Evil does not Exist

Japanese director Ryuchi Hamguichi makes critically acclaimed movies in the international art-house style.  His pictures tend to be very long (for instance, 2021's Drive my car clocking in at three hours) and win awards at festivals.  Evil Does Not Exist (2023) is shorter than his other films, less than two hours long, and intentionally unimpressive.  It's a bleak parable about the commercial exploitation of nature, really just an anecdote with a contrived ending.  The movie is interesting but there is nothing particularly special about it -- perhaps, the film's dour low-key tone is its whole point, but it makes the picture a hard-sell; I'm not sure I would recommend it.  The movie is made to provoke arguments about its enigmatic ending.  But there's not enough heat in this frosty movie to make those arguments particularly robust.  

It's Spring in a mountainous area of Japan, apparently within driving distance of Tokyo.  Some people live in a village of scattered metal cabins with slant roofs -- it looks like a colony of Norwegian or Swedish modernist cottages in a murky, greyish forest.  A man named Tatumi chops and splits wood, patrols the forest looking for ginseng and wild wasabi, and carries water from a unprepossessing stream back to his van for use in a local restaurant.  The water is used for soups with udon and soba noodles and the cafe owner (who is from Tokyo) says that it has a particular efficacy in the food that she prepares,  Tatumi has an eight-year old daughter named Hana who likes to roam the woods looking for fallen pheasant feathers.  Displayed on the walls of Tatumi's house are pictures of him with the child and a woman.  But the woman never appears in the movie and we assume that she had died -- however, the film is elliptical and it is merely an assumption that Tatumi is a widow; maybe, his wife moved away or divorced him.  We don't know.  Tatumi and Hana, while collecting water for the noodle place, find the skeleton of a deer in the forest.  Tatumi tells his daughter that the deer was gut-shot by hunters and died because of its wound.  Sometimes, we hear distant shots -- it's hunting season in these woods.  Hana gives a pheasant feather to an older man, the village's chief, a fellow named Sagura.  Everyone in the hamlet seems related to one another.

A bland-looking mostly silent woman and a slightly older man make a presentation to the villagers on behalf of some sort of talent agency and theatrical group called Playmode.  The company is planning to build a campground, really a sort of luxury hotel, in the forests for "glamping" -- this means "glamor camping."  The place will have comfortable tents, many BBQ pits, and a number of other amenities.  The presentation doesn't go well -- the villagers, including Tatumi, are suspicious.  The plans for the glamping facility are obviously defective -- the sewage system is too small to the number of units.  The BBQ pits will pose a risk of fire in dry weather -- "this place is dry and windy," a woman tells the presenters.  There are a number of other objections which the PR people can't address.  A young man with dyed blonde hair says that Playmode is in a hurry to build because of "subsidies" that will expire.  He gets so angry that he lunges out of his seat, only to be restrained by Tatumi.  The meeting is inconclusive and the villagers remain hostile to the project.  But the chief (or mayor), Sagura seems willing to make a deal -- it just has to be a better deal.  The PR team (the bland woman and the man) return to Tokyo where the boss tells them to get the deal done -- they are told to coopt Tatumi by offering him a job as caretaker for the property.  In fact, there are tax credits or subsidies about to lapse and Playmode is in a hurry to get the Glamping enterprise up and running -- the blonde punk was right.

The woman and man motor back to the village.  They both express dissatisfaction with their lives in Tokyo.  The woman has tried on-line dating with no success.  The man wants to get married and move away from the city.  The couple go Tatumi's house where he is splitting firewood.  (The man whose name is Mayuzimi tries to split logs with limited success but, when he is successful, he is very enthused and muses about moving to the woods to live with the villagers.)  The PR team and Tatumi eat at the noodle place and discuss the project -- the campground is going to be built along a deer path in the woods; deer, Tatumi tells them, are docile until they are pushed into a corner, but will, then, fight fiercely.  The eight-year old Hana is roaming in the woods, lured along the trails by a bird that she is following.  Later, she doesn't return and the villages organize a search party to find her.  Tatumi with  Mayuzimi finds the girl in the twilight -- she is staring at a wounded deer.  (Spoilers here follow.)  It's clear that the child is in danger due to her close proximity to the luxuriantly antlered and dying deer.  But instead of rescuing Hana, Tatumi decides to strangle the inoffensive Mayuzimi.  He throttles the poor guy into unconsciousness.   By the time, he has completed his assault, the deer has apparently gored Hana -- it's vanished and she's lying on the frosty ground with blood coming out her ear.  Tatumi picks up the girl and carries her back to the village.  Mayuzimi revives for a moment and staggers across the icy field but collapses again.  

The ending is intended as a riddle.  But it's an irritating riddle:  Tatumi's obtuse decision to assault Mayuzimi results in his daughter being badly injured, maybe, even killed.  It's obvious that Tatumi identifies with the beleagured deer -- although the animals are mostly passive, they will fight when cornered.  Tatumi apparently thinks that the Glamping proposal has cornered the villagers and triggered there "fight or flight" response.  But Tatumi may also be a malcontent and, even, mentally ill.  When he comes upon the skeletal remains of the deer, he says with confidence that it was "gut-shot" and died for that reason -- but objectively there's no way that he could reach that conclusion on the evidence of the skull and scattered bones.  Presumably Tatumi is projecting hs own anxiety about the Glamping project onto the dead deer.  In fact, the villagers, although opposed to the project, generally keep an open mind about it and seem willing, even anxious, to make a deal.  Clearly, the "chief" or mayor wants the project, which will be economically beneficial to the area, to be implemented.  The mayor says that people living "upstream" must not act irresponsibly to allow their sewage and garbage to pollute the places where people downstream live -- this the ethic by which he lives.  These concerns are embodied in a scene in which the blonde-haired punk, searching for Hana, runs down a slope next to a concrete trench full of water careening over many box-like steps as the creek descends.  It's a somewhat surreal image of water flowing through a rationalized, cube-like concrete trench. 

