterate them in a grisly way by selling the songs to White musicians (who tame them for the ears of White audiences.)  Levee has purchased some bright yellow shoes -- he likes to look fine.  These shoes are like Chekhov's gun -- if you show shoes in the first act, the shoes better detonate by the end of the play.  Levee gets two impressive monologues, really Shakespearian-style soliloquies:  when one of the band members says that he's "spooked up" by the White man, Levee launches into a harrowing account of how he saw his mother gang-raped by White thugs, was almost stabbed to death, and not treated by a (presumably) White doctor who was busy mid-wifing a cow.  He boasts about how his father hunted down the White assailants and killed four of them before he was caught, hanged, and his corpse burned.  Later, Levee denounces Jesus for not rescuing his mother when she called out for help.  This leads to a knife fight with the band leader Cutler who seems to be a Christian.  (The knife fight foreshadows the film's denouement a few minutes later in which Levee stabs Toledo, a kindly and philosophical old Black man, who has accidentally tread on Levee's yellow shoes. (The two incidents with the knife seems one too many.)  Cutler gets an impressive speech about the way White men humiliated a Black preacher who accidentally found himself in a racist Southern village after dark -- this is the speech that triggers Levee's nihilistic assertion that "life is nothing" and "death kicks life's ass" and has more impressive style to boot.  "God hates niggers," Levee says.  "Jesus hates you!" he says to an outraged Cutler.  Ma Rainey also has a powerful soliloquy in which she denounces the music industry for not caring about her and for despising her even as the White businessmen make money off her talent;.  (This speech is racially inflected but, I think, more broadly applicable to the relationship between business and art in general.  The recording industry is set up to make money and the relationships between artists, their agents, and the business professionals who run the industry are heartless and purely instrumental -- you're only as valuable as your ability to make money for the company.)   A dramatic problem with these lacerating monologues is that they are so powerful and emotionally overwhelming that there's no place for the narrative to go after someone has spoken so decisively and to such a scarifying effect. -- the action simply has to stop and cut away.  After all, how do you respond to a lengthy monologue about someone's mother being gang-raped?  These speeches make their points effectively but they have the effect of suggesting that the plot is just a mechanism to give these characters their soap-boxes from which to orate.

Some critics have suggested that Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the best film of the year.  I don't necessarily disagree except that I haven't seen too many recent movies and, of course, we don't know whether there is another Ingmar Bergman or Orson Welles working this year in Turkey or Singapore or China. (It's unfair but I wonder what Charles Burnett, I think America's greatest Black director, would have done with Wilson's play.)  It's eerie to see Chadwick Boseman as Levee railing against the heavens like King Lear and demanding that God strike him down if He exists for this blasphemy.  Boseman, of course, died at 42 of cancer shortly after the movie was made.  The film's points are encapsulated in a gruesome coda in which a pale moon-faced White man (he looks like Paul Whiteman) mechanically plays Levee's song "Jelly Roll" in the squarest of all square versions.  It's like the "St. James Infirmary" played by Lawrence Welk.  

What she said - the Art of Pauline Kael

 I didn't intend to write about the 2018 documentary What she said -- The Art of Pauline Kael.  The subject is too close to me and I don't think that I can be objective.  When I was a teenager, I avidly followed Kael's movie reviews in The New Yorker and read all of her books.  She influenced my perspective on film so powerfully that there are many movies that I  can see only through her eyes.  If I'm enjoying a film that she panned, I can hear her voice hectoring me and smearing disapproval all over a film that I might otherwise admire.  Certain pictures, most particularly things like Lawrence of Arabia and Clockwork Orange, I have always disdained because Kael savaged them so thoroughly.  It has taken me 30 years to realize that she wasn't always reliable and that many of her opinions were perverse to the point of absurdity -- I now admire Cabaret, for instance, but was trained to dislike it by Kael's scathing review.  Her opinions were so strong and expressed so vehemently that they were overwhelming and seemed, when I was young, inarguable.  Sometimes, I parroted her declarations -- that was an easy way to lose friends, particularly in the seventies when movies were a religion to many of us.

What she said isn't particularly profound and it doesn't yield much in the way of insights as to Kael's commanding personality.  There's a dearth of good footage showing Kael, and she wasn't particularly photogenic or impressive in TV interviews.  In her middle age, she came across as dowdy and efficiently opinionated -- the kind of woman you used to see at polling places, an election judge affiliated with the League of Women Voters.  (Although I know she was a progressive politically, she had the matronly appearance of a stern Republican delegate to the State Convention.)  She wasn't a "movie star" and didn't have "movie star" looks and this, of course, was always the curse of her existence -- like Andy Warhol, who knows the heights to which she might have ascended, had she been conventionally beautiful.  On TV, she seems to always have a slight grievance and her incredible sense of humor is inexplicably damped -- she speaks a bit pedantically and, in one interview, with Dick Cavett, she uses the noun "oneself" to refer to herself no less than five times in two sentences.  She doesn't speak the way she writes -- a factor that leads you to conclude that her intensely idiomatic and colloquial style, her way of seizing her readers by the buttonholes and jawboning them into submission, was a carefully contrived, and much studied, rhetorical device.  She was fundamentally contrarian and her best work enthusiastically demolishes the opinions of her competitors in the movie reviewing trade.  Her book on Citizen Kane, Raising Kane establishes the framework for the new Netflix movie Mank and was correctly perceived by Welles and his acolytes as a vicious and seditious act of lese majeste.  (Peter Bogdanovich mournfully observes how unfair the book was.)  Kael's mode was to attack sacred cows -- and Welles was a sacred cow when she wrote the book praising Mankiewicz and, if truth be known, damning Welles with mere "faint praise".  (In fact, Kael was a great admirer of Welles and her review of Chimes at Midnight is an astonishing defense of that film.)  Kael's victims were, often, severely damaged by her attacks -- for instance, David Lean claimed that he didn't make a movie for 14 years after Kael denounced him in print and, then, added an in-person assault at a party to her hostile campaign.  Like all contrarians, Kael derived her energy from the consensus opinion that she was attacking.  The more secure and powerful the consensus, the more vehement and effective her denunciation.  The odd thing was that she was, more or less, without any sort of theoretical principles -- I still recall her stinging rebuke of philosophical film critics like Siegfried Kracauer (I think it was called:  "Is there a cure for Film Criticism?")  Paradoxically, she often espoused positions in her reviews that were the opposite of her more extended polemical screeds.  For instance, she effectively damned Andrew Sarris' auteur approach to cinema, while, at the same time, using her reviews to elevate Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Coppola, and Robert Altman to the eminence of being distinguished American film auteurs.  Paul Schrader notes that Kael was shrewd in that she withheld her views until a consensus had developed and, then, attacked that consensus.  One suspects that some of her strongest opinions were founded on an obsessive desire to say the opposite of what other critics were saying -- did she famously praise Bonnie and Clyde because it was a great film or because other mainstream critics had been universally hostile to the movie?  It doesn't really matter because the force of her prose was such that she, often, seems to talk herself into positions that she has adopted as a mere contrarian strategy.  Her writing was always characterized by the most vivid hyperbole -- a good movie was the greatest of all time, epochal as far as she was concerned -- like the first performance of The Rite of Spring as she said in relation to Last Tango in Paris; movies that she didn't like were garbage, "slime" (she called Chaplin's Limelight "slimelight") not just failures but morally reprehensible.  Like most movie critics (I think Roger Ebert was the great exception), her opinions ultimately hardened to the point that she became inflexible and dogmatic.  Her highly emotional response to films became increasingly bizarre and capricious -- I remember that, at the end of her career, she might encourage her readers to see a picture that was otherwise a failure because a certain scene might have taken an emotional direction of which she approved.  (It mattered only slightly that the film failed to develop as she had hoped -- someone says in an interview that Kael always judged herself on her good intentions, a self-assessment that kept her from seeing the unnecessary cruelty that she visited upon those whom she thought were mistaken about movies that she liked or didn't like.)  In the end, those who live by the sword die by the sword as well -- she was taken down by an essay by Renata Adler that was so breathtakingly savage that you flinched as you read it.  And, unfortunately, Adler's diatribe, although profoundly unfair, was sufficiently accurate to create a recognizable parody of Kael's faults and affectations before pulverizing them to dust and ashes.  (I can still recall the shock with which I read Adler's essay and, also, the sense of recognition that much of what Adler identified as wicked and worthless in Kael's writing was, in fact, characteristic of her obsessions and rhetorical hyperbole.)  Kael didn't recover from Adler's mauling; Adler out-Kaeled Kael.  She retired shortly thereafter, leaving her admirers (and I remained one) to speculate endlessly as to what she would thought of certain films that we knew she had seen but on which she was now silent.  

