The Road

Confession time: I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I love McCarthy, I thought the book sounded great, and it was hardily recommended by friends for whose taste in literature I harbor nothing but the highest admiration. Still, I never read the fucking thing. I guess the best argument I can make on my lazy behalf is that no other novel in recent memory better fits the category of book described in the first chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler as: “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too.” That being said, I have nothing to compare John Hillcoat’s adaptation (written by nobody screenwriter John Penhall) of The Road to other than other post-apocalyptic movies, a job Hillcoat’s somber-as-fuck existential film goes a long way toward making irrelevant. It’s clearly its own thing. In some ways it succeeds and in others it does not. In the end, the only other film it leaves me wanting to compare it to is the better film that it itself could have been w/ a number of small to mid-size adjustments. Or, perhaps, to the better film that it in fact was when in first came in at some four-and-a-half hours. Or maybe even the subsequent film that it became before once again being ushered back into editing for being too bleak for test audiences. First the triumphant end of things: The Road is a masterpiece of visual design. Flawless, even. Its incorporation of every single conceivable stop along the grey scale tour, its incredible landscape compositions, and its flattened out vistas of half-eradicated space are absolutely superb. The way its ashen, hollowed-out humans are absorbed into the gutted leftover detritus of human species activity, which itself dissolves back in to a natural world that is itself dead or dying, creates a sense of profound monoform unity. Everything is reduced to the same dismal grain, the skin of the film as sickly and washed out as that of its characters. But it is precisely this reduction of the human characters in The Road to elements of its landscape that makes its repeated attempts to rise to the level of transcendent elegy nearly impossible to achieve. The tone is too post-human and maudlin for that. It is forced to lean far too heavily on the by turns elegiac and sinister – admittedly gorgeous but always excessively foregrounded – score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and an unfortunate voiceover which pretends that this film is about Viggo Mortensen’s Man when by all rights it should really be about The Boy, played w/ some serious credibility by newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee. One suspects that the voiceover and the flashbacks to pre-apocalyptic domesticity featuring lithe Charlize Theron as increasingly moribund mommy, were heavily padded-on after the film’s poor performance at test screenings. Were the Weinsteins and the folks at Dimension honestly hoping to proffer an adaptation of The Road onto the general public which people somehow wouldn’t find bleak? By using the voiceover and tying it into flashbacks that are supposed to be dreams, the film puts itself in the wrong head, and does so sloppily at that. It’s just not credible. The flashbacks work when they are at their most fragmentary: two sets of hands playing on a piano briefly breaking away for a caress, the wife before an iced-over window behind which a fire appears to be frostily burning, the synthetic appropriation of an inner thigh, the play of sun on a sundress. But when large blocks of the past play out it feels like a cheat. I mean who dreams convenient bits of backstory when they go to sleep at night? All that these flashbacks are ultimately good for, soundtracked as they are by insistent music and poetic voiceover mewlings, is 1) reminding the viewer how much better Terrence Malick is at this stuff, and 2) undermining a potentially powerful film about how a father’s love for his son becomes a distorted, prismatic splintering of itself into something morally blurry and increasingly monstrous. Taking away Mortensen’s voiceover would go a long way toward making him more frightening, the implication of his dogged way-the-fuck-beyond-the-pale love for his son more suffocating, and the final release of his son from this protracted bondage at the film’s end, on the shores of the horizonless Gulf Coast, more liberating (if not exactly hopeful). This is the story of a man who holds his son hostage, two suicide bullets left in his revolver, by using the boy as his only reason to go on, as an excuse to see all other human beings as a threat, and as a source of hope where there determinedly is none. The Man is, after all, the figure in this dyad who stands in for the civilization whose hubris got it snuffed out in the first place. It is The Boy who is slowly made aware of this, as he grudgingly comes to realize that they are not unconditionally the “good guys” after all, that “good” is in fact a dead luxury, and that there may not be any kind of evil his father would not be willing to engender in his son’s name. There is a key point somewhere in this film where The Boy becomes terrified of The Man, and it is this exact moment, difficult if not impossible to pinpoint, upon which everything rests. Anytime The Boy turns to another he is chastened by the paranoiac father. The family that takes The Boy in at the end of the film is given away by the presence of their dog as the cause of the noises which precipitated the departure of our duo, at father’s brash insistence, from the underground bunker where they had enough food and supplies to last them a very long time indeed. It is the paranoia brought about by his deformed, mutant love that gets The Man killed and effectively leaves his son to his own meager devices. In reality, though, it is not until this monstrous father is vanquished that the son can begin to live out his final days w/ any degree of efficacy whatever. That yr father – the fundamental support without whom there would be no norm, no ability to accept frustration, to obey any prohibition, without whom there is no law or moral code – is in fact a monster made such by his love for you: this is the root of a child's nightmare, where there is nothing left to protect you from the only one left to protect you. To discover – in a world of hillbilly cannibal marauders, walls of fire, and regular tree-felling earthquakes – that the one you love the most is the one you most have to fear: this is the very heart of The Road’s true horror story.