The film's photography is gloomy (it looks cold and dim) and the landscapes aren't impressive.  The villagers live in nondescript woods split apart by snowy meadows.  The mountain peaks are far away, dusted with snow.  Most of the scenery consists of brush and groves of trees.  The creek that supplies water for the cafe is a just a moist seep in the woods leaking a foot-wide stream down hill.  The people living in this area fancy themselves pioneers -- the woods were first opened up for settlement during the housing shortage after World War II.  But there's no privation and the people have nice-looking cottages and a reasonably well-equipped modern school  Now and then, we see hawks and a couple deer.  The movie goes out of its way to avoid turning the PR team into villains.  The woman and man are polite, listen carefully to the villagers, and, in fact, poor Mayuzimi is murdered when he has decided that he's going to move to the woods and join the villagers --he's sick and tired of the megalopolis.  Hamaguichi directs according the international art house paradigm style -- sequences are filmed in single shots that last three or four minutes (you will see lots of wood being split in this movie); the camera tracks morosely through the woods and there are, at least, four instances of the camera shooting upward into the grey (or moonlit) sky as the camera moves over the forest floor -- ghostly looking twigs and branches make a web overhead.  There are four shots (at least) taken from the back of a moving vehicle looking away from the direction of motion.  Camera set ups are held until people walk out of the frame and, then, the empty shot may linger for another ten seconds.  There are relatively few close-ups and many shots are deliberately inexpressive -- people talk with their backs to the camera or are filmed from great distances that obscure their features as they speak.  The sound design derives from some of Godard's pictures -- changes of scene are signaled by jarring sound cues; music abruptly stops when the film cuts away to another scene and the soundtrack is vivid with the sound of chain saws, cars and trucks starting, the thud of an axe splitting wood, the sounds of birds and flowing water. Most of the compositions feature bluish-grey monochrome highlighted here and there by splashes of bright red -- the paradigm for this is a scene in the woman from Tokyo cuts her finger on a thorn and we see the razor-sharp thorn dripping blood; the wounded deer has a red gouge in its side.  A red ball sits in the lead-colored school yard.  Hamaguichi labors to make nature look as gloomy and uninviting as his urban landscapes.-- it's just patches of snow and a jumble of barren-looking trees and brush.  

The Lady in the Van

 The Lady in the Van is a 2015 film directed by Nicholas Hytner adapting a memoir by the celebrated British playwright, Alan Bennett.  The story, said to be mostly true, concerns a homeless woman who parked the van in which she was dwelling outside of Bennett's flat in Camden Village, a part of London.  The woman told Bennett that she intended to stay near his driveway for three months -- in fact, she lived by his home, in three different iterations of the van, for 15 years up to the date of her death in 1989.  Bennett first wrote an essay about the experience that he, later, expanded into a short book.  Then, he devised a monologue on the subject that was premiered in 1990 and, then, performed on BBC radio as a play in 1999.  The lady in the van, named Mary or Margaret Shepherd was played by Maggie Smith, the celebrated British actress who died on September 27, 2024 at the age of 89.  Smith was famous for her performances in the BBC show Downton Abbey as well as work she did in the Harry Potter films among many other iconic roles.  Smith looks terrible in the movie; her face is gray and she seems emaciated, traipsing about in shapeless filthy clothing.  The script begins with a oratorical cadenza about her bad odor -- she is said to smell like "the inside of an ear" and many other worse things.  A couple shots show excrement attributed to the character and she is said to defecate in a plastic bags that surround her reeking, noisome van.  At one point, Bennett, who is a character in the movie, reproaches himself for paying so much attention to Ms. Shepherd's shit -- a cynical version of himself says that this is because he is "caring" for the elderly female vagrant.  "Caring is all about shit," Bennett tells us.  Smith's performance is uncompromising, the kind of work for which elderly actors are acclaimed for being "brave", and Smith isn't afraid to appear in the worst possible light in this film.  Of course, as a young woman, she was one of Britain's greatest beauties and, so, the film is dispiriting in some respects -- but she imparts a fierce dignity to a character that most of us would turn away from in disgust if we met her on the street.  

The Lady in the Van is highly literate and intelligent.  The script is well-crafted and effective.  The subject matter is slender, however, and the story is tricked-out with some distressing twists and turns; to pad the material into a feature-length movie, Bennett turns the story into an account of his personal struggles as a closeted homosexual man, a lonely and isolated writer, and a devoted son caring for his own mother (who is suffering from senile dementia) in a plot that is posited as parallel to the story about Margaret (or Mary) Shepherd.  Writers, Bennet notes, are in dialogue with themselves -- they talk to themselves and, indeed, what is written on the page is the product of an interior conversation.  Bennett dramatizes this concept by dividing his character into two persons, both, more or less, identical although one is more formally dressed than the other.  Bennett says that one of the versions of himself is the person who has to live his life; the other version is Bennett as writer, an unscrupulous fellow who will use Ms. Shepherd's poverty and mental illness as fodder for his writing.  (The conceit is a little like several pictures involving Truman Capote including the TV show, The Swans and the film Capote.)  The double Bennett's allow the playwright to dramatize his reactions to the vagrant and provide brittle, witty and aphoristic dialogue about the woman -- it's a pretty clever concept and, for the most part, works well.  Mary Shepherd is on the lam -- she believes that she killed a bicyclist in a hit-and-run accident twenty years earlier.  A corrupt cop blackmails her -- this part of the movie seems weirdly obtuse:  is the cop supposed to be a villain and, if so, why is he portrayed so warmly (by the great Jim Broadbent)?  As the film progresses, Bennett provides further information about the homeless woman -- she turns out to have been once an accomplished pianist (she performed at the Proms), a former nun, and an ambulance driver in "blacked-out Kensington during the war."  The people in Camden Village, a very upscale neighborhood (the widow of Ralph Vaughn Williams, the great composer, lives there) are surprisingly accommodating to her and, throughout the movie, everyone behaves with British civility and equanimity.  The only villains in the picture are members of the Catholic Church -- apparently, Shepherd liked playing the piano more than praying when she was a novice nun and, as a result, her vow of obedience included a promise to never play the piano again.  (Toward the very end of the movie, just before her death, Shepherd pays some Chopin on a piano in a care center.)  Bennett contrives the film to depict his clashes with the obdurate, bullying and filthy Shepherd in the context of his own mother's decline -- his mother becomes comatose as the film progresses.  Ultimately, when Shepherd dies, her evil spirit hovering over Bennett is exorcized.  The gay man ends up with a loving partner and the movie has a happy ending the celebrates Alan Bennett becoming well-adjusted at the end of his own life. (Bennett, I should note, is still alive and, often, publishes diary entries in The London Review of Books).  This material is obviously deeply significant to Bennett as witness his extensive engagement with the subject but it's not immediate apparent as to what the movie is supposed to mean.  We see Bennett apparently hiring "rent-boys" throughout the movie -- Shepherd, to whom the concept of homosexuality seems alien, accuses the handsome young men of being "communists."  At the end of the film, Bennett has integrated himself into one figure; he no longer bickers with himself and, in fact, doesn't need to because he has a romantic partner living with him.  

