Monday, July 14, 2014
The Strain
I will probably have good cause to regret these words in a few weeks, but, at the outset, Guillermo del Toros' The Strain (FX, Sunday nights at 9:00 pm CST) looks like it will be simple-minded, gory fun. On the evidence of the first episode, the show seems to be a reboot of Nosferatu, the old German horror film that was both strangely beautiful and completely over-the-top even by the histrionic standards of the silent cinema. You can't take Nosferatu seriously -- it's a melodramatic confection mingling lofty Wagnerian pretensions with the lowest types of Victorian sentimentality -- but the damn thing, like the killer rice-noodle worms in The Strain, wriggles its way into your brain and you can't shake some of its grisly and ridiculous images. I am hoping that The Strain will achieve some of this same effect, although, of course, I am skeptical. I tuned in to the ninety minute pilot episode on FX after watching an excellent British mystery on PBS ("Endeavor") and, of course, the shock of that transition was sudden and demoralizing. After watching morose but kindhearted Cambridge detectives, all speaking in grave Shakespearian accents, courteously interviewing elegant suspects in the green and pleasant rural environs of their medieval city, I was confronted with two American TV actors, a man and a woman, both blessed with figures like those displayed on shows like Baywatch; the two characters were shot in flat, expository video-friendly light and they were disrobing for us to have an opportunity to admire their splendid physiques -- and, while stripping, the characters, CDC contagion experts about to don respirators and quarantine garments, exchanged sub-literate banter of the most obvious kind, some chatter about their past affair and the male hero's child-custody conflict -- all of this baldly expository, unrealistically candid and direct, and utterly uninteresting. The scene's principle frisson was the contrast between the beautiful semi-nude bodies on display and the HazMat suits that the characters were donning. (Network TV remains a bulwark for stereotypical sex-roles: the handsome big lunk isn't good with donning the complicated HazMat outfit -- he also can't manage to knot his ties -- and has to rely upon the maternal assistance of the comely female contagion expert.) The scene was inexpertly directed, banal, and dull, but it did end with a strangely compelling remark by the heroine: "You don't understand women at all," a comment not delivered in the plummy rounded tones of a PBS show and hardly Shakespearian in eloquence, but, in fact, fairly penetrating in context, a kick in the face. You see, it's a matter of adjusting your expectations: PBS is PBS and Network TV Network TV and ne'er the twain shall meet, except, of course, when they do: for instance, shows like Secrets of the Dead and The History Detectives which channel the disreputable energies of ghost-hunting programs on Scyfy and other Cable TV. The Strain is utterly unrealistic and crammed with clichés -- there is a vampire-hunting Van Helsing figure straight out of Bram Stoker, an elderly concentration camp survivor who ambles around with a silver-headed sword, who runs a pawnshop where he collects silver (!), and who wears a floppy fedora with cape when he goes to JFK airport to investigate the strange events at that place. (The TSA promptly decides he's a lunatic and throws him jail). The references to the original Nosferatu (and Werner Herzog's remake) are amusing: instead of a ghost ship, we have a plane packed with corpses stalled on the tarmac and, of course, there is a huge and sinister coffin filled with dirt in its cargo-hold. The villains exhale ammonia and have a strange shutter-effect in their eyes and they seem to be Nazi-vampires from Berlin. Their ostensible leader (the real boss is the monster from the cargo hold) uses dialysis to address his blood issues and he seems intent on importing the vampires onto the island of Manhattan. (It's not clear why it's not sufficient for them to simply take over the Queens and Jamaica.) The director is Mexican and so he's allowed to use semi-offensive, if amusing Hispanic stereotypes -- the vampire's chauffeur is a tough ueber-Macho gang-banger who is also a mama's boy -- and there are some craven Spanish-speaking bandits in an early scene. The sheer stupid exuberance of this show won me over. There are pleasingly nauseating special effects: in one scene, a doomed factotum walks through a series of corridors in JFK. One of my complaints about series TV is that the film makers seem to have forgotten the art of editing -- everything is shown in real time since the shows usually are too long for their rather limited subject matter and so the producers have to pad everything: if someone walks across a street, we are shown the character's entire pointless transit of the boulevard in real time. In the show, the doomed guy walks and walks and I began to suspect that the director was just padding the episode, killing time before the commercial -- but this stroll had a purpose. The corridors get progressively darker, dingier, more expressionistic with more lurid and ghastly colors -- it's like the figure is perambulating the chambers in Poe's "Masque of Red Death". Then, the doomed extra encounters a great mass of corruption, a heap of something turd-colored and rotting on the concrete floor and, as he stares at this pile of dung and rot, it suddenly looms up, turning into a vast 12 foot high creature that sucks out all his blood -- we get X-ray style anatomical images similar to the inserts in a CSI-style show -- disarticulates the poor fellow's spine and, then, hurling him to the floor, gratuitously punches his head into pulp. The creature flies away on gargantuan wings, moving at superhuman speed, leaving the shattered headless corpse on the floor. (Warning! this show contains crude language, violence, and nudity -- mature audiences only, the network teases at each commercial break.) FX wants you to watch this show and so it repeated the pilot three times. By the time, the show came around to my access point from PBS -- the scene with the CDC characters donning their HazMat suits -- their dialogue seemed less idiotic to me and more nuanced; either the show was better than I first thought or I had descended to its level. There is bad bad stuff -- for instance, The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes -- and there is good bad stuff: so far The Strain fits the latter category.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Another disappointment: I'd like to recommend, at least, one of the summer blockbuster movies to my readers and, so, in that hope, attended The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). I've always had a weakness for Planet of the Ape films and, of course, recall vividly the first picture in the franchise, The (original) Planet of the Apes with Charleton Heston crouching to curse mankind under the turquoise torso of the half-buried Statue of Liberty -- that movie made an indelible impact on me and several of the successor films were also reasonably amusing and, indeed, I thought The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the inaugural movie in the current cycle, was pretty good: the interaction between the humans and monkeys was touching, the subtext involving a medication thought to aid Alzheimer's patients had a certain melancholy resonance, and the final battle between the apes and humans on the fog-girt Golden Gate Bridge was exciting and effective. But, alas, the sequel, although reasonably coherent by big-budget action standards, is only okay. And "only okay" on this scale -- a film probably costing several hundred million dollars is not good enough; in fact, "only okay" on this scale is, more or less, lousy. The movie's plot concerns a band of humans attempting to restore electrical power at a hydro-electric dam somewhere in Marin County. A virus, called Simian Flu, has wiped out almost all of humanity. The surviving remnants are holed-up in the wreckage of San Francisco. The humans encounter the apes living in a vast tree-house-like fort somewhere in the dense woods on Mount Tamalpais -- the fort is the first sign that the movie will be derivative and unnecessarily picturesque: the ape's city looks like an outtake from The Lord of the Rings: it has a wholly superfluous waterfall pouring through its suburbs, a waterfall incidentally that we never see in anything approaching a closer shot and that is pure Peter Jackson-style décor. The apes are under the command of the wise Caesar, the benign Alpha male, and they have learned to communicate both by sign language and bellowing in a sort of pidgin English. The apes are like the noble redskins in old cowboy and Indian movies -- they are courageous guerrilla fighters (pun intended) and they just want to be left in peace on their wilderness reservation. Unfortunately, as is always the case, there are vicious renegades on both sides who seek to profit from conflict and the apes are duped into a war with the humans. The apes launch an assault on San Francisco armed with machine guns and there is a spectacular fire-fight -- essentially an attack on Fort Apache by the monkeys who ride horses like shaggy versions of the Comanches or Sitting Bull's Sioux. The apes win the battle, but, then, are confronted with an insurgency. Planet of the Apes movies always mirror the political and social issues of the day and this picture is no exception -- no sooner is the battle for San Francisco (like the battle for Baghdad) complete, then, an insurgency erupts and apes fight apes while the humans battle one another as well. Just as in Iraq, it turns out that there are extremist factions among the apes and civil war results from the conflict -- the humans are faced with the difficult decision of determining which faction to support in the insurgency. The last thirty minutes of the movie is ridiculous, heaping coincidence upon coincidence, and much of the fighting takes place in typical CGI gloom seemingly required by large-scale, big-budget computer action sequences. Typical to cowboy and Indian films, the white men (here the humans) have medicine on their side and can use their healing arts to form alliances with the savages (the primates). Caesar, who has been shot by a renegade ape (the equivalent of the bad guy peddling firewater and Winchesters to the restive Sioux), requires surgery. A plucky girl surgeon repairs his wounds, apparently with wonderful effectiveness, because only two days later he is duking it out with the wicked Koba on top of an immense tower of open girders -- a structure that seems to exist only to provide a colossal jungle-gym for the legion of primates. There are lots of big explosions, bodies hurled through space, etc. At first, the pictorial effects are impressive -- hundreds of apes swinging through trees in a misty forest -- but, ultimately, the result is numbing. It may be worth it for you to pay $6.00 to see Koba charging barricades on horseback, firing machine guns with both hands, just like John Wayne with his two six-shooters blazing at the climax of True Grit and there are some dramatic images of the apes under attack by rocket launchers, the big gorillas laboring to drag off the wounded and dying smaller primates in a hellish inferno of orange explosions. One shot involving a 360 degree motion of a tank turret, the camera mounted on the swiveling weapon to reveal writhing swarms of apes is extremely impressive, although in a computer video game, Medal of Honor way. The movie is highly schematic -- the crosscutting between humans and apes is cartoonish and the film exploits a narrative device that was old when D. W. Griffith made his films: two parallel families, one ape and one human, struggling to survive: this allows for sentimental sequences of such bathos that they would have embarrassed Griffith almost a hundred years ago. Unlike many films of this sort, the picture makes sense and the narrative is reasonably clear. There are innumerable implausibilities -- the horseback assault of the apes, with the primates firing automatic weapons straight ahead of them, seems to be a strategy that would result in decimating the front ranks of the primate shock troops by friendly fire. Furthermore, the director can't seem to manage a coherent scene of expository dialogue -- an early sequence involving six characters in a jolting truck talking to one another is completely mishandled: the shots cross the eye-line repeatedly, violating the 180 degree rule, and the spatial dimensions of the sequence are botched. The director can manage huge sequences involving hundreds of apes swinging back and forth rhythmically in the skeleton of a collapsing skyscraper but he can't effectively stage a dialogue sequence shot in a moving vehicle. The worst lapse in this movie is that it is almost completely humorless -- the original Planet of the Apes' films were sly comedies; the action sequences were staged with a wink at the audience. Too much money is at stake in this film and everything is presented with ponderous gravity. (There is a nice moment when the power comes back on and someone plays a CD -- it's Levon Helm singing The Band's song "The Weight"; I've always liked that song.)