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Busy, funny, and (ahem) fantastic, w/ its endlessly inventive promulgation of densely industrious sight gags and word games, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s new Roald Dahl-adapted stop-motion extravaganza, invokes many of the sorts of things you might find in a typical child’s bedroom: shoebox dioramas, model train sets (an actual one of which is on display in Mr. Fox’s son Ash’s bedroom), ant farms (the geological strata of this autumnal toy world are presented to the viewer in cross-section through which the various animals dig and burrow, constructing rhizomes), doll houses, and lots of furry stuffed creatures anthropomorphically dressed. This is a child’s-eye-view of the world, then. This will not surprise viewers of Mr. Anderson’s previous films. All of them erect heavily art-directed childlike vantages (often pejoratively mistaken for “infantile” ones) w/ all the wonder and play that the term suggests, as well as the impalpable idea of a world-sense founded in an endless questioning, prodding, discovering – the very processes by which a child comes to an understanding of what all of this stuff consists in which his questions unquestioningly believe. The world that this child’s gaze looks upon in a Wes Anderson movie, though, the world that is having sense and understanding made out of it, cut out from cardboard, is a world of adolescence in perpetual relapse (one of the many obvious and not so obvious things it has in common w/ Spike Jonze's recent Where the Wild Things Are). Inescapable, unrelenting, painful adolescence is the preservative fluid in which Anderson’s fetal creatures are ultimately suspended. This is less a flaw inherent to his films than it is a reality at the heart of which is the genuine clinical sociocultural symptomatologies his films delineate: it’s a condition, in short, w/ which contemporary society is duly afflicted. And such is the case w/ The Fantastic Mr. Fox. All the men are animals who won’t – cannot – grow up. Mr. Fox himself is a chicken thief turned newspaper columnist, an unsatisfying career change made by virtue of a promise he makes to his soon-to-be wife at the start of the film. They find themselves in quite a pickle, trapped in a cage, about to be butchered, she announcing that she is pregnant. Mr. Fox (sort of) promises that if they survive he will reign in his wild ways. Cut to twelve fox years later, Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney as only a slightly toned down variation on the go-for-broke convivial Clark Gable chutzpah he brought to O Brother, Where Art Thou?), full of resentments toward the boring, hardscrabble domestic scene in which he’s stuck, living in a hole in the ground w/ wifey and bitter, ungainly, ‘different’ son Ash. Something’s gotta give. Against the advice of his Badger lawyer (Bill Murray doing his thing), uppity Mr. Fox, in the throes of his midlife fox crisis, decides to move his family into a beech tree on a hill, in plain view of the residences of nefarious farmers Bunce, Boggis, and the unremittingly nefarious cider-drunken sharpshooter Bean (Michael Gambon, likewise – and hilariously – doing his thing), and to secretly return to his thieving ways, w/ the assistance of bashful opossum pushover, Kylie (snout poking out of bandit mask). By virtue of Mr. Fox’s inability to keep his animalness and hubris in check, he enters a war of attrition w/ his tripartite farmer adversaries, putting his family, community, and self in serious jeopardy. And getting his tail blown off for his trouble. When Mrs. Fox confronts him and asks him why he has lied to her, been so selfish, and thrown the whole animal community into a state of crisis, he responds quite simply: I’m a wild animal. Who amongst us cannot relate? I am what I am, the confluence of the various drives that make me up; I fight, I fuck, or I flee. I’m a fox goddamnit! It is precisely the adolescent who holds up his unmediated, untrammeled drives for valorization. It is the adolescent who, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, “idealizes the drives and their satisfaction.” It is the adolescent who says “I am a wild fucking animal. What did you expect?” The adult knows to keep the drives in check, to make use of an ingrained, healthy shame to prevent indulgence in shameless behavior. The adult operates without the constant need to pursue his animal appetites, damn the torpedoes. Mr. Fox’s son Ash is the other side of adolescent striving. Unable to live up to the reputation of his one time whack bat star father, who dismisses him and instead focuses his attention and praise on hotshot maternal cousin Kristofferson – athletic, wise, disciplined and effortlessly able to seduce Ash’s foxy (ahem) lab partner – Ash desperately fails to attain the realization of infinite pleasure and perfect harmony in the object relation, so he blames himself for the failure of this relation, turns against himself, and ultimately enacts an inward-directed nihilism that causes him to act out in ways that differ from his cocksure father’s acting out (he acts shameless because he is actually ashamed), but which likewise put others in jeopardy and which can only be resolved by joining his father in a selfless acting-on-behalf-of-community. In the end, Mr. Fox indeed does bring all the animals together, in celebration of their animalness, listing off each of their Latin nomenclatures, putting the animal to use on behalf of, curbing the drives for the shared purpose of a collective overcoming. Still, these American-voiced animals in their war of independence against the British farmers whose law stands in for the paternal limit, the law-of-the-father, are still made intelligible, ultimately, in terms of an Oedipal transference which once again finds them, in their collective ideality, simply pulling one over on daddy. So for all its valuable children’s movie life lessons about community, selflessness, and the celebration of difference, the cute little beasties in Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, having escaped certain death beneath the earth, but consigned to remain there all the same, under the law of the father, are unable to escape the prison of chimeras that is their adolescent ideation. For all the jubilation at hand, there is a certain sadness at work underground. These animals remain, like the human Andersoneans who precede them, as trapped as the rest of us when we find ourselves backstepping - when we refuse, or are unable, to grow up.

