Fifty years is a long time measured against the span of a human life. Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon was released in 1973, well-reviewed in its time, and, in facts, a seminal picture. (Wim Wenders hesitated to make Alice in the Cities, a prototype for his later "road movies", when he saw Paper Moon and realized that Bogdanovich had beat him to the punch -- both Alice in the Cities and Paper Moon share a common premise, that is, a man travels about aimlessly with a little girl. Ultimately, Wenders' friends encouraged him to proceed with his project, but the German director recalls that he was discouraged by Bogdanovich's picture and thought that his film would suffer by comparision.) To my shame, I must confess that I have let fifty years pass (Bogdanovich is dead now) before watching the movie. Something about the film's casting and publicity campaign put me off initially. And, of course, I'm a snob, preferring a black and white German picture set in desolate and provincial German villages to a virtually identical black and white American movie staged similarly against a desolate Midwestern background. But, in fact, there is something slightly wrong with Paper Moon and it's not quite as good as its reputation. Based on a novel (Addie Pray), the script for Paper Moon doesn't exactly cohere and the extremely episodic nature of the narrative prevents the picture from attaining any real dramatic force -- it's just one thing after another (as is also true of Wender's comparable film). The acting, particularly Tatum O'Neal in the role of the ten-year old Addie, is often astonishing but there's something slightly hollow and forced about the movie. That said, Paper Moon is an elegant, beautifully filmed example of the American art film and, certainly, not inferior to German or French pictures of this sort -- the existentialist conceit of the hero traveling from one encounter to another in a picturesque wasteland is just as good in American English as it is in German. And, it should also be remembered, that many landmark films of the sixties and seventies are severely episodic and don't necessarily comprise a thematically consistent whole -- consider, for example, La Dolce Vita or Arthur Penn's sprawling Little Big Man. Finally, on the level of its deep structure, Paper Moon's structure is profoundly American -- the film's core is derived from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Paper Moon begins in a treeless and barren cemetery where the ten-year-old Addie's mother, apparently the town prostitute, is being buried. The woman was killed in a drunk driving accident (she was apparently riding with an inebriated client) and no one in the area dares come to her obsequies. Ryan O'Neal, playing Mose, an itinerant con-man appears belatedly, nonchalantly swooping up a bouquet from another dusty grave, to deposit the flowers atop the dead whore's casket. The long shot showing Mose approaching the pathetic little funeral (there is a pastor, the little girl, and one middle-aged woman in attendance), and, then, stealing the bouquet, exemplifies the film's casual but precise mise-en-scene: we see exactly what the director needs us to see, but, nothing, is amplified or exaggerated for effect -- it's all loosely, but perfectly staged and deliberately de-dramatized in the best European art film manner. (In fact, this may be the problem with the film -- it's so tastefully reticent that it never gains much emotional force.) The middle-aged woman at the graveside wants Mose to take Addie to her aunt in St. Joseph, Missouri -- they are somewhere in the middle of Kansas -- and, in fact, accuses him of being her real father (based on the "jaw-line"). This becomes a motif in the film; Addie wonders which of her mother's admirers is her actual father -- she accuses Mose of having met her mother "in a barroom" as if this establishes his paternity. Mose takes the child from the cemetery and confronts the man (or his father) who was involved in the accident that killed the woman. He extorts $200 from the man and, then, plots to put Addie on a train to St. Joseph. But Addie has heard that Mose settled her wrongful death case for $200 and demands that she be paid that money. To placate the child, Mose says he'll take her by car to St. Joseph. But, along the way, he needs to do some business, that is, run some cons to finance their trip. (Mose's principal grift is to use the newspaper to identify local widows, go to their homes, and pretend to deliver specially customized -- that is, engraved -- Bibles to them. The widows are flattered that their deceased husband had ordered a Bible in their name, although, of course, this is a fraud, and are willing to pay ten bucks or so for the scriptures.) Addie is no fool and she quickly grasps that the "widow" grift can be exploited for