There's nothing particularly new or noteworthy in this documentary.  It zips along efficiently addressing the highlights in Kael's career.  The film is illustrated by innumerable movie clips but they don't add anything much to the film and, in fact, many of the snippets are from movies that Kael detested.  Like many estimable women, she didn't begin her career until relatively late in life -- her first reviews were published when she was 35.  (She spent her youth in fruitless love affairs and raising, as a single mother, her daughter Gina.  Gina, a very attractive, if slightly hapless, women now approaching old age herself appears in the film -- she seems to have been treated, by and large, by her mother as a sort of administrative secretary.)  Kael had worked as a waitress and a seamstress and ran a couple of tiny repertory film theaters on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.  There's some fabulous footage of her drunk at a cocktail party, holding a martini glass and welcoming her guests.  She was quintessentially a woman of the golden West -- she clearly didn't like New York City and talks, in one sequence, about her fear of going out of her apartment.  (She was very small and thought of herself as physically defenseless.)  It's interesting that she was really never paid enough money to support herself entirely by movie reviews -- even at the New Yorker, she didn't make enough on which to live.  (For this reason, she had to give lectures and sell her books, mostly collections of film reviews that she had written.)  She had many of the characteristics of a PR huckster.  (Her first book is largely comprised of short blurbs that she wrote to encourage people to see movies that she showed in her repertory theaters in San Francisco).  In fact, she famously (and unsuccessfully) worked for Warren Beatty for six months as a consultant (and, apparently, some kind of publicist) -- her sojourn in Hollywood was a failure, although the details remain mysterious:  it's a bit like Plato traveling to Syracuse to put his political ideas into practice there -- it wasn't a successful venture.  She spent much of her life worrying about money.  There's a startling sound clip of her resigning from a show on which she provided film reviews on the radio -- she bitterly laments her poverty and the fact that, if she isn't going to be paid for her services, she isn't going to provide them for free.  As a woman who valued authenticity of emotion more highly than anyone else, she was keenly aware of being manipulated by filmmakers that she didn't like -- she famously detested Hitchcock, I think, because of his manipulative effects, and seems to have had a blind spot for Michael Powell, a great director but someone she didn't much admire.  (She didn't seem to understand film noir and had little interest in many of the great crime films from the forties and fifties -- for instance, she doesn't seem to have been very impressed by Fritz Lang's American films.)  Its possible that her distaste for Hitchcock (who was, for better or worse, an auteur -- and promoted in that way) was primarily an aspect of her contrarian opinions.

The film begins and ends with Kael answering questions put to her by a small child -- probably a grandchild.  She is asked about her favorite film -- she answers Menilmontant.  She asked when she was most happy:  "Now," she says.  I didn't come to many of the films that Kael disliked until my middle-age and, in this regard, I value her disapprobation -- she kept me from seeing many movies until later in my life that I now like and, therefore, stored up pleasures for me, accordingly, that I now appreciate.

   

Laurel & Hardy two-reelers from 1931

 My DVR doesn't record short films well -- I get the end of one picture as a preface to the next:  Laurel & Hardy are standing at a door that opens onto a blizzard.  A gloomy gus stands next to them in greasy underclothes with a five-o'clock shadow.  L & H are about to trudge out into the storm carrying a small mutt when a big cop in a rain-slicker appears.  He points to a sign nailed on the door:  SMALL POX QUARANTINE -- 'Now no one can leave for a month!' the cop says.  The gloomy man says:  "I just can't stand it!"  He picks up a long-gun and strides decisively off-screen to the left.  Then, we hear the gun fired not once but three times, while Stan & Olly do a  double-take staring also off-screen to the left..

A wizened-looking harridan is holding a hatchet.  She has an evil glint in her eye.  She says to an elegantly dressed flapper:  "You stay here and phone for an ambulance."  Stan begins to whimper and, then, flees with the woman at his heels waving the axe at him.  He leaps over a hedge and vanishes in the darkness.

James.Horne is listed as the director of four two-reel comedies produced in 1931 and starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The shorts are Be Big, Our Wife, Laughing Gravy, and Chickens come home.  The films are made with an impeccably invisible camera style and editing -- the viewer has no sense of any technique intervening between image and what we see. (I believe there are perhaps two close ups in about 80 minutes of film.)  The films are varied to some degree and show that the boys, as they are called, had greater range than sometimes attributed to them.  Each of the films displays an esthetic of total destruction -- small things get broken, then, large things, and, at last, the whole set is generally destroyed.  Each of the films contains images that can only be described as nightmarish -- scenes of paralysis and confinement that are palpably frightening.  Most small children are frightened by L & H two-reelers.  By contrast, no one has ever been afraid of a Charlie Chaplin picture.  I will leave it to others to interpret this fact.  