La nana / The Maid

To be a live-in maid / nanny to one family for over twenty years, as Catalina Saavedra’s Raquel has been in Sebastián Silva’s subtle and sneaky second film, is to work and have worked a shitty, demanding, confoundingly repetitive, and often quietly humiliating job upon which you not only come to depend for your livelihood and physical security, but for yr sense of belonging, home, personal self-value, and emotional wellbeing. It is an indentured servitude that doubly imprisons by imposing the most desperate form of psychic need upon its entrapped practitioner. La nana, an autobiographical film based on Silva’s childhood (his younger brother plays his teenage self), shot in his family’s Chilean home, dedicated to his two childhood maids, approaches this perilous lifestyle w/ a deeper, more restrained understanding than any film about the baffling socioeconomic and psychological polarities of living w/ and/or as household help than any I have ever seen, and is so unique in its doing so that it cannot help but sieve much of the business of its meaning-making from the audience expectations that it implicitly subverts. From the beginning of the film, Catalina Saavedra’s jerky, nervous, tick-laden performance and halfway malevolent forty-one-year-old-virgin gaze set us up to expect the worst; some sort of cathartic aberration; some good ol’ ultraviolent bourgeois comeuppance; a calamitous return of repressed libidinal energy in the form of a raucous reprisal. The literary and cinematic depiction of maids has often focused on repression, alienation, and dispossession leading to rebellion, abjection, madness, and murder. The master narrative for these maid tales is the case of the Papin sisters, Lea and Christine, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933. Jean Genet used the story as the launching-pad for his theatrical masterpiece, The Maids, first performed in 1947. It has gone on to directly influence films such as Les Abysses (’63) by Nikos Papatakis, Claude Chabrol’s 1995 masterpiece La cérémonie, Jean-Pierre Denis’ Les blessures assassins / Murderous Maids (’00), among other works of cinema, theater, literature, and reportage. (Unrelated masterpieces like Joseph Losey’s The Servant ('63), Buñuel’s Le journal d'une femme de chamber (’64), and Pasolini’s Teorema, have likewise used personal servants as standing-reserves for violent, subversive destabilization of erstwhile calm zones of domestic upper-middle-class placidity w/ their immanent and corrosive play of sublimated power relations). Saaverda’s performance and the way the filmmakers isolate and underscore her odd, increasingly pathological behavior – complete w/ migraine headaches, blackouts, attacks, and spells of glassy aphasia – present us w/ a woman quite clearly on the brink of physical and emotional collapse. While this is indeed the crux of the situation, La nana doesn’t use her as a cog in a diaphanous discursive machinery of class schism. Instead it renders her as a woman in a complex situation of servitude and neediness, who struggles to meet these unconscious needs and has to confront the fear that her piece of security, a security that has been carved out for her conditionally, can be taken away from her at any moment if she is no longer seen as of use. Any form of change is, in fact, a possible threat to this partial, compromised zone of dependence and abnegation as both-part-of-and-not-a-part-of another family w/ its own unsteady dynamics. Even the two growing teenagers – he regularly spunking up his bedsheets and pajamas and she flowering into a self-possessed, confrontational adult whose face Raquel has thusly carved spookily out of her collection of family photos – threaten her already loosening grip on a status quo that she perceives as desperately necessary to her physical and spiritual survival and to which she clings like a territorial surrogate-mother bear at war w/ chronos. Her kindly mistress proves understanding, but when her solution to the ongoing dilemma is to hire another maid to help Raquel out, the already problematic maid goes even further off the rails, desperate not to lose any ground: she makes short work of the first assistant, an innocent, guileless Peruvian name Mercedes, whom she browbeats and locks out of the house, disinfecting the entire bathroom each time the poor young thing takes a shower; a second maid, Sonia, is brought in – mean, coarse, and built like a brick shithouse – but she quits too after the two maids come to blows, Sonia also having been locked out of the house (and having consequently injured herself climbing over it); finally, after she collapses in front of her benefactors, a third auxiliary maid named Lucy enters the picture during Raquel’s consequent convalescence, and everything changes in a way that we do not see coming and which, in its heartwarming unraveling, makes of our cynical, condescending expectations an object of ridicule. Lucy is a sweet, engaging and sympathetic woman who refuses to be chastened by Raquel’s passive-aggressive hardheadedness, insisting her way through the older woman’s force field, taking being locked out of the house as an opportunity to sunbathe naked, befriending Raquel, loving her, listening to her, coaxing her. Mariana Loyola’s performance in the role of Lucy stands in stark disjunction w/ Saavedra’s – hers is reminiscent of a Chilean riff on Sally Hawkins’s infectious performance-as-workable-lifestyle-ethic turn in