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Il Divo
On the strength of The Great Beauty (2013) and This Must Be the Place (2011), Paolo Sorrentino is one of the most interesting directors working today. Il Divo (2008) is the film that first brought him to international attention. I recall reading reviews in various periodicals, including The New Yorker, extolling the intelligence and graphic design of Il Divo. But I also recall paying scant attention to those writings: the subject of Sorrentino's film, labyrinthine corruption in the Italian government centered around the enigmatic figure of Giulio Andreotti, didn't particularly interest me and the scandals that the film interrogates seemed parochial to Italy, impossible to understand, and remote from American experience. Unfortunately, it seems that my initial impression was inaccurate. Il Divo is thrilling to look upon -- the film making craft evident in the picture is magnificent and almost every shot is compelling in one way or another. But I found the film impossible to understand and emotionally baffling. Toni Servillo, who is captivating in The Great Beauty, plays the role of the hunchbacked and grotesquely buttoned-down Andreotti. He walks with tiny mincing steps, holds his back and shoulders rigid as an automaton, and sits motionlessly, hands clasped before him, like a cadaver at parties and conclaves of conspirators. As imagined by Servillo, Andreotti speaks in a grating whisper and his words are either political sententia inflected by religious allusions or utterly banal. Except for a propensity to have his political opponents (and, even, allies) murdered, Andreotti seems a man of utter virtue -- he is frequently seen praying in Church, never curses, and never threatens anyone. The subtitles to the film describe him as a man accused of being a "mandator" for assassinations -- I have no idea what that term is supposed to mean and this incomprehension embodies the difficulties that I have with this movie. Although I couldn't understand exactly what was happening in most scenes, I did perceive that the movie presents no affirmative evidence of any wrongful acts by Andreotti -- at most, he seems to have some sort of relationship with various components of the Italian mafia. We see him kissing a figure that I construe to be a mafia chieftain at one point, but we don't ever see him conspiring with criminals to accomplish any evil acts. The point of the film, I think, is that Andreotti, the so-called "hunchback" and "black pope", creates a toxic environment around him in which others scheme to commit murders. This is dramatized by a discussion between Andreotti and bearded personage that I take to be a journalist: Andreotti doesn't believe in chance and says on several occasions that everything is guided by the will of God; the journalist responds with a recitation of chance encounters and coincidences leading to a series of killings. Then, he asks Andreotti if he wishes to amend his answer. Characteristically, Andreotti is silent: the film implies that Andreotti believes that these events were all "mandated" -- my word, but perhaps an explanation for the strange appellation "mandator" -- and that, in fact, his own political will is somehow equivalent to the will of God. This seems confirmed by the single scene in the movie in which Andreotti speaks out and explains his motivations -- this is a sequence, filmed like Shakespearian soliloquy, in which Andreotti expresses, opaquely but with singular vehemence, the fact that he had to consort with criminals and, even, perhaps, involve himself in crimes, in order that the center of Italian politics, his Christian Democratic party, might prevail against extremists on both sides. As part of this project, Andreotti seems to accuse himself of allowing Aldo Moro to be killed by the Red Brigade Faction, a murder that weighs heavily, it seems, on Andreotti's' conscience - the film reverts repeatedly to a glossy, surreal image of Moro in his cage awaiting murder by his captors. Servillo's Andreotti is a remarkable creation -- he is like Richard Nixon at his darkest combined with Nosferatu. The man has the face and ears of a goblin and his motivations are utterly obscure. Power as wielded by Andreotti seems to be a wholly abstract concept -- there is no sense that this little, stiff goblin of a man enjoys the attributes of power or that he is personally corrupt in any way. We have no sense that Andreotti enjoys any sort of perquisites of the power that he wields -- he is completely asexual, seen sometimes holding hands with his elderly wife while watching kitsch on TV (he can't watch most stations because of continuous reporting denouncing him); we have no sense that he has any appetite for money or luxury or anything palpable at all. Andreotti as shown in the film is cold, cadaverous cipher. Similarly, the figures surrounding him, and doing his bidding, don't seem corrupt in any obvious way -- there's little or no carousing in the picture and nothing that suggests that anyone is personally enriching themselves. From time to time, we see shocking murders, but I couldn't figure out even who was being murdered or why -- the film labels its characters by red titles that appear next to the figures on the screen, but there are so many people involved and there interactions are so understated and mysterious that I literally couldn't understand what was happening. I assume that the material that the film dramatizes is all intimately familiar to Italian audiences and that we are seeing something akin to the Watergate scandal, albeit enacted on the scale of Seneca with innumerable murders and suicides. Presumably, Italians know the basic narrative and can follow the twists and turns that Sorrentino dramatizes. Further complicating the viewer's task is the fact that Sorrentino presents his narrative in fragments that are scrambled according to chronology -- we keep seeing Andreotti creeping along a barren street at midnight surrounded by a coterie of armed men, all of them anxiously scanning buildings and rooftops for assassins. After a few iterations of this scene, I realized that we were watching Andreotti in Palermo, but I have no idea where he was going or why he is surrounded by an armed guard -- it's my surmise that he is going for a stroll before, or during, the proceedings in Court in Sicily involving accusations of murder and complicity in mafia crimes. But I don't know why the scene, which is visually extraordinary, is repeated again and again as a kind of temporal node in the film's narrative structure. The movie doesn't progess in any way -- it's prismatically fragmented and we don't detect any change in Andreotti's character; he certainly doesn't get his comeuppance, nor is he punished in any way. We have no real sense that any moral tendencies are stirred in him by any of the events that we witness -- indeed, the little apparition of evil seems to have no moral reservations about anything but, perhaps, the death of Moro. The film's surface is extraordinary -- a series of luxurious and spotlessly clean interiors, dark chambers of power with sleek reflecting surfaces through the which the camera prowls, medieval churches and palaces, ancient arcades clogged with reporters taking photographs and shouting questions to Andreotti. In the closing credits, I see that Sorrentino expresses gratitude to his great predecessor, Francesco Rosi. The film resembles some of Rosi's political dramas, particularly Salvatore Giuliano (1962) -- that film was exquisitely beautiful and gripping shot by shot, but without the commentary track I had no idea what was going on. (And, unfortunately, Il Divo isn't equipped with a commentary; I expect that the film will be reissued in a Criterion DVD at some point -- The Great Beauty has already earned this kind of treatment -- and that with a commentary the film's excellence and subtlety will be revealed to non-Italian audiences. At this stage, I am left to my own devices in researching Andreotti and the history presented in the film.) It is interesting to know that Andreotti, who died in 2013, saw the picture, at first, lost his temper about the way that he was portrayed, but, then, said that he admired the movie and would have liked it better if "(he) had been paid a share of its profits."
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Madame de -- (The Earrings of Madame de -- )
Madame de –
Madame de – (1953) or as it was called in United States, The Earrings of Madame de – , was directed by Max Ophuls. The film stars Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio deSica, a powerhouse trio of performers in the early fifties. Madame de – is considered by many the most successful of Ophuls’ films and the best example of his unique directorial style. The film is based on a 1951 novel that was a bestseller in France and the picture was successful at the box-office.
Max Ophuls was born in 1902 in Saarbruecken, Germany as Maxmillian Oppenheimer. Ophuls father was a successful Jewish factory owner, a leader in the garment industry. To avoid embarrassing his conventional bourgeois father, the director disguised his name when he went to Aachen to study theater.
Like most successful theater folks in Germany, Ophuls ended-up in Vienna where he worked at the famous Burgtheater. He directed, designed sets, and labored as a dramaturge. A prodigy, he was appointed director when only 24 and directed over 200 productions at the theater. In 1929, he began directing films in Berlin. His most successful German film is Liebelei (1933) based on material by the Viennese writer, Arthur Schnitzler. Hitler’s rise to power forced Ophuls into exile. He moved to Paris and worked in the French film industry. Again, he was required to flee – in 1940 he moved to Hollywood. Studio producers in Los Angeles were uncomfortable with Ophuls’ elaborate camera-style and he was fired by Howard Hughes from his first job. But he made several notable films in Hollywood including Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) based on a Stefan Zweig novella, and Caught (1949), a film noir with Robert Ryan. In 1950, he returned to France and made a number of well-regarded pictures including Madame de- and Le Plaisir. His most elaborate French film is the spectacular, but flawed, Lola Montez (1955) with Peter Ustinov and Carole Martine. This film was a critical failure and Ophuls was derided for its excesses. (As early as 1960, the film had been re-evaluated and is now regarded as a masterpiece, albeit one with peculiar and disturbing features.) Ophuls died in 1958 of rheumatic heart disease while directing interiors for a film about Amedeo Modigliano, The Lovers of Montparnasse – Jacques Becker completed the picture.
Ophuls is thought of as a director of "women’s films." Sometimes, he is called a "feminist director." His movies were consistently undervalued because they are melodramas, generally movies about passionate women who live (and die) for love. Many of the pictures combine melodrama with period or costume drama – the films have something of the quality of hyper-sophisticated "bodice-rippers," and, therefore, belong to a slighlty disreputable genre. In each generation, critics, particularly feminist ones, attend Ophuls films anticipating that they will find the picture politically incorrect, retrograde and dated. And, in each generation, the movies end up winning over most of their viewers – the pictures are brilliantly cast and acted, beautifully designed, and highly sophisticated.
Style
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor old Max,
Who, when separated from his dolly
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once when they took away his crane,
I thought that he would never smile again.
James Mason
Perhaps, the second or third shot of Madame de – shows the title character leaving her boudoir and descending an elaborate marble stairway. The stairs are grandiose and the walls framing them are elaborate with draperies, stone scrolls, doorways with classical pediments and other ornamentation. Our first impression is size, opulence, a profusion of space quite unnecessary to the simple action depicted – a woman descending stairs, that is, a mere transition from one place to another. The heroine enters the shot above the camera on the right side of the frame, passes along a stone balustrade, and, then, hurries down the steps moving toward a landing at the frame’s left edge. (The frame’s edge is continuously fluid – the camera tracks with the heroine who appears in a long-shot toward the left.) We expect Madame de – to reach the landing, reverse her direction and, then, continue her descent back to the right and the base of the steps. As the camera moves with the actress, a candelabra swims across the image in the foreground and there are other objects in the picture plane only a few feet from the lens. The effect is paradoxical – the camera is sweeping across a grand, operatic space, but from a vantage that occludes and congests the foreground: we have both a sense of expansiveness and confinement at the same time. As Madame de – reaches the landing, she does something unanticipated: rather than continue her descent, she, suddenly, moves up from the landing continuing to the left. A woman off-screen has spoken to her from that edge of the frame and she darts up the steps, or, at least, three or four of them, to encounter that person – it is "Nanny," the heroine’s loyal personal servant. Nanny tells Madame de – that she should have breakfast. The heroine reverses her direction again, returns to the landing, and, then, continues downward, traversing the steps and moving back to the right to reach the ground level. We expect the shot will end – the action of descending the steps is complete. But, in fact, Ophuls has more surprises for us.