In Be Big, L & H live in adjacent apartments with their sleek-looking and stylish "flapper" wives -- women as polished and ornamental as hood ornaments. The boys have promised to take their wives to the Jersey Shore.  (People don't have cars in this milieu -- they travel by taxi and train.)  A drunk playboy who is a member of bizarre all-male club calls Ollie and tells him that the fraternity is planning a "stag party" in his honor.  The men in this club wear weird get-ups including baggy jodhpurs and tight riding boots.  At first, Ollie professes determination to stay with the plan to take the wives to the beach.  But the playboy whispers some kind of blandishments into his ear (this is a pre-code film).  Ollie is seduced and feigns sudden onset of something like a migraine in order to stay at home.  The wives depart for the shore.  Stan & Ollie have to get dressed in their club finery.  Ollie puts on Stan's boots.  When the error is discovered, Ollie tries to take off the boots without success -- they are too tight.  Calamities proliferate over about 12 minutes:  windows are broken, chairs and tables are smashed to tinder, Ollie gets a nail stuck in his buttocks, and Stan is trapped in a Murphy bed that folds back into the wall when he is entangled in it.  The wives find that their train won't depart until the morrow and come back home.  When they discover the boys' misconduct, they take shot-guns and blast away at the bed in the wall where L & H are hiding.  This knocks down the back side of the house which seems about to collapse. (The plot is a sketch for the sublime Sons of the Desert made four or five years later.)  The scenes in which Stan and Ollie struggle to remove the boot are nightmarishly protracted and fantastically ingenious.  

Our Wife involves preparations for Ollie's marriage.  Stan manages to destroy a stack of sixty plates, a variety of pieces of furniture, while Ollie is propelled into the kitchen which he batters to pieces.  Of course, Stan sprays the cake with Flit because there are several pesky flies in its frosting.  It doesn't matter, of course, because Ollie ends up face-down in the cake in the ruins of the dining room.  Meanwhile, the chubby bride's father (James Finlayson) refuses to allow the wedding and locks the woman in her room.  Ollie and Stan plan an elopement.  But, first, they have to get the woman out the window of her upstairs bedroom.  "You get a ladder so we can elope," Ollie tells Stan.  After a series of catastrophes involving the ladder, Ollie finally gets the big woman out of the house.  But Stan has rented a comically small car.  It takes five minutes to cram the two Botero-sized figures (Ollie and his fat wife) into the tiny car and, then, Stan (the best man) has to get in as well -- this sequence is hellishly claustrophobic and the stuff of which nightmares are made.  When the couple finally reach the Justice of the Peace, the old man is severely cross-eyed:  he marries Stan to the fat woman accidentally and when he says that he will "kiss the bride", he plants a wet one on Ollie.  Stan whimpers while the Justice of Peace's lesbian daughter glares at him in a steely way.

Laughing Gravy begins with the boys in bed with Stan suffering from hiccups.  It's a gloomy, shabby genteel room in a boarding house.  The boys have smuggled a little dog into their apartment; this is Laughing Gravy.  A blizzard is raging outside.  The landlord hears the dog barking at Stan's hiccups and puts the dog outside.  Ollie goes out to get the dog and gets locked out in the storm.  "Tie two sheets together and pull me up," Ollie tells Stan who is standing at the upstairs window.  You can imagine how this turns out.  Ollie ends up in a barrel full of freezing water.  Later, the boys end up on the roof of the house in the blizzard.  The chimney is destroyed and much of the house.  The grumpy gloomy landlord destroys the kitchen and gets caught in a half-wrecked cabinet.  People are bonked in head by bricks and ceiling plaster cascades down into beds that flatten-out under the impact.  At last, the landlord orders Stan & Ollie with Laughing Gravy to leave the boarding house, but, then, a policeman arrives...

Chickens Come Home is uncharacteristically opulent and, apparently, shot on the set of one of the studio's upscale drawing room comedies -- interior walls are touring and there's a comparatively large cast.  L & H are "Dealers in High Grade Fertilizer" with an impressive office and about a half-dozen female clerical workers.  Ollie, in fact, is running for office -- he wants to be Mayor.  Both of the boys are married to the same sleek flappers that we saw in Be Big.  (There's a good gag at the beginning -- Stan appears stylishly dressed for business carrying a fly swatter --  he says that he has just come from the "sample room.")  A sinister vamp appears -- she's an apparition from Ollie's past and carries with her a photograph from the sea-shore:  Ollie has lifted her up on his shoulders.  It doesn't look too scandalous but, apparently, Ollie believes the picture will sink his putative career as a politician.  He agrees to make a settlement with the vamp.  (There's lots of hiding people in a small room, a WC apparently, and, at one point, Ollie gets the woman's white boa-like fur piece caught in his ass so he wears it behind him like a tail.  Mirrors and doors are destroyed.)  Meanwhile, Stan's wife is meeting with a nasty harridan who says that all men are vicious -- "I should know I've had five of them," the harridan declares, toying with her hatchet.  (Why is she armed with a hatchet?)   Stan is sent to the vamp's vast and Moroccan-themed apartment to negotiate with her while Ollie hosts a party with the elite in town.  The floozy overcomes Stan and appears at Ollie's party.  Ollie tries to conceal her (and the incriminating picture that Stan has brought).  He has to keep bribing his smarmy butler, played by Jimmy Finlayson.  Lots of furniture and crockery are destroyed.  Finally, the vamp confronts Ollie who says that he will shoot her and kill himself -- a revolver has materialized.  The vamp gets knocked unconscious and Ollie and Stan try to spirit her away -- they collude to create a towering figure with the vamp's upper body supported by Stan and Ollie who are hiding under her dress and what appears to be part of a tapestry.  (The grotesque figure surmounted by the floozy's pale, motionless face totters though the house, a genuinely alarming apparition and her form mimics the incriminating picture from the beach.)  Of course, the charade collapses and Ollie's face appears between the vamp's knees (which actually belong to Stan).  The harridan who has warned Mrs. Laurel about the perfidy of men appears with her axe and... (The film seems to be parodying some other movie -- but I can't identify it.)

These films are genuinely funny.  You will laugh out loud.  And they are also grotesque and fearsome.  