Happy-Go-Lucky – but even more perfectly modulated and surprising in terms of where it takes the film. Given an opportunity to be heard, a space in which compassion can open her up to a new acceptance of life on life’s terms, and a locus for transference aided by tenderness, Raquel emerges slowly and cautiously from her fog, like a wounded animal into a clearing. Lucy, who is only passing through and likes it that way, allows Raquel to giver herself away so that she may receive herself back, become alive to herself, no longer defined simply as an precarious adjunct to a family that just won’t stay still, a position she disdains and depends upon in a maddening and untenable day-to-day paradox that has up until this point been closing in on her, shutting her down. The final shot of the film is of Raquel, enacting the transference in real bodily terms, taking up the now-moved-on Lucy’s habit of jogging w/ earphones, locked into her own flesh, her own psychic and biological autonomy, smiling as she roves gingerly out into the world, content in herself of having a self. The film, then, is about how the right person entering her desperate, sad life at the exact right moment, makes it okay for Raquel to feel okay. Of course this is how this story goes. And we should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.

La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris

Watching La danse, I kept thinking of death. My death. It seemed weird. Perhaps, I thought at first, perhaps it is Wiseman. Eighty-years-young this coming January, Frederick Wiseman is simply the greatest, most important filmmaker working in the United States, and he is not long for this world. He was one of the first filmmakers to perfectly hone the observational mode of direct cinema made famous in the U.S. by the Maysles Brothers and D. A. Pennebaker, but more than anything else a form perfected in Quebec by Michel Brault. As a Canadian, I cherish the documentary tradition on which my national cinema is founded. It is the only national cinema in the world whose two greatest filmmakers, Michel Brault and Allan King, are primarily known for documentaries. Wiseman is alone in the U.S. as their equal. He has been making films that immerse the viewer in the workings of institutions without talking heads, direct address, intertitles, chronology – any cinematographic tools that would serve to foreground any functional agency of the artist’s – since making 1967’s Titicult Follies, one of the greatest and most heartbreaking documentaries ever produced. His films are exhaustive fly-on-the-wall dioramas of institutional life: mental institutions like in Titicut, high schools, police departments, welfare offices, zoos, hospitals, women’s shelters, meat packing plants, Wiseman has done them all. La danse is his second film focusing on a ballet company, after 1995s Ballet, about the American Ballet Theater, and it is as beautiful and purely cinematic a film as I have ever seen. I think that a dance company is the absolute perfect subject for Wiseman, allowing him to focus on the institution, how it runs, what kind of market forces converge upon and underpin it, as well as upon dance itself: perhaps the one artform that the cinema elevates more completely, by virtue of the proximity it can attain, than any other. Filmmakers from Powell and Pressburger to Norman McLaren to Robert Altman have done some of their best work w/ ballet as their subject. The film begins w/ quickly intercut establishing shots of Paris followed by similar shots of the world beneath the studio: corridors, pipes, tunnels, the striated networks and subterranean structures that underlay the studio. Photographer John Davey uses the square box of the old Academy ratio (1.33:1) to emphasize the hard and soft lines of these busy connective tissues, these arteries and tessellations. The art of dance is not just thrown into contrast w/ the bureaucracy and consumer capitalist machinations that it requires in order to exist at all, but the smoothed, infinitely opened out spaces where the dancing is done – both the mirror-walled rehearsal spaces that reflect infinitely redoubled illusory reflections outward, and the actual stages w/ their purplish-blue spotlights terminating at a black horizon – suggest plateaus that all this underrigging supports in the same way money, human labor, and the Lehman Brothers support it. The bodies of these incredible young people, boys and girls (like w/ most great films, I was steadfastly bisexual for the duration), are framed in such a way that we almost never see them reflected in the mirrors when they are rehearsing. They are singular and they command the attention of our entire sensory-motor apparatus. The brain and nervous system dance w/ them the same way someone richly involved in a sporting event will jerk about an enacting of the direction he wants a player to go. In a way that is somewhat similar to kung fu movies, dancers remind us of Spinoza’s supposition that we are not yet aware of what a body is capable. Dancers are masochist, practicing a kind of bondage. What they do to their bodies to transcend what is thought of as the body, its utilitarian implementation, is staggering, and to see what they do, these beautiful, tormented bodies, atop these opened-out planes, is to witness something as primordial and elemental as the flickering of a flame. Dance is a Heracletean drug. The process of hypnotizing ourselves watching these dancers is similar