The Witness (2017) is a documentary about the murder of Kitty Genovese. This slaying in March 196 was famously reported by A.M. ("Abe") Rosenthal in The New York Times. Rosenthal massaged the facts so support the striking claim (apparently originating with the "beat" reporter) that 38 inhabitants of the apartment building where Genovese lived saw her being butchered but did absolutely nothing. As the film notes, this aspect of the story became far more famous than the murder itself, establishing in sociological literature something called "the bystander effect." "The bystander effect" represents the proposition that if many people witness a violent crime each will expect the other to take action to intervene with the effect that no one does anything. In its more sinister form, the "bystander effect" has been invoked to support the assertion that most people, particularly in urban environments, are simply too apathetic and disengaged to protect a victim from assault. The Genovese murder has been repeatedly asserted as diagnostic of alienation that afflicts the "lonely crowd" in big cities, people who turn up their TV sets to avoid hearing cries for help. But, of course, there's a serious problem with all of this gloomy analysis: it's based on what we now call "false news." Rosenthal's story about the 38 uncaring witnesses was invented -- in fact, people in the apartment complex (who could not see what was happening to Genovese) heard her screams and called the police. At least, one woman, at risk to herself, rushed to Genovese's rescue and the victim died in her arms. There's no evidence that anyone turned a blind eye (or, more accurately, a "deaf ear") to what was happening to Genovese. One of the neighbors recalls, however, that many of people in the housing complex were tattooed with concentration camp numbers and, therefore, perhaps, hesitant to trust government authorities or the police. Nonetheless, as Mike Wallace observes, "Abe" Rosenthal made up the story of the apathetic 38 witnesses to "sell newspapers."
The Witness is an ambitious production and it ventures considerably beyond an exploration of the so-called "bystander effect." In fact, the film resembles to some degree Errol Morris' remarkable Wormwood in that the picture is driven by an obsessive inquiry by Genovese's brother, Bill. Bill Genovese lost both legs in Vietnam and believes that he volunteered for active duty in the Marines because he didn't want to be viewed as "apathetic" -- in other words, the story of the 38 witnesses was decisive in his life and may have resulted in his own mutilation. In Wormwood, a son who refuses to accept the official account of his father's death, allegedly suicide but possibly murder, destroys his life and the lives of his family by devoting his entire existence to attempts to discover what really happened to his father -- he goes so far as disinterring his father's corpse and having it dissected. In The Witness, Bill Genovese is literally crippled by his sister's murder -- we see him crawling up the steps in the stairwell where his sister died on his hands and stumps of his legs. He also will spare no effort to learn the truth about his sister's murder -- at the end of the movie, he even restages his sister's murder, hiring an actress to scream for help on the sidewalk in front of the apartment and in the stairwell where Kitty died. Bill Genovese, only half a man after the blast tore off his legs, is like a living metaphor -- when we see him in his wheelchair, distraught on the dark sidewalk in front of the apartment building, we get a powerful sense for how this obsession has ruined him. (And, as in Wormwood, there are family conferences in which his brothers keep urging him to cease and desist from his obsessive research -- it ultimately proves nothing, his siblings tell him, and just re-opens wounds that are fifty-years old.) But Bill will not be relegated to the status of a feckless bystander and he continues to aggressively prosecute his sleuthing to the horror of everyone else involved. Most of Bill's efforts relate to reconstructing his sister's life and gathering details about her murder -- the myth of the 38 complacent witnesses has been repeatedly debunked in the years following the crime. Ultimately, Bill tries to interview Winston Mosely, the murderer. Mosely remains incarcerated and his son, a spectacularly smarmy fellow, tries to parley Bill's obsession into a favorable petition to the parole board -- although to no avail. Mosely's son, wearing a big cross, argues that Winston was "triggered" by racial slurs uttered by Kitty Genovese. Bill points out that a week before killing Kitty, Mosely murdered an African-American woman, raped her as she was dying, and, then, set her and her house on fire. Mosely's son says disingenuously that he didn't hear much about that. He, then, argues that the Genovese murder was possibly gang-related: "Aren't you the Genovese crime family?" he asks. (Later, Winston Mosely sends a letter to Bill Genovese claiming that he was just the driver for a gangland hit on Kitty.) The duel between the murderer's son and the victim's brother, which is so understated as to be invisible, is striking -- we see how events have consequences fifty years later and how the two men, now old themselves, clash over how their relatives are to be remembered and portrayed. As it turns out, Kitty was gay and the famous picture of her was a police mug shot -- she was arrested and jailed for running numbers for a bookie and, so, there is a tiny kernel of truth as to Mosely's assertion that she was involved in organized crime. In fact, she was a bartender at a somewhat disreputable establishment in Queens and the viewer suspects that, perhaps, there's a little more to the gang connection than meets the eye. In any event, the film is effective and moving -- it was broadcast on Independent Lens, a documentary series on PBS, that starts at 10:00 pm. I was tired and didn't want to stay up late to watch the movie, but after about two minutes casual viewing, I was hooked and stayed for the full ninety minutes.
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
Sunday, December 8, 2019
Evil
Evil is a CBS TV series consisting of ten episodes aired between September and December in 2019. The show is currently available streaming "On Demand." On the evidence of five episodes that I have watched, the program is consistently entertaining with appealing characters and highly intelligent writing -- indeed, the quality of the dialogue and plotting is as good as anything that I have seen recently on network TV.
The show's premise is that the Catholic church investigates miracles and other paranormal phenomenon including varieties of demonic possession. The purpose for this investigation is to determine whether the paranormal incident has theological dimensions or a natural cause. For instance, Church authorities are not willing to commit to exorcisms unless they have evidence that the person suffering the affliction is "possessed" as opposed to merely mentally ill. In order to accomplish these objectives, the Church has designated a team consisting of a young man training for the priesthood, a forensic psychologist and a technology expert whose role is unmask shams and hoaxes that use high-tech means to perpetrate their frauds. Of course, the investigative team is devised along the lines of the X-Files, one of TV's greatest shows, and a worthy predecessor to Evil The forensic psychologist is an attractive young woman, Dr. Kristin Bouchard, seasoned in the court-room where she has performed, not too honestly, 34 competency evaluations -- working for the State's attorney, she admits on cross-examination that she has found all 34 defendants competent to stand trial. After she deviates from this predictable course, considering the possibility that a mass murderer may be demonically possessed, the DA fires her. But the Priest-in-training, David Acosta, a spectacularly handsome and charismatic African-American man, senses that she is highly intelligent and sufficiently scientific to have an open-mind about the paranormal -- and, so, he recruits her as the "skeptic" (the so-called "Devil's Advocate") on his team. The third member of the group is a Muslim man, Ben Shakir, who specializes in computers and technology -- he is also skeptical by inclination. Series TV requires that each of these characters have compelling back stories. For instance, Dr. Bouchard has four daughters, and lives in a funky house under a huge bridge -- it's apparently in Queens. She was a famous mountaineer before giving up climbilng to raise her family. Dr. Bouchard's husband, who is unseen in the show, is still a mountain-climber and said to be guiding tourists up Mount Everest while the action of the show unfolds. Dr. Bouchard's mother, played by Christine Lahti, is an attractive, high-spirited woman in her sixties who hangs around bars prospecting for sexual encounters with men. David Acosta takes hallucinogens to experience visions of God -- he was a journalist in the Middle East before seeking to become a priest. Shakir's part is under-written, at least, in the first episodes -- we see him at home with his sister, also a tech expert, who wears a head-scarf. Clearly, the formula here is directly derived from the X-Files -- the attractive and spunky rationalist, Dr. Bouchard, plays against the ecstatic seeker, David Acosta just as Gillian Anderson's Dana Scully served as the skeptical counterpart to the mystically inclined Fox Mulder ("I want to Believe") as played by David Duchovny. Both Tv shows traffic in unresolved sexual tension between the two principals -- this venerable plot device was the engine for Moonlighting (Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis), worked well in the X-Files and seems no less effective in Evil -- in the 2019 CBS series, Dr. Bouchard is tempted to cheat on her husband, who has deserted her to climb mountains, with the hunky David Acosta. Acosta is prettier than Bouchard -- he's solidly built with a noble bald ebony head and vast melting eyes and he's pious: we see him praying on his knees. At the end of the fifth episode, Acosta suggests to Dr. Bouchard that they "maybe get a drink together" -- this seems to me to be a fateful invitation.
A strong series TV show is often dependent on supporting characters. Here Christine Lahti as Dr. Bouchard's free-spirited and promiscuous mother does an excellent job with a character who, we think is really only on-board as a babysitter so that her daughter can spend her nights exploring spooky crimes and miracles -- this seems a waste until the fifth episode when there is a truly shocking turn of events involving the heroine's mother that seems to bode ill for Dr. Bouchard (and well for the audience watching the show.) Also very good is Michael Emerson as the utterly monstrous Dr. Leland Townsend, a nihilistic forensic psychologist, who replaces Dr. Bouchard as a "mouthpiece" for the cynical DA and who may well be some kind of demonic entity himself. (Emerson is the whitest of all white men, so pale that he is almost translucent, and his WASP line-readings are intended to counterpoint David Acosta's African-American presence as hero and love-interest in the show.) Four little girls who play Dr. Bouchard's daughters are all very good -- this is one of the few shows that includes a realistic depiction of children -- and there's a handsome, if cadaverous incubus, named George who also gets to creep into the heroine's bed from time to time. As with the X-Files, some of the episodes are clearly intended to "stand alone" -- that is, to be segments detached from the overall narrative arc involving the continuing characters in the show. In the X-Files, the stand-alone episodes were often very funny and far and away better than the rather morose, lugubrious narrative arc -- a story involving a shadowy government conspiracy, all sorts of fatal diseases, and, as the show progressed, reproductive problems for the leading lady. These aspects of the story, involving much portentous and whispered dialogue, were always much less interesting than the witty and, often, quite frightening "creature feature" elements of the show. Based on the first five episodes of Evil, and by contrast with the X-Files, the plot that binds together the various investigations is actually very good, not slow-moving or pointlessly ominous, and it seems to me, successful as an entertainment. The individual investigations are well-conceived and, sometimes, exceeedingly frightening -- the material is also quite grim, involving suicides and unsettling murders: in some ways, the show is more uncompromising than the X-Files. The first episode involving a mass murderer seems to involve the supernatural, but is resolved on the basis of a natural explanation. In general, the show defaults to natural explanations for mysterious events although there is an admixture of the occult in the series. This is evident in the second episode that involves a girl thought to be dead who revives after being without heart beat or respiration for 177 minutes -- this program, which makes a powerful if annoyingly tendentious civil rights argument, was the weakest of the five that I have seen: but it also involves the unsettling appearance of something that looks like an angel on a hospital surveillance monitor, a motif that is mentioned from time to time as the show progresses. The third episode involving a cantankerous and abusive Broadway producer who may be possessed by a devil is funny with sinister overtones and a suicide scene that is more effective because it is very underplayed. The fourth episode involving a little boy who tries to kill his baby sister is extremely disturbing. The fifth show was created for Halloween and it involves a gruesome exorcism, an assault on Dr. Bouchard's children that is very creepy, and a tour of a "haunted strip club" by paranormal investigators clearly mimicking the foul-mouthed heros of the show Ghost Adventures -- this episode finds the exact right mixture of the uncanny, the horrible, the parodic (there is a witty reprise of the arrival of Max von Sydow in The Exorcist) and the humorous and represents a classic of the genre. Unless things fall to pieces in the next episodes, Evil represents a considerable achievement and is well worth streaming.