Limite

Long thought lost, the Brazilian experimental film, Limite (apparently pronounced "Li mee chee") was reconstructed from elements discovered in 2007.  In its day, the early 1930's, the picture was highly regarded -- it was praised by Orson Welles and said to be admired by Sergei Eisenstein.  (We now know that an effusive article published in London and attributed to Eisenstein was, in fact, authored by the movie's director, Mario Peixoto.)  The movie is nearly impenetrable but striking and employs disconcerting techniques not ventured in cinema, so far as I know, until Godard.  As is the case with many avant garde productions, history never caught up with Limite's expressive innovations and the picture represents a cul-de-sac -- Peixoto wrote poems and published criticism but he never made another movie (although apparently not for want of trying).  The film is too daunting to have been popular with anyone but intellectuals of the most rarefied order and the movie, although stylistically brilliant, didn't found a school and has no imitators.  (Some of the peculiar stylistic features of the film -- for instance, an emphasis on close shots of people's feet and legs as they walk are characteristic of the movies made by Robert Bresson, the great French director; but Peixoto's film doesn't seem to have influenced the later movie-maker; Bresson's predilection for showing people's feet when they walk or run is an independent invention.)  Because the film is Brazilian, weirdly non-narrative, unseen even by most cinephiles and made as a silent picture -- although it has a florid score featuring Debussy, Franck and other late Romantic composers -- it's a dead end.  The sort of  histrionic acting that the movie uses, it's montage effects, and high-contrast black-and-white, sometimes used in negative form, are all characteristics of a late twenties avant-garde that died out without producing much in the way of successors; sound film engendered a different kind of avant-garde, although some aspects of Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon superficially resemble imagery and photographic practices in Limite.    

After an image of vultures squabbling on a rock, the movie begins with a series of shots showing an open boat sweltering in glassy motionless water.  A woman sits upright at the front of the boat, gazing into the silky smooth distance.  A man is slumped in the middle of the boat, bent over an immobile oar.  A woman, who seems to be either dead or asleep, rests at the back of boat.  The image resembles Eakins with reflections cast upon the still water.  The boat seems to be far out at sea -- there's no land visible on the horizon.  The film explores this curious tableaux from various angles, including ultra close-ups of the two women and the man in the boat.  Then, the movie cuts to a woman seemingly behind some kind of barred window.  Various close-ups, some hard to interpret, show the woman reaching through the bars and a lock being opened.  The camera, then, tracks behind the woman as she emerges from the building and walks down a shabby-looking street that has the typical closed-off and enigmatic appearance of a Latin American residential neighborhood, all crumbling walls with no  windows.  Close-ups feature the woman's legs and feet as she walks away from what we learn later is a jail.  (Someone is reading a newspaper in which an article about a jail-break is featured.)  As the woman advances into the landscape, she leaves the town and the road becomes a pale country lane -- these shots have a tremendous sense of presence and the landscape seems to brood heavily over the rural thoroughfare.  The woman turns away to the left, but the camera ignores her motion and continues to advance along the road for a dozen yards or so before turning to the left where we expect to see the character -- instead, the camera shows a desolate field of cut sugar cane with shaggy dark mountains hanging over the sharp-looking stubble in the foreground.  The camera, then, tracks back without a cut to where the woman is discovered apparently despairing and slumped over a kind of turnstile leading into the sugar cane field.   The forward motion of the camera after the woman has moved to the left and, apparently, just bent down over the turnstile is one of the most spectacularly pointless camera maneuvers that I have ever seen -- this sort of thing would not be done until Godard's Weekend, thirty five years later, a film in which some scenes feature an untethered camera that more or less wanders away from the figures that it is supposed to be filming.  Limite, then, shows us a series of enormous close-ups of enigmatic objects -- they turn out to be scissors and other equipment used in the garment industry.  A woman is working on sewing something.  After many shots of her labor, often cubist in their appearance, we see this woman move from the dark cubicle where she is working and out onto the same ghostly and deserted lane where the other woman was walking -- it's obvious that these are the two women from the boat although whether these are flash-backs or flash-forwards or merely abstract formal interpolations is unclear.  The movie encourages us to read the images as narrative but we don't have any sense for the plot that we are shown.  There's a huge close-up of a painfully dying fish intercut with images of the man and two women becalmed at sea.  The dying fish turns out to be in a fish-market where the sewing woman is getting groceries -- she carries a bag back to a dismal-looking house where the young man from the boat, still completely morose and inert is sitting on the steps waiting for her.  These shots are interrupted by a repeated image of the camera rapturously swinging up to peer at a rivulet of water trickling from a dark hole in pylon.  (It seems to be some kind of fountain).  The sad young man turns out to be a pianist who plays in a local movie theater -- in fact, we see him tickling the ivories during a Chaplin film featuring the star as a criminal clawing  his way out of the earth to escape f rom a prison.  This image reminds us that one of the women has somehow escaped from some kind of jail.  (Somehow, the movie manages to make the Chaplin movie look sinister and bleak.)  Many of the shots are cut together in ways that don't match -- for instance, one of the women (you can't really tell them apart) meets the man in the middle of the sunbaked street; there's a low-angle shot showing them in a confrontation with a huge utility pole towering between them.  But other shots don't show the utility pole at all -- the editing suggests an encounter but the topography of the meeting between the man and woman changes according to the camera angle.  In one shot, a woman looks out over the bay with a picturesque clump of yucca in the foreground.  But other shot don't show the yucca at all or we see the distinctive plant somewhere completely different from its location suggested in what appears to be the "master shot" of the woman and the terrain around her.  Two lover are walking down the dusty lane in the twilight -- the camera suddenly forgets about them and drifts to the side to show a flower, and not even a particularly impressive flower (it's more like a tattered dandelion).  This sort of thing is startling and, at times, the film seems to anticipate the mise-en-scene in Terence Malick's films, a battle scene suddenly interrupted while the camera scrutinizes a butterfly or an orchid that just happens to be at the edge of the action.  The malaise on the open boat seems to be getting worse.  The boat is now leaking.  Two young men meet in a barren cemetery -- the scene seems to have homosexual implications but, ultimately, one of the young men accuses the other of "possessing a woman who is not (his) own".  There are no clues as to what is going on between the men -- one of them has removed a wedding ring from  his hand but we don't know why.  Everyone in the picture looks like everyone else -- the young men are wearing eerily identical suits, although one guy has very neatly combed hair and the other man sports an unruly mop a bit like Eisenstein's coiffure.  As the men walk away from the cemetery, one following the other, the camera whips through some underbrush in a dizzying blur, a shot repeated maybe five or six times.  There's a woman on a broken down pier and she's contemptuously eating something and, perhaps, spitting out seeds.  Who is she?  One of the young men confronts the sneering woman.  Then, we see the ecstatically spinning landscape of underbrush again, but this time slowed down so we can pick out individual twigs and branches.  One of the men has soiled his suit by staggering through a muddy lagoon -- his legs and dress shoes look filthy.  A long sequence follows in which the man walks from place to place viewed through two open windows in a building next to the luxuriantly wooded bay -- the shot exists merely to show that the figure can be seen from different perspectives from the water-side structure (appearing as black frames around the outdoor scene shown through the two window openings).  The man collapses next to a barb wire fence and the camera inspects the wires and their barbs and, then, noodles around in the sky for a minute or so, picturing various cloud formations. About six minutes of turbulent water follows,  shots showing waves seeming to smash into one another and, then, we are back on the boat of misery, now obviously sinking -- the man leaps into the sea and vanishes.  There's more shots of rolling sea and, then, the camera shows us the woman in white clinging morosely to a spar.  The little boat has also vanished.  The film ends as it began with the mysterious shot of the woman glaring at the camera and raising her gilded handcuffs (they look like jewelry) up to the camera.  There's a shot of sun spangling water and, then, the film's opening image:  sinister-looking vultures in silhouette gathered on top of a rock.  