The movie features an excellent cast of BBC character actors.  The picture is effectively filmed.  The whole show is conceived as a struggle against the sentiment that is inherent in the film's conception -- a wacky, eccentric homeless lady teaches a Gay man how to live with bravery and stand in  his own Truth.  To avoid the picture descending into bathos, Bennett and Hytner engineer several gruesome and jarring shocks -- there's a big close-up of human feces stuck on a garbage can and the scene in which Mary Shepherd accidentally kills the bicyclist is gory, with a big gout of blood disfiguring the front of the van.  Clearly Bennett loves this material so much that he can't let go of it -- the movie has three or four endings one after another, including Ms. Shepherd's ascent into heaven, and, in the last scene, we see the real Bennett participating with the movie crew in making the picture.  It's a charming, beautifully written, and inconsequential movie.

Industry

Why are people so angry?  Maybe, it has to do with this political moment and the fractiousness in our Republic.  Perhaps, social media, offering anonymous opportunities for people to rage at one another is partially to blame.  Social media permits non-confrontational confrontations -- that is, you can insult someone over the internet without the risk of getting punched in the nose. Or, maybe, and I venture this hypothesis leavened with some skepticism, indignation is a mainstay of our culture.  We are schooled in rage by the TV programs that we watch.  In the old days, kids got into fights and beat one another up with dismaying regularity.  But, now, physical fights result in police intervention, expulsion from school, and, general consternation that may end up implicating social workers and therapists.  By and large, I suppose that we live in a less violent world, something that is all to the good -- people no longer thrash one another over minor points of personal privilege or engage in duels or entertain themselves by bar-fighting.  But, human aggression, probably, is hard-wired and impossible to ameliorate.  And, so, we now spend our time vicariously enjoying insults and verbal aggression and displays of vehement indignation and anger presented to us on TV.  Cable TV in particular has become the great institute, the university of rage.  This is true of Cable News which operates around the clock to stoke the fires of righteous indignation and outrage.  But it is also apparent in the dramas that are broadcast on cable services like HBO.  And this brings me to a British show, just now concluded on HBO (now called MAX), bearing the title Industry. 

I confess that I have no idea as to the overarching plot of Industry or what it's characters are supposed to be doing.  I don't know why they are always insulting and berating one another.  Ostensibly, these tirades have something to do with the high intensity work place featured in the show, the so-called "industry" on which the program is based.  The characters labor for some kind of investment bank or stock brokerage house, an enterprise called Pierpoint located in the financial district in London.  Everyone in the show is depicted stooping over computer screens glowing with columns of numbers and graphs that show inscrutable indices that go up precipitously and, then, plunge with equal alacrity.  When the graphs show an upward trend, the workers all are jubilant and they engage in ecstasies of florid greed.  When the graph lines plunge, people get suicidal, come to work drunk or stoned on hard drugs such as heroin, and shriek at one another producing interminable rants and tirades.  The show makes no effort to educate its watchers as to what is going on -- presumably, the lines on the computer graphs signify wealth and profit or loss and poverty, but it's totally unclear what is going on.  People speak in impenetrable jargon rendered even more incomprehensible by the English accents that are frequently impossible to decipher.  When they are not at work, the people in the show copulate with one another, go to decadent parties, and howl at one another in rage.  The program has something to do with a concept called "short selling" -- although from time to time, people have tried to explain to me what this means I have been impervious to these explanations.  As far as I can see, "short selling" is some species of quasi-criminal fraud that renders the casino of high finance even more speculative, perilous, and unpredictable.   

As it happens, the episode on which I am reporting as characteristic of this show was the program finale. This wasn't clear to me until the end but the cross-cutting between different characters was supposed to tie-up the plot strands developed in the show.  Hence, the program was fractured into a series of short scenes presented as parallel action -- although I have watched about five of these shows, I can't recall the names of most of the characters and, certainly, have no emotional (or other) investment in them.   In keeping with the program's aggressive anomie, the different plot strands are isolated and feature small groups of characters atomized by their greed into truculent couples or trios -- since the trading floor with the computer plotted profit and loss displays was not operable during this show, there was really no forum in which the different protagonists could interact.  

The episode opens with a conclave of British bankers and Saudi investors insulting one another.  The Saudis ask something like "Why is your imperialism better than ours?" Then, there's a fisherman who gets threatened for some reason by another character.  Two women exchange Baroque insults and, then, blackmail threats.  A tall twit of the kind featured in Monty Python sketches travels around the country with a girl with black-hair called Jasmine.  An Asian guy who is a boss at the enterprise, now owned by the Saudis, gives a pep talk to his workers.  At first, they shout and harass him making snarky comments but his eloquence wins them over -- he expostulates on how greed is good a bit like Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. We learn that a girl's father is some kind of predator.  The twit and the cute black-haired girl have driven to a extravagantly (and comically) huge country estate where someone important lives -- this turns out to be a hirsute tech-bro of some kind  The twit and the girl go for a stroll in the 100 acre garden by the mansion and end up having desperately urgent sex on a bench outdoors -- they claw off each other's clothing.  Then, the girl goes into the vast manor house with its walls covered in acres of medieval tapestry and a gallery of about a hundred Tudor and Elizabethan portraits.  The Tech-Bro, who admits to being a heroin addict, proposes marriage to the black-haired girl who is still, presumably, dripping with the twit's semen.  He's a wealthy guy and she agrees to marry him.  Meanwhile, the two women who have been alternately threatening one another and blackmailing others summon a Pakistani guy into a room and humiliate him with torrents of abuse.  (This is how people fire each other on this idiotic show.)  While the Pakistani pleads for his job, the women call him names including saying that he is a "punter" whatever that means.  Someone ends a conversation with the words:  "I hope you will enjoy feeling your flesh sear in the hell that you have made for yourself."  People get betrayed over some percentage of profits or REI (or some other inscrutable acronym) and hurl insults at one another.  The Asian guy who has given the pep talk and motivated the workers at the company is fired by his Arab masters, although it's not so bad because they give him 20 million dollars severance pay.  Some woman is involved in the Asian guy's firing and he accuses her of betraying him or betraying her own government -- she worked for Pierpoint and, also, for the regime at some point.  There are more tirades and harangues.  One of the two women who tormented the Pakistani (I think) hatches a criminal scheme to do more "short sales", conduct that seems reprehensible but, also, highly lucrative.  The Asian guy bursts into tears on the now-closed trading floor.  A bill collector insults the Pakistani and, then, pulls out a revolver and blows off his blonde girlfriend's head.  The black-haired girl who has agreed to marry the hirsute Tech-Bro is told that her husband-to-be is child molester who has raped 12 year old girls.  No worries -- he's a very wealthy man.  The twit is shown somewhere compromising himself by making another speech about greed.  The End.