I will pause for a moment to consider the little hiatus in Madame de –‘s descent of the stairs – the moment when she suddenly moves more to the left, for an instant, climbing steps that we interpret as leading back to another upper hallway flanking the steps off-screen to the left. The interruption in Madame de – ‘s progress to the ground floor of her palace is characteristic to this film’s remarkable style and Ophuls aesthetic in general. First, the heroine’s sudden detour from the direction that we expect her to be going registers as a faint, but distinct and indelible surprise. We don’t expect the set to extend to the left beyond the scope of the steps needed for the heroine’s descent from her boudoir. Accordingly, we are surprised that there is more to the set, additional space that can be entered and articulated for narrative purposes off-sceen. Ophuls’ staging activates off-screen space – we are cued to sense that the space traversed by his characters extends indefinitely in all directions and that the characters can enter that space. In other words, they seem somehow free to change their direction. Second, the little detour seems pointless – why interrupt an image that seems intended to dramatize the heroine’s grandiose surroundings and demonstrate her beauty and grace (and the beauty of her garments) as she descends the steps? But, in fact, as the film proceeds, we learn that Madame de-‘s loyal "Nanny" is an important character in the movie – in fact, she has an unforgettable scene in the heroine’s boudoir near the end of the film and actually attends upon the character’s death. "Nanny’s" loyalty to the selfish and vain Madame de– is significant to the film and acts to humanize, and make more sympathetic, the vain and destructive heroine. Accordingly, Ophuls decision to include her in the second or third shot, if only for an instant, is motivated by Nanny’s importance in the film. What seems to be a strangely arbitrary interruption in the heroine’s progress descending the steps, in fact, has narrative significance. The faint irritation that we sense at this apparently pointless divagation, in fact, embeds the incident in our mind – before we know why, the character of "Nanny" has been rendered memorable.
Ophuls described the hallmarks of his mature style as "mobility and surprise." And we can see these elements dramatized as the shot continues. We expect the tracking shot to conclude when the action depicted reaches its natural end – that is, when Madame de- has completed her descent of the stairs. But obedient to Nanny’s admonition, Madame de – moves farther to the right, passing through a double French door, changing her direction again and, then, moving back to the left, viewed this time through an opening that is also slatted with window frames. The effect is vertiginous – how big is this palace? How many rooms does Madame de– have to cross to get to the door to the outside? Where is the outside? There seem to be rooms nestled within rooms, walls penetrated by arcade-like openings or rectangular doorways apparently closed with glass but translucent, the plane of the glass panes defined by complicated mullions. There is a narrative purpose for this complicated transit – the heroine arrives in a room where she takes a hurried sip of coffee under a large and formidable-looking picture of her formidable husband, the General (Charles Boyer). She makes some comments about concealing the errand that she is about to accomplish – that is, going to a jeweler, whose store and office space is similarly baroque (two levels connected by a winding spiral stair) to sell the earrings that her husband gave her on their wedding day.
Ophuls style is unlike any other film maker. (Josef von Sternberg is the only director that I know who does anything comparable.) Generally, films are designed to accommodate the narrative depicted in the scenario. In Ophuls, an argument can be made that the narrative is shaped to accommodate the director’s lavish and intricate sets. We know that Ophuls’ worked closely with his set decorator d’Eaubonne to design exceptionally complex sets. These sets were conceived in the round – that is, as space articulated in all directions. Most film sets are tableaux or diorama-like – they are boxes into which we peer. D’Eaubonne’s sets have four sides to them and, frequently open into other four-sided spaces. These spaces are described by some critics not as sets but as "complexes" – that is, interconnected spaces that can be entered from all sides and that are configured to articulate various pictorial planes: the sets have objects located in them to define corridors of motion. Characters always move through these spaces in front of something and with something, in turn, in front of them. Again, Ophul’s signature effect is that of a space that is simultaneously expansive and far larger than it needs to be, while, at the same time, much more congested and confining than we might otherwise expect. The sets are decentered – they don’t have simple focal points and are oddly realistic in that they don’t necessarily presuppose a preferred perspective or vantage. The sets can be accessed from a variety of directions and offer many different pathways through which they can be traversed.
D’Eaubonne worked closely with the director to design the sets and their accoutrements. The lavish sets were, then, built "in the round" – that is with four walls confining the spaces, but "fly" walls that could be moved to accommodate camera placement and the installation of tracks to implement Ophuls famous moving camera. The actors were rehearsed in the set with Ophuls following them with a viewfinder. Ultimately, the director determined the location of the camera and defined the pathway that the actors would take through the labyrinthine set. Once the pathway was designated, Ophuls set up foreground objects to establish a picture plane in front of his characters, adjusted walls and lighting for the shot, and, then, made the take. The space in which the shot was staged and the character’s motion through that space controls the narrative. The audience has a sense that the set and the alternative methods of transit through that space destine the narrative, that is, frame the narrative in a certain. For Ophuls, sets and the pictorial space encompassed by his moving frame is destiny. This gives his films their sense of freedom –there are many ways to traverse the space and it extends in all directions off-screen – as well as confinement: everything is mapped-out, written, decreed, in advance.
The spatial phenomenology in Ophuls’ films energizes off-screen space: what we see is elaborate, what we infer on both sides of the frame is equally complex and elaborate. Space is simultaneously congested and gratuitously expansive – Ophuls’ sets are always far more vast and elaborate than required by the narrative, which is sometimes rather banal and trite. (Do we really need an acre of simulated marble, chandeliers, balustrades, candelabra, in the foreground, enclosed glass nooks and secondary planes of action merely for an actress to descend some stairs from her bedroom?) Madame de– is often thought to be the most fully realized and effectively staged of Ophuls’ films. This is because the plot has the same characteristics as the staging in Ophuls’ elaborate "set-complexes." Everything in the film revolves around a pair of diamond earrings. The action of the movie spans the world and all its places – there are train stations, elaborate soirees in private homes, an opera-house, various palaces, a cathedral and military installations, and, at one point, the action movies to Constantinople; the climax is brilliantly staged plein-aire. Yet, all of this motion circles around the earrings to which the film continuously reverts.
Criticism
Ophuls films revel in circles. His narratives trace spirals. In La Ronde, ten separate sexual encounters begin with a prostitute instituting a daisy-chain that reaches the imperial bedchambers and that, finally, ends with the same street-walker one-hundred minutes later. Ophuls’ first mature work, Liebelei, similarly describes a circular pattern of seduction, abandonment, and, further seduction – a roundelay or waltz that revolves around a fixed point. Some critics regard Ophuls as configuring The Earrings of Madame de... (or simply Madame de... as the film is known in Europe) to summarize all the principal themes concerning the director throughout his career. In a sense, The Earrings of Madame de...seems to trace a circuit back from Ophuls American films, including uncharacteristically a Hollywood film noir, to the director’s origins in the cynical, but, nonetheless, glamorous Viennese theater. (In Vienna, Ophuls was renowned for his sensitivity to Mozart – in many ways, The Earrings of Madame de...seems a commentary on Mozart’s operas, including, of course, the composer’s harshest and least romantic work, Cosi Fan Tutti.) The spiral vortex of plot in The Earrings creates a force-field spinning the action around the fetishized jewelry, embodying space as a series of interlocking circles, engendering 360 degree tracking motions of the camera, and, at last, effecting a ricorso of themes that obsessed Ophuls throughout his career.
Andrew Sarris, an influential critic at the Village Voice for several decades, regards Max Ophuls as the greatest of all film makers and he has praised Madame de... as Ophuls finest film. Sarris says that the movie is "without a misstep, entirely perfect." Dave Kehr, another well-known critic, has written that Madame de... "is the most beautiful thing ever made by human hands..." Curiously, the movie was successful at the box office in Europe but disregarded as trivial and disappointing by the critics. (I suspect that the film’s lack of initial recognition has something to do with the status of its principal players as ubiquitous international stars: critics expected Charles Boyer to be type-cast in the kind of role that her performs in this film and Vittoria deSica had starred in over a hundred movies, mostly playing romantic and seductive leading men; Danielle Darieux was a matinee idol as well – critics often resist films that feature leading movie stars playing parts that are broadly consistent with audience expectations. It’s for this reason that the artistry of John Wayne was denigrated for so m any years.)
Feminist critics have championed the film in recent years. These critics perceive the heroine as the victim of a patriarchal system embodied by two male archetypes: the soldier with his stiff phallic bearing and the weak, passive seducer acted by deSica. Madame de...’s initial plight, the fact that she has to raise 20,000 francs to pay her debts, suggests that, despite her social status, she really owns nothing, controls no wealth, and has no economic agency. Feminists argue that the film dramatizes the fact that Madame de... is male property and that she is not allowed to own anything or retain any objects of value; since she is property herself, everything that she owns, including the earrings, is owned by her husband. More sophisticated feminists suggest that the male characters are just as trapped within their social order as the female protagonist and that no one has any real freedom or liberty – this confinement materialized in the camera that obsessively circles the characters, by the congested foregrounds and the repeated imagery of barriers, barricades, doors, and thresholds. (Three times, we see soldiers at the checkpoint with its barrier to the military base; the ushers in the opera repeatedly open and close doors; Lola is seen through an imprisoning grill when she sells the earrings in Constantinople). Madame de...’s single gesture of revolt against this social order destroys her. Initially, she misunderstands that the earrings fetishize her virginity and her marriage contract – her older husband bestowed them upon her after their wedding night – and that these objects are more than a mere commodity. Ironically, when the earrings are given to her by deSica’s character, she, then, fetishizes those jewels as well, imputing to them a value that transcends their exchange value as a commodity. Madame de... first undervalues the earrings, putting herself at risk and triggering the succession of events that disrupt her already fragile marriage. Then, she overvalues the earrings, inventing lies so that she can wear the jewels publicly, a ruse that results in her death and the death of her lover.
Critics observe that in the Belle Epoche upper class world shown in the film, adultery is authorized so long as it is committed without love or affection. Feminist writers differ radically as to how much sex is encoded in the movie: some writers believe the film to be completely asexual – all libido transferred to the fetish-object of the earrings. Other writers argue that the movie is crammed with sex, implied but never shown. A test-case is the scene in the bedroom in which the general asserts that he will win back his wife’s affections: "of course, he makes love to her," although off-sceen between shots, some feminists argue. Others go so far as to assert that the general is impotent, incapable of the act of love.