Although the viewer waits for a narrative to emerge from these materials, Peixoto steadfastly withholds anything like a plot.  Indeed, it becomes evident (I can't say "clear") that the images in the film don't really  illustrate a story, but, instead, are ciphers for emotional states -- apparently, images for depression, a sense of entrapment, the water representing turbulent, if unidentified emotions.  The boat, at first seems to be the sequel of some kind of shipwreck but gradually is revealed as an allegory for emotional stasis or paralysis.  (It may be, of course, that the woman in white has lured her unfaithful lover and his girlfriend out onto the sea to destroy them -- but we don't ever see her taking any hostile action and this is just conjecture;  indeed, the man voluntarily leaps overboard and we don't know what happened to the other woman.)  Possibly, the film has something to do with the cinema itself and the way that it shapes our expectations:  toward the end of the movie, a man is shown in a repeated scene buying a ticket, apparently to the movie theater -- this would seem to be someone other than the pianist who plays for the silent shows (wouldn't he be admitted free of charge?)  It's hard not to see in this shot some suggestion that the audience has been duped -- they have bought a ticket expecting to see a juicy melodrama involving two women fighting for a Latin lover and, instead, are treated to two-hours plus of giant closeups (in one shot, we literally peer up the nose of the woman), seascapes, and the melancholy deserted fishing village in the cove.  The Chaplin film briefly projected in the movie house implies certain expectations that the film seems conceived to thwart.  Everyone is engaged in some kind of flight, a sort of prison-break from the constraints of narrative.  The idea seems to be that Peixoto, instead of a narrative, simply provides us with the turbulent emotions that would accompany such a story -- the story is suppressed and what we see are its emotional values, the traces that it might leave on our feelings.  

The film is impressive, mostly clear, although there's about a five minute sequence close to the beginning convulsed by celluloid decay.  Limite had no commercial run -- it was too puzzling to be shown in Brazilian cinemas.  The picture was projected by various film clubs for many years, but gradually rotted away -- the nitrate film stock ended up decomposed into illegibility.  It took three years for the movie to be restored with funds from the Martin Scorsese World Cinema Foundation (the work was done by Cinema Ritrovatta in Bologna).  Like most experimental films, Limite seems far too long and suffers from an inflated sense of its own importance.  But it is an unusual film and beautifully made and worth, I think, puzzling over.  

 

The Dead Don't Die

 Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die (2019) is a completely unnecessary film,  It's amiable and pleasant to see well-known performers put through their paces, but the movie is a low-energy affair (this is part of its shambolic charm) and it's hard to figure out why the film was made.  Presumably, the cast enjoyed making the movie, but this seems an insufficient reason to invest in a production of this sort.  The Dead Don't Die is a zombie horror film, although not really frightening and it simply recycles things done much more ferociously in other pictures that take the genre seriously.  Jarmusch doesn't take this seriously and there are ironic "air quotes" around most of the film's standard zombie scenes.  But the film isn't a full-blown comedy by any means and it's imagery, although not too scary, is pretty horrific.  The kinds of people who will pay money to see a movie by Jim Jarmusch aren't likely to be fans of the horror genre and so the movie plays like a zombie picture for people who would never watch a movie of that sort.  As a consequence, lots of scenes from other movies are just reprised in this film -- Jarmusch seems confident that his target audience of aging hipsters won't have seen other zombie films and, therefore, won't recognize the stuff that he steals from those pictures.  The film is very slip-shod -- it doesn't have much of an ending or climax and some characters seem to be simply forgotten.  Jarmusch seems to have worked hard to get all of his buddies in the film and so it has a large cast -- but, as a result, almost all the parts are underwritten to the point of being mere sketches for characters, the sort of thing you might see on Saturday Night Live.  Jarmusch has been in horror-territory before -- his film Only Lovers Left Alive was about vampires living in ruined mansions in Detroit:  the vampire mythos involving love and death is far more profound in its implications than the rather vulgar and dull conceit that motivates zombie pictures and, I thought, Jarmusch's deadpan but intrinsically passionate approach to his lonely lovelorn vampires was moving and, even, profound.  The Dead Don't Die plays as a shaggy dog story, a tossed-off joke that isn't really funny and that seems wholly superfluous.