As I hope you can see this is pure garbage, wholly unrelated to any kind of plausible social milieu or human psychology.  Everyone just screams at everyone else.  The dialogue is fifty percent threats and abuse.  The show is reasonably entertaining on the basis of its high-voltage charge of sheer, unmitigated rage and vitriol.  Industry is aggressively ugly, shot in shrill close-ups with an incessantly, and pointlessly, moving camera -- it has a soundtrack that sounds either like Mahler or a horror film or a  perky K-pop tune. The thing pushes all your buttons but I'm ashamed I spent so much of my increasingly short life watching this sort of thing.  

Vox Lux

 Brady Corbett's Vox Lux (2018) seems a companion-piece to the director's enigmatic The Childhood of a Leader (2015).  The Childhood of a Leader is all prelude to significance that occurs almost completely off-screen, after the film's final frame.  By contrast, Vox Lux is all postlude -- it concerns events occurring after a mass murder at a school that colors everything that happens in the movie, a grim shadow that darkens the career of the film's protagonist, a pop star who seems similar to Lady Gaga (or possibly the Icelandic Bjork.)  The Childhood of a Leader had a consistent, bleak tone and was all of a piece; it's discordant elements were literally discords -- that is, the wildly ornate score by Scott Walker working against the muted Bresson-style mise-en-scene.  Vox Lux is completely unstable with respect to its subject matter and tone -- the movie seems hellbent on compressing together as many wildly discordant elements as possible:  Vox Lux contains primitive home movies, a plummy orotund narration that sounds like excerpts from a novel by Thackeray (recited in a florid way by Willem Dafoe), a horror film mass shooting followed by a sort of Star is Born rock-and-roll biopic, tense dialogue sequences between mother and daughter that have the flavor of an Ingmar Bergman film, and, finally, an exuberant concert sequence that ends the movie that could have been shot and choreographed by Jonathan Demme (it looks like Stop Making Sense) --  in fact, a closing title informs us that the film is dedicated the late Demme.  What this all means is hard to define and the film luxuriates in ambiguous and confusing mysteries.  The movie that is most similar to Vox Lux is Paolo Sorrentino's equally bizarre This Must be the Place, a picture that stars Sean Penn as a Jewish punk rocker (imitating Robert 
Smith of "The Cure") engaged in seeking revenge for the Holocaust.  As with Vox Lux, your reaction is some variant of "What the fuck?"

The film's heroine, Celeste, is first seen in home-movies prancing around for her father's camera -- this would be pretty ordinary except for a very fat woman in the background who seems to be accompanying the little girl on some kind of keyboard sitting across her lap.  After some flamboyant narration, Dafoe telling us about how Celeste was named and that name's implications -- weird Masterpiece theater prose that completely disrupts the film and rips us out of it (Corbett seems anxious to keep us from identifying with what we see on screen) -- the picture shifts into horror movie mode.  A car hurtles along a dark highway.  A boy walks in the impenetrable gloom.  We see pools of light under street lamps.  Where is this? Who is in the car?  Whose shadow stalks across the screen?  Where is he going?  A title tells us that what we are seeing is "Prelude".  In a brightly lit, if dour middle-school band room, the teacher is welcoming the students back after the holiday break.  A goth kid with black contact lens and wearing inky dark and sepulchral garments enters the class room.  He guns down the teacher.  Celeste, who is eerily unafraid, tries to talk to him.  She offers to pray with him.  He opens fire after saying he's "already killed so many" and shoots Celeste through the neck.  A SWAT team breaches the school and comes to the band room where about twenty kids are heaped up against the wall in a gory pile of corpses.  We never find out what happened to the gunman, a kid whose name is Corbin Active.  We see Celeste horribly injured in am ambulance.  A procession of ambulances drives along a dark, frozen river.  In the hospital, Celeste slowly recovers.  Her sister, Ellie, who fortuitously skipped school on the day of the massacre, visits her.  Gradually, the two girls work out a song obliquely referencing the shooting.  Ellie is about 17 and Celeste seems to be 14.  In a wheelchair, Celeste with Ellie attends a religious service in which an Episcopalian priest urges that the congregation pray for everyone including the perpetrator.  Asked to speak, Celeste sings her song. The next sequence is called "Genesis" and identified as 2000 and 2001.  Ellie and Celeste's song has been recorded and become a huge international hit.  The girls have acquired an agent, a tough-talking hoodlum played by Jude Law -- Law's performance is intentionally jarring:  he struts around and talks like Sylvester Stallone in bizarre and profane gangster lingo -- Celeste tells him not to swear so much around the pious Ellie.  Celeste and Ellie go to Stockholm where they record an album in a Swedish studio.  The girls are now misbehaving.  Ellie takes Celeste to bars where she drinks until she vomits.  Terrorists attack Manhattan, bringing down the Twin Towers.  With their agent, the girl's fly to LA where they make a video featuring Celeste on the back of a motorcycle driven by a man in a grotesque sequin mask.  (The song is called "Hologram.")  Celeste goes to a club where she listens to a heavy metal group and, then, has sex with the singer -- he says he loves pop music; she says that he reminds her of Corbin Active, the kid who tried to kill her.  Returning to her room, Celeste finds Jude Law in bed with Ellie.  The next day a plane crashes into the World Trade Center.  The third sequence in the film is called "Regenesis".  It's now 2017.  Celeste is a huge pop star but is also addicted to booze and has had trouble -- she was involved in an accident in which she killed a pedestrian while drunk (cashing his family out with 13 million dollars); at the accident, Celeste unleashed a torrent of racist vituperation; this is all off-screen and reported to us by the narrator.  Celeste has also blinded herself in one eye by an overdose of "methanol" a few years earlier -- like Odin, she has surrendered an eye for wisdom. There follows some initially confusing scenes involving the 35 year old Celeste (Natalie Portman), got up in Goth make-up and punk hairdo, and her daughter, played by the same actress who performed the part of the teenage Ellie.  At first, it's hard to figure out the relationship but we learn, after some mystifying scenes, that Celeste ended up pregnant after her encounter with the LA musician and "as a child, had a child."  Celeste has essentially abandoned the girl, who is now about 14, to her sister, Ellie with whom she is estranged.  Celeste is planning a come-back tour, beginning in New Brighton, the town where the school massacre occurred. (I think the place is supposed to be on Staten Island.)  But things are complicated by a mass shooting on a beach in Croatia -- some thugs, their faces concealed by the sequin-glitter masks used in the video for the song "Hologram" have shot up a tourist beach and killed twenty people.  It's not clear who did this or why.  And, furthermore, it's uncertain whether the massacre was some kind of perverted homage to Celeste or mere a coincidence -- the terrorists needed masks and the "Hologram" masks were the most readily available.  Celeste has a long painful colloquy with her daughter whose name is Albertine.  Albertine confesses that she has just lost her virginity.  This horrifies Celeste and she viciously accuses Ellie of parenting malpractice.  Celeste attends a press-conference and makes a bizarre and tasteless comment:  "I've got more number one hits than a AR-47 with a thirty mag roll."  She refuses to cancel her New Brighton concert and an interviewer brings up the accident in which she killed the pedestrian.  Celeste, after a very bad day, goes back to the hotel where has sex with her agent, Jude Law's character.  She is high on painkillers (she still has a bullet in her neck) and gets very drunk, inebriated to the point where she has to be carried out to the tour bus.  The last section of the film is a concert sequence entitled "Finale".  This conclusion to the movie shows Celeste performing several songs that seem to allude to the shooting at the school -- the songs are fully choreographed with pulsing laser light and a chorus of dancers supporting Celeste who postures and struts on the stage.  The dancers wear mask like those involved in the Croatian beach massacre.  Ellie, who we learn has written most of Celeste's songs, is in the audience with Albertine and Jude Law.  The narrator tells us a Dorian-Grey-style secret; after this revelation, we see Jude Law bathed in diabolical red light and Ellie with Albertine bobbing up and down in the enthusiastic crowd.  When the last song ends, the movie is done.