The show's premise is that the Catholic church investigates miracles and other paranormal phenomenon including varieties of demonic possession. The purpose for this investigation is to determine whether the paranormal incident has theological dimensions or a natural cause. For instance, Church authorities are not willing to commit to exorcisms unless they have evidence that the person suffering the affliction is "possessed" as opposed to merely mentally ill. In order to accomplish these objectives, the Church has designated a team consisting of a young man training for the priesthood, a forensic psychologist and a technology expert whose role is unmask shams and hoaxes that use high-tech means to perpetrate their frauds. Of course, the investigative team is devised along the lines of the X-Files, one of TV's greatest shows, and a worthy predecessor to Evil The forensic psychologist is an attractive young woman, Dr. Kristin Bouchard, seasoned in the court-room where she has performed, not too honestly, 34 competency evaluations -- working for the State's attorney, she admits on cross-examination that she has found all 34 defendants competent to stand trial. After she deviates from this predictable course, considering the possibility that a mass murderer may be demonically possessed, the DA fires her. But the Priest-in-training, David Acosta, a spectacularly handsome and charismatic African-American man, senses that she is highly intelligent and sufficiently scientific to have an open-mind about the paranormal -- and, so, he recruits her as the "skeptic" (the so-called "Devil's Advocate") on his team. The third member of the group is a Muslim man, Ben Shakir, who specializes in computers and technology -- he is also skeptical by inclination. Series TV requires that each of these characters have compelling back stories. For instance, Dr. Bouchard has four daughters, and lives in a funky house under a huge bridge -- it's apparently in Queens. She was a famous mountaineer before giving up climbilng to raise her family. Dr. Bouchard's husband, who is unseen in the show, is still a mountain-climber and said to be guiding tourists up Mount Everest while the action of the show unfolds. Dr. Bouchard's mother, played by Christine Lahti, is an attractive, high-spirited woman in her sixties who hangs around bars prospecting for sexual encounters with men. David Acosta takes hallucinogens to experience visions of God -- he was a journalist in the Middle East before seeking to become a priest. Shakir's part is under-written, at least, in the first episodes -- we see him at home with his sister, also a tech expert, who wears a head-scarf. Clearly, the formula here is directly derived from the X-Files -- the attractive and spunky rationalist, Dr. Bouchard, plays against the ecstatic seeker, David Acosta just as Gillian Anderson's Dana Scully served as the skeptical counterpart to the mystically inclined Fox Mulder ("I want to Believe") as played by David Duchovny. Both Tv shows traffic in unresolved sexual tension between the two principals -- this venerable plot device was the engine for Moonlighting (Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis), worked well in the X-Files and seems no less effective in Evil -- in the 2019 CBS series, Dr. Bouchard is tempted to cheat on her husband, who has deserted her to climb mountains, with the hunky David Acosta. Acosta is prettier than Bouchard -- he's solidly built with a noble bald ebony head and vast melting eyes and he's pious: we see him praying on his knees. At the end of the fifth episode, Acosta suggests to Dr. Bouchard that they "maybe get a drink together" -- this seems to me to be a fateful invitation.
A strong series TV show is often dependent on supporting characters. Here Christine Lahti as Dr. Bouchard's free-spirited and promiscuous mother does an excellent job with a character who, we think is really only on-board as a babysitter so that her daughter can spend her nights exploring spooky crimes and miracles -- this seems a waste until the fifth episode when there is a truly shocking turn of events involving the heroine's mother that seems to bode ill for Dr. Bouchard (and well for the audience watching the show.) Also very good is Michael Emerson as the utterly monstrous Dr. Leland Townsend, a nihilistic forensic psychologist, who replaces Dr. Bouchard as a "mouthpiece" for the cynical DA and who may well be some kind of demonic entity himself. (Emerson is the whitest of all white men, so pale that he is almost translucent, and his WASP line-readings are intended to counterpoint David Acosta's African-American presence as hero and love-interest in the show.) Four little girls who play Dr. Bouchard's daughters are all very good -- this is one of the few shows that includes a realistic depiction of children -- and there's a handsome, if cadaverous incubus, named George who also gets to creep into the heroine's bed from time to time. As with the X-Files, some of the episodes are clearly intended to "stand alone" -- that is, to be segments detached from the overall narrative arc involving the continuing characters in the show. In the X-Files, the stand-alone episodes were often very funny and far and away better than the rather morose, lugubrious narrative arc -- a story involving a shadowy government conspiracy, all sorts of fatal diseases, and, as the show progressed, reproductive problems for the leading lady. These aspects of the story, involving much portentous and whispered dialogue, were always much less interesting than the witty and, often, quite frightening "creature feature" elements of the show. Based on the first five episodes of Evil, and by contrast with the X-Files, the plot that binds together the various investigations is actually very good, not slow-moving or pointlessly ominous, and it seems to me, successful as an entertainment. The individual investigations are well-conceived and, sometimes, exceeedingly frightening -- the material is also quite grim, involving suicides and unsettling murders: in some ways, the show is more uncompromising than the X-Files. The first episode involving a mass murderer seems to involve the supernatural, but is resolved on the basis of a natural explanation. In general, the show defaults to natural explanations for mysterious events although there is an admixture of the occult in the series. This is evident in the second episode that involves a girl thought to be dead who revives after being without heart beat or respiration for 177 minutes -- this program, which makes a powerful if annoyingly tendentious civil rights argument, was the weakest of the five that I have seen: but it also involves the unsettling appearance of something that looks like an angel on a hospital surveillance monitor, a motif that is mentioned from time to time as the show progresses. The third episode involving a cantankerous and abusive Broadway producer who may be possessed by a devil is funny with sinister overtones and a suicide scene that is more effective because it is very underplayed. The fourth episode involving a little boy who tries to kill his baby sister is extremely disturbing. The fifth show was created for Halloween and it involves a gruesome exorcism, an assault on Dr. Bouchard's children that is very creepy, and a tour of a "haunted strip club" by paranormal investigators clearly mimicking the foul-mouthed heros of the show Ghost Adventures -- this episode finds the exact right mixture of the uncanny, the horrible, the parodic (there is a witty reprise of the arrival of Max von Sydow in The Exorcist) and the humorous and represents a classic of the genre. Unless things fall to pieces in the next episodes, Evil represents a considerable achievement and is well worth streaming.
Knives Out
Russian formalists distinguish between the fabula (that is the plot of a story) and the syuzhet (the way that the story is narrrated or told). The genre of mystery and detective stories relies upon devising a narrative that creates the greatest possible distance between fabula and syuzhet. In these kinds of a novels or films, a relatively simple plot -- X kills Y and, then, tries to conceal the identity of the killer -- is subjected to a complex syzuzhet designed to obscure the story to the point that it can not be deciphered in the "real time" that it takes the audience to read the story or watch the movie. At some point, very close to the end of the narrative, someone has to explain the fabula, an endeavor complicated by the requirement that all misdirections employed to obfuscate the story also must be motivated and explained. If done properly, this kind of story is highly entertaining -- we are shown remarkable and inexplicable things that are ultimately rationalized into meaning. This meaning is also reassuring to the audience -- we learn that crime doesn't pay and that justice prevails in the world. In Knives Out (2019 directed by Rian Johnson) a recent example of this genre, the film's theme is announced explicitly: a kind heart that acts without guile will always triumph against the world's connivance. Most often, this moral is demonstratively untrue, but it is worth stating and, even, a praiseworthy aspiration. Knives Out, in fact, is doubly virtuous in that proclaims a moral that is worth stating and, further, dramatizes this concept in the context of America's conflicted notions about the value of immigration and immigrants.
Knives Out is a prestige production, built with care for the Holiday Season -- it's family entertainment in the best sense of that concept. There is very little cursing in the film and the violence, as is generally the case in mystery narratives, is kept to a manageable, even, decorous level. The picture is intelligently scripted with engagingly eccentric characters and has a fantastic set -- a pseudo-Gothic castle atop a wooded hill that one of the character's describes as being the embodiment of a Clue gameboard. The film is literate and it plays fair -- most of the details necessary to solve the crime are presented before the solution is explained in the picture's last ten minutes, the standard scene in which the genius sleuth sits down all the suspects and talks them through the crime. The fabula is ingenious and the distortions imposed upon it by the syuzhet are also clever and entertaining. The film is shallow, a cunningly made entertainment, but it delivers the goods and, as I have observed above, also preaches a sermon worth hearing.
The cast is a rogue's gallery: Christopher Plummer is amusing as a benevolent, if overbearing, mystery writer who has amassed a vast fortune. He is found dead by a housekeeper played by Edi Patterson, a character actor who is always excellent -- she was the best thing in the HBO series The Righteous Gemstones. Of course, in classical detective fiction, the butler in the great manor house is often accused of the crime -- in this case, the butler's role is played by a Hispanic immigrant, Marta (Ana de Armas), the old man's nurse. Michael Shannon playing one of two ineffectual sons is very good as is Jamie Lee Curtis (with husband acted by Don Johnson) acting the part of the eldest daughter. Of course, the film is dominated by Daniel Craig who plays the sleuth, hired by one of the suspects to solve the crime. Craig's character is named Benoit Blanc and he drawls his lines in a southern accent so deep fried that someone calls him "KFC." It's an amusing star turn -- the sort of role (Hercules Poiret or Miss Marple) that authorizes the actor to amuse himself and the audience with all sorts of odd affectations. There's nothing wrong with Knives Out -- in fact, it is compelling throughout its length. I can't really write about the story in more detail because this would reveal plot points best experienced in the theater. Ordinarily, I don't care about "spoilers" and disclose plot points with impunity -- in this case, the plot points are, in fact, the entire raison d'etre of the movie and to reveal them would be to ruin the picture. I suspect that I will find the movie, more or less, forgettable -- this is the fate of even the best of these kinds of films. Who today remembers the prestige version of Peter Schaffer's Sleuth (1972) It was also a handsome production with all sorts of big stars (Sir Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine) -- I saw it, enjoyed it a great deal, and, then, promptly forgot all about the film until this moment as I write this review.
Knives Out is a prestige production, built with care for the Holiday Season -- it's family entertainment in the best sense of that concept. There is very little cursing in the film and the violence, as is generally the case in mystery narratives, is kept to a manageable, even, decorous level. The picture is intelligently scripted with engagingly eccentric characters and has a fantastic set -- a pseudo-Gothic castle atop a wooded hill that one of the character's describes as being the embodiment of a Clue gameboard. The film is literate and it plays fair -- most of the details necessary to solve the crime are presented before the solution is explained in the picture's last ten minutes, the standard scene in which the genius sleuth sits down all the suspects and talks them through the crime. The fabula is ingenious and the distortions imposed upon it by the syuzhet are also clever and entertaining. The film is shallow, a cunningly made entertainment, but it delivers the goods and, as I have observed above, also preaches a sermon worth hearing.