Bill Murray plays Cliff, a small-town cop, sort of like Sheriff Andy of upstate New York.  Cliff's deputy is Ronnie (Adam Driver).  The two cops patrol a tiny town in a wooded area.  The town seems to consist of one long avenue that runs between various businesses where the film's action takes place --  there's a gas station that also implausibly sells movie memorabilia and comic books, a diner,, a hardware store, a motel, the police station, and a correctional facility for teenagers. On a side street, we see a funeral parlor run by an unearthly seeming Tilda Swinton -- she claims to be from Scotland and speaks with a rich brogue but prays to the Buddha and has a rack full of samurai swords in her backroom.  A hermit lives in the woods -- he's played by Tom Waits in a beard with shaggy hair that makes him look like Bert Lahr's cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz.  Waits' character watches the action with binoculars and mutters under his breath various comments on the zombie apocalypse -- none of them are original or interesting:  it's all a critique of consumerism as far as the hermit is concerned, a point made with far more style in George Romero's pictures.  Polar fracking, whatever that means, has knocked the earth off its axis and the days seem to last forever.  For some reason, this phenomenon causes the dead to claw their way out of their graves and, of course, they are hungry, hankering to eat the living.  The film observes all of this mayhem with scarcely amused deadpan equanimity.  Friends of the director appear briefly in the film, but are wasted -- I mean this literally:  they appear only to be killed.  For instance, Rosie Perez has a brief part, but zombies eat her.  Carol Kane plays the corpse of an old drunk -- she is resurrected muttering "Chardonnay" only to be beheaded.  Iggy Pop plays a zombie obsessed with coffee -- he repeats the word ten times or so before he has his head blown off.  Steve Buscemi plays a farmer who wears a hat styled on Trump's MAGA caps -- the  zombies eat him about midway through the movie and he really doesn't play much of a part in the film; he's the local curmudgeon and White supremacist and he gets, more or less, what he deserves.  Adam Driver and Bill Murray seem to be phoning their parts in -- they don't care much about the proceedings and the humor in the situation is that neither of them seems much perturbed about the dire situation.  The only actor in the proceedings who takes the film seriously is Chloe Sevigny as a female cop -- she's suitably terrified by the ghastly proceedings and weeps and cowers in an effective display of real terror. (At one point, she even vomits.)  But her naturalistic acting seems out of place in a film that otherwise doesn't take itself seriously.  Adam Driver's Ronnie keeps saying that things "won't turn out well" -- when the Sheriff asks him how he knows this, Ronnie says that he's read the script:  "Jim had me read the whole thing," Ronnie says.  This makes Bill Murray mad and he says that Jarmusch only had him read the scenes in which he was involved -- a snarky comment that doesn't make sense in the context of the film because, if Bill Murray would have read all his scenes, he would know that Ronnie is right:  it doesn't turn out well.  Some "hipsters from Cleveland" show up -- it's a couple of boys and Selena Gomez.  They check into the motel.  Ronnie notes that Selena Gomez'  character "is from Mexico" -- he knows this because he likes Mexican people and has been to Mexico twice.  These "hipsters from Cleveland" don't play much of a part in the film -- they get eaten before we even find out what they doing crossing the country in a vintage car that is said to be "very Romero" (referring to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.)  Everyone gets eaten and Tilda Swinton, who turns out to be a space alien, beheads thirty or forty zombies before being transported into a UFO and, thereby, departing from the movie.  Everyone talks about a country-western musician named Sturgill Simpson -- he's heard on the radio crooning a song called, as you might expect, "The Dead Don't Die" with the refrain:  "The afterlife is over/ But the afterlife goes on."  When Ronnie hears this on the radio of the squad car, he cheerfully says:  "That's the theme song."  In the end, Ronnie and Cliff emerge from their besieged cop car to battle the army of zombies.  They go down fighting.  Sturgill Simpson's song  is played agailn and the movie is over.  The only survivors seem to be three disaffected kids from the correctional facility -- their guards have been eaten by the monsters and the last thing we hear them say is "Let's go hide somewhere."  The film is modestly enjoyable but it feels like an "in joke", that is, a "hipster joke" -- one of the graves in the cemetery bears the name Samuel Fuller, of course, the well-known American director who transfigured schlock into art and a mentor to Jim Jarmusch.    

The Way of a Gaucho

 In Jacques Tourneur's The Way of a Gaucho (1952), someone says:  "He's a fool, but very gaucho!"  This assertion epitomizes the theme of this rather curious film:  Gauchos are intractably stubborn, courageous, and bound by an iron code of honor.  Tourneur sees his hero, and their kind, as insufferable, but, also, noble.  But the gaucho way is doomed.  At one point, a saturnine Richard Boone playing Salazar, a military officer, sentences the film's hero to ten lashes for "ignorance of history" -- this means that the gaucho way of life, featuring much galloping about and knife fighting, is passing away and that it is useless to oppose the course of history.  (Of course, this is a time-honored theme in American Westerns particularly those directed by Sam Peckinpah -- the film anticipates in some ways, The Wild Bunch and The Ballad of Cable Hogue and, of course, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a  movie that ends on the last frontier of the Andes foothills.)  The movie is exciting and features fascinating landscapes of a kind that are unfamiliar to North American landscapes -- although, in point of fact, the west in Argentina looks recognizably like the American west. The movie represents an odd compromise -- a somewhat childish theme is developed with Tourneur's customary eloquence and sophistication.  Visually, the film is impressive and its imagery tracks its ideas -- the movie begins with a frieze of hard-riding gauchos galloping hell-for-leather across an endless, featureless pampas; the movie ends with complicated shots full of walls and formal gardens, cloisters and black carriages at a crumbling monastery.  The gauchos, in the first scene, call the couch rolling toward the estancia where some of the action takes place, a "hearse".  In the end, the hero consents to be arrested and imprisoned -- the freedom of the vast open plains has been cabined and its centaur-like hero locked away in a prison. (Tourneur equates civilization with death -- in a scene near the end of the film, the hero escapes from a posse hunting him during an elaborate funeral conducted at an ancient crumbling cathedral.) 

The Way of a Gaucho begins with a reunion.  Miguel, the son of an old gaucho rancher, has returned from the city to his estancia.  His foster-brother, Martine, the hero of the movie, greets him with a mixture of contempt and warmth -- Martine accuses him of become soft and bringing to the pampas city ways.  Tourneur doesn't let the film linger -- within five minutes or so, Martine has killed a man in a knife fight (a dispute over an insult, and he is in jail.  (It's a rather commodious jail in which another gaucho sings a mournful minor key song while strumming his guitar -- when Martine sardonically suggests that the man has been jailed for his crimes against music, the other guy says:  "I've killed men for less", suggesting the insane code of honor to which these men subscribe).  Martine is spared jail on the basis of being sent to a remote and primitive army encampment -- it's like a rudimentary Fort Apache made of thorny twigs and mud and, in fact, there's an Indian war underway.  Martine clashes with the educated and cynical Salazar, the commander, and ends up being flogged and, then, tortured by being exposed to the sun staked out in a corral.  Some of the other soldiers, including the guitar player from jail, free the delirious Martine who promptly challenges Salazar to a knife fight.  Salazar tries to shoot Martine but gets slashed across his forearm, a wound that disables him and renders his right hand useless.  Martine then escapes to the Andes foothills and leads a band of outlaws who may be allied with the hostile Indians (this is a bit unclear.)  The outlaws attack a group of cavalry escorting railroad workers to the frontier and hurl their ties and rails into a huge muddy river flowing between barren cliffs.  This exciting sequence is scored to some of the best music I've ever heard in a movie -- a  sort of thumping, galloping melody that is underscored by wild squealing chromatic scales.  The plot is a little bit redundant.  Martine first deserts the army after a battle with the Indians fought in a wide, dusty dry river-bed.  (South American Indians are, more or less, identical to the Ogallala Sioux and Cheyenne in John Ford's cavalry movies -- they are great horsemen, wear impressive head-dresses, and carry feathered lances.)  While fleeing the cavalry, Martine comes upon an Indian who has a maiden literally slung across his saddle.  Martine kills the Indian and rescues the woman, Theresa, played by the fabulously beautiful Gene Tierney.  Theresa turns out to be pious and, after some exquisite day-for-night scenes, that suggest the filigree light and shadow of Joseph von Sternberg, Martine returns her to the estancia where he is, then, captured by Salazar and taken back to the army camp to be tortured (these are the scenes with Rory Calhoun as the gaucho spread-eagled and enjoying the blazing sun with a big tarantula for company.)  After his second desertion, Martine and Theresa who are now "married" in their own eyes (and she's pregnant), try to cross the Andes into Chili.  They get to a snowy and barren pass where Theresa collapses -- we see her kneeling to a humble cross on a cairn among the blue-grey glaciers.  Martine takes her back to Argentina where he tries to persuade a priest to marry them -- this is the priest who taught Martine and Miguel to read.  Salazar is nosing about, eager for revenge because of his damaged right hand, and he chases Martine back into the wilderness.  Miguel's role in all of this is unclear and the part is under-written -- the film sets him up as a rival for the love of Theresa, but this putative plot never really develops.  (The fact is that the movie recognizes Martine and Theresa as a "married couple" at least in the eyes of God and, since she's pregnant with Martine's child, Miguel really never gets a shot at her.)  There's another big horse chase with Miguel participating.  Martine escapes by riding through a huge herd of cattle and stampeding them -- this results in spectacular shots of a sea of horned beasts tumbling across the screen while tiny lone horsemen try to head them off.  Miguel gets trapped in the herd and crushed to death by the stampede.  Martine escapes, but realizes in the end that the gaucho way is doomed.  He turns himself in to Salazar who seems inclined to forgive and forget -- after all, Martine was only following the archaic and heroic gaucho way -- and Salazar may be returning a favor:  Martine spared his life a half hour earlier when he caught hm in an ambush in the Sierra foothills.  Martine admits that he was a fool not to be persuaded to give up the gaucho way of life and, even, acknowledges that Salazar was trying to talk him into living in a more domesticated and rational way.  The film's ending is another curiosity:  everything seems aimed to deliver a climactic duel between Salazar and Martine, but fighting is avoided; Salazar doesn't try to kill Martine and the gaucho agrees to go to jail for three years.  And, on this anti-climactic note, the film ends.