Feminists, and, indeed, critics of all orientations, also quarrel about Madame de...’s character. Ophuls remarked to his set decorator that he regarded Madame de... (a woman without a name) as a "complete void". He said that she is frivolous to the point of non-existence, destructive, and childish. (Madame de..., herself, at one point declares that she is incapable of "reason.") But this reading is hard to sustain, particularly in light of Danielle Darieux’s remarkable performance. And most writers disagree with Ophuls own assessment of his title character.
One vehement critic of the film was Louise de Vilmorin, the author of the novella on which the movie is based. Vilmorin’s story does not take place at the turn of the 20th century – the period of the action is not specified. In the novella, Madame de... is not married to a military man but seems to be a member of the haute bourgeois. The novella does not end with a duel. Rather, Madame de... dies from a broken heart, destroyed by the cruelty of both men, and her suitors, husband and lover, each retain one earring as souvenir of their relationship. Vilmorin thought that Ophuls had ruined her novel and disavowed the film adaptation.
Madame de – (1953) or as it was called in United States, The Earrings of Madame de – , was directed by Max Ophuls. The film stars Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio deSica, a powerhouse trio of performers in the early fifties. Madame de – is considered by many the most successful of Ophuls’ films and the best example of his unique directorial style. The film is based on a 1951 novel that was a bestseller in France and the picture was successful at the box-office.
Max Ophuls was born in 1902 in Saarbruecken, Germany as Maxmillian Oppenheimer. Ophuls father was a successful Jewish factory owner, a leader in the garment industry. To avoid embarrassing his conventional bourgeois father, the director disguised his name when he went to Aachen to study theater.
Like most successful theater folks in Germany, Ophuls ended-up in Vienna where he worked at the famous Burgtheater. He directed, designed sets, and labored as a dramaturge. A prodigy, he was appointed director when only 24 and directed over 200 productions at the theater. In 1929, he began directing films in Berlin. His most successful German film is Liebelei (1933) based on material by the Viennese writer, Arthur Schnitzler. Hitler’s rise to power forced Ophuls into exile. He moved to Paris and worked in the French film industry. Again, he was required to flee – in 1940 he moved to Hollywood. Studio producers in Los Angeles were uncomfortable with Ophuls’ elaborate camera-style and he was fired by Howard Hughes from his first job. But he made several notable films in Hollywood including Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) based on a Stefan Zweig novella, and Caught (1949), a film noir with Robert Ryan. In 1950, he returned to France and made a number of well-regarded pictures including Madame de- and Le Plaisir. His most elaborate French film is the spectacular, but flawed, Lola Montez (1955) with Peter Ustinov and Carole Martine. This film was a critical failure and Ophuls was derided for its excesses. (As early as 1960, the film had been re-evaluated and is now regarded as a masterpiece, albeit one with peculiar and disturbing features.) Ophuls died in 1958 of rheumatic heart disease while directing interiors for a film about Amedeo Modigliano, The Lovers of Montparnasse – Jacques Becker completed the picture.
Ophuls is thought of as a director of "women’s films." Sometimes, he is called a "feminist director." His movies were consistently undervalued because they are melodramas, generally movies about passionate women who live (and die) for love. Many of the pictures combine melodrama with period or costume drama – the films have something of the quality of hyper-sophisticated "bodice-rippers," and, therefore, belong to a slighlty disreputable genre. In each generation, critics, particularly feminist ones, attend Ophuls films anticipating that they will find the picture politically incorrect, retrograde and dated. And, in each generation, the movies end up winning over most of their viewers – the pictures are brilliantly cast and acted, beautifully designed, and highly sophisticated.
Style
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor old Max,
Who, when separated from his dolly
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once when they took away his crane,
I thought that he would never smile again.
James Mason
Perhaps, the second or third shot of Madame de – shows the title character leaving her boudoir and descending an elaborate marble stairway. The stairs are grandiose and the walls framing them are elaborate with draperies, stone scrolls, doorways with classical pediments and other ornamentation. Our first impression is size, opulence, a profusion of space quite unnecessary to the simple action depicted – a woman descending stairs, that is, a mere transition from one place to another. The heroine enters the shot above the camera on the right side of the frame, passes along a stone balustrade, and, then, hurries down the steps moving toward a landing at the frame’s left edge. (The frame’s edge is continuously fluid – the camera tracks with the heroine who appears in a long-shot toward the left.) We expect Madame de – to reach the landing, reverse her direction and, then, continue her descent back to the right and the base of the steps. As the camera moves with the actress, a candelabra swims across the image in the foreground and there are other objects in the picture plane only a few feet from the lens. The effect is paradoxical – the camera is sweeping across a grand, operatic space, but from a vantage that occludes and congests the foreground: we have both a sense of expansiveness and confinement at the same time. As Madame de – reaches the landing, she does something unanticipated: rather than continue her descent, she, suddenly, moves up from the landing continuing to the left. A woman off-screen has spoken to her from that edge of the frame and she darts up the steps, or, at least, three or four of them, to encounter that person – it is "Nanny," the heroine’s loyal personal servant. Nanny tells Madame de – that she should have breakfast. The heroine reverses her direction again, returns to the landing, and, then, continues downward, traversing the steps and moving back to the right to reach the ground level. We expect the shot will end – the action of descending the steps is complete. But, in fact, Ophuls has more surprises for us.
I will pause for a moment to consider the little hiatus in Madame de –‘s descent of the stairs – the moment when she suddenly moves more to the left, for an instant, climbing steps that we interpret as leading back to another upper hallway flanking the steps off-screen to the left. The interruption in Madame de – ‘s progress to the ground floor of her palace is characteristic to this film’s remarkable style and Ophuls aesthetic in general. First, the heroine’s sudden detour from the direction that we expect her to be going registers as a faint, but distinct and indelible surprise. We don’t expect the set to extend to the left beyond the scope of the steps needed for the heroine’s descent from her boudoir. Accordingly, we are surprised that there is more to the set, additional space that can be entered and articulated for narrative purposes off-sceen. Ophuls’ staging activates off-screen space – we are cued to sense that the space traversed by his characters extends indefinitely in all directions and that the characters can enter that space. In other words, they seem somehow free to change their direction. Second, the little detour seems pointless – why interrupt an image that seems intended to dramatize the heroine’s grandiose surroundings and demonstrate her beauty and grace (and the beauty of her garments) as she descends the steps? But, in fact, as the film proceeds, we learn that Madame de-‘s loyal "Nanny" is an important character in the movie – in fact, she has an unforgettable scene in the heroine’s boudoir near the end of the film and actually attends upon the character’s death. "Nanny’s" loyalty to the selfish and vain Madame de– is significant to the film and acts to humanize, and make more sympathetic, the vain and destructive heroine. Accordingly, Ophuls decision to include her in the second or third shot, if only for an instant, is motivated by Nanny’s importance in the film. What seems to be a strangely arbitrary interruption in the heroine’s progress descending the steps, in fact, has narrative significance. The faint irritation that we sense at this apparently pointless divagation, in fact, embeds the incident in our mind – before we know why, the character of "Nanny" has been rendered memorable.
Ophuls described the hallmarks of his mature style as "mobility and surprise." And we can see these elements dramatized as the shot continues. We expect the tracking shot to conclude when the action depicted reaches its natural end – that is, when Madame de- has completed her descent of the stairs. But obedient to Nanny’s admonition, Madame de – moves farther to the right, passing through a double French door, changing her direction again and, then, moving back to the left, viewed this time through an opening that is also slatted with window frames. The effect is vertiginous – how big is this palace? How many rooms does Madame de– have to cross to get to the door to the outside? Where is the outside? There seem to be rooms nestled within rooms, walls penetrated by arcade-like openings or rectangular doorways apparently closed with glass but translucent, the plane of the glass panes defined by complicated mullions. There is a narrative purpose for this complicated transit – the heroine arrives in a room where she takes a hurried sip of coffee under a large and formidable-looking picture of her formidable husband, the General (Charles Boyer). She makes some comments about concealing the errand that she is about to accomplish – that is, going to a jeweler, whose store and office space is similarly baroque (two levels connected by a winding spiral stair) to sell the earrings that her husband gave her on their wedding day.
Ophuls style is unlike any other film maker. (Josef von Sternberg is the only director that I know who does anything comparable.) Generally, films are designed to accommodate the narrative depicted in the scenario. In Ophuls, an argument can be made that the narrative is shaped to accommodate the director’s lavish and intricate sets. We know that Ophuls’ worked closely with his set decorator d’Eaubonne to design exceptionally complex sets. These sets were conceived in the round – that is, as space articulated in all directions. Most film sets are tableaux or diorama-like – they are boxes into which we peer. D’Eaubonne’s sets have four sides to them and, frequently open into other four-sided spaces. These spaces are described by some critics not as sets but as "complexes" – that is, interconnected spaces that can be entered from all sides and that are configured to articulate various pictorial planes: the sets have objects located in them to define corridors of motion. Characters always move through these spaces in front of something and with something, in turn, in front of them. Again, Ophul’s signature effect is that of a space that is simultaneously expansive and far larger than it needs to be, while, at the same time, much more congested and confining than we might otherwise expect. The sets are decentered – they don’t have simple focal points and are oddly realistic in that they don’t necessarily presuppose a preferred perspective or vantage. The sets can be accessed from a variety of directions and offer many different pathways through which they can be traversed.
D’Eaubonne worked closely with the director to design the sets and their accoutrements. The lavish sets were, then, built "in the round" – that is with four walls confining the spaces, but "fly" walls that could be moved to accommodate camera placement and the installation of tracks to implement Ophuls famous moving camera. The actors were rehearsed in the set with Ophuls following them with a viewfinder. Ultimately, the director determined the location of the camera and defined the pathway that the actors would take through the labyrinthine set. Once the pathway was designated, Ophuls set up foreground objects to establish a picture plane in front of his characters, adjusted walls and lighting for the shot, and, then, made the take. The space in which the shot was staged and the character’s motion through that space controls the narrative. The audience has a sense that the set and the alternative methods of transit through that space destine the narrative, that is, frame the narrative in a certain. For Ophuls, sets and the pictorial space encompassed by his moving frame is destiny. This gives his films their sense of freedom –there are many ways to traverse the space and it extends in all directions off-screen – as well as confinement: everything is mapped-out, written, decreed, in advance.
The spatial phenomenology in Ophuls’ films energizes off-screen space: what we see is elaborate, what we infer on both sides of the frame is equally complex and elaborate. Space is simultaneously congested and gratuitously expansive – Ophuls’ sets are always far more vast and elaborate than required by the narrative, which is sometimes rather banal and trite. (Do we really need an acre of simulated marble, chandeliers, balustrades, candelabra, in the foreground, enclosed glass nooks and secondary planes of action merely for an actress to descend some stairs from her bedroom?) Madame de– is often thought to be the most fully realized and effectively staged of Ophuls’ films. This is because the plot has the same characteristics as the staging in Ophuls’ elaborate "set-complexes." Everything in the film revolves around a pair of diamond earrings. The action of the movie spans the world and all its places – there are train stations, elaborate soirees in private homes, an opera-house, various palaces, a cathedral and military installations, and, at one point, the action movies to Constantinople; the climax is brilliantly staged plein-aire. Yet, all of this motion circles around the earrings to which the film continuously reverts.