to the effect produced by the pulsing, silently musical, morphological handpainted films of structuralists like McLaren and Stan Brakhage w/ the added component of these sexually charged bodies, commingling bodies, bodies that will grow old and die. Dance, like everything else (only more so), is about fucking and dying. Wiseman’s film is a fetishization of death-drive opened up onto a plateau built up from a microcosmic superstructure of institutional scaffolding. Much of the dance work shown in the latter sections of the film invokes Alfred Jarry, the occult, Magick. One woman dancer smears two children w/ stage blood, slams buckets violently over their heads, then lays them at the stage. These beautiful, young bodies writhing in death-lust. There is no power anywhere like this power. And then suddenly we are watching janitors cleaning out an empty, cavernous theater, and again the specter of death and depopulation. It's ineluctable. La danse is easily the film of the year and, after Allan King’s Dying at Grace, the second best documentary I have seen this decade.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

In a story in his latest book, narrated by the Hep C virus, Will Self riffs on the “slapstick of addiction.” “Slapstick is, in essence, the ritualized worship of causation, something humans place more faith in than they do their gods,” he writes. “Anyone watching a comedian attempting to do two things at once – or even one – will be familiar with this instinctive belief.” Watching hypomanic Nicholas Cage, in the early throws of cocaine psychosis, do even one thing at once in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans proves a recipe for high highwire comedy indeed. Like Wile E. Coyote pursuing a fix bigger than God, he rushes into and out of concentric, inward-eddying happenings, vamping like Red Skelton on rotgut, hobbled like Olivier in Richard, Duke of Gloucester mode, hovering at the edge of the wolf pack to sniff out weird mushrooms, whilst employing some seriously advanced intuitive drunken monkey kung fu. Turns out he is doing two things at once, whether he is in-the-moment aware of it or not. He is an addict, bien sûr, but he never stops being the decorated hero cop. Dude gets his man, he just takes the scenic route is all, roughing up grannies if he has to. Maybe not so scenic. The post-Katrina New Orleans of Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant non-remake is somewhere between Western ghost town and movie-movie backlot. There are plenty of cars but no people, most of the action taking place in any-place-whatevers – the police stations, crime scenes, sports bars, luxury mob apartments, casinos, and rustic hideouts of any given Steven Seagal movie. Directing Nicholas Cage to (cue Bavarian accent) “let the hog loose,” Herzog gives the actor plenty of room to spree. And let the hog loose he does. All over what is essentially a hopped-up Don Siegel picture w/ those cool oldschool crane-shot urban reveals. The police procedural, like slapstick, is all about causation. One clue leads to another leads to a shakedown leads up the ladder leads to the kingpin. This is precisely what happens in Port of Call, except that Cage’s vulpine piggy is running on schizzed-out midbrain instinct, forced to improvise at the speed of sound. Out hero is not a user of intravenous drugs: he is a snorter, a smoker, a popper. It is always go-time. A race to get up on the stress hormone. The accidental inhalation of heroin requires a hard-slog over to his girlfriend’s (a prostitute who looks-like-a-starlet-because-she-is, of course) to get the alkaloid antidote lest he need, you know, sit down for a spell. Like all addicts, Lieutenant Terence McDonagh’s cure for existential loneliness is isolation. He is locked into his own mad monadology. People are projections on a screen, action movie ciphers as much for him as they are for us. They can’t touch him. The limbic compromise of his reptile brain causes him to see iguanas, like the lobsters and crabs that followed Sartre around for a couple years after he took mescaline. Alleygators get under his skin. Herzog’s one Herzogean touch in the visual field is the employment of reptile-cam – insert shots in extreme wide-angle of scaly neo-cortex topographies connected to Cage's dopey backgrounded gaze. The other thing the good Lieutenant has in common w/ all addicts in active addiction (and I should know), is the backward slapstick skip of ethics as they retreat up the beach to allow for the incoming tide of dependency. Counterintuitively, Port of Call actually suggests the efficacy of these tremendously pliable ethological gradations and degradations, first because their playing out is very funny, and second because they somehow work … for a while. The film isn’t so much a celebration of addiction, then, as a kind of marveling at it. Where Abel Ferrera’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant saw abjection and aberration put a man of faith back on his knees, Port of Call’s hero practices the wrong kind of surrender all together, but an immanent plane of causation yields to him all the same, the way Buster Keaton might accidentally fall into the exact place he needs to be. The reptile comes out on top by chance, and the hog, somehow, is vindicated. It’s luck ‘til luck runs out. And we need luck. We do. But we need a human connection, and I don't buy the variety served up here in the dénouement. You can't have it both ways.