The cast is a rogue's gallery: Christopher Plummer is amusing as a benevolent, if overbearing, mystery writer who has amassed a vast fortune. He is found dead by a housekeeper played by Edi Patterson, a character actor who is always excellent -- she was the best thing in the HBO series The Righteous Gemstones. Of course, in classical detective fiction, the butler in the great manor house is often accused of the crime -- in this case, the butler's role is played by a Hispanic immigrant, Marta (Ana de Armas), the old man's nurse. Michael Shannon playing one of two ineffectual sons is very good as is Jamie Lee Curtis (with husband acted by Don Johnson) acting the part of the eldest daughter. Of course, the film is dominated by Daniel Craig who plays the sleuth, hired by one of the suspects to solve the crime. Craig's character is named Benoit Blanc and he drawls his lines in a southern accent so deep fried that someone calls him "KFC." It's an amusing star turn -- the sort of role (Hercules Poiret or Miss Marple) that authorizes the actor to amuse himself and the audience with all sorts of odd affectations. There's nothing wrong with Knives Out -- in fact, it is compelling throughout its length. I can't really write about the story in more detail because this would reveal plot points best experienced in the theater. Ordinarily, I don't care about "spoilers" and disclose plot points with impunity -- in this case, the plot points are, in fact, the entire raison d'etre of the movie and to reveal them would be to ruin the picture. I suspect that I will find the movie, more or less, forgettable -- this is the fate of even the best of these kinds of films. Who today remembers the prestige version of Peter Schaffer's Sleuth (1972) It was also a handsome production with all sorts of big stars (Sir Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine) -- I saw it, enjoyed it a great deal, and, then, promptly forgot all about the film until this moment as I write this review.
Friday, December 6, 2019
Dolemite is my name
Dolemite is my Name (Netflix 2019) is a boisterous bio-pic about a blaxploitation impresario, Rudy Ray Moore. The movie is a vehicle for Eddie Murphy, rated R for raunchy over-the-top language, but, in reality, mild-mannered with a G-rated sensibility. In its inspirational tone, the film, paradoxically, resembles A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood about Fred Rogers, also a movie dedicated to uplifting the downtrodden -- despite is subject matter, Dolemite is surprisingly sweet, chaste, and inspirational: it's the story of a group of underdogs banding together to put on a show, a plot that dates back, at least, to the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney musicals produced in the late 1930's. After a startling first forty minutes, the movie relaxes into genre, providing the predictable pleasures that films of this sort offer -- the last half of the movie is formulaic and doesn't deviate from the time-tested genre narrative: the plucky, but resourceful, team of misfits achieves some success and works effectively together to produce their show; at the last minute, complications ensue and the outcome is in doubt -- but, in the end, all is well and the tenacious gang of losers become winners acknowledged by all. This sort of story is always entertaining and Dolemite is well-executed. In particular, Eddie Murphy gives an extremely thoughtful performance -- Rudy Ray Moore is desperate for attention and fame, the son of a dirt-poor and abusive Arkansas sharecropper, and, unlike the brash, trash-talking hero that he impersonates as Dolemite, a sort of African-American James Bond in the form of an urban pimp, Moore is sexually reticent, sometimes fearful, and, essentially, a loner. Despite the crew of misfits that he gathers around him, Murphy's Moore is isolated, often lacking in self-confidence, and his displays of bravado are obviously compensatory for wounds inflicting on him by his impoverished childhood and previous failures. Murphys performance is surprising and implies a deep core of anxiety only half-concealed by Moore's exuberant braggadocio.
The first half of the film is better than its formulaic second part. Moore is pitching rhythm and soul records featuring his singing to a radio announcer (Snoop Dog) operating out of a ghetto record store. The announcer knows that Moore is a failure but he doesn't look down on him -- after all, he acknowledges, he's a loser too, trapped in the dead end of the sound-studio in the back room of a slum record shop. An old wino comes into the record store where Moore works -- the man stinks and alarms the other customers, but he's got an engaging schtick. He can recite the old urban "toasts", rhymed epics like "Shine and the Titanic" and "The signifying monkey". This sort of poetry is deemed in bad taste by urban Blacks -- it's got a jail-house ring Moore recognizes the raw power in these old rhymes and he buys some booze and spends time fraternizing with the hobos and winos hanging around a derelict, if once famous, hotel, The Dunbar. The scenes with the winos are impressively shot and performed -- the old drunks are scary-looking (one of them is missing half his jaw) but the half-improvised rhymes that they recite are funny and have a razor-edge. Moore gets some flamboyant pimp clothes and a big Afro wig and, carrying a silver-headed cane, goes on-stage at the California Club where he is an emcee to perform (over objection) some of this material. The crowd is enthusiastic and Moore becomes a minor celebrity performing filthy rhymed proto-raps to a sort of bongo drum accompaniment. These shows lead to several comedy albums. Of course, the mainstream media won't touch this material -- it's too aggressively obscene -- and so Moore hosts a house-party, records some routines to live (and very drunk) audience and, then, produces these records under his own label. (He sells them in brown paper wrapping marked with devil insignia and his first album is called Eat our More Often.) The records sell like the proverbial hot-cakes and Moore goes on a chitlin-circuit tour. Belatedly, the White-owned media take interest -- if Black art can turn a profit, the white folks want in on the loot. Moore produces several records, all of them with a pimp-theme: he appears naked on the cover surrounded by naked girls. Along the way, he develops a crew of sidekicks, including most notably a big fat woman named Queen Reed. One night, with his buddies, Moore goes to see The Front Page a movie based on the old screwball comedies of the thirties starring Jack Lemmon, Walther Matthau, and the young Susan Sarandon. The audience is entirely White and Moore with his buddies can't understand the humor at all -- it's completely incomprehensible to him. This leads Moore to come up with the idea of making a movie that urban Black audiences would like, something featuring "car chases, explosions, and titties." Moore mortgages his interest in his comedy recordings which have become very profitable and uses the money to hire some White kids from film school to shoot an urban gangster/pimp film called Dolemite is my Name. To accomplish this production, Moore commandeers the squalid Hotel Dunbar, steals electricity from a nearby power pole, and shoots the movie guerilla-style using people from the hood -- for instance, his writer is a local playwright with serious aspirations (he gets talked into the movie by Moore's argument that the film will depict the ravages of drugs on the inner city.) One of the lead actors says proudly that he has been "directed by Polanski" -- his colleagues are quick to remind him that he played an elevator operator in one scene in Rosemary's Baby. Local girls are recruited to form a crew of Shaolin kung fu "ho's." The production is imperiled when the cameraman, a kid named Nicholas von Sternberg (the son of Josef von Sternberg, the famous director), tells Moore that they have run out of the "short ends" on which they have been filming. Moore is distraught and about to abandon the project when one of the actors reminds him, surprisingly enough, of the example of John Cassavetes, the director who made his indy productions on a shoe-string budget. Moore digs deep, goes further into debt, and finishes the movie. No one will distribute the picture because it is awful in all respects.. Moore then "four-walls" the movie -- that is, rents a theater in Indianapolis for a midnight premiere and promotes the film himself. The rest of the movie is predictable and I will leave it to your surmise as to how this all turns out.
Most of the performers in the film have a hard-bitten aspect and there are a lot faces in this picture that you don't expect to see in a mainstream Hollywood production. Most of the movie is convincingly gritty and raw. It's a great pleasure to hear the old urban "toasts" like "The Signifying Monkey" spectacularly performed by Eddie Murphy. The presentation of this material is also satisfyingly sophisticated -- Murphy knows that the apparent ease with which streetcorner poets performed this complex material is the result of hard work and practice. The film shows Moore collecting this material, the writing and rewriting it, adapting the rhymes and combing through the meter while practicing the lines with different cadences and inflections. Nothing comes easily and everything is the product of intense effort. Of course, the film's final reel is full of inspirational dialogue -- for instance, Queen Reed, thanking Moore for putting people like her, those who are unconventionally beautiful, on-screen. Moore himself is paunchy and early reviews of the movie mock his beer-belly -- he performs the sex scenes in the film shot decorously to hide his girth. There's nothing not to like about this film and Murphy's performance is beautifully nuanced. (At the end of the film, the picture shows us clips from the actual 1975 film My Name is Dolemite. It's startlingly primitive and raw and, if anything, Murphy and his company in the Netflix movie are much, much prettier than the original players, including Moore who is very "ghetto". Both the prototype film and its bio-pic successor demonstrate an unsettling aspect of American life -- until the Netflix movie, I had never heard of Rudy Ray Moore and had no idea as to influence on the Black community.)
The first half of the film is better than its formulaic second part. Moore is pitching rhythm and soul records featuring his singing to a radio announcer (Snoop Dog) operating out of a ghetto record store. The announcer knows that Moore is a failure but he doesn't look down on him -- after all, he acknowledges, he's a loser too, trapped in the dead end of the sound-studio in the back room of a slum record shop. An old wino comes into the record store where Moore works -- the man stinks and alarms the other customers, but he's got an engaging schtick. He can recite the old urban "toasts", rhymed epics like "Shine and the Titanic" and "The signifying monkey". This sort of poetry is deemed in bad taste by urban Blacks -- it's got a jail-house ring Moore recognizes the raw power in these old rhymes and he buys some booze and spends time fraternizing with the hobos and winos hanging around a derelict, if once famous, hotel, The Dunbar. The scenes with the winos are impressively shot and performed -- the old drunks are scary-looking (one of them is missing half his jaw) but the half-improvised rhymes that they recite are funny and have a razor-edge. Moore gets some flamboyant pimp clothes and a big Afro wig and, carrying a silver-headed cane, goes on-stage at the California Club where he is an emcee to perform (over objection) some of this material. The crowd is enthusiastic and Moore becomes a minor celebrity performing filthy rhymed proto-raps to a sort of bongo drum accompaniment. These shows lead to several comedy albums. Of course, the mainstream media won't touch this material -- it's too aggressively obscene -- and so Moore hosts a house-party, records some routines to live (and very drunk) audience and, then, produces these records under his own label. (He sells them in brown paper wrapping marked with devil insignia and his first album is called Eat our More Often.) The records sell like the proverbial hot-cakes and Moore goes on a chitlin-circuit tour. Belatedly, the White-owned media take interest -- if Black art can turn a profit, the white folks want in on the loot. Moore produces several records, all of them with a pimp-theme: he appears naked on the cover surrounded by naked girls. Along the way, he develops a crew of sidekicks, including most notably a big fat woman named Queen Reed. One night, with his buddies, Moore goes to see The Front Page a movie based on the old screwball comedies of the thirties starring Jack Lemmon, Walther Matthau, and the young Susan Sarandon. The audience is entirely White and Moore with his buddies can't understand the humor at all -- it's completely incomprehensible to him. This leads Moore to come up with the idea of making a movie that urban Black audiences would like, something featuring "car chases, explosions, and titties." Moore mortgages his interest in his comedy recordings which have become very profitable and uses the money to hire some White kids from film school to shoot an urban gangster/pimp film called Dolemite is my Name. To accomplish this production, Moore commandeers the squalid Hotel Dunbar, steals electricity from a nearby power pole, and shoots the movie guerilla-style using people from the hood -- for instance, his writer is a local playwright with serious aspirations (he gets talked into the movie by Moore's argument that the film will depict the ravages of drugs on the inner city.) One of the lead actors says proudly that he has been "directed by Polanski" -- his colleagues are quick to remind him that he played an elevator operator in one scene in Rosemary's Baby. Local girls are recruited to form a crew of Shaolin kung fu "ho's." The production is imperiled when the cameraman, a kid named Nicholas von Sternberg (the son of Josef von Sternberg, the famous director), tells Moore that they have run out of the "short ends" on which they have been filming. Moore is distraught and about to abandon the project when one of the actors reminds him, surprisingly enough, of the example of John Cassavetes, the director who made his indy productions on a shoe-string budget. Moore digs deep, goes further into debt, and finishes the movie. No one will distribute the picture because it is awful in all respects.. Moore then "four-walls" the movie -- that is, rents a theater in Indianapolis for a midnight premiere and promotes the film himself. The rest of the movie is predictable and I will leave it to your surmise as to how this all turns out.