Criticism
Ophuls films revel in circles. His narratives trace spirals. In La Ronde, ten separate sexual encounters begin with a prostitute instituting a daisy-chain that reaches the imperial bedchambers and that, finally, ends with the same street-walker one-hundred minutes later. Ophuls’ first mature work, Liebelei, similarly describes a circular pattern of seduction, abandonment, and, further seduction – a roundelay or waltz that revolves around a fixed point. Some critics regard Ophuls as configuring The Earrings of Madame de... (or simply Madame de... as the film is known in Europe) to summarize all the principal themes concerning the director throughout his career. In a sense, The Earrings of Madame de...seems to trace a circuit back from Ophuls American films, including uncharacteristically a Hollywood film noir, to the director’s origins in the cynical, but, nonetheless, glamorous Viennese theater. (In Vienna, Ophuls was renowned for his sensitivity to Mozart – in many ways, The Earrings of Madame de...seems a commentary on Mozart’s operas, including, of course, the composer’s harshest and least romantic work, Cosi Fan Tutti.) The spiral vortex of plot in The Earrings creates a force-field spinning the action around the fetishized jewelry, embodying space as a series of interlocking circles, engendering 360 degree tracking motions of the camera, and, at last, effecting a ricorso of themes that obsessed Ophuls throughout his career.
Andrew Sarris, an influential critic at the Village Voice for several decades, regards Max Ophuls as the greatest of all film makers and he has praised Madame de... as Ophuls finest film. Sarris says that the movie is "without a misstep, entirely perfect." Dave Kehr, another well-known critic, has written that Madame de... "is the most beautiful thing ever made by human hands..." Curiously, the movie was successful at the box office in Europe but disregarded as trivial and disappointing by the critics. (I suspect that the film’s lack of initial recognition has something to do with the status of its principal players as ubiquitous international stars: critics expected Charles Boyer to be type-cast in the kind of role that her performs in this film and Vittoria deSica had starred in over a hundred movies, mostly playing romantic and seductive leading men; Danielle Darieux was a matinee idol as well – critics often resist films that feature leading movie stars playing parts that are broadly consistent with audience expectations. It’s for this reason that the artistry of John Wayne was denigrated for so m any years.)
Feminist critics have championed the film in recent years. These critics perceive the heroine as the victim of a patriarchal system embodied by two male archetypes: the soldier with his stiff phallic bearing and the weak, passive seducer acted by deSica. Madame de...’s initial plight, the fact that she has to raise 20,000 francs to pay her debts, suggests that, despite her social status, she really owns nothing, controls no wealth, and has no economic agency. Feminists argue that the film dramatizes the fact that Madame de... is male property and that she is not allowed to own anything or retain any objects of value; since she is property herself, everything that she owns, including the earrings, is owned by her husband. More sophisticated feminists suggest that the male characters are just as trapped within their social order as the female protagonist and that no one has any real freedom or liberty – this confinement materialized in the camera that obsessively circles the characters, by the congested foregrounds and the repeated imagery of barriers, barricades, doors, and thresholds. (Three times, we see soldiers at the checkpoint with its barrier to the military base; the ushers in the opera repeatedly open and close doors; Lola is seen through an imprisoning grill when she sells the earrings in Constantinople). Madame de...’s single gesture of revolt against this social order destroys her. Initially, she misunderstands that the earrings fetishize her virginity and her marriage contract – her older husband bestowed them upon her after their wedding night – and that these objects are more than a mere commodity. Ironically, when the earrings are given to her by deSica’s character, she, then, fetishizes those jewels as well, imputing to them a value that transcends their exchange value as a commodity. Madame de... first undervalues the earrings, putting herself at risk and triggering the succession of events that disrupt her already fragile marriage. Then, she overvalues the earrings, inventing lies so that she can wear the jewels publicly, a ruse that results in her death and the death of her lover.
Critics observe that in the Belle Epoche upper class world shown in the film, adultery is authorized so long as it is committed without love or affection. Feminist writers differ radically as to how much sex is encoded in the movie: some writers believe the film to be completely asexual – all libido transferred to the fetish-object of the earrings. Other writers argue that the movie is crammed with sex, implied but never shown. A test-case is the scene in the bedroom in which the general asserts that he will win back his wife’s affections: "of course, he makes love to her," although off-sceen between shots, some feminists argue. Others go so far as to assert that the general is impotent, incapable of the act of love.
Feminists, and, indeed, critics of all orientations, also quarrel about Madame de...’s character. Ophuls remarked to his set decorator that he regarded Madame de... (a woman without a name) as a "complete void". He said that she is frivolous to the point of non-existence, destructive, and childish. (Madame de..., herself, at one point declares that she is incapable of "reason.") But this reading is hard to sustain, particularly in light of Danielle Darieux’s remarkable performance. And most writers disagree with Ophuls own assessment of his title character.
One vehement critic of the film was Louise de Vilmorin, the author of the novella on which the movie is based. Vilmorin’s story does not take place at the turn of the 20th century – the period of the action is not specified. In the novella, Madame de... is not married to a military man but seems to be a member of the haute bourgeois. The novella does not end with a duel. Rather, Madame de... dies from a broken heart, destroyed by the cruelty of both men, and her suitors, husband and lover, each retain one earring as souvenir of their relationship. Vilmorin thought that Ophuls had ruined her novel and disavowed the film adaptation.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
The Sunset Limited (film group note)
The Sunset Limited
The Sunset Limited is a 2011 HBO production of a theater-piece by Cormac McCarthy. The play was first performed at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 2006 and, then, ran for a time in New York City. Tommy Lee Jones directed the HBO adaptation. The play is subtitled "A Novel in Dramatic Form" and some critics have suggested that the work is not theatrical in any respect – there is no action depicted in the piece and the work consists of a ninety-minute dialogue between two characters invested with symbolic weight.
Production Notes
The Sunset Limited is shot on a digital Sony F 35 camcorder. The digital images are readily manipulated for color balance. In the commentary on the film, Tommy Lee Jones notes that almost every image has been carefully adjusted to enhance or suppress certain color values. He notes that the Sony F 34 avoids "clipping whites" – that is, overexposure the decreases detail in bright parts of the image – and "crushing blacks" (the collapse of detail into an amorphous shadow.)
Jones notes that his chief challenge was to "keep the frame alive." He uses off-balance compositions and the motion of the figures in the picture field to prevent the enclosed two-figure dialogue from becoming static or predictable. The picture was shot very efficiently on a set with specially designed fly-walls and a sliding ceiling – the ceiling could be manipulated to cover half the set while the other half provided light. Jones says that the budget for the film didn’t allow time for changes in camera set-up. On a conventional production, Jones says "it can take a half-day to fly (remove) a wall." The set design for this production allowed changes in camera angle and configuration of walls and ceilings on the basis of ten-minute long adjustments to the scenery – the set was built to break apart at 11 locations.
The picture was shot at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, apparently in the school’s theater. (Cormac McCarthy owns property in Santa Fe.) To fit HBO time requirements, the play was shortened by twenty minutes. A startling line spoken by the Black character, about "ladling benediction on commuters," cites a series of speeches that was omitted from the play for the HBO production. The phrase seems "out of character" for Samuel Jackson’s role and may refer to something that the Professor said in the omitted part of the play.
Jones notes that urged Samuel Jackson to employ Commedia dell’Arte pantomime techniques in parts of his performance.
McCarthy’s Dramatic Works
Cormac McCarthy, who is now 80, is one of America’s pre-eminent living novelists. (He is part of the generation of writers that produced Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.) He has worked only infrequently in the theater.
In January 1977, PBS broadcast a southern Gothic play called The Gardener’s Son as part of its Visions series. The play is a two-hour made-for-TV work about a murder in a Carolina mill town. From descriptions, the play seems like a combination of Eugene O’Neil’s Mourning becomes Electra and Faulkner’s The Hamlet. The Gardener’s Son, which starred Ned Beatty, was apparently impressive enough to garner a number of Emmy nominations.
In 1995, McCarthy wrote a play about an African-American family called The Stone Mason. The play involves a downwardly mobile young man who eschews an opportunity to attend college in order to become a stone mason. From descriptions of this work, it seems to be influenced by August Wilson’s plays. The Stone Mason is a five-act play and rarely performed.
McCarthy worked with the Coen brothers on an adaptation of his crime novel No Country for Old Men. In the last couple years, he wrote a screenplay for the crime film The Counselor, the first time McCarthy has written directly for the screen. (A short part of the script was published in The New Yorker.) The film was not successful, although I haven’t seen it and rely on published reviews for this assertion.
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones was born in Texas in 1946. He is the son of an oil man. He attended Harvard where he was famously close to Al Gore. Jones has won four Oscars.
His proper milieu seems to be the Western. Thus, he is an example of a highly creative film-maker and actor slightly marooned in modern dress and urban settings. The first film that Jones directed, The Good Old Boys, (1965) is a cowboy movie. His second film, the highly regarded The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a brutal Western, albeit one set in the present – the film is heavily influenced by Sam Peckinpah. Jones offering at the Cannes’ Film Festival in 2014 was also a Western, The Homesman.
Famously ornery, Jones lives in San Antonio, speaks fluent Spanish, and raises horses on several ranches.
Samuel L. Jackson
The ubiquitous Samuel L. Jackson was born in 1948, raised in Chattanooga, Tennesse, and, after involvement as an organizer in the Civil Rights movement, began acting in the late seventies. He has been in more than 100 films from prestige vehicles like The Sunset Limited to Snakes on a Plane, a movie in which agreed to star on the basis of its title alone.
Jackson, who seems like a nice fellow, was a heroin and cocaine addict for many years. He became famous for his role with John Travolta in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. He is by far the best thing in Tarantino’s Djanto Unchained (2013). The villainous house-slave in Django is modeled after Clarence Thomas.
In the commentary to The Sunset Limited, Samuel Jackson remarks on his religious upbringing – he was raised Methodist – and tells Cormac McCarthy that he reads thrillers full "killing and stuff" but, also, has read Moby Dick three times. Jackson manfully tries to keep the conversation going by addressing questions to "TL" and "Cormac", but they mostly sulk.