There's a spoiler below; you have been warned.

As with Childhood of a Leader, Corbett's direction is eccentric.  There are many scenes of people walking along corridors or vehicles on empty highways.  The shots of the skyscrapers of Manhattan picture the buildings as dark, ominous towers and the montage is scored to belligerent symphonic music by Scott Walker -- these images seem a precursor to Corbett's new movie about an architect, The Brutalist released at film festivals in New York and Toronto to great acclaim.  There are many startling images -- for instance, when the girls go to Manhattan, we see the island at night with sinister music and, then, flashes of the face of the punk rock kid with whom Celeste has a child; the boy's pale face splashes on the screen in double-exposures with the gloomy Manhattan skyline.  There are weird non sequitur scenes -- for instance, Celeste gets into a nasty exchange with a fan in the restaurant where she eats with Albertine; it's cringeworthy and the scene just goes on and on.  Exposition necessary to understand scenes is frequently delayed until we have been intentionally confused -- this is the case in which Albertine, who is identical to the young Ellie, suddenly appears.  Celeste seems too young to be her mother and the sequence is very disorienting.  The concert seems are glitzy and menacing at the same time.  In one scene, Celeste as a teenager is learning a dance choreographed to her music -- the room is dim and lightless and she glides behind a professional dancer who shows her the moves with a robotic dispassion and, even, uncanny indifference; it's disquieting although I don't know exactly why.

What is this movie about?  It seems that Celeste has, at first, inadvertently (and sincerely) capitalized on her survival of the school shooting to become a celebrity.  Later, she seems to be directly profiting from her notoriety.  She asserts, I think authentically, that she is acting in good faith (at least when she is a teenager):  she remarks that "(she) doesn't want to make people think too hard; I just want them to feel good", justifying in this way, the pop music that she has written in the aftermath of the massacre (she's talking to the heavy metal punk who gets her pregnant).  It's an open question, posed a bit indirectly by the film, as to whether the terrorists in Croatia were acting to achieve popular fame.  The same question can be posed about the 9-11 terrorists.  And this relates to Celeste's celebrity -- didn't she become famous entirely because of a horrible crime (which she has exploited?.  Is fame the spur to mass murder or ideology?  Or was Celeste always pre-disposed to becomes a great singer and entertainer -- this is suggested in the narration accompanying the shots of her as a child.  (After all, Madonna or Lady Gaga became famous without being involved in some sort of horrible massacre.)  The movie's big reveal is a cheat, but one that is pretty scary:  the narrator says that after Celeste was shot by Corbin Active, she was cast into a limbo between life and death-- the devil, Celeste believes, came to her in that state and she made a deal with him:  she would serve the devil with her music, if he spared her life.  (This revelation is accompanied by images of Jude Law glowing in fiery red light).  Of course, this supernatural revelation is over-determined and, probably, merely symbolic:  Celeste has made a Faustian deal with the fact of the massacre and its perpetrator -- she will become famous on the basis of the murder and suffering of others.  But this seems unfair -- there is abundant evidence that she is courageous (she's not afraid of Corbin) and highly talented and, probably, doesn't need the devil to pave her way to success.  As with The Childhood of a Leader, the question posed by the film is the genesis of the man (or in the case of Vox Lux, the woman) of destiny -- it probably doesn't require a shooting or childhood misfortune to make a person a famous figure; fame of this kind is, most likely, bred in the bone. But if this is truly the case what is movie for?  

Minneapolis Institute of Art - Hendrick Goltzius & Co.

 Works on paper by the early 16th century Dutch artist, Hendrick Goltzius (1558 - 1617) are on show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  These graphic works, mostly engravings, are eccentric, intricately detailed images in the Mannerist style.  Goltzius was a Mannerist's Mannerists -- he exploits the pretensions of this style, its operatic gestures and lugubrious subject matter, for all that it's worth:  the results aren't pretty, but the work is fascinating,: over-wrought images of saints and apostles, learned mythological allegories requiring copious footnotes, strangely muscular figures rendered uncanny by bizarre perspectives and extreme foreshortening.  This is pretentious virtuoso stuff, all the more remarkable because rendered by an artist whose right (dominant) hand had been maimed in a childhood accident and was essentially immobile -- indeed, it seems that the virtuosic draftsmanship and the cunning bite of the engraver's burin are all efforts to compensate for Goltzius' personal infirmity, his ruined right hand.  (Goltzius hand was crippled in a fire that burned him when he was a child; the artist made many studies of his hand showing its twisted fingers and fused joints.)   