The Messenger

It would seem natural that Israeli combat veteran Oren Moverman’s directorial debut would delve into the heavy moral morass of military life and its discontents. Already having made a name for himself in the industry adapting Denis Johnson (whose heavily visual prose in Jesus’ Son already seem blocked out and halfway art directed), and, in concert w/ director Todd Haynes, the various parallel texts mythological that cohabitate under the aegis of "Bob Dylan," Moverman appears to have a handle on the complex interplay of inner and outer worlds running alongside one another (or outer worlds on top of other outer worlds), an understanding of the dexterity required to make slippery texts, subtexts, and metatexts conceptually cohere, and an ear for oddball countercultural American vernacular not actually uncommon to foreigners perhaps because one is forced to hone ones depth perception when operating outside of ones native tongue (think Kafka). That being said, none of these apparent assets is evident from The Messenger: all that is left is talk, talk, talk. There is clearly a good film to be made on the subject of men whose job it is to notify next of kin that their loved one has died in combat, perhaps w/ the bulk of this cast, and perhaps w/ Mr. Moverman calling the shots. This is certainly not that movie. Despite the high-test quality of the two central leads (Ben Foster as wounded-in-action Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery and Woody Harrelson as Captain Tony Stone, recovering alcoholic military lifer secretly ashamed to have never seen combat), they are consistently made to masticate heavily telegraphed dialogue that sounds an awful lot like writing. Though a wonderful actress, Samantha Morton has to deal w/ the worst of it, forced to trade in dross that would be impossible to sell even in the mouth of an actress more suited to the part of a sexually compelling working class American woman w/ a half-black kid. Samantha Morton has become more asexual as her giant forehead increasingly leads her around and her eyes look out of the screen like huge, glossy cries for help – every time I see her these days I can only think of that ethereal, wide-eyed and amniotic human battery she played in Minority Report. What ever happened to the hot-mess firecracker who first made herself known to me fucking-the-pain-away her way through Under the Skin? She is not the problem though. All of the characters say things that no one would ever say, moving episodically through sets that feel like empty casks in which no one has ever lived, emotional payoff falls out of the sky and goes kersplat, and the dead-in-its-tracks romance between achy-broken Foster and nervous android Morton is sickeningly creepy in a way Moverman is apparently unaware of, leaving one to wonder if he actually sees this stalking and cagey cornering as fucking redemptive (?). The Messenger remains refreshingly free of message in the big picture but remains chalk-full of tiny little moment-to-moment messages that are persistently spelled out and scattered condescendingly about our feet like birdseed. So far the critics have been gobbling it up. Personally, I hunger for something more substantial. I remain convinced, however, that when people start using him right Ben Foster will be one of this generation's finest actors. Maybe he needs to be playing shy-but-hyper like he did when he was a kid. Here he just barely doesn't quite totally suck. Professional pothead Woody Harrelson actually takes him to town. Goddamn!