The movie is impeccably shot and very exciting.  It can afford to end on a dying fall because of the effectively staged action sequences that precede the denouement.  The picture is full of vast landscapes:  huge desert canyons on the flanks of the Andes, endless flat prairie ("I can ride a horse for a hundred miles without turning its head"), badlands that look a bit like the wilderness around Lone Pine in California with the white summits of the mountains towering over the moonscape of rocks and gulches, and, of course, the huge mountain vistas in the scenes in the pass.  There are oddities -- for instance, in one scene, the gaucho snatches huge eggs from an ostrich nest and people fight with bolos.  Why are there ostriches on the pampas?  The men stand on horse back to survey the distant horizons (we see a small boy doing this in an opening scene) and, in one memorable sequence, the hero stands on his horse, gazes around, and, then, drops into his saddle effortlessly and gallops away, a spectacular feat of horsemanship.  There are some florid poetic speeches, implausible but, perhaps, intended to seem "translated from the Argentine Spanish" and everyone is very Catholic.  This is a large-scale and effective Western, with an intelligent if a bit repetitive script, and well worth watching.  

Mank

Regrettably, Netflix's highly promoted  new film, Mank, isn't too good.  The picture is handsomely produced and features Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who wrote Citizen Kane.  Mank is carefully written itself, replete with aphorisms and bon mots that resemble things that Oscar Wilde might have said if he were a tough-guy New York Jew.  The film is ambitious and its gleaming Art Deco black and white  photography is streamlined and sleek, but, ultimately, the subject matter is simply too thin to support a two-hour plus movie.  Mankiewicz, a chronic alcoholic, wrote Citizen Kane, a script for which Orson Welles later claimed the lion's share of credit, while recovering from a broken leg in a remote sanitarium at Victorville, California.  Mankiewicz was flat on his back and heavily medicated (it seems Welles and RKO had provided him with a crate of booze laced with Seconal) and, of course, the work of a writer, most of which takes place in the imagination, is essentially invisible.  There's no edifice constructed before our eyes, just an ever-increasing number of typed pages, and scriptwriting in these circumstances is, more or less, solitary work.  Therefore, for much of the movie, Mankiewicz has no one with whom to trade witticisms -- he's mostly isolated, surrounded by women who minister to his physical needs as an invalid but don't necessarily have anything interesting to say to  him.  From time to time, we see him on the phone conversing with the arrogant and unpleasant Welles and John Houseman from the Mercury Theater hectors him from time-to-time about his progress and his drinking.  Accordingly, the heavy lifting in the movie has to take place in flashbacks.  These interpolations into the present (1940 and Mankiewicz confined to the sanitarium) are overly explicit -- each signaled by a glimpse of the script for Mank helpfully establishing the date, the location, and that what we are seeing is a "flashback" (it's written right on the page).  The flashbacks relate to Mankiewicz's relationship with Louis B. Mayer at MGM and, then, his encounters with William Randolph Hearst, and his mistress, Marion Davies at San Simeon, seemingly the source of the scandalous material about the great muckraking newspaper tycoon retailed in Kane.  These flashbacks which take place at the height of the Depression in 1934 and later in 1936, an election year in which Mankiewicz supported the Socialist candidate Upton Sinclair against the Republican, Merriam, in the California gubernatorial race.  Too much has been politicized these last few years and the film doesn't do itself any favors by implying that Sinclair v. Merriam is an analogy for Biden v. Trump.  Clearly some equivalences are emphasized by the film -- Sinclair is tarred with the label of Socialist and the Merriam campaign relies heavily on lies and deceit, that is, carefully contrived deceit broadcast to the voting public.  (Probably, when the film was produced, the director David Fincher thought that Bernie Sanders might be the Democratic presidential candidate, thus making the equation between the self-proclaimed Socialist Sinclair and Sanders even more overt.)  The Republican campaign, backed by Louis B. Mayer working as henchman for the suave William Randolph Hearst, is a surrogate for the Trump campaign and the Conservative party gets itself involved in all sorts of skullduggery, including saying that if Sinclair won the election a horde of transient hobos would destroy property in the suburbs -- pronouncements that echo some of what was argued by Trump in his campaign. (San Simeon stands in for Mar-a-Lago).  The problem is that this subplot, involving arcana from California politics now more than 80 years ago isn't too interesting and, in fact, seems somewhat unrelated to the principal plot involving Mankiewicz' labor on the Kane script.  In fact, the political subplot is necessary to the narrative but for a reason that tends to undercut the entire film and that, in fact, demonstrates more than a little bad faith in the screenwriter for Mank.  (The script is probably as good as it can be, given the inherently non-dramatic narrative -- an aging drunk lying in bed and., sometimes, dictating to a female amanuensis.  But it's full of holes, tries way to hard to make its points -- as witness the political subplot -- and simply unconvincing.  Jack Fincher, the director David Fincher's father, wrote the scenario and, despite the wealth of period detail, and inside Hollywood lore, the story simply doesn't work on any level -- the dialogue is too clever and snarky by half and, ultimately, the audience wonders if there is a there there -- and there isn't; the whole thing ends up being weirdly inconsequential.)