better pay -- it just depends on how wealthy the widow shows herself to be -- and she masters the art of conning these grief-stricken women, jacking up the price in cases in which wealth is apparent. Conversely, Addie has a conscience and won't implement the grift on widows with many children living in poverty. (A lot of people are living in apparent poverty in this film set during the heart of the Great Depression). Addie masters some of Mose's other cons, including some elaborate techniques to short-change hapless small-town merchants and, with her assistance, the two make a lot of money. Addie keeps the ill-gotten loot in a cigar box and manages the pair's business accounts. Pretty soon, the objective of getting Addie back to St. Joe is forgotten as the pair travel about the dusty midwest cheating people. Mose is not too bright. At a county fair, he picks up another hooker, Trixie Delight (played by Madeline Kahn); she's working at a sideshow as a hootchy-cooch dancer, the "Harem Slave". Trixie has a thirteen year old maid, a much-bullied Black girl, and the two women become participants in Mose's travels. Mose is enamored with Trixie and loses all perspective on their more profitable criminal activities. So Addie and the Black girl conspire to get a smarmy, grinning hotel desk clerk in bed with Trixie -- the man flashes a grill of buck-teeth that make him look like a rodent. Mose is outraged when he catches them in flagrante delicti and abandons Trixie and her maid (Addie has given the girl thirty dollars to get back to her people in the South). A few months pass. Mose observes a bootlegger working out of a small-town hotel and contrives to sell the crook's own whiskey to him for $625, a king's ransom at the time. Unfortunately, the bootlegger is in cahoots with the county sheriff (his brother) and the cops arrest Mose and Addie. They escape and Bogdanovich stages a superbly crafted and very thrilling chase scene. Mose has to swap out cars to continue his escape and this leads to a farcical "wrassling" match with a very young Randy Quaid as a malign hillbilly. (Mose cheats of course). Mose and Addie get across the bridge into Missouri but the Kansas sheriff and his deputy pursue them in a free-lance capacity and deliver a beating to Mose (taking all their money for a good measure.) Mose deposits Addie with her officious and kind aunt in St. Joe. But, like Huckleberry Finn, Addie can't be tamed and isn't suited for a domestic life -- she rejoins Mose and, presumably, their adventures will continue as they "light out for the territories". The final shot embodies the film's sophisticated sensibility but, also, its alienating effects. Addie joyously climbs into Mose's rattle-trap truck and they roll down a hill, driving toward a vast deserted landscape where the road runs out ahead of them to the grim and dusty horizon. The shot signifies freedom. But it's also a "freedom that's just another word for nothin' left to lose" in the words of a song of the era. The viewer's response to the "happy ending", accordingly, is complex with existentialist undertones -- what's ahead of the two grifters seems to be just an endless desert.
The movie is brilliantly shot by Laszlo Kovacs. Much of the footage has a documentary appearance; it looks like images by Walker Evans. (The movie was made at Hays, Kansas and St. Joseph, Missouri -- the latter place is a dying provincial city full of marble banks but with completely empty streets; this is where Mose literally runs into a dead end.) The smaller parts are all pitch-perfect, cast with faces that will be familiar to someone of my generation -- although I couldn't identify any of these folks by name. Madeline Kahn is excellent as the somewhat forlorn hooker -- she says at one point that she just wants to get her (famous) "tits in the front seat of the car." She has a great scene with Addie in which she admits that she's always been, more or less, disposable and that the girl should tolerate her because, soon enough, she'll be abandoned. The sorrowful little Black servant is very good -- she didn't have a career really after this movie. Addie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a misnomer because she's actually the star of the film. She plays most of the picture with an impenetrable and obdurate scowl on her face, but there are wonderful sequences in which she behaves like a little girl, including a fine scene in which she looks at a picture of her mother and imitates some of the dead woman's mannerisms. (She also smokes incessantly and turns out to be more corrupt and avaricious than Mose.) The picture is slightly too austere and uncompromising to be wholly successful. But, there's no doubt that it's a highly consequential movie, an excellent film that misses greatness by just the smallest of margins.
No comments:
Post a Comment