Most of the performers in the film have a hard-bitten aspect and there are a lot faces in this picture that you don't expect to see in a mainstream Hollywood production. Most of the movie is convincingly gritty and raw. It's a great pleasure to hear the old urban "toasts" like "The Signifying Monkey" spectacularly performed by Eddie Murphy. The presentation of this material is also satisfyingly sophisticated -- Murphy knows that the apparent ease with which streetcorner poets performed this complex material is the result of hard work and practice. The film shows Moore collecting this material, the writing and rewriting it, adapting the rhymes and combing through the meter while practicing the lines with different cadences and inflections. Nothing comes easily and everything is the product of intense effort. Of course, the film's final reel is full of inspirational dialogue -- for instance, Queen Reed, thanking Moore for putting people like her, those who are unconventionally beautiful, on-screen. Moore himself is paunchy and early reviews of the movie mock his beer-belly -- he performs the sex scenes in the film shot decorously to hide his girth. There's nothing not to like about this film and Murphy's performance is beautifully nuanced. (At the end of the film, the picture shows us clips from the actual 1975 film My Name is Dolemite. It's startlingly primitive and raw and, if anything, Murphy and his company in the Netflix movie are much, much prettier than the original players, including Moore who is very "ghetto". Both the prototype film and its bio-pic successor demonstrate an unsettling aspect of American life -- until the Netflix movie, I had never heard of Rudy Ray Moore and had no idea as to influence on the Black community.)
Sunday, December 1, 2019
The Irishman
The Irishman (2019) is a disappointment. With a run time of 3 1/2 hours, Martin Scorsese's gangster picture is a geriatric reprise of Goodfellas but without the cinematic razzmatazz. The film isn't bad and, despite its inordinate length, The Irishman isn't dull. But it's an unnecessary film. There's no reason for the picture to have been made because it doesn't tell us anything that Scorsese hasn't illustrated before with more fervor, conviction, and beauty. Like its protagonists, the film feels weary and a bit perfunctory. These problems are illustrated by a protracted dialogue occurring at about the one-hour mark between Frank Sheeran, the titular Irishman, and Jimmy Hoffa, the charismatic leader of the teamsters' union. Robert DeNiro acts the part of Sheeran, a mobster assassin, playing against Al Pacino as Hoffa. In the scene, Hoffa tries to convince Sheeran to stand for election as the boss of a teamster's local, #326. The two men are rooming together in an unpretentious motel and the sequence lasts about five minutes. Throughout the film, Pacino chews the scenery and he is both convincing and effective as the Union leader. DeNiro just seems lazy -- he phones in a performance so understated as to be nearly non-existent. (DeNiro's indifference and lack of affect is thematic, but it doesn't help the movie -- a passive and emotionally repressed protagonist is problematic as the hero of an epic film. This is demonstrated most famously by Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in which the hero's lack of agency sinks what would otherwise be a brilliant picture.) In the dialogue between Hoffa and Sheeran there seems to be nothing at stake: the viewer can't figure out why Sheeran would not agree to run for office as the local Union president and, similarly, it's not exactly clear why Hoffa desires this. The dialogue is ill-focused and maundering; we don't care about the outcome and, furthermore, it goes nowhere -- of course, we know that Sheeran will ultimately agree to participate in the election that will be fixed in his favor. The scene doesn't advance the movie. Nonetheless, Scorsese stops the action and lets the dialogue play out in what feels like real time, presumably because he wants us to enjoy (as he does) the presence of two great actors working together in the scene. But, even, this effect is attenuated by the way that the dialogue is filmed. Scorsese is a studio classicist -- at least, this is how he make movies nowadays. He stages the dialogue in a series of shots that follow the classical Hollywood paradigm of shot, then, reverse shot, then shot and reverse shot over and over again until the scene ends. It would be more daring and effective, I think, to stage the scene as one continuous dialogue, filmed as a sequence shot without cuts -- for instance, like the famous scene with Agnes Moorhead and Tim Holt in the kitchen in The Magnificent Ambersons. Scorsese has the best instincts of any living director and I think he understands that his material here in this scene is simply not strong enough to support the intensity of one continuous sequence shot -- the dialogue would seem empty and tedious and, so, Scorsese has his great editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, cut the sequence according to the standard shot/reverse shot formula. But the effect is to suggest that DeNiro, perhaps, can't remember his lines and, so, the dialogue has to be cut into manageable fragments -- and, in any event, the scene is wholly superfluous.
The Irishman spans a period of about forty years -- even a longer time if a flashback to Anzio and the campaign in Sicily is considered. The picture doesn't have any real narrative trajectory and there's nothing like a convincing plot -- rather, the movie is a chronicle about hoodlums and the Teamsters that is detailed, historically accurate, I think, and, even, pedantic: the film uses the equivalent of footnotes, titles projected over the images of various gangsters advising the audience at to their eventual fates -- either prison or being shot to death. The problem is that a raw chronicle doesn't make much sense as a story -- it's just one damn thing after another. Frank Sheeran is a Philadelphia hoodlum who begins his criminal career stealing meat off trucks. Petty theft follows a logic of ever-increasing depredations until the crook gets caught. So Sheeran is charged with stealing carcasses for his gangster buddies -- he literally empties one of the trucks and, so, the officials can't look the other way. The Teamsters' lawyer, played effectively by Ray Romano, gets Sheeran acquitted and, then, introduces the Irish thug to his uncle, a Philadelphia crime boss, Russell Bufalino (played by Joe Pesci in a very restrained manner). Bufalino is entangled with the criminal enterprises operated around the fringes of the Teamsters. Through Bufalino, Sheeran becomes factotum to Jimmy Hoffa, distinguishing himself by making bombs to blow up cabs during a conflict with the taxi-drivers. Hoffa has donated a million dollars of Teamster money to Richard Nixon and, therefore, is despised by the Kennedy family. Bobby Kennedy spearheads a prosecution into mob influence on the Teamsters and, ultimately, Hoffa goes to prison for four or five years. In jail, Hoffa gets into a fight with a hotheaded Italian gangster named Tony Provenzaro -- Hoffa is contemptuous of the Italians and there's some funny dialogue about the inadequacies of criminals of that ethnic stripe. (The audience can see that Hoffa is making the wrong sort of enemies.) When the union leader is released from prison, he wants to regain authority over the teamsters. But his surrogate, a fat dullard named Fitzsimmons, has been loaning Teamster pension money to the mob, financing their enterprises in Las Vegas, and the gangsters are concerned that Hoffa will call in these loans. Ultimately, a scheme is hatched to execute Hoffa. Repeatedly, Russell Bufalino and Sheeran try to persuade Hoffa to relinquish his campaign to recapture leadership of the Union. Everyone tells him to retire, but he's stubborn and won't listen to this advice. (These sequences involve the only real suspense in the movie and have a mildly tragic aspect -- Hoffa is too stubborn to quit while he is ahead and, therefore, seals his fate. However, it must also be said that this part of the movie is highly repetitious -- all the main characters have extended, flaccid dialogues with Hoffa in which they beg him to cease and desist from his efforts to regain control over the Union.) Sheeran, who is Hoffa's only close friend, is enlisted to assassinate the union leader. He kills Hoffa and presides over the incineration of his corpse. Then, he calls Jo, Hoffa's wife, and tells her that he's pretty sure that the union boss will turn up alive somewhere soon. This singular bit of disingenuous cruelty later haunts Sheeran in his dotage. After Hoffa is killed, the movie has nowhere to go. The various thugs get shot or sent to prison. Sheeran ends up in jail with with Russell, the mob boss whom he has loyally served. Later, the FBI interviews Sheeran in a nursing home where he is confined. Sheeran refuses to tell the G-men how he killed Hoffa and disposed of the body -- this aspect of the movie is puzzling; we're supposed to admire (or, at least, respect) Sheeran's omerta, that is, his refusal to snitch, but there's no one left to snitch on, and, furthermore, Sheeran didn't respect that code in babbling about his crimes to various writers who, apparently, were the sources for Charles Brandt's book about the murderer on which the movie is based. (In fact, Sheeran repeatedly squealed, telling various implausible stories about Hoffa's murder in the hope of securing a book deal -- you can read about this in The New York Review of Books on-line as of December 1, 2019; no one bought Sheeran's confession -- it was deemed too unbelievable.) Sheeran has a painful colloquy with one of his daughters -- one of the very few scenes in which women get to talk in this movie -- and prepares for his death. Just before the ending, a kindly nurse admits that she has no idea who Jimmy Hoffa was -- this may be a problem for younger viewers of this film as well. Sheeran counsels with a priest and, in the final scene, is shown sitting alone in his nursing home room, the door half-open because he doesn't like the feeling of being confined. (This synopis leaves out about 15 murders in which various gangsters get their brains blown out against walls or sidewalks.)