Antichrist

Shot by Anthony Dod Mantel – Dogme 95’s onetime photographer in residence – w/ awe-inspiring etherealized gorgeousity one minute and raw guttering nerves the next, Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is, if nothing else, easily the best thing he has done since his masterpiece The Idiots (’98) (the only film he ever made under the strictures of his Dogme manifesto’s various vows of chastity). Unveiling the new film at Cannes this year, the walking Danish personality cult attempted to explain its origins by way of describing a creative impasse brought about by a period of clinical depression and extreme anhedonia to which an extreme act of purging was the only viable artistic response. Certainly Antichrist is a film that feels overwhelmed by crises at once personal, artistic, and spiritual. It details a Satanic metempsychosis wherein all of nature, within and without the realm of the human and the personal, has become transfigured by daemonia. No vision of hell realized on earth has ever been rendered so impersonally while at once feeling so extremely grounded in specters of personal suffering – it seems to suggest firsthand experience of how easily life can be lived into a corner from which one suddenly cannot escape, where the earth itself burns the soles of yr feet and the spasms and shudderings of a cataleptic horror become the lingua franca of all human exchange. Antichrist tells of a married Seattle couple whose lives are shaken to the core when their infant son escapes his crib and crawls out the window to his death whilst they, taking a break from doing the laundry, are hastily (and graphically) fucking. This is merely the prologue, done in slowed-to-a-pulsing-seethe b&w tableaux vivant accompanied by Handel. From here we enter the tidal process of their gradual, terrific undoing, accompanied by a pernicious, droning score and delineated with baleful inevitability in four chapters and an epilogue, each separated by smeared chalkboard title cards: “Grief,” “Pain,” “Despair,” and “The Three Beggars” – the beggars in question being manifestations of the three previous chapter titles embodied by a deer perpetually giving birth to a half-externalized stillborn, a talking fox eviscerating itself (“chaos reigns,” it extemporizes), and a crazy fucking resilient crow, one of each of which is introduced at the end of each of the first three chapters as brief, calamitous visions of universal enmity, all congregating in the final one. The film proper starts w/ “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg as withered gynec apparition) in a state of almost complete grief-stricken collapse, being subjected to a strong-arm regime of recovery by her stupid, rigid, and invasive therapist husband, “He” (chiseled, phallic, and purplish Willen Defoe w/ lips not unlike that of a penis). Our couple soon retreats to their cabin in the woods, portentously named “Eden,” He trying to take her to the core of her fear so that She may be expunged of it. From here their Ingmar Bergman-school Kammerspiel sparring culminates w/ the two of them driven to the brink in an explosion of cathexis and violent desublimation whereby a whole history of gynocide precipitates a confused degeneration of human and extra-human nature (not to mention a bloody cock-bludgeoning and an unspeakably graphic clitoredectomy-w/-scissors). “The Epilogue” follows He, emerging half-crippled from the woods, leading a giant procession of women w/ blurred, amorphous faces; the repressed female dead of a phallocracy built atop their myriad corpses; the depersonalized currency w/ which evil has spent itself. She, a creature of Intuition and Nature who has been working on a dissertation concerning the history of 16th Century violence toward women, is no longer certain that such violence was not in some way justified by virtue of an inherent evil embodied in the feminine, a nature which has evidently been awakening within her for some time, evidenced by the fact that She appears to have been secretly abusing their son during the period leading up to his death. He, in his way, represents the Rational and the realm of Control, though some sort of invagination of his cortex allows him visions of animal excrescence and a connection to the realm of sublimated destructive evil w/ which the natural world surrounding Eden is invisibly pregnant. The violence that erupts when She becomes terrified that He will leave her confuses this dynamic all the more as She proceeds to enact a mutual mortification of the flesh that parallels the kinds of violence men have traditionally visited upon women, almost religious in its ritualized singularity. It is almost impossible not to, by the end of the film, see the two characters as two sides of one nature inscribed upon the hand, and in the head, of Mr. Von Trier. As a filmmaker who has often said he identifies w/ the women his films keep martyring as if he were doing them a favor (much to the dismayed chagrin of many a feminist), he is also famous for being rigid, arrogant, and especially cruel to his actresses. It seems obvious that Von Trier deeply relates to both characters: both part of nature and both, ultimately, overwhelmed by it. If nature is, as She would have it, “Satan’s church,” then it seems fit that each of us, and not just Mr. Von Trier and his human puppets, should be possessed by and in possession of an unspeakable evil that courses through all that which is and which manifests itself in forces which overpower all rational blockades we may seek to impose upon them, whether internally or externally. Evil, then, is in the aether and Antichrist is less about gender than it may at first appear – instead it is finally about the absorption and depolarizing of gender’s pitiful surfaces and the assertion of its ultimate irrelevance. The film ends w/ a bizarre dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky, a filmmaker whose deeply religious vision was not nearly as troubled as Antichrist’s is. What Von Trier’s film does share w/ Tarkovsky’s masterpieces, though, is an absolute disgust w/ all secular-humanist institutions and modes of address as well as a gauzy visual power. The distinction is – and it is a great one – that Antichrist has no room for the divine. Its sodden wounds are cauterized w/ bile and sap.