The Goltzius etchings are shown in two small rooms, about 50 pictures displayed in an intimate show. You have to look at these things closely; the pictures are hung at eye-level and you can examine them at close range.  The curator of prints at the MIA is a wit and his (or her) explanatory labels are written in an appealingly jaunty style -- there are lots of references to TV reality shows and contemporary celebrities.  Normally, efforts like this to gin-up relevance are annoying -- but the descriptive labels in this show are so good-natured and amusing that I thought them inoffensive and, even, amusing (as well as helpful).  As with many Mannerists, the subject matter of many of the prints is extremely recondite:  Hercules with Cacus, the Demogorgon in the Cave of Eternity, and various allegories, portrayed as feasts of the gods, including a bizarre print showing King Midas with ass's ears.  Goltzius made a cycle of small prints depicting each of the 12 apostles and there's a group of etchings that depict God's creation of the world that look like kinky precursors to William Blake (God holds calipers to measure out his creation) but in a pretentiously learned style.  Goltzius' self-consciously scholarly approach to print-making culminates in a series of pictures showing the life of the Virgin, each of images imitating the style of some other famous artist -- for instance, the Mannerist Parmigiano, Albrecht Duerer, Raphael, and others.  In one remarkable, and surreal image, the Goddess of War in Teutonic nippled breast-plates attacks the Turks blowing a sinuous war-horn.  In several pictures, roiling clouds look like the convolutions of the small intestines.  A cat killing a bird postures like a diva in an opera -- Goltzius' figures all look like professional wrestlers; they have vacant expressions and bulging, ripped muscles. (In one of his paintings, not in this show, Goltzius shows a dog flexing its pecs and shoulder muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger.)  Nothing in this show could be conceived as pretty in any conventional sense -- indeed, the images are, more or less, grotesque. His creatures have bland automaton-like faces and often their skulls are macrocephalic -- heads are deformed as if by the practice of cranial binding.  Goltzius delights in chiaroscuro effects and he makes his serpentine engraved lines quivery and tense with energy, darkness full of snakes coiled and about to strike.  

An ongoing show features Chinese wall-hangings of hermit-scholars in spectacular landscapes.  The big paintings, made on silk banners, show small figures brooding over foaming waterfalls and mountains shaped like sprouts of asparagus and mushrooms.  These are about 800 years old and intensely poetic images.  I don't have any idea what emotional valence these things had for their original users.  Similarly, I don't know how the banners, which are narrow but about ten to 12 feet tall, were used -- were these objects of devotion, images for contemplation, or just ornate decorations.  Your eye, at first, can find no purchase in the chaos of clouds, foaming waterfalls, and beetling rock formations, sometimes with the disk of the moon hovering overhead.  However, the pictures invite you to scan them for little gazebo-like temples and tea-houses; as your eye seeks out the hermit gazing into this wilderness, you end up seeing the spiky rocks and canyons and the mountains shaped like shaggy pointer fingers in the image -- it's a way to trick you into seeing, indeed, seeing closely the landscapes that are the raison d'etre of the images.  (Labels says that the pictures are supposed to illustrate precepts of the Tao or "the Way.")

Tucked away in the Oceania hall, full of wonders  --huge totem-poles carved into enigmatic hermaphroditic figures with abstract skeletal frigate birds overlaying them as a stylized lattice-work -- there 's a two-foot long sculpture of a little monster with a menacing egg-shaped head, bulging eyes, and a rib cage that is exposed and suggests either death or extreme famine.  This object is from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and it's called Moai Kavakava (that is, "image with ribs").  The culture of Easter Island was so ravaged by European colonizers that no one really knows what the small teak-wood sculpture is supposed to represent -- it looks a bit like statues of the ascetic Gautama Buddha half dead from starvation with his ribs and other bones poking through his taut skin.  But, unlike the famished Buddha, this little thing isn't benign - it's a deity that looks like it wants to kill you.    

The Childhood of a Leader

 The Childhood of a Leader, a 2015 film directed by Brady Corbet, is an inexplicable chronicle of inexplicable events.  I have no idea what it is supposed to mean.  Sartre wrote a novella called "The Childhood of a Leader" intended to expose the psychological forces that induce anti-Semitism and Fascism.  There are no convincing correlations between Sartre's Bildungsroman, focusing intensely on the protagonist's latent homosexuality, and his admiration for various strong-man figures that he encounters in his adolescence.  Corbett's picture shows us a few events that occur when the hero is about ten years old with a tiny, if grandiose, epilogue depicting the character's manhood.  In the Corbett film, the youth has no friends, impulsively seeks a sexual encounter with a governess, and the story is devoid of any ideological content -- there is no trace of the anti-Jewish influences that motivate Sartre's 100 page novella.  So, we must begin with an understanding that knowing about the Sartre story, which shares a title with Corbett's picture, does nothing to enhance one's understanding of the movie.  The film, which is grim and rather dull, is, nonetheless, a work of art, carefully designed and beautifully lensed with an alarmingly sinister and bombastic musical score -- in some scenes, the score, sounding like a cross between Morricone and Shostakovich, rife with grotesque effects, actually seems to drive the action.  (The soundtrack was composed by Scott Walker, a musician who began as a teen pop icon and, then, evolved into an avant-garde post-punk composer; he died in 2019 at the age of 78 -- someone characterized  him as "Andy Williams turning into Stockhausen.) The picture has to be analyzed on its own terms.  In cases, where there's no interpretative help from genre or precursor works (the film closest to The Childhood of a Leader is Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol), we must begin by looking carefully at the evidence at hand.  

The Childhood of a Leader consists of an "Overture", three sections (:"Tantrums" 1 - 3), and a brief epilogue entitled "A New Era -- or Prescott the Bastard" -- I have no idea as to the identity of "Prescott", although I presume this is the name of the title character, now grown-up.  The three "tantrum" sections are about the same length -- probably about 30 minutes each.  The "Overture" begins with a self-referential "alienation effect":  we hear an orchestra tuning up, then, someone says something about getting to work, and the percussive and impressive musical overture follows.  A montage of documentary shots establishes that it is 1919, the Great War is over (we see some footage showing combat and starving children), and Woodrow Wilson has  come to France to great acclaim to negotiate a lasting peace.  Trains chug past ravaged battlegrounds and wrecked villages.  Wilson looks smug and confident.  Local peasants stand by the tracks holding signs that praise the American president.  In the first "tantrum", we see a group of children descending a stairs, shot through a window -- one of the children is a cherubic youth with long blonde hair wearing angel wings.  The camera comes inside the building that turns out to be a church and we see the children rehearsing in French a nativity pageant.  Afterward, the cherubic youth goes outside, collects stones (we hear them clinking in his fist) and, then, begins throwing the rocks at the people emerging from the church.  A man chases the boy who runs into a tree and is slightly injured.  The boy will not explain why he pitched the stones at the congregational members leaving the church.  At the  boy's home, we are introduced to his mother, a stunning woman with black-hair and a stern demeanor (she turns out to be a  German missionary's daughter).  The boy's father is playing billiards with a handsome young man named Charles, apparently a journalist.  The two men discuss how evil triumphs if good people aren't engaged to defeat bad forces in the world.  There is a question as to whether vengeance or forgiveness should be applied to the defeated Germans.  No one knows why the boy threw the stones and he refuses to answer questions about the incident.  The next day, he is taken to the Catholic priest and asked to apologize.  The lad refuses.  That night, the boy has a strange dream, apparently prescient of an unusual pompous building shown in the film's epilogue -- the dream features a dome with rotunda and eerily moving old man-lift elevators.  The boy wets the bed.  On the following Sunday, the priest preaches a homily suggesting forgiveness and reconciliation should guide the negotiations for the treaty in Versailles.  We know that the boy's father is the Assistant Secretary of State, an American advisor to Woodrow Wilson and that he is involved in the treaty negotiations in Paris, apparently close enough that  he can drive there after spending weekends with his family.  The father seems to favor a course of punishment in assessing reparations against the Germans.  After the church service, the boy has to stand next to the Priest and, as people shake hands with him, he is supposed to apologize.  Someone mistakes the boy for a girl and he is enraged -- but he does look like a beautiful young girl.  During the service, the children have presented the Christmas pageant.