So what is this supposed to be about? Sheeran is a blank, a man without qualities. He's not ingenious or witty or courageous. He's just a cowardly killer. He doesn't feel remorse for his crimes. The priest that sits with him at the end of the movie, is reduced to saying: "You can be sorry without feeling sorry." And, as far as we can see, Sheeran doesn't feel anything at all. There's a suggestion that his moral vacancy was formed during World War II in which we see him murdering prisoners of war in cold blood. (These scenes are implausible: Sheeran makes the enemy prisoners dig their own graves. Why does he take the time for this exercise? After all, these scenes are supposed to be set in the midst of the bloody chaos of combat in Sicily. Why wouldn't he just shoot the POWs and leave them rotting in the woods?) At one point, Sheeran compares Hoffa to General Patton. In effect, Sheeran's defense is like that of Eichmann -- "I was just following orders." This seems to be his justification for killing Hoffa who is one of his only friends and who trusts him implicitly -- Bufalini gives the command and Sheeran obliges by betraying the only man who really trusts him. As punishment for his evil deed, Sheeran is shown to be estranged from his daughters -- yet, they really have almost no role in the film and, so, this estrangement doesn't feel tragic or, even, pathetic; it's merely a perfunctory plot element. In an early scene, Sheeran is told that his daughter was "pushed" by her boss, a Philly grocer running a "mom and pop" street-corner store. Sheeran takes his daughter by the hand, goes to the man's grocery store, and beats the grocer, finally operatically stomping on his wrist until it is broken. Of course, the little girl is horrified. From that point onward, she scarcely talks to her father and, later, very sensibly, rejects efforts by Russell Bufalino to befriend her -- with friends like this, you don't need enemies. Another daughter does talk to Sheeran late in the film. She tells him that she never came to him with her problems for fear of the violent mayhem that he would commit. Sheeran is so dimwitted that this comment comes as a surprise to him. But these themes are undeveloped. Sheeran's family life is underwritten to the point that it doesn't really register at all. Indeed, in one short scene, we see him embarking on a love affair with a mistress whom he will later marry -- deserting his wife and his four daughters to whom he was supposedly devoted as a good family man. Scorsese has no interest in any of these aspects of his hero's life, nods vaguely in this direction, and, then, moves onto what chiefly concerns him -- old men plotting about one another and making picturesque threats, followed by murders. The director's total indifference to these aspects of the film renders the pathos at the end of the movie completely nugatory -- Sheeran has never cared about his daughters before, so why should we care that they won't talk to him when he's old and infirm.
The film has a complex and fluent structure: for the first two-thirds, the picture is enveloped in a double frame: Sheeran is narrating events from the nursing home but focuses on a momentous trip that he and his wife took with Bufalini and his spouse -- the two women are addicted to nicotine and the trip cross-country takes three days because the gangsters have to stop every hour or so for the women to smoke. Along the way, Bufalino makes calls at various enterprises that he is "protecting" and picks up tribute. Ultimately, we learn that this road trip will lead to a wedding (the lawyer Bufalino's daughter is getting married) and, then, Detroit where Sheeran will murder Hoffa. Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Steve Zaillan, are nimble at keeping these narrative elements up in the air. The film's typical plot device is to show two parallel strands of action occurring simultaneously and intercut with one another. For instance, when we are shown a jury trial, the film cuts away to scenes in which Hoffa and his lawyer are conniving to corrupt the jurors. When Sheeran's daughter delivers a speech to her elementary school class about the Teamsters and how everything arrives by truck, her words are intercut with shots involving explosions and other mayhem committed by the mobsters affiliated with the Union. In one of the French New Wave films, I think it's Shoot the Piano Player, someone swears an oath on his mother's life -- Truffaut cuts away to an insert of an old lady dropping dead. Scorsese does the same thing repeatedly in this film: if someone mentions a killing, the film cuts away to show the murder. In one scene, the movie stages Kennedy's inauguration, a Christmas party at Sheeran's house in which his daughter rebuffs the creepy Russell Bufalino and, then, when someone remarks that Joe Kennedy has had a stroke and is an "eggplant", we see the elder Kennedy sitting in his wheelchair on a terrace looking across the bay to Miami Beach. On a granular level, the picture is continuously ingenious, mildly entertaining, and exceedingly nimble in the way the narrative is advanced. (It goes without saying that the doo-wop soundtrack replete with minor hits from the era -- it's devised by Robbie Robertson -- is lushly gorgeous.) Furthermore, the last fifteen minutes of the movie develops some real emotional power as Sheeran confronts the fact of his impending death and grieves for the loss of those who have died before him. (There's a particularly memorable sequence involving an aggressive casket salesman.) These parts of the film are effective, but they have nothing to do with Sheeran's criminal career -- in fact, these scenes are effective because universal; they show us a destiny common to us all. There's more emotional impact in watching Sheeran lose control of his legs in the hallway of his house and slowly fall to the ground than in the dozen murders staged in the film. But we would respond to this kind of material with the same emotional response if the hero were a garbage collector. (There has been much press accorded to the CGI effects in the movie that "de-age" the characters, showing them much younger than the chronological age of the actual actors. These effects are really not that noticeable and work pretty well. But one cavil is in order: CGI can take the wrinkles and jowls out of the faces of the actors, but it can't make them move like young men -- in a couple of scenes, most notably the beating of the grocer, we see a young Robert DeNiro brutalizing his victim but he walks with a hunch and limp like someone 75 years old.)
Scorsese has been an important director to me. In fact, I would say that Raging Bull is the film that has most influenced my view of how movies should be made. Raging Bull is the Ciizen Kane of my generation. I thought Scorsese's Silence was a masterpiece and have immensely admired many of his films. But with The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that I loathed, Scorsese seemed to have lost his way -- you can't make an effective movie about villainy without showing someone who exemplifies some good traits. In The Wolf of Wall Street, everyone is vicious and Scorsese seems to admire the exuberance of their villainy. The Irishman lacks exuberance. Scorsese's characters are too old to be robust in their evil. But everyone in the movie is either wicked or clueless -- a film in which everyone is a villain or a victim of a villain, ultimately, isn't too interesting. The Irishman simply recycles nasty stuff that Scorsese did with much greater flair in Goodfellas (and, there's nothing as brilliant as the sequence in which the cocaine-addled hero played by Ray Liotta is tracked by the FBI while trying to run too many quotidian errands at one time). Thus, The Irishman simply feels redundant.
The Irishman spans a period of about forty years -- even a longer time if a flashback to Anzio and the campaign in Sicily is considered. The picture doesn't have any real narrative trajectory and there's nothing like a convincing plot -- rather, the movie is a chronicle about hoodlums and the Teamsters that is detailed, historically accurate, I think, and, even, pedantic: the film uses the equivalent of footnotes, titles projected over the images of various gangsters advising the audience at to their eventual fates -- either prison or being shot to death. The problem is that a raw chronicle doesn't make much sense as a story -- it's just one damn thing after another. Frank Sheeran is a Philadelphia hoodlum who begins his criminal career stealing meat off trucks. Petty theft follows a logic of ever-increasing depredations until the crook gets caught. So Sheeran is charged with stealing carcasses for his gangster buddies -- he literally empties one of the trucks and, so, the officials can't look the other way. The Teamsters' lawyer, played effectively by Ray Romano, gets Sheeran acquitted and, then, introduces the Irish thug to his uncle, a Philadelphia crime boss, Russell Bufalino (played by Joe Pesci in a very restrained manner). Bufalino is entangled with the criminal enterprises operated around the fringes of the Teamsters. Through Bufalino, Sheeran becomes factotum to Jimmy Hoffa, distinguishing himself by making bombs to blow up cabs during a conflict with the taxi-drivers. Hoffa has donated a million dollars of Teamster money to Richard Nixon and, therefore, is despised by the Kennedy family. Bobby Kennedy spearheads a prosecution into mob influence on the Teamsters and, ultimately, Hoffa goes to prison for four or five years. In jail, Hoffa gets into a fight with a hotheaded Italian gangster named Tony Provenzaro -- Hoffa is contemptuous of the Italians and there's some funny dialogue about the inadequacies of criminals of that ethnic stripe. (The audience can see that Hoffa is making the wrong sort of enemies.) When the union leader is released from prison, he wants to regain authority over the teamsters. But his surrogate, a fat dullard named Fitzsimmons, has been loaning Teamster pension money to the mob, financing their enterprises in Las Vegas, and the gangsters are concerned that Hoffa will call in these loans. Ultimately, a scheme is hatched to execute Hoffa. Repeatedly, Russell Bufalino and Sheeran try to persuade Hoffa to relinquish his campaign to recapture leadership of the Union. Everyone tells him to retire, but he's stubborn and won't listen to this advice. (These sequences involve the only real suspense in the movie and have a mildly tragic aspect -- Hoffa is too stubborn to quit while he is ahead and, therefore, seals his fate. However, it must also be said that this part of the movie is highly repetitious -- all the main characters have extended, flaccid dialogues with Hoffa in which they beg him to cease and desist from his efforts to regain control over the Union.) Sheeran, who is Hoffa's only close friend, is enlisted to assassinate the union leader. He kills Hoffa and presides over the incineration of his corpse. Then, he calls Jo, Hoffa's wife, and tells her that he's pretty sure that the union boss will turn up alive somewhere soon. This singular bit of disingenuous cruelty later haunts Sheeran in his dotage. After Hoffa is killed, the movie has nowhere to go. The various thugs get shot or sent to prison. Sheeran ends up in jail with with Russell, the mob boss whom he has loyally served. Later, the FBI interviews Sheeran in a nursing home where he is confined. Sheeran refuses to tell the G-men how he killed Hoffa and disposed of the body -- this aspect of the movie is puzzling; we're supposed to admire (or, at least, respect) Sheeran's omerta, that is, his refusal to snitch, but there's no one left to snitch on, and, furthermore, Sheeran didn't respect that code in babbling about his crimes to various writers who, apparently, were the sources for Charles Brandt's book about the murderer on which the movie is based. (In fact, Sheeran repeatedly squealed, telling various implausible stories about Hoffa's murder in the hope of securing a book deal -- you can read about this in The New York Review of Books on-line as of December 1, 2019; no one bought Sheeran's confession -- it was deemed too unbelievable.) Sheeran has a painful colloquy with one of his daughters -- one of the very few scenes in which women get to talk in this movie -- and prepares for his death. Just before the ending, a kindly nurse admits that she has no idea who Jimmy Hoffa was -- this may be a problem for younger viewers of this film as well. Sheeran counsels with a priest and, in the final scene, is shown sitting alone in his nursing home room, the door half-open because he doesn't like the feeling of being confined. (This synopis leaves out about 15 murders in which various gangsters get their brains blown out against walls or sidewalks.)