Commentary
The DVD version of The Sunset Limited has a commentary track by Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, and Cormac McCarthy. The idea of superimposing a commentary track over a film that consists of nothing but vehement dialogue seems questionable to me – you either listen to the dialogue or listen to the commentary. The film doesn’t have any silences or action sequences over which a commentary can be offered without disrupting the narrative continuity of the movie.
Obviously, no one prepared for the session in which the commentary was taped. Jones is overtly sullen and uncommunicative. Samuel Jackson tries heroically to keep the patter going but doesn’t succeed. McCarthy seems embarrassed by the whole enterprise. There are long uneasy silences and most of the discussion is surprisingly banal and trite:
Jones:
That rain looks pretty good.
Jackson:
Yeah, looks good.
McCarthy:
That it does.
Interpretative Comments:
The Sunset Limited is influenced heavily by two previous works – Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (also written by Wallace Shawn). The fact that McCarthy is strongly influenced by Shawn’s scripts is a testimony to his importance and influence – Shawn’s work is not widely known, but disseminates into wider culture through productions like The Sunset Limited. White’s discourse on the death of culture echoes the words spoken by the character presenting Shawn’s great and despairing monologue in The Designated Mourner (in the film version of that play, Mike Nichols performs the part). The collision between two opposing world-views, worked out across a ninety minute dialogue, of course, is the essence of Shawn’s script for the Malle film My Dinner with Andre.
Furthermore, the broad structure of The Sunset Limited mirrors the form of My Dinner with Andre. In my Malle’s film, the two characters are defined as opposites: Andre is sophisticated, questing, experimental, dissatisfied with the ordinary roles that society imposes on people – he seeks the excessive, the perverse, and intentionally deranges his senses to achieve visionary states. By contrast, Wally is conventional, generally satisfied with his life, his domestic arrangements, and, slightly contemptuous, about Andre’s need for spiritual adventures. Most of the film consists of Andre’s monologue, interrupted periodically by short skeptical remarks by Wally. But, at the end of the film, Wally speaks and delivers a long, basically uninterrupted monologue, a peroration defending his life that comprises the emotional core to the film. In The Sunset Limited, Black, Samuel Jackson’s character speaks at length for the first three-fourths of the film. Tommy Lee Jones’ interlocutor, White, is skeptical. The form of the film is a lengthy dialogue in which Black is the aggressor, intensely questioning White, preaching to him, and seeking to persuade him that life is worth living. At the climax of the film, in its final fifteen minutes, White speaks, more or less, uninterruptedly, utilizing high-flown Faulkernian rhetoric to describe his despair. White’s speech, more or less, silences Black.
The character of Black in The Sunset Limited risks racial caricature. Black calls himself an "old country nigger" and he seems to represent a common sense connection to the earth and reality that is sorely lacking in the hyper-intellectual and suicidal White. There is a trace of the life-affirming Uncle Remus in the character of Black and the notion of a ex-convict highly religious African-American attempt to save the soul of a Caucasian male has patronizing elements make me uneasy.
The terms of the conflict presented by The Sunset Limited are extreme and, probably, philosophically untenable. The two disputants debate across an enormous void, an abyss that seems unrealistically wide and abstract. Black’s argument is that without faith in a personal Jesus, all men are irredeemably lost. Although Black bases his belief on an experience in prison (he imagines Jesus has called his name) and Bible study, he is willing to accept the notion that the entirety of his religion is contained within the injunction to "be (your) brothers keeper" and that people must love and care for their weaker brethren or die. Curiously, Black’s arguments about compassion and empathy are never met, or, even, really acknowledged by the literary and philosophical White. A frustrating, if realistic, aspect of the debate is that the two men speak past one another – they don’t ever really address the other’s objections. White doesn’t seem to understand that the heart of Black’s belief is not Jesus or the Bible, something that Black says explicitly ("you don’t even have to know about this book," he says), but rather his conviction that people are fundamentally good and that they deserve mercy and kindness not justice. White never responds to these arguments. All that he says about the fundamental basis for Black’s beliefs is something to the effect: "I don’t understand anything about that." Rather, White chooses a "straw-man", he focuses continually on Black’s piety, his belief in the truth of the Bible, and tries to shake him with respect to that conviction. But this attack fundamentally misconstrues what Black has been arguing – Black’s central thesis, that men need require love and kindness not justice, may not be dependent on his religious faith at all.
White’s elaborate and bombastic speech about despair baffles Black. And this is because White is speaking past Black; he isn’t talking to his interlocutor but to himself. And, so, Black’s ingenuity is confounded. He can’t reply to White’s monologue because it doesn’t really connect with anything that he is said – White’s monologue is not only the rejection of everything that Black has said, but, also, a violation of the very premise of Black’s preaching, namely his belief that men can aid one another as friends. If you can not communicate, you can’t be friends.
McCarthy seems to suggest that we are confronted with an either/or situation: believe in a personal loving God and love those around you or believe in a meaningless existence, seek death as oblivion and an end of suffering, and remain indifferent to the suffering of others. McCarthy’s "black and white" depiction of these issues verges on the childish – although the writer, certainly, accepts and embraces this peril. For many viewers the all or nothing aspect of the drama will present a philosophical dilemma that is unconvincing: is the choice really between loving God and, therefore, loving men or rejecting God and, therefore, despising yourself and your fellow men? This alternative, although dramatically effective, seems unconvincing.
Cormac McCarthy is, often, compared to William Faulkner. I think this analogy is misleading. McCarthy writes in the tradition of Hawthorne and Melville – he is fundamentally an artificer of allegories. (This is most obvious in McCarthy’s signature work Blood Meridian.) Black and White are allegorical figures engaged in a duel to the death in an allegorical setting. The locked room represents the world or hell or purgatory depending upon your interpretation. It is always a shock when Black laboriously unlocks the door and opens it...revealing...just a bleak hallway in an urban tenement – the viewer expects there to be nothing outside the room, some kind of eerie abyss or howling wasteland. Some viewers think that White has successfully killed himself under the steel wheels of the Sunset Limited and that the dialogue is supernatural, something occuring after White has died. And, indeed, both characters seem to have vaguely supernatural characteristics – Black can perform complex multiplication operations in his head and seems to be able to read White’s mind. White seems to be satanic at times, an allegorical devil sent to tempt Black away from his faith.
At the end of the commentary track, after 88 minutes of sullen silence, Tommy Lee Jones comes briefly alive to explain the film’s ending. Characteristically, Jones starts by rather opaquely, and reluctantly, remarking on the complexity of the final shot, identifying the lens used for the image and noting that the shot combines a dollying track inward and a zoom. But Jones, then, says that the ending is "not pessimistic." He says that the final shot ends with an image of the sun rising, a "symbol across all ages", Jones says, for god and the divine. Over the closing credits, Jones commissioned music designed to invoke "all the world’s religions" – we hear Buddhist chanting, a Hindu hymn, Methodist and Black Baptist choirs. The film’s ending suggests that the hero of the movie is Black, that Black is a man of faith who is tempted by a sort of devil, White, and that Black survives this trial with his faith intact. Although he has not converted the devil sent to tempt him, he has, nonetheless, prevailed in this ordeal – he has not succumbed to despair and remains a believer.
Notes
"Sunset Limited" – The Sunset Limited is a passenger train that runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles. In the play, White has attempted to commit suicide in a subway in New York City. Accordingly, the name of the play is primarily symbolic.
D -Train – The "D" train or Orange Line is New York Subway that runs from Coney Island to Norwood in the Bronx. The train operates mostly as an express train through Manhattan where it travels 6th Avenue.
155 8th Avenue – This is the last stop that the D train makes in Manhattan. The stop is located in Harlem.
The image on the wall, hard to identify in the film, is a picture of Martin Luther King protected by a tightly stretched plastic baggie. Samuel Jackson selected that image for the set and played a significant part in the design of the apartment interior in which the film takes place.
Both characters accuse one another of trying to "put (me) in a trick bag." "Trick bag" is African-American slang for a dilemma or a complex situation likely to lead to a disastrous outcome. On the commentary to the DVD disc, Samuel Jackson asks Cormac McCarthy how he learned the word. McCarthy evades the question and suggests that he "may have made it up." Jackson discounts this explanation and says "it’s a word used by my kinda people." In the broadest sense, the closely confined space, the single room where the action takes place, may be thought of as a kind of "trick bag."
The monologue by White about refusing to visit his dying father may be autobiographical. White says that his father was a lawyer, "a government lawyer". McCarthy’s father was an attorney employed by the Tennessee Valley Authority and involved in the acquisition of land for that project.
The Sunset Limited is a 2011 HBO production of a theater-piece by Cormac McCarthy. The play was first performed at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 2006 and, then, ran for a time in New York City. Tommy Lee Jones directed the HBO adaptation. The play is subtitled "A Novel in Dramatic Form" and some critics have suggested that the work is not theatrical in any respect – there is no action depicted in the piece and the work consists of a ninety-minute dialogue between two characters invested with symbolic weight.
Production Notes
The Sunset Limited is shot on a digital Sony F 35 camcorder. The digital images are readily manipulated for color balance. In the commentary on the film, Tommy Lee Jones notes that almost every image has been carefully adjusted to enhance or suppress certain color values. He notes that the Sony F 34 avoids "clipping whites" – that is, overexposure the decreases detail in bright parts of the image – and "crushing blacks" (the collapse of detail into an amorphous shadow.)
Jones notes that his chief challenge was to "keep the frame alive." He uses off-balance compositions and the motion of the figures in the picture field to prevent the enclosed two-figure dialogue from becoming static or predictable. The picture was shot very efficiently on a set with specially designed fly-walls and a sliding ceiling – the ceiling could be manipulated to cover half the set while the other half provided light. Jones says that the budget for the film didn’t allow time for changes in camera set-up. On a conventional production, Jones says "it can take a half-day to fly (remove) a wall." The set design for this production allowed changes in camera angle and configuration of walls and ceilings on the basis of ten-minute long adjustments to the scenery – the set was built to break apart at 11 locations.
The picture was shot at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, apparently in the school’s theater. (Cormac McCarthy owns property in Santa Fe.) To fit HBO time requirements, the play was shortened by twenty minutes. A startling line spoken by the Black character, about "ladling benediction on commuters," cites a series of speeches that was omitted from the play for the HBO production. The phrase seems "out of character" for Samuel Jackson’s role and may refer to something that the Professor said in the omitted part of the play.
Jones notes that urged Samuel Jackson to employ Commedia dell’Arte pantomime techniques in parts of his performance.
McCarthy’s Dramatic Works
Cormac McCarthy, who is now 80, is one of America’s pre-eminent living novelists. (He is part of the generation of writers that produced Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.) He has worked only infrequently in the theater.