Here is the film's big problem.  Mankiewicz, who is treated with kid gloves and imagined to be a sort of secular saint, in fact, is an unattractive character.  First, he's a hopeless drunk.  The film shows Mankiewicz as gallant in a doomed sort of way, but watching an alcoholic destroy himself (and those around him) is a questionable sort of entertainment.  (And the film traffics in offensive cliches -- when Mankiewicz stalls out during his work on the script, his female assistants at the Farm get him a crate of booze; fueled by excellent bourbon, Mank overcomes his problems with the script and, while drunk, does his best work.  This view of alcoholism is as archaic as John Wayne pouring beer into Dean Martin in Rio Bravo to dry him out -- the bottom of the narrative falls out and we find ourselves in the 1950's swilling martinis as a aid to esthetic endeavor.)  Second, Mankiewicz betrays his friendship with both Marion Davies, who is shown to genuinely like the sourpuss screenwriter, and Hearst himself.  Hearst admires = Mank and has him sit next to him at his feasts in San Simeon and, in fact, the mogul seems like a reasonably nice guy.  Of course, he has Marion Davies' love, authentic it seems, to vouch for him.  So, it seems inexcusable that Mank would betray the old man and attempt to humiliate him on-screen -- "rosebud" as the film notes was, possibly, Hearst's pet name for his wife's clitoris.  What Mankiewicz does seems objectively unreasonable and, probably, inexcusable -- he's been feted by the old man who has put up with his offensive drunkenness and, then, turns around and betrays him by proffering all sorts of scandalous rumor in the public marketplace.  It's an unsavory spectacle.  Finally, Mankiewicz has signed a contract with RKO providing that Welles would be given full credit for the script.  The climax of the movie, which is supposed to be its triumphant ending, involves Mankiewicz breaching the agreement, much to the rage of the egotistical and offensive Orson Welles.  But the fact is that a contract is a kind of promise and Mankiewicz was paid to write the script and attribute it to Welles and his decision to breach the agreement seems morally (and legally) questionable.  It's an odd film that has for its high point a man breaching an agreement that he has made in writing for purely self-aggrandizing reasons.  So how do the Finchers, pere et filles, contrive to make a treacherous drunk the hero of the film?  This is where the apparently extraneous political subplot figures in the scheme of the film.  Mayer and Hearst's political opposition to Sinclair is made to seem so vicious that it gives Mankiewicz the right (even the obligation) to torpedo the newspaper tycoon.  Mank's bad conduct is excused, as it were, by the wretched, politically savage carnage inflicted on Upton Sinclair by the head of MGM and Hearst.  But a moral argument of this sort, which the film is really too ashamed to present outright, makes no sense.  Two wrongs don't make a right as I'm sure your mother informed you long ago.  The same strategy is employed to excuse Mankiewicz' nasty breach of promise to Welles.  Orson Welles is portrayed as so vain and ludicrous that, of course, Mankiewicz has every right to betray him as well.  In this respect, the film also hedges its bets by showing that having the authorship of Citizen Kane attributed to Mankiewicz causes him to be the subject of various threats -- in the last part of the movie, various characters try to talk Mankiewicz out of allowing the movie to be produced.  But none of this makes any sense because there's no indication that Mank has any ability to keep RKO or Welles from producing the movie he has written.  Therefore, efforts by Marion Davies to cajole him into somehow queering the project -- as well as Joe Mankiewicz and Charles Lederer, also begging him to stop the production -- seem completely unwarranted:  what is Mank supposed to do to preclude the film to stop Kane from reaching theaters?  The entire picture, accordingly, is designed to vindicate Mank's questionable behavior both with respect to betraying his friend William Randolph Hearst and, then, reneging on his contract with Welles.  Curiously, enough the film doesn't really make the only argument that could be plausibly advanced on this topic -- that is, that genius has its own prerogatives.  Wagner was a swine but he wrote great music.  Mankiewicz is a fickle drunk but this doesn't mean that he wasn't a great artist as well.  But this justification, an argument that I might accept, is no longer viable in a world that has canceled Garrison Keillor, Woody Allen, and Roman Polanski for their bad behavior -- an artist's work is no longer reliably regarded as distinct from his life and, therefore, Fincher doesn't dare excuse Mank on the basis that genius has its privileges, perhaps, unavailable to the rest of us.  (And, in fact, the movie labors ceaselessly to anoint Mank has sexually pure -- he's never tempted by the blandishments of Marion Davies, for instance.  Instead, he remains completely true to his wife who has the thankless role of appearing now and then on the other end of phone conversations.)  A penultimate scene in which Hearst tells a little parable to Mank about an organ grinder's monkey who thought that he was the captain of his fate seems to imitate Welles' predilection for speeches of this kind -- for instance, the fable of the frog and the scorpion in Mr. Arkadin.  But the story is a complete non sequitur:  Mank, in fact, proves it wrong in that he "fights" for his authorship of the script and ends up with an Oscar.  So what's the point of the picturesque fable? 

The film's dialogue is heavily laden with expository information.  It's as if the witticisms are all footnoted so that we know generally what's going on -- the film supposedly makes us privy to the "inside baseball" in early 1940's Hollywood and so information is constantly being spoonfed to the film's viewers.  This results in most of the dialogue sounding strangely pedantic and unconvincing.  Someone says something and, then, we get a quick Cliff's Notes exegesis of what was spoken.  The movie contains scenes that are inexplicably geared to movie cognoscenti -- for instance, we see L.B. Mayer punching Erich von Stroheim because the director had audacity to say to Mayer, a good family man, that he thought his own mother (von Stroheim's) was a whore.  This scene is presented to us, but not explained -- I assume that most viewers will have no idea what is going on.  (It's not helped by the fact that the actor who gets slugged looks nothing like von Stroheim.) The picture is full of references to cinema history:  we see Charlie Chaplin, Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer, and little Shirley Temple even has a line.  (Where is Rin-Tin-Tin or the Lone Ranger's horse?)  Some showy sequences -- for instance, L.B. Mayer demanding that all his stars take a 50% decrease in wages because of the Depression -- are striking but they go nowhere.  (I think the scene is supposed to illustrate the depths of the Depression that the heroic Upton Sinclair is trying to combat -- but showing wealthy movie stars being a little less wealthy is an odd way to make this point.)

Mank  is an ambitious film and viewers will have to make up their own mind about whether it succeeds.  I thought the movie was airless and contrived, a disappointment, but, of course, I approach films from a perspective different from most casual viewers.  And, perhaps, there is something in this picture that eludes me.  My criticism is that the picture is fundamentally phony.  At a couple of points, the black and white film flashes a reel-change signal in the upper right hand of the screen -- this is ostentatiously done.  But I presume the movie is digital in every respect and this signal intended for an imaginary yeomen-projectionist laboring in some imaginary booth in a theater somewhere is as fake, as phony, as everything else in this picture.