So what is this supposed to be about? Sheeran is a blank, a man without qualities. He's not ingenious or witty or courageous. He's just a cowardly killer. He doesn't feel remorse for his crimes. The priest that sits with him at the end of the movie, is reduced to saying: "You can be sorry without feeling sorry." And, as far as we can see, Sheeran doesn't feel anything at all. There's a suggestion that his moral vacancy was formed during World War II in which we see him murdering prisoners of war in cold blood. (These scenes are implausible: Sheeran makes the enemy prisoners dig their own graves. Why does he take the time for this exercise? After all, these scenes are supposed to be set in the midst of the bloody chaos of combat in Sicily. Why wouldn't he just shoot the POWs and leave them rotting in the woods?) At one point, Sheeran compares Hoffa to General Patton. In effect, Sheeran's defense is like that of Eichmann -- "I was just following orders." This seems to be his justification for killing Hoffa who is one of his only friends and who trusts him implicitly -- Bufalini gives the command and Sheeran obliges by betraying the only man who really trusts him. As punishment for his evil deed, Sheeran is shown to be estranged from his daughters -- yet, they really have almost no role in the film and, so, this estrangement doesn't feel tragic or, even, pathetic; it's merely a perfunctory plot element. In an early scene, Sheeran is told that his daughter was "pushed" by her boss, a Philly grocer running a "mom and pop" street-corner store. Sheeran takes his daughter by the hand, goes to the man's grocery store, and beats the grocer, finally operatically stomping on his wrist until it is broken. Of course, the little girl is horrified. From that point onward, she scarcely talks to her father and, later, very sensibly, rejects efforts by Russell Bufalino to befriend her -- with friends like this, you don't need enemies. Another daughter does talk to Sheeran late in the film. She tells him that she never came to him with her problems for fear of the violent mayhem that he would commit. Sheeran is so dimwitted that this comment comes as a surprise to him. But these themes are undeveloped. Sheeran's family life is underwritten to the point that it doesn't really register at all. Indeed, in one short scene, we see him embarking on a love affair with a mistress whom he will later marry -- deserting his wife and his four daughters to whom he was supposedly devoted as a good family man. Scorsese has no interest in any of these aspects of his hero's life, nods vaguely in this direction, and, then, moves onto what chiefly concerns him -- old men plotting about one another and making picturesque threats, followed by murders. The director's total indifference to these aspects of the film renders the pathos at the end of the movie completely nugatory -- Sheeran has never cared about his daughters before, so why should we care that they won't talk to him when he's old and infirm.
The film has a complex and fluent structure: for the first two-thirds, the picture is enveloped in a double frame: Sheeran is narrating events from the nursing home but focuses on a momentous trip that he and his wife took with Bufalini and his spouse -- the two women are addicted to nicotine and the trip cross-country takes three days because the gangsters have to stop every hour or so for the women to smoke. Along the way, Bufalino makes calls at various enterprises that he is "protecting" and picks up tribute. Ultimately, we learn that this road trip will lead to a wedding (the lawyer Bufalino's daughter is getting married) and, then, Detroit where Sheeran will murder Hoffa. Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Steve Zaillan, are nimble at keeping these narrative elements up in the air. The film's typical plot device is to show two parallel strands of action occurring simultaneously and intercut with one another. For instance, when we are shown a jury trial, the film cuts away to scenes in which Hoffa and his lawyer are conniving to corrupt the jurors. When Sheeran's daughter delivers a speech to her elementary school class about the Teamsters and how everything arrives by truck, her words are intercut with shots involving explosions and other mayhem committed by the mobsters affiliated with the Union. In one of the French New Wave films, I think it's Shoot the Piano Player, someone swears an oath on his mother's life -- Truffaut cuts away to an insert of an old lady dropping dead. Scorsese does the same thing repeatedly in this film: if someone mentions a killing, the film cuts away to show the murder. In one scene, the movie stages Kennedy's inauguration, a Christmas party at Sheeran's house in which his daughter rebuffs the creepy Russell Bufalino and, then, when someone remarks that Joe Kennedy has had a stroke and is an "eggplant", we see the elder Kennedy sitting in his wheelchair on a terrace looking across the bay to Miami Beach. On a granular level, the picture is continuously ingenious, mildly entertaining, and exceedingly nimble in the way the narrative is advanced. (It goes without saying that the doo-wop soundtrack replete with minor hits from the era -- it's devised by Robbie Robertson -- is lushly gorgeous.) Furthermore, the last fifteen minutes of the movie develops some real emotional power as Sheeran confronts the fact of his impending death and grieves for the loss of those who have died before him. (There's a particularly memorable sequence involving an aggressive casket salesman.) These parts of the film are effective, but they have nothing to do with Sheeran's criminal career -- in fact, these scenes are effective because universal; they show us a destiny common to us all. There's more emotional impact in watching Sheeran lose control of his legs in the hallway of his house and slowly fall to the ground than in the dozen murders staged in the film. But we would respond to this kind of material with the same emotional response if the hero were a garbage collector. (There has been much press accorded to the CGI effects in the movie that "de-age" the characters, showing them much younger than the chronological age of the actual actors. These effects are really not that noticeable and work pretty well. But one cavil is in order: CGI can take the wrinkles and jowls out of the faces of the actors, but it can't make them move like young men -- in a couple of scenes, most notably the beating of the grocer, we see a young Robert DeNiro brutalizing his victim but he walks with a hunch and limp like someone 75 years old.)
Scorsese has been an important director to me. In fact, I would say that Raging Bull is the film that has most influenced my view of how movies should be made. Raging Bull is the Ciizen Kane of my generation. I thought Scorsese's Silence was a masterpiece and have immensely admired many of his films. But with The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that I loathed, Scorsese seemed to have lost his way -- you can't make an effective movie about villainy without showing someone who exemplifies some good traits. In The Wolf of Wall Street, everyone is vicious and Scorsese seems to admire the exuberance of their villainy. The Irishman lacks exuberance. Scorsese's characters are too old to be robust in their evil. But everyone in the movie is either wicked or clueless -- a film in which everyone is a villain or a victim of a villain, ultimately, isn't too interesting. The Irishman simply recycles nasty stuff that Scorsese did with much greater flair in Goodfellas (and, there's nothing as brilliant as the sequence in which the cocaine-addled hero played by Ray Liotta is tracked by the FBI while trying to run too many quotidian errands at one time). Thus, The Irishman simply feels redundant.
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
David Lynch's films are chimeras constructed of grossly disparate materials. In a typical Hollywood film, classical decorum is observed with respect to style and substance. Ciizen Kane or The Best Years of our Lives are all of one piece and, therefore, emotionally coherent. Even work made by independent film makers observe this principle of stylistic unity: a movie by Kelly Reichardt or Harmony Korinne may violate some norms of studio film production -- but the pictures themselves are emotionally and stylistically consistent. Lynch's pictures violate these rules in the most flagrant ways possible -- I can't think of any director whose different stylistic and thematic elements are so remote from one another. In 1992' Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, at least, five distinct sensibilities can be readily discerned within the film's lurid, crime-film format. First, there is Eagle Scout Lynch: this material is weirdly banal, somewhat like a deranged episode of the Andy Griffith Show -- Eagle Scout Lynch admires dedicated government bureaucrats, hard-bitten sassy waitresses, firefighters and cops, cups of boiling hot coffee and pie. Second, we encounter creepy uncle Lynch -- this aspect of the director's sensibility is obsessed with underage girls, frilly underpants, girlish diaries and the transgressions of barely post-pubescent young women. Then, there is Lynch de Sade, a pornographer who seems to enjoy the torture of his jailbait victims and takes obvious sadistic pleasure in dramatizing their misery. Lynch de Sade uneasily jostles up against Soap Opera Lynch -- this is the director specializing in complicated teenage love affairs, with kisses rendered against swelling, swooning music. The music reminds us of another avatar of the director, MTV Lynch -- this is the sensibility that pauses the action in his films to spend four or five minutes simply observing Isabelle Rosseliini crooning "Blue Velvet" or Julee Cruise, seemingly in a trance, whispering incantations against a lush buzzing drone of legato chords. Finally, we have Brakhage Lynch, the uncompromising experimental film maker who dissolves images into clouds of color, intercuts anatomical footage of screaming vocal chords into his mise-en-scene, and sends characters catapulting through eerie fields of energy -- Experimental Lynch shoots images through microscopes and telescopes, runs voices backward on his soundtrack, and prosecutes odd essays into complete abstraction. (At least an entire one-hour program on Lynch's majestic Twin Peaks, The Return was almost completely abstract -- generally experimental films are terribly tedious, but, somehow, Lynch's abstractions, because rooted in a narrative, avoid dullness.) I said that there were five distinct versions of David Lynch -- so let's count them: Eagle Scout Lynch, creepy uncle Lynch, Lynch de Sade, Soap Opera Lynch, MTV Lynch and Brakhage Lynch: in fact, I guess, the director is even more versatile than I thought, manifesting in no less than six wild divergent avatars.
In many ways, Fire Walk with Me is a work of great significance to an understanding of Lynch's central themes. In this movie, Lynch's obsessions are displayed in their essential form without dilution or obfuscation. Lynch's persistent subject is the duality of human beings -- everyone has a public persona and a dark private self. (Lynch characteristically expresses this concept by using Doppelgaengers: the best example, perhaps, is the bifurcation of FBI agent Cooper into loathsomely evil and transcendentally good characters in Twin Peak: the Return. (In fact, if I recall that series correctly, Cooper was split into, at least, three selves: good, evil, and the strangely dimwitted insurance salesman under assault by demonic entities in Las Vegas.) Lynch's concept that every person has a solar and lunar self is formally expressed by sharp divisions in his films -- often, a Lynch film will suddenly split apart in the middle, the narrative inexplicably traveling down a completely different (although obscurely related) path. This is the structure in Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and, of course, Fire Walk with Me. The latter film begins with a peculiar apparent indirection -- somewhere in Washington State, a young woman, said to be a "drifter", has been murdered, her body wrapped in plastic, and thrown in a river. Two FBI agents are dispatched to investigate the murder -- exactly why the FBI would be involved is unclear: we don't recognize these agents, although one of them is played by Mel Ferrer (and will be very prominent in The Return 25 years later) -- the other naif is no less than the very young Kiefer Sutherland. The agents encounter unpleasant law enforcement officers who seem to be the evil side of the helpful and kind cops in the original Twin Peaks series. An autopsy of the corpse is conducted and, then, one of the officers inexplicably vanishes. (I am leaving out characteristic Lynch grotesquerie including the apparition of a woman in a skin-tight outfit whose dance can be decoded as indicative of the first half hour's plot in the film.) David Lynch appears as FBI agent Gordon -- he literally, as well as figuratively, directs the action in the movie. After the disappearance of the FBI agent (played I think by Kiefer Sutherland), the film abruptly shifts gears with a title that says "one year later." The swooning Twin Peaks theme by Angelo Baldamenti takes over the soundtrack and we see, to our surprise, Laura Palmer, the dead woman from the earlier TV series, walking down a sidewalk in the idyllic small town of Twin Peaks. Gradually, it becomes apparent that we are witnessing a prequel to the events in the original TV series. For the next ninety minutes, the film documents the last week in the life of Laura Palmer, showing us how she came to be murdered by a nightmare figure that she calls "Bob." Palmer has been raped from the age of 12 by her father and she is horribly damaged. We learn that she is addicted to cocaine and moonlights as a prostitute -- this is notwithstanding the fact that she is a prom queen and loved by two young men, the evil and belligerent Bobby Briggs and the gentle, rebellious James. Lynch's narrative structure is complex with frequent flashbacks. But we gather that Laura's father, Leland Palmer is on the verge of a crack-up. In fact, when he plotted an orgy with his teenage girlfriend, who turns out to Theresa Gates, she intended to set him up with two willing and nubile girls -- when Leland glances at the half-naked girls, he sees that one of them is his own daughter, Laura. This causes Palmer to beat Gates to death -- thus, providing us with a solution to the murder mystery posed in the film's first half-hour. As the film progresses, Laura is more and more abused and degraded until, in the end, Bob, the evil avatar of her father, beats her to death. This is very dire material and, I think, critics were put off by Lynch's graphic depiction of something that the dream-characters call Garmonzio -- that is, "pain and suffering." In an interview on the DVD, Sheryl Lee (the actress who plays Laura Palmer) says that since she has become a mother, she has been very alert to the fact that Lynch shows innumerable clues that Laura is the victim of violent, soul-destroying rape -- "Bob has been doing this to me since I was twelve," she wails to one of her friends. But, as Lee points out, no one helps her. Thus, the film can be read as an indictment of a particularly horrible kind of child abuse. But the problem with this analysis (to which Sheryl Lee is blind) is that Lynch glories in the abuse -- he presents Laura Palmer's sexual degradation pornographically, as, in fact, erotically thrilling. Thus, there is an enormous divergence between the grievous subject matter and Lynch's pornographic approach to this material -- he wants us to be come sexually excited at what happens to Laura Palmer and, indeed, presents many of the sex scenes (Lee is naked for about a third of movie) as glamorous and titillating. Thus, we have a complete fission between the good Lynch, who is telling us something important and tragic about his heroine, and the evil Lynch who designs his shots to estheticize the sexual violence and, even, sadistically delight in it. The closest analog to this film that I know is G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box -- in that film, Pabst shows Louise Brooks in all of her unforgettable glamour and allure, while, simultaneously, chronicling with a great deal of sadistic pleasure, her ultimate sexual abasement including her being butchered, at the end, by no less than Jack-the-Ripper. I make this comparison advisedly: I would argue that Sheryl Lee's performance as the doomed Laura Palmer is one of the most startling, erotic, and terrifying images of a young woman ever filmed -- she is simultaneously victim and destroyer of men, simultaneously pathetic and intensely seductive. The ambiguities in her performance, Lee's eyes half closed in some kind of dreamy ecstasy, are astonishing and the acting is non pareil -- in fact, Lee says in the interview (she's 52 now) that the role all but destroyed her and her willful misunderstanding of the movie as a warning against child abuse and incest seems something that she has constructed to preserve her own sanity.