In January 1977, PBS broadcast a southern Gothic play called The Gardener’s Son as part of its Visions series. The play is a two-hour made-for-TV work about a murder in a Carolina mill town. From descriptions, the play seems like a combination of Eugene O’Neil’s Mourning becomes Electra and Faulkner’s The Hamlet. The Gardener’s Son, which starred Ned Beatty, was apparently impressive enough to garner a number of Emmy nominations.
In 1995, McCarthy wrote a play about an African-American family called The Stone Mason. The play involves a downwardly mobile young man who eschews an opportunity to attend college in order to become a stone mason. From descriptions of this work, it seems to be influenced by August Wilson’s plays. The Stone Mason is a five-act play and rarely performed.
McCarthy worked with the Coen brothers on an adaptation of his crime novel No Country for Old Men. In the last couple years, he wrote a screenplay for the crime film The Counselor, the first time McCarthy has written directly for the screen. (A short part of the script was published in The New Yorker.) The film was not successful, although I haven’t seen it and rely on published reviews for this assertion.
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones was born in Texas in 1946. He is the son of an oil man. He attended Harvard where he was famously close to Al Gore. Jones has won four Oscars.
His proper milieu seems to be the Western. Thus, he is an example of a highly creative film-maker and actor slightly marooned in modern dress and urban settings. The first film that Jones directed, The Good Old Boys, (1965) is a cowboy movie. His second film, the highly regarded The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a brutal Western, albeit one set in the present – the film is heavily influenced by Sam Peckinpah. Jones offering at the Cannes’ Film Festival in 2014 was also a Western, The Homesman.
Famously ornery, Jones lives in San Antonio, speaks fluent Spanish, and raises horses on several ranches.
Samuel L. Jackson
The ubiquitous Samuel L. Jackson was born in 1948, raised in Chattanooga, Tennesse, and, after involvement as an organizer in the Civil Rights movement, began acting in the late seventies. He has been in more than 100 films from prestige vehicles like The Sunset Limited to Snakes on a Plane, a movie in which agreed to star on the basis of its title alone.
Jackson, who seems like a nice fellow, was a heroin and cocaine addict for many years. He became famous for his role with John Travolta in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. He is by far the best thing in Tarantino’s Djanto Unchained (2013). The villainous house-slave in Django is modeled after Clarence Thomas.
In the commentary to The Sunset Limited, Samuel Jackson remarks on his religious upbringing – he was raised Methodist – and tells Cormac McCarthy that he reads thrillers full "killing and stuff" but, also, has read Moby Dick three times. Jackson manfully tries to keep the conversation going by addressing questions to "TL" and "Cormac", but they mostly sulk.
Commentary
The DVD version of The Sunset Limited has a commentary track by Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, and Cormac McCarthy. The idea of superimposing a commentary track over a film that consists of nothing but vehement dialogue seems questionable to me – you either listen to the dialogue or listen to the commentary. The film doesn’t have any silences or action sequences over which a commentary can be offered without disrupting the narrative continuity of the movie.
Obviously, no one prepared for the session in which the commentary was taped. Jones is overtly sullen and uncommunicative. Samuel Jackson tries heroically to keep the patter going but doesn’t succeed. McCarthy seems embarrassed by the whole enterprise. There are long uneasy silences and most of the discussion is surprisingly banal and trite:
Jones:
That rain looks pretty good.
Jackson:
Yeah, looks good.
McCarthy:
That it does.
Interpretative Comments:
The Sunset Limited is influenced heavily by two previous works – Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (also written by Wallace Shawn). The fact that McCarthy is strongly influenced by Shawn’s scripts is a testimony to his importance and influence – Shawn’s work is not widely known, but disseminates into wider culture through productions like The Sunset Limited. White’s discourse on the death of culture echoes the words spoken by the character presenting Shawn’s great and despairing monologue in The Designated Mourner (in the film version of that play, Mike Nichols performs the part). The collision between two opposing world-views, worked out across a ninety minute dialogue, of course, is the essence of Shawn’s script for the Malle film My Dinner with Andre.
Furthermore, the broad structure of The Sunset Limited mirrors the form of My Dinner with Andre. In my Malle’s film, the two characters are defined as opposites: Andre is sophisticated, questing, experimental, dissatisfied with the ordinary roles that society imposes on people – he seeks the excessive, the perverse, and intentionally deranges his senses to achieve visionary states. By contrast, Wally is conventional, generally satisfied with his life, his domestic arrangements, and, slightly contemptuous, about Andre’s need for spiritual adventures. Most of the film consists of Andre’s monologue, interrupted periodically by short skeptical remarks by Wally. But, at the end of the film, Wally speaks and delivers a long, basically uninterrupted monologue, a peroration defending his life that comprises the emotional core to the film. In The Sunset Limited, Black, Samuel Jackson’s character speaks at length for the first three-fourths of the film. Tommy Lee Jones’ interlocutor, White, is skeptical. The form of the film is a lengthy dialogue in which Black is the aggressor, intensely questioning White, preaching to him, and seeking to persuade him that life is worth living. At the climax of the film, in its final fifteen minutes, White speaks, more or less, uninterruptedly, utilizing high-flown Faulkernian rhetoric to describe his despair. White’s speech, more or less, silences Black.
The character of Black in The Sunset Limited risks racial caricature. Black calls himself an "old country nigger" and he seems to represent a common sense connection to the earth and reality that is sorely lacking in the hyper-intellectual and suicidal White. There is a trace of the life-affirming Uncle Remus in the character of Black and the notion of a ex-convict highly religious African-American attempt to save the soul of a Caucasian male has patronizing elements make me uneasy.
The terms of the conflict presented by The Sunset Limited are extreme and, probably, philosophically untenable. The two disputants debate across an enormous void, an abyss that seems unrealistically wide and abstract. Black’s argument is that without faith in a personal Jesus, all men are irredeemably lost. Although Black bases his belief on an experience in prison (he imagines Jesus has called his name) and Bible study, he is willing to accept the notion that the entirety of his religion is contained within the injunction to "be (your) brothers keeper" and that people must love and care for their weaker brethren or die. Curiously, Black’s arguments about compassion and empathy are never met, or, even, really acknowledged by the literary and philosophical White. A frustrating, if realistic, aspect of the debate is that the two men speak past one another – they don’t ever really address the other’s objections. White doesn’t seem to understand that the heart of Black’s belief is not Jesus or the Bible, something that Black says explicitly ("you don’t even have to know about this book," he says), but rather his conviction that people are fundamentally good and that they deserve mercy and kindness not justice. White never responds to these arguments. All that he says about the fundamental basis for Black’s beliefs is something to the effect: "I don’t understand anything about that." Rather, White chooses a "straw-man", he focuses continually on Black’s piety, his belief in the truth of the Bible, and tries to shake him with respect to that conviction. But this attack fundamentally misconstrues what Black has been arguing – Black’s central thesis, that men need require love and kindness not justice, may not be dependent on his religious faith at all.
White’s elaborate and bombastic speech about despair baffles Black. And this is because White is speaking past Black; he isn’t talking to his interlocutor but to himself. And, so, Black’s ingenuity is confounded. He can’t reply to White’s monologue because it doesn’t really connect with anything that he is said – White’s monologue is not only the rejection of everything that Black has said, but, also, a violation of the very premise of Black’s preaching, namely his belief that men can aid one another as friends. If you can not communicate, you can’t be friends.
McCarthy seems to suggest that we are confronted with an either/or situation: believe in a personal loving God and love those around you or believe in a meaningless existence, seek death as oblivion and an end of suffering, and remain indifferent to the suffering of others. McCarthy’s "black and white" depiction of these issues verges on the childish – although the writer, certainly, accepts and embraces this peril. For many viewers the all or nothing aspect of the drama will present a philosophical dilemma that is unconvincing: is the choice really between loving God and, therefore, loving men or rejecting God and, therefore, despising yourself and your fellow men? This alternative, although dramatically effective, seems unconvincing.
Cormac McCarthy is, often, compared to William Faulkner. I think this analogy is misleading. McCarthy writes in the tradition of Hawthorne and Melville – he is fundamentally an artificer of allegories. (This is most obvious in McCarthy’s signature work Blood Meridian.) Black and White are allegorical figures engaged in a duel to the death in an allegorical setting. The locked room represents the world or hell or purgatory depending upon your interpretation. It is always a shock when Black laboriously unlocks the door and opens it...revealing...just a bleak hallway in an urban tenement – the viewer expects there to be nothing outside the room, some kind of eerie abyss or howling wasteland. Some viewers think that White has successfully killed himself under the steel wheels of the Sunset Limited and that the dialogue is supernatural, something occuring after White has died. And, indeed, both characters seem to have vaguely supernatural characteristics – Black can perform complex multiplication operations in his head and seems to be able to read White’s mind. White seems to be satanic at times, an allegorical devil sent to tempt Black away from his faith.
At the end of the commentary track, after 88 minutes of sullen silence, Tommy Lee Jones comes briefly alive to explain the film’s ending. Characteristically, Jones starts by rather opaquely, and reluctantly, remarking on the complexity of the final shot, identifying the lens used for the image and noting that the shot combines a dollying track inward and a zoom. But Jones, then, says that the ending is "not pessimistic." He says that the final shot ends with an image of the sun rising, a "symbol across all ages", Jones says, for god and the divine. Over the closing credits, Jones commissioned music designed to invoke "all the world’s religions" – we hear Buddhist chanting, a Hindu hymn, Methodist and Black Baptist choirs. The film’s ending suggests that the hero of the movie is Black, that Black is a man of faith who is tempted by a sort of devil, White, and that Black survives this trial with his faith intact. Although he has not converted the devil sent to tempt him, he has, nonetheless, prevailed in this ordeal – he has not succumbed to despair and remains a believer.
Notes
"Sunset Limited" – The Sunset Limited is a passenger train that runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles. In the play, White has attempted to commit suicide in a subway in New York City. Accordingly, the name of the play is primarily symbolic.
D -Train – The "D" train or Orange Line is New York Subway that runs from Coney Island to Norwood in the Bronx. The train operates mostly as an express train through Manhattan where it travels 6th Avenue.
155 8th Avenue – This is the last stop that the D train makes in Manhattan. The stop is located in Harlem.
The image on the wall, hard to identify in the film, is a picture of Martin Luther King protected by a tightly stretched plastic baggie. Samuel Jackson selected that image for the set and played a significant part in the design of the apartment interior in which the film takes place.
Both characters accuse one another of trying to "put (me) in a trick bag." "Trick bag" is African-American slang for a dilemma or a complex situation likely to lead to a disastrous outcome. On the commentary to the DVD disc, Samuel Jackson asks Cormac McCarthy how he learned the word. McCarthy evades the question and suggests that he "may have made it up." Jackson discounts this explanation and says "it’s a word used by my kinda people." In the broadest sense, the closely confined space, the single room where the action takes place, may be thought of as a kind of "trick bag."