In "Tantrum 2," an attractive governess is engaged to teach the boy French.  They read together a fable about a lion and a mouse.  The moral of the fable is that "Little Friends may prove Great Friends."  The governess is wearing a translucent white blouse through which the boy can see the woman's nipples.  The woman looks as if she could be his mother's twin sister.  Impulsively, the boy grabs at the governess' breast which offends her.  Then, it's Ash Wednesday and mother and son walk  in a spooky religious procession with people wearing long pointed black hoods.  (On the soundtrack, we hear someone incongruously crooning "I'm always chasing rainbows.")  The father plans for a secret meeting with his allies at the rural house -- they are conspiring against Wilson who has a more reconciliatory program for the peace.  A test of wills ensues between mother and son -- he refuses to eat supper, despising the French cuisine (which a maid verifies to be disgusting).  The  boy is locked in his room for refusing to eat.  But the maid, Mona, who has taken a maternal attachment to the boy (in lieu of his icy mother's affections) sneaks in food for him to eat.  The mother discovers this and fires the maid, Mona, despite her pleas.  Mona then vows to spend every waking hour "destroying your (the mother's) family."  The boy also refuses to see the governess but tells her to "return in three days."  The father's allies gather and vow to cut off coal to Germany.  One of the father's associates congratulates him on "having a beautiful little daughter."  This enrages our hero, the future leader, and he traipses about the house naked (presumably to reveal his actual sex).  Dad beats the kid and, maybe, injures the boy's arm.  He seems to have a seizure as he sprawls on the floor.  Dad tries to persuade mom to have sex with him but she has a migraine and refuses -- obviously, standard operating procedure for this marriage.  The boy again reads aloud the parable of the Lion and the Mouse, demonstrating his proficiency in French.  Mom pays off the governess (Ada is her name) and gives her some advice:  remain a teacher and never marry.

In "Tantrum 3", documentary footage shows us that the peace treaty has been signed.  There's a big party at the rural mansion where the family lives.  Charles, from the first "Tantrum", is at the party.  Some critics see an implication that Charles is, or has been, the mother's lover and, further, the protagonist may, in fact, be his son.  There's no doubt that something odd is going on between the boy's parents and the handsome Charles (he is a widower whose wife, also a journalist was killed at the Front), but nothing is ever dramatized or even implicitly presented to explain the situation.  (In fact, Charles seems to have a girlfriend at the party.)  The boy goes outside and picks up a bunch of stones (they click together in his fist).  At the party, the boy demands to sit among the adults.  When his mother asks him to lead the assembled diplomats in a prayer, he refuses and, then, shouts "I don't believe in praying any more."  He repeats this with increasing agitation.  When his mother confronts him, he bashes her on the forehead with a big stone and knocks her out (or she swoons).  Dad chases our hero, catches him at the top of the stairs, where he seems to have a seizure.  (The seizure is shot from a bizarre overhead camera angle that tilts the action of people running up the stairs to where the boy is lying so that they move upside-down.)  

An epilogue follows.  Some ministers are meeting in a weird official building with man-lifts, dark corridors and a rotunda above a third or fourth floor space.  (We have seen this building and the circular rotunda before in the nightmare that the boy experienced that caused him to wet the bed -- this scary sequence, involving vistas on remote monuments and strange untenanted corridors with the manlifts continuously gliding up and down occurs in the first "Tantrum" scene.)  Some nondescript officials in  boxy Soviet-style suits mumble some urgent gibberish -- it's all spoken in euphemistic circumlocutions.  The bureaucrats descend from the upper chamber under the rotunda and meet a huge, roaring crowd outside the elaborate structure.  Cops and soldiers are wearing hats decorated with red asterisk-shaped insignia, apparently the sign of the regime.  A procession of big sedans makes its way through the cheering mob.  Inside one of the cars is a man with a moustache and  shaved head, apparently the little boy now grown up (although there is nothing to really establish this).  The man gets out of the car while people shout and the camera rolls over and over again, spinning between sky and the crowd while the musical score builds to a percussive climax.  A small child cranes her neck in a strange way to look up into the heavens above the crowd.   

The picture is handsomely made, although gloomy.  The images have Rembrandt-style lighting, burnished and dark with amber glowing areas.  Shots are often quite long and, sometimes, action is filmed from idiosyncratic angles.  In several instances, the movie cuts from medium shots to extremely long shots, small figures lost in a big, sere landscape.  There is no sunlight for the first 30 minutes of the 115 minute movie -- the first bright exterior occurs at that point, showing the leprous-looking, vast, and decaying mansion.  Parts of the film are shot like a horror movie.  The bland and angelic protagonist who is continually mistaken for a  girl looks like other uncanny and demonic children in past movies, most notably like Damien in The Omen.  The film's impressive symphonic score underlines the action and, in many cases, seems to precede the movie's images and drive their organization and editing.