Of course, the film is often difficult to understand and Lynch complicates the material with all sorts of supernatural events. The supernatural occurrences are intended as commentaries on the action or embody some of the film's more perverse concepts -- these flourishes act to distance the otherwise grievous material and keep the film from becoming too tragic to be entertaining, that is, too tragic to be a work of art. The one-armed man's missing limb has become a dwarf who speaks in very slow and garbled cadences. A white horse appears to Laura Palmer's mother, the beast standing aloof in her bedroom. At the same time, Leland Palmer is bringing a tall glass of milk to his half-crazed long suffering wife, we see Laura inhaling vast amounts of cocaine, writhing in her lingerie as she awaits rape by Bob. At an orgy, an evil whoremaster says: "I am the great went." to which Laura responds: "and I am the muffin." A whole series of objects symbolize the action: there are the coded rings worn by the sexual perverts, eerie paintings that come to life, the rotor of an ominous ceiling fan, a cheap picture of children at a table protected by a hovering angel. Nightmare winds stir the dark forests of the Pacific Northwest and there are rocky peaks descending in cliffs to cold rivers and lakes Like all great film actresses, Sheryl Lee can look like a half-dozen women -- sometimes, she is childish and naive, in other shots, she looks like a vamp from the silent era, sometimes, she is just an ordinarily teenage girl, but, in many images, she seems to be in some kind sexually induced trance verging on coma. At the film's apotheosis in the so-called "red room", a space of pure fantasy, Laura Palmer looks like the most beautiful woman ever shown on film, like Helen of Troy, idealized with her hair and make-up exquisitely done, an angel hovering in the air extracted from a child-like picture in her room, the winged white form praying for her, as her evil father, Leland Palmer floats in the air. Bob, Palmer's monstrous alter-ego, rips a pouch of blood from Leland's belly and naming it Garmonzio, throws the gore onto the lightning zig-zags on the tile floor. The gore somehow vanishes. Agent Cooper stands next to Laura Palmer, the embodiment of reason and compassion, a sort of secular Bodhissatva, also protecting her. This film was universally derided when first released. It's impossible now to see the cause of this rage and derision. In fact, as I have earlier argued, this film is the central work in the canon of Lynch's films. On its own terms, it's close to flawless.
In many ways, Fire Walk with Me is a work of great significance to an understanding of Lynch's central themes. In this movie, Lynch's obsessions are displayed in their essential form without dilution or obfuscation. Lynch's persistent subject is the duality of human beings -- everyone has a public persona and a dark private self. (Lynch characteristically expresses this concept by using Doppelgaengers: the best example, perhaps, is the bifurcation of FBI agent Cooper into loathsomely evil and transcendentally good characters in Twin Peak: the Return. (In fact, if I recall that series correctly, Cooper was split into, at least, three selves: good, evil, and the strangely dimwitted insurance salesman under assault by demonic entities in Las Vegas.) Lynch's concept that every person has a solar and lunar self is formally expressed by sharp divisions in his films -- often, a Lynch film will suddenly split apart in the middle, the narrative inexplicably traveling down a completely different (although obscurely related) path. This is the structure in Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and, of course, Fire Walk with Me. The latter film begins with a peculiar apparent indirection -- somewhere in Washington State, a young woman, said to be a "drifter", has been murdered, her body wrapped in plastic, and thrown in a river. Two FBI agents are dispatched to investigate the murder -- exactly why the FBI would be involved is unclear: we don't recognize these agents, although one of them is played by Mel Ferrer (and will be very prominent in The Return 25 years later) -- the other naif is no less than the very young Kiefer Sutherland. The agents encounter unpleasant law enforcement officers who seem to be the evil side of the helpful and kind cops in the original Twin Peaks series. An autopsy of the corpse is conducted and, then, one of the officers inexplicably vanishes. (I am leaving out characteristic Lynch grotesquerie including the apparition of a woman in a skin-tight outfit whose dance can be decoded as indicative of the first half hour's plot in the film.) David Lynch appears as FBI agent Gordon -- he literally, as well as figuratively, directs the action in the movie. After the disappearance of the FBI agent (played I think by Kiefer Sutherland), the film abruptly shifts gears with a title that says "one year later." The swooning Twin Peaks theme by Angelo Baldamenti takes over the soundtrack and we see, to our surprise, Laura Palmer, the dead woman from the earlier TV series, walking down a sidewalk in the idyllic small town of Twin Peaks. Gradually, it becomes apparent that we are witnessing a prequel to the events in the original TV series. For the next ninety minutes, the film documents the last week in the life of Laura Palmer, showing us how she came to be murdered by a nightmare figure that she calls "Bob." Palmer has been raped from the age of 12 by her father and she is horribly damaged. We learn that she is addicted to cocaine and moonlights as a prostitute -- this is notwithstanding the fact that she is a prom queen and loved by two young men, the evil and belligerent Bobby Briggs and the gentle, rebellious James. Lynch's narrative structure is complex with frequent flashbacks. But we gather that Laura's father, Leland Palmer is on the verge of a crack-up. In fact, when he plotted an orgy with his teenage girlfriend, who turns out to Theresa Gates, she intended to set him up with two willing and nubile girls -- when Leland glances at the half-naked girls, he sees that one of them is his own daughter, Laura. This causes Palmer to beat Gates to death -- thus, providing us with a solution to the murder mystery posed in the film's first half-hour. As the film progresses, Laura is more and more abused and degraded until, in the end, Bob, the evil avatar of her father, beats her to death. This is very dire material and, I think, critics were put off by Lynch's graphic depiction of something that the dream-characters call Garmonzio -- that is, "pain and suffering." In an interview on the DVD, Sheryl Lee (the actress who plays Laura Palmer) says that since she has become a mother, she has been very alert to the fact that Lynch shows innumerable clues that Laura is the victim of violent, soul-destroying rape -- "Bob has been doing this to me since I was twelve," she wails to one of her friends. But, as Lee points out, no one helps her. Thus, the film can be read as an indictment of a particularly horrible kind of child abuse. But the problem with this analysis (to which Sheryl Lee is blind) is that Lynch glories in the abuse -- he presents Laura Palmer's sexual degradation pornographically, as, in fact, erotically thrilling. Thus, there is an enormous divergence between the grievous subject matter and Lynch's pornographic approach to this material -- he wants us to be come sexually excited at what happens to Laura Palmer and, indeed, presents many of the sex scenes (Lee is naked for about a third of movie) as glamorous and titillating. Thus, we have a complete fission between the good Lynch, who is telling us something important and tragic about his heroine, and the evil Lynch who designs his shots to estheticize the sexual violence and, even, sadistically delight in it. The closest analog to this film that I know is G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box -- in that film, Pabst shows Louise Brooks in all of her unforgettable glamour and allure, while, simultaneously, chronicling with a great deal of sadistic pleasure, her ultimate sexual abasement including her being butchered, at the end, by no less than Jack-the-Ripper. I make this comparison advisedly: I would argue that Sheryl Lee's performance as the doomed Laura Palmer is one of the most startling, erotic, and terrifying images of a young woman ever filmed -- she is simultaneously victim and destroyer of men, simultaneously pathetic and intensely seductive. The ambiguities in her performance, Lee's eyes half closed in some kind of dreamy ecstasy, are astonishing and the acting is non pareil -- in fact, Lee says in the interview (she's 52 now) that the role all but destroyed her and her willful misunderstanding of the movie as a warning against child abuse and incest seems something that she has constructed to preserve her own sanity.
Of course, the film is often difficult to understand and Lynch complicates the material with all sorts of supernatural events. The supernatural occurrences are intended as commentaries on the action or embody some of the film's more perverse concepts -- these flourishes act to distance the otherwise grievous material and keep the film from becoming too tragic to be entertaining, that is, too tragic to be a work of art. The one-armed man's missing limb has become a dwarf who speaks in very slow and garbled cadences. A white horse appears to Laura Palmer's mother, the beast standing aloof in her bedroom. At the same time, Leland Palmer is bringing a tall glass of milk to his half-crazed long suffering wife, we see Laura inhaling vast amounts of cocaine, writhing in her lingerie as she awaits rape by Bob. At an orgy, an evil whoremaster says: "I am the great went." to which Laura responds: "and I am the muffin." A whole series of objects symbolize the action: there are the coded rings worn by the sexual perverts, eerie paintings that come to life, the rotor of an ominous ceiling fan, a cheap picture of children at a table protected by a hovering angel. Nightmare winds stir the dark forests of the Pacific Northwest and there are rocky peaks descending in cliffs to cold rivers and lakes Like all great film actresses, Sheryl Lee can look like a half-dozen women -- sometimes, she is childish and naive, in other shots, she looks like a vamp from the silent era, sometimes, she is just an ordinarily teenage girl, but, in many images, she seems to be in some kind sexually induced trance verging on coma. At the film's apotheosis in the so-called "red room", a space of pure fantasy, Laura Palmer looks like the most beautiful woman ever shown on film, like Helen of Troy, idealized with her hair and make-up exquisitely done, an angel hovering in the air extracted from a child-like picture in her room, the winged white form praying for her, as her evil father, Leland Palmer floats in the air. Bob, Palmer's monstrous alter-ego, rips a pouch of blood from Leland's belly and naming it Garmonzio, throws the gore onto the lightning zig-zags on the tile floor. The gore somehow vanishes. Agent Cooper stands next to Laura Palmer, the embodiment of reason and compassion, a sort of secular Bodhissatva, also protecting her. This film was universally derided when first released. It's impossible now to see the cause of this rage and derision. In fact, as I have earlier argued, this film is the central work in the canon of Lynch's films. On its own terms, it's close to flawless.