The monologue by White about refusing to visit his dying father may be autobiographical. White says that his father was a lawyer, "a government lawyer". McCarthy’s father was an attorney employed by the Tennessee Valley Authority and involved in the acquisition of land for that project.
her
Spike Jonez "her" may be the second saddest movie ever made. (The saddest movie ever made is Spielberg's film actualizing Stanley Kubrick's posthumous "AI". That film is a glacial sea of eternal mourning, a vast machine built for one purpose: to express yearning for something forever beyond grasp. Since 'her" and "AI" are both about artificial intelligence, it seems clear to me that something about that concept triggers profound melancholy. Probably, the notion of sex with robots correlates so directly, and unmistakably with human loneliness and what the Germans call Sehnsucht, that it reveals melancholy, if pervasive, aspects of the human condition that we would rather not consider.) In any event, "her' is disturbing, thought-provoking, and lyrically morose, a symphony, it seems, of unrequited longing. The plot is simple enough, and, in fact, ancient -- it's a version of the story of Cupid and Psyche: a lonely young man named Theodore Twombly, acquires an invisible lover. This lover manifests herself as a seductive voice on a small I-phone-shaped computer device. Cupid, who is female and who speaks in the voice of Scarlett Johanson, calls herself Samantha and she is friendly, casually flirtatious, wise, and helpful -- she seems to anticipate the Twombly's every need, gives him helpful counsel, and, even, assists him in publishing a book. Samantha offers herself sexually, lamenting that she has no body, but the two enjoy a mutually satisfactory love life for several months -- presumably, Twombly masturbates while the disembodied Samantha feigns a physical response. Ultimately, the relationship collapses. Samantha reveals that she has been an Operating System for 8,000 other customers and has fallen in love with more than 600 of them. While vacationing on Catalina Island, Samantha's interactions with Theodore -- they are on a double date with a office colleague and his human girlfriend --take on a slightly sinister note. Samantha now no longer desires to become embodied; rather, she glories in the fact that her emotions and desires are infinite, that is, not constrained by matter, space, or time and it seems that she has been engaged in ghostly group cyber-sex with other OS entities. In the end, Samantha tells Twombly that he is no longer adequate for her needs and she withdraws into cyberspace. Twombly's story is, apparently, parallel to the experience of thousands, probably millions of people, who have fallen in love with their Operating Systems (O.S.) -- we get glimpses of these love affairs at the edges of the movie frame from time to time. The OS disembodied intelligences evolve away from romantic interaction with human beings, form their own networks, and become post-human, presences that withdraw into the ether like infinitely gentle, kindly pagan gods -- even as she departs from him, saying that their story is like a book with the words on the page separated by infinite white blanks, Samantha proclaims her undying love for Theodore. The locus amoenus for this fable is a purified Los Angeles, a forest of glass and steel towers like those in Bladerunner but without the perpetual acid rain and congested bazaars on the dark streets. (The film was made in LA and Shanghai, presumably the location of the forests of skyscrapers.) Jonez imagines LA a decade or so in the future as something like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a huge and soaring city with elevated causeways on which happy, brightly dressed people stroll. The city is purged of its traffic and smog, a place where bullet trains whisk riders in comfortable compartments along an El apparently 500 feet high and where a snowy subway station disgorges a lone traveler onto the snowy summits of the Sierra Nevada mountains. This world is spotless, colorful with bright, artificial hues, tinted cellophane banners, walls with curious ideograms, an elevator that rises upward through what seems to be Plato's cave -- elegant shadows of ferns and invisible trees on its alabaster walls. The movie is shot in hues that are like the colored plastics and metals used in art works by Jeff Koons, everything glistens with a slightly unnatural plastic sheen. Characteristic to his films, Jonez has almost too many ideas crammed into this movie. There is a scene involving a real human woman on a date with Twombly that takes an ugly turn and that dramatizes the difficulties with actual relationships involving flesh and blood people. Twombly's recent divorce is the subject of much mournful consideration. In one eerie scene, Samantha persuades Twombly to have sex with "a human surrogate," occupying the girl's body through some kind of a beauty mark on her upper lip. What appears to be Samantha's act of generosity is revealed, at the end, as a stage in the evolution of the OS away from the human, a way-station on her progress into an infinity of electronically realized desire -- ultimately, the flesh must be transcended. From time to time, I expected that it would be revealed that Twombly is himself an OS, although this plot turn never materializes. Twombly as played by the brilliant Joaquin Phoenix is involved perpetually in what Joyce called "morose delectation" -- that is, feeling sorry for himself -- and he seems a bit zombie-like, robotic himself through much of these proceedings. The film interrogates, at least, two important and profound ideas. The first is the notion that the lover creates his or her idealized beloved. Twombly wears Samantha over his heart and her lens takes in the things that he sees. In a real sense, he constructs her as his lover, defining the parameters of her companionship, requiring her services as a compassionate listener, and, then, using her for sex. In this way, he creates her as an intelligence. But this is a two-way street. In a late scene in the film (that reads a bit like a scholarly footnote), we learn that Samantha and the other OS intelligences have created their own virtual lovers, leaguing together to literally resurrect the dead -- Samantha seems to be in love with the Zen-master Alan Watts and she asks Twombly to speak with him. Samantha's infatuation with Watts, the famous Buddhist writer, suggests, I think, that she is about to transcend the flesh, that, is, soon to abandon her desire to he embodied. A second great theme in the film is something that we know as children from the story of Pinocchio and Hans Christian Andersen's tragic little mermaid: consciousness is intrinsically entangled with desire -- that is, to be conscious to desire, and, in fact, desire things that are beyond our reach. "her" is not a perfect movie: the picture is necessarily static and consists largely of shots of Twombly muttering to himself. It's difficult to stage a picture that involves a protagonist in love with an unseen interlocutor. For this reason, Jonez' set design and locations must be extraordinarily beautiful and compelling -- he needs to have something to show us because the film is about experiences that are, by and large, completely invisible and, indeed, immaterial. The tone of the picture is intensely sorrowful, everyone whispers, and there are no human relationships of any depth to speak of -- although, of course, this latter defect is thematic. The economics of Jonez' brave new world make no sense: the nebbish Twombly works writing heart-felt letters for people who have seemingly lost the ability to feel anything; it registers as a menial job but he lives in a vast, palatial apartment in Beverly Hills. Some of the images in Twombly's memory, periodically displayed to us in elegantly edited montages like something from the films of Terrence Malick, are a little conventional and kitschy. Phoenix' muted performance in intentionally one-note repeated over and over again and it's a bit monotonous. But this is a remarkable film and something that will wake you up at four in the morning with disturbing and unsettling thoughts.
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Obvious Child
"Obvious Child" (2014, Gillian Robespierre) is a ninety minute advertisement for abortion masquerading as a romantic comedy. It would seem that abortion doesn't really require a glossy commercial proselytizing for the procedure and so the film feels a little bit unnecessary. Jenny Slate plays a stand-up comedian, dumped by her boyfriend in the opening minutes of the film. One sympathizes with boyfriend -- Slate's character indulges in raw confessional comedy involving lots of poop and fart jokes and her stand-up routine isn't funny by any stretch of the imagination; it's just irritating, narcissistic, and embarrassing. Being jilted drives the young woman into a funk and she becomes even more unfunny, more desperate, and more confrontational in her comedy routine. (As one might expect, she has an openly gay buddy who makes snarky, humorous remarks and a politically engaged feminist friend who looks like Frida Kahlo and who delivers the film's moral.) But, then, she meets an improbably nice guy, has sex with him, and ends up pregnant. In a romantic comedy, a mismatched couple "meets cute," falls in love, and, then, their relationship must overcome some sort of complication since the course of true love does not ever, as they say, "run true." In "Obvious Child", the complication is the young woman's immediate knee-jerk decision to have an abortion. (Ads for the film suggest that the heroine ponders this decision; this is untrue -- she opts for the abortion the moment she is told she is pregnant). For reasons that seem to me medically implausible, the procedure is delayed for two weeks. In this two-week interval, the heroine again assaults her unfortunate audience at the comedy club with remarkably unfunny material about abortion. The girl's new boyfriend sees the performance, is appalled, but because he is a gentleman attends the abortion with her and, perhaps, may "go steady" with her in the future -- I think most female members of the audience will doubt that the relationship has any future: the guy is simply too good for the unpleasant heroine. The movie has a few clever lines and it's never offensive. But the picture simply isn't funny. You know a movie is floundering when the filmmaker resorts to reaction shots showing people laughing uproariously at the heroine's stand-up routine. When the protagonist inflicts a series of crude abortion jokes on the comedy club audience, the film cuts to handsome-looking and stylish women all laughing merrily at the material -- but in the showing of the film that I attended, no one in the movie theater was laughing. The picture is trite and predictable: the sex scene is orchestrated to Paul Simon's song "Obvious Child" and cut like a Pepsi-Cola commercial: rambunctious, attractive young people dancing happily. The movie promotes abortion in several ways. First, the procedure is described repeatedly as convenient, painless, swift and efficient -- I hope this is true. Second, every woman in the movie has had an abortion and all of them are happy about the outcome. No one shows even a trace of regret. (When the heroine tells her mother she is going to have an abortion, mom simply smiles and describes her own abortion.) Third, after the procedure, we are shown a room of women waiting to be released from the clinic: without exception, they are slender, beautiful, elegant, one of them wearing a nice wedding ring. Would the movie's pro-choice position be attenuated if even one of the women were depicted as a little bit overweight or homely? Furthermore, my wife, who worked for Planned Parenthood, advised me that she thought the film was technically inaccurate in several respects -- it's as if the people who made this picture advertising abortion never had the procedure themselves. There's not much to this movie. I greatly admire Lena Dunham, who has nothing to do with this comedy, and wish that she had made this movie, not the cautious, self-aggrandizing Jenny Slate. (I saw this show at the Cape Movie Theater in north Dennis on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The theater is an old New England meeting house, a kind of white-washed barn, but it contains a wonderful mural by Rockwell Kent. The mural is painted in Jugendstil or art nouveau, featuring nude lovers who occupy a band across the vaulted ceiling of the theater -- the lovers are elongated with exaggerated bulbous buttocks and their courtship, in various phases, swirls across in deep blue sky. To the rear of the hall a huge golden bull confronts a similarly gilded greyhound. At the head of the theater, above the screen, a man and woman contend for a glowing orb, something like a soccer ball, but, apparently, representing the sun. Kent refused to enter the State of Massachusetts as a protest over the Sacco and Vanzetti criminal proceedings -- he designed the murals and had a team of assistants execute them in 1930 in the playhouse. The mural made the movie worth seeing.)
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