I have almost no idea what this impressive, if somewhat dull, movie is supposed to mean.  The first riddle is to decipher the relationship between the frame involving treaty and reparations negotiations with the defeated Germans.  I suppose this may have something to do with deterring aggression and, of course, a  theme in the picture is the boy's unmitigated and unmotivated aggressive conduct.  It's unclear how the twice repeated parable of the mouse and the lion is meaningful, although the text is afforded pride of place in the movie.  (Is this to suggest that the little boy is now a mouse but will grow up to be a lion?  If so, it's hard to track the parallels between the story and the action in the film.) Clearly, the child is friendless with a cold mother and a remote indifferent father.  The picture shows that the person he most loves and trusts in the world, Mona, is callously driven away from the household for caring for him -- but this is also ambiguous and its hard to know what to make of Mona's  threat that she will spend the rest of her days ceaselessly trying to destroy the family.  Some parts of the film are simply impossible to interpret or, even, really see clearly:  why does the epilogue begin with images of gears and machines that seem to be imprinting some kind of seal on documents?  Why are there no names used for major characters -- we don't find out that the boy is called "Prescott" until the last five minutes of the film. What are the ministers speaking about before the leader's arrival in the last section?  Does the protagonist suffer, like Julius Caesar, from the "falling sickness" or some kind of epilepsy?  Why is the film named after a celebrated novella by Sartre but, as far as I can see, completely different from  that story and its themes?   All of these things, and many others are riddles,  but I'm not sure it's worth working out answers to these questions -- or, if answers, even exist.  Most fundamentally, the story takes place in 1920 -- this means that the epilogue occurs around 1940 in what seems to be an middle European country?  Where is this supposed to be?  What is the country posited to be ruled by an American?  These questions are probably too literal-minded.  We first see the boy in a shadowy stairwell, descending with angel's wings on his shoulders.  Is he a supernatural figure, some kind of demonic angel of destruction and apocalypse?   

Dark Winds (Netflix TV series)

Dark Winds is neo-noir crime show that represents state of the art genre story-telling.  The program is diverting with fascinating characters and locations.  Production values are excellent and the acting is persuasive.  There's not much substance to the show, but it's entertaining and can be recommended.  Dark Winds is interesting in that demonstrates certain formulae and conventions that are effective mainstays of programs of this sort.  (Dark Winds can be seen in  two six-show series originally made for AM in 2022 and 2023.  As a result of this origin, episodes are about 48 minutes long and cut into 12 to 13 minutes block with fades signifying were commercials were originally inserted.  The show has picked up for a third season, now in production.)

Dark Winds is a police procedural detailing the efforts of its protagonist cops with respect to solving a several crimes.  Shows of this sort capitalize on unfamiliar settings that have an exotic appeal.  In this case, Dark Winds takes place on the 27,000 square mile Navajo Nation reservation in New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Utah.  This setting provides very picturesque locations in which the action plays-out -- sequences are shot in Monument Valley and scenic canyon country with towering buttes and colorful rock formations. (There are many spectacular night scenes with a psychedelic aura -- the buttes and cliffs glow in a turquoise aura under dark skies dense with stars.)  The show contains a lot of dialogue in Dine, the language spoken by the natives on reservation and the cultural folkways of the Navajo (Dine) people are exploited to full effect --  the show has an anthropological flavor featuring rituals, good and bad medicine, malign witches and the like.  As with many shows of this kind, supernatural agents and events are suggested, although, in most instances, the plot progresses toward establishing a naturalistic explanation for these things -- although often malign and criminal.  The door is kept open a crack with respect to supernatural intervention in the plot. The story-line is classically designed.  The presiding good cop (Joe Leaphorn) is confronted with a savage double-murder, possibly committed by supernaturals.  The FBI, who here appear as foes or antagonists to Leaphorn, are investigating a bank job in Gallup, New Mexico in which a helicopter carrying loot was last seen flying into Navajo country.  Of course, the two investigations will turn out to be related and Joe's detective work on the double murder will have implications that will draw him into the bank heist story.  

When a program is set in an exotic and unfamiliar milieu, the viewer needs a character who appears as a surrogate for the audience, someone who doesn't know the local customs and practices, and with whom the other actors can interact to explain what is going on and provide necessary plot exposition.  The role of newcomer is played by Jimmy Chee, a cop who is Navajo but new to the reservation -- he is the vehicle used for exposition in which other characters "fill him in" on necessary information. The protagonist in this kind of program must be either flawed or suffering from some past trauma that afflicts him emotionally and may cloud his judgement.  Joe Leaphorn, the main cop, has lost his son in an explosion that may or may not have been triggered by terrorists attempting to drive the mining industry off Navajo land.  The show is set in 1971 so that the cast can include hippies, damaged and violent Vietnam vets, and Navajo militants of the kind associated with the American Indian Movement (AIM).  Furthermore, the setting more than 50 years ago allows several things:  first, there's more overt racism against the Indians and more politically incorrect imagery (for instance wood carvings of cigar store Indians) available to the show than might be the case today -- although in  truth not much seems to have changed as to FBI, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and racial  tensions shown in the program.  Second, the period setting in 1971 allows for a classic rock-and-roll soundtrack to enliven the proceedings.  Of course, there's a comely lady cop to provide love interest for Jimmy Chee, the handsome newcomer to the Rez.   

The cast is led by Zahn McClarnen (Joe Leaphorn).  McClarnen who has chiseled features and a dark complexion looks the way everyone, including Indians, imagines a brave and stoic native warrior would look.  His character is highly intelligent, intuitive, and married to a loving and supportive wife.  McClarnen has tremendous charism, looks spectacular, and he carries the show.  (McClarnen was indelible as Officer Big in the comedy Reservation Dogs.)  The other characters are also memorable including Noah Emmerich, an actor who specializes in playing corrupt FBI agents, and Rainn Wilson (formerly of The Office) who has a cameo in a couple episodes as Devoted Dave, a flamboyant hypocritical and corrupt used car dealer -- there's no enough of him in the show.  There are a half-dozen very good Indian actors in the show, all of them unfamiliar to me, but who provide a quirky and interesting cast of characters as well as local color -- we see the hogans in which the Navajo live, their flea markets and trading posts and are privy to their customs: a Navajo girl's coming of age ceremony (it involves sashes, much grinding of corn into meal, and long distance running) is prominently documented in a couple episodes.  The eccentric characters in the show and some of the subplots are similar in flavor to the Coen Brothers' crime films -- and the show also invokes (and looks a bit like) the FX series Fargo, the program in which I first saw Zahn McClarnen playing the scary Indian assassin Hanzee.  

Dark Winds has an impressive pedigree:  it's produced by George R. R. Martin (the author of The Game of Thrones) and Robert Redford and the program has an authentic vibe -- it's actually shot in the places where the action takes place.  Further, the show adapts crime novels by Tony Hillerman set on the Navajo Reservation (the so-called "Leaphorn and Chee" mysteries) and the story, although implausible in many respects, is well-plotted and compelling.  It's not padded and moves along a serviceable clip.  When your interest flags with the rather routine villains and gun fights and cop procedural details (autopsies and qualitative testing on water samples), the fascinating Navajo lore retains your interest.  It would be a mistake to make any claims that this series is anything more than an amusing, well-crafted detective show -- but that's sufficient in itself and I recommend the program.