Friday, November 29, 2019
Nothing Sacred
Apparently, Carole Lombard specialized in getting knocked-around in her films. In 1936, FSA photographer, Walker Evans, made a famous picture of two decrepit houses in Atlanta. On a hoarding in front of the houses, big mural-sized advertisements have been posted for movies. The ad in the center of the composition shows Carole Lombard sporting a black eye and smiling seductively: the name of the movie advertised is Love before Breakfast. Nothing Sacred (directed by William Wellman) was made two years later in 1937. Contemporary ads show the two stars, Frederic March and Carole Lombard, squaring off like professional boxers and the poster cries out: "See the Fight!" At the climax of Nothing Sacred, Frederick March punches Carole Lombard so hard that she is knocked-out. But, no worries: she revives and hits March in the jaw so hard that he's also out cold.
Nothing Sacred is a scatter-brained screw-ball comedy, so diffuse that it almost evaporates before your eyes. Shot in technicolor, it's a handsome film and Lombard is fantastically beautiful. A scene in which the two beautiful stars occupy a white sailboat running upriver and posed against the Manhattan skyline is iconic: it doesn't matter that the shot is executed in rather unconvincing rear-projection -- the intent is clear and the concept is fabulous. Furthermore, the film is casually surrealistic and, therefore, the dream-like character of some of the imagery fits the picture's general tone. This is a movie in which one main character is described "as a cross between a Ferris Wheel and a werewolf." A quack doctor produces eggs from a half-dozen pockets, pierces them and urges the hungover heroine to suck out the contents. Several important scenes are played with Lombard resplendent under a big fireman's hat. At the end of the movie, the lovers are safely aboard a cruiser with an incandescent sunset casting a red-orange glare over all of the proceedings -- the dipsomaniacal doctor wakes up, looks out his porthole at the flaming sunset and the equally brilliant sea and cries out: "The hotel is flooded!" At a cabaret, the theme is "Tootsies of all Nations" and mostly naked Walkyries on horses ride out from backstage to stand in statuesque tableaux among broken columns underneath a huge chandelier. The sets are lavish Art Deco confections with towering fluted pillars and enormous windows looking out on the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Everything is grandiose, elegant, over-sized, acres of curtains cover walls and hotel rooms seem as large as bowling alleys.
The film's premise is a little queasy-making. A journalist (Wally played by Frederick March) is in hot water because he promoted an Oriental potentate as a patron of the arts. The potentate turns out to be a fraud -- a shoe-shine man from Harlem. As punishment for his gullibility, Wally is put in the newspaper's basement where he is assigned writing obituaries. Wally learns that a girl at a clock factory in Warsaw, Vermont is dying of cancer -- the radium used to paint the dials of the clocks is eating away her bones. Wally finagles a trip to Vermont to meet the woman (Hazel Flagg played by Lombard) and offers her a trip to Manhattan -- the idea is that she will have a good time in the bright lights of the big city before she succumbs. But Hazel has just discovered that she's not sick at all. The radium isn't killing her. Nonetheless, she wants the free trip to New York City and so, with her small-town doctor, she connives to maintain the illusion that she is dying. (The premise makes light of a real tragedy -- the horrible deaths of many women and girls who worked painting radium on clock dials in Elgin, Illinois. It is said that geiger counters still trigger when the graves of the dead women are approached.) In the big city, Hazel is wined and dined and given the keys to the City. Of course, she falls in love with Wally, the journalist who is squiring her around town. In a misguided effort at publicity, Wally's paper brings in famous European specialists in radium poisoning to try to cure the girl. But, of course, they discover that the celebrated and tragic young woman is not sick at all. Hazel decides to feign suicide and flee with her corrupt and drunk small-town doctor. She ends up in the river and has to be pulled-out by a fireman with Wally who has ineffectually jumped into the drink with her -- he can't swim. Hazel now decides to fake her death from pneumonia and escape. Just before she can vamoose, the famous doctors, all of them comically bearded and speaking like Bela Lugosi, appear. Wally decides to fool the doctors into thinking that Hazel is really feverish by fighting with her -- this results in the exchange of punches that leaves both stars with swollen jaws. The big fight scene, celebrated in the movie's posters, really adds nothing to the plot. Hazel and Wally flee the city and we see them last on their honeymoon on a cruise ship in the tropics -- the sun is wildly orange and red that they both wear sunglasses.
There's not much to the movie although the dialogue is consistently witty and bizarre. The film decries tabloid journalism and the ease with which readers of this stuff are manipulated. In fact, the trade of the journalist is identified as purveyor of fake news, an unsettling pop culture trope that haunts us today. Wellmann, curiously enough, hides his stars in some crucial scenes -- he interposes barriers between the stars and the camera. In an early scene set in Warsaw, Vermont, a tree limb completely hides the heads of Wally and Hazel as they discuss traveling to New York -- it's a surrealist image worthy of Magritte: we've paid to see Lombard and March and, yet, during this crucial piece of dialogue their faces are hidden. In another scene, March and his editor have a colloquy hidden behind huge bouquets of flowers. A pivotal love scene is played-out in a kind of lathe packing box that entirely hides the stars. In a later scene, Hazel is shot through the black veil of a woman who has come to denounce her. This is part of the general surrealist ambience: Hazel's funeral will involve 30,000 cars and a half million mourners. In Warsaw, a feral child darts from behind a picket fence and bits Wally on the ass. A children's choir sings a morbid tribute to Hazel scored to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." In a final scene, Wally says that Hazel's plight will be forgotten: "You were just another freak like the Bearded Lady or Jojo, the dog-faced boy."
Nothing Sacred is a scatter-brained screw-ball comedy, so diffuse that it almost evaporates before your eyes. Shot in technicolor, it's a handsome film and Lombard is fantastically beautiful. A scene in which the two beautiful stars occupy a white sailboat running upriver and posed against the Manhattan skyline is iconic: it doesn't matter that the shot is executed in rather unconvincing rear-projection -- the intent is clear and the concept is fabulous. Furthermore, the film is casually surrealistic and, therefore, the dream-like character of some of the imagery fits the picture's general tone. This is a movie in which one main character is described "as a cross between a Ferris Wheel and a werewolf." A quack doctor produces eggs from a half-dozen pockets, pierces them and urges the hungover heroine to suck out the contents. Several important scenes are played with Lombard resplendent under a big fireman's hat. At the end of the movie, the lovers are safely aboard a cruiser with an incandescent sunset casting a red-orange glare over all of the proceedings -- the dipsomaniacal doctor wakes up, looks out his porthole at the flaming sunset and the equally brilliant sea and cries out: "The hotel is flooded!" At a cabaret, the theme is "Tootsies of all Nations" and mostly naked Walkyries on horses ride out from backstage to stand in statuesque tableaux among broken columns underneath a huge chandelier. The sets are lavish Art Deco confections with towering fluted pillars and enormous windows looking out on the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Everything is grandiose, elegant, over-sized, acres of curtains cover walls and hotel rooms seem as large as bowling alleys.
The film's premise is a little queasy-making. A journalist (Wally played by Frederick March) is in hot water because he promoted an Oriental potentate as a patron of the arts. The potentate turns out to be a fraud -- a shoe-shine man from Harlem. As punishment for his gullibility, Wally is put in the newspaper's basement where he is assigned writing obituaries. Wally learns that a girl at a clock factory in Warsaw, Vermont is dying of cancer -- the radium used to paint the dials of the clocks is eating away her bones. Wally finagles a trip to Vermont to meet the woman (Hazel Flagg played by Lombard) and offers her a trip to Manhattan -- the idea is that she will have a good time in the bright lights of the big city before she succumbs. But Hazel has just discovered that she's not sick at all. The radium isn't killing her. Nonetheless, she wants the free trip to New York City and so, with her small-town doctor, she connives to maintain the illusion that she is dying. (The premise makes light of a real tragedy -- the horrible deaths of many women and girls who worked painting radium on clock dials in Elgin, Illinois. It is said that geiger counters still trigger when the graves of the dead women are approached.) In the big city, Hazel is wined and dined and given the keys to the City. Of course, she falls in love with Wally, the journalist who is squiring her around town. In a misguided effort at publicity, Wally's paper brings in famous European specialists in radium poisoning to try to cure the girl. But, of course, they discover that the celebrated and tragic young woman is not sick at all. Hazel decides to feign suicide and flee with her corrupt and drunk small-town doctor. She ends up in the river and has to be pulled-out by a fireman with Wally who has ineffectually jumped into the drink with her -- he can't swim. Hazel now decides to fake her death from pneumonia and escape. Just before she can vamoose, the famous doctors, all of them comically bearded and speaking like Bela Lugosi, appear. Wally decides to fool the doctors into thinking that Hazel is really feverish by fighting with her -- this results in the exchange of punches that leaves both stars with swollen jaws. The big fight scene, celebrated in the movie's posters, really adds nothing to the plot. Hazel and Wally flee the city and we see them last on their honeymoon on a cruise ship in the tropics -- the sun is wildly orange and red that they both wear sunglasses.
There's not much to the movie although the dialogue is consistently witty and bizarre. The film decries tabloid journalism and the ease with which readers of this stuff are manipulated. In fact, the trade of the journalist is identified as purveyor of fake news, an unsettling pop culture trope that haunts us today. Wellmann, curiously enough, hides his stars in some crucial scenes -- he interposes barriers between the stars and the camera. In an early scene set in Warsaw, Vermont, a tree limb completely hides the heads of Wally and Hazel as they discuss traveling to New York -- it's a surrealist image worthy of Magritte: we've paid to see Lombard and March and, yet, during this crucial piece of dialogue their faces are hidden. In another scene, March and his editor have a colloquy hidden behind huge bouquets of flowers. A pivotal love scene is played-out in a kind of lathe packing box that entirely hides the stars. In a later scene, Hazel is shot through the black veil of a woman who has come to denounce her. This is part of the general surrealist ambience: Hazel's funeral will involve 30,000 cars and a half million mourners. In Warsaw, a feral child darts from behind a picket fence and bits Wally on the ass. A children's choir sings a morbid tribute to Hazel scored to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." In a final scene, Wally says that Hazel's plight will be forgotten: "You were just another freak like the Bearded Lady or Jojo, the dog-faced boy."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)