An Education

Though the culmination of the titular éducation sentimental in An Education invariably leaves residuum of a deeply ingrained conservatism as aftertaste, Danish director Lone Scherfig and de rigueur English scenarist Nick Hornby, in full ribbed-for-her-pleasure mode (adapting the Granta-published memoir of barb’d-tongu’d journo Lynn Barber), give themselves enough ethological slack that the film never becomes explicitly reactionary (or sentimental, in point of fact), in no way hanging any of its finally-all-quite-likeable characters out to dry, or in any real way resembling a cautionary tale, despite some hard lessons hard won. The journey is, as the film details it, well bloody worth the tears in the tea. As anyone knocked about by the school of life can tell you, a little mutual exploitation can serve its purpose so long as ones illusions don’t get in ones way. It is precisely w/ the not-so-innocent cultivation and sudden decommissioning of her illusions that bright, impetuous, sixteen-year-old Francophile, and prospective Oxfordite Jenny gets burned. In pre-swing 1961 Victorian Twickenham, in a land before mods and rockers and Peter Pan syndrome, Jenny hooks up with Peter Sarsgaard’s David Goldman, a charming, worldly, thirtysomething Jew, w/ a knack for the short con and a tendency to botch its more involved, longer-investment brother, who effortlessly ensconces her in his world of art auctions, concerts, supper clubs, jazz, and bon vivant friends Danny and Helen. By flattering her intelligence and wantonly entitled aspirations for cultural ascension, he wisps her away to Oxford and then Paris, where she is summarily, and apparently quite briskly, deflowered on her seventeenth birthday, having had her square-peg parents smarmily won over by David’s improvisatory wiles, his having played on their fears of looking like the people they in fact are, and having implicitly promised to make all her Juliette Gréco-soundtracked dreams come Technicolor true. Sarsgaard makes the film credible by playing the truth of the arrested-adolescent conman: all flash and filigree masking the scared child within, full of thinly concealed neuroses, a terror of honesty and exposure, and some pretty considerable sexual hang-ups that manifest themselves in the bedroom in the form of uncomfortable baby-talk and an awkward attempt to bring a banana into the mix. This warts-and-all education is just as much his as Jenny’s, only sadder, he seemingly just as excitedly enraptured by this world of things made sparkling new as his jailbait Audrey Hepburn w/ her eyes alight and proneness to full-faced blushery. It is the kind of adult sanity, which David Foster Wallace elsewhere on this Blog calls “the only unalloyed form of heroism available today,” that is the structuring absence of this too-good-to-be-true pleasure cruise drunken boat from which Jenny has the opportunity to awaken but which David is far too deep in to ever escape, his pathology and track record having serialized his protective skins of untruth and armored-in-riches childishness. Everybody is talking about young ingénue Carey Mulligan and her resplendent turn as Jenny. Enough has already been said as far as all that is concerned. She is indeed something. The film’s sense of genuine midrange BBC tragedy, however, lives and dies by the wounded man-boys in An Education. Both Sarsgaard and Alfred Molina, as Jenny’s stuffy, befuddled chump of a well-meaning father, expose layers of defensiveness and self-deceit through which brief rays of vulnerability and genuine care cautiously pierce. The real heartbreaker, though, is Mathew Beard in a small part as Jenny’s erstwhile teen suitor, who w/ wince-inducing pubescent lack-of-any-dexterity-whatever navigates out-of-my-league desire, clumsy-waltzing around a steadfast limit he is shatteringly aware of, making him the most pathetic male figure in the film, but also the only one in possession of sufficient self-awareness to know when to make an exit. It is finally Jenny who holds most of the real power in An Education, as is often the case in these situations (not a politically correct sentiment, granted), and having had her heart edifyingly broken before it is too late, she emerges from the film, and a con in which she was much more than a willing participant, as a potentially unstoppable force, poised to enter adulthood a second time w/ procedural savoir-faire, shed of all the mauvaise foi. The film, finally, is a breezily directed and prettily framed piece of triumphant ball-busting bluster, almost worthy of half the effusive praise it has been getting.

(Untitled)

Another deadpan comedy in an unhurried lackadaisical register from director Jonathan Parker and his writing partner Catherine DiNapoli – they of the slightly droll Crispin Glover-starring adaptation of Herman Melville’s hysterically funny but admittedly one-joke short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” – (Uncut) is a loving sort of a satire that refuses to-talk-down-to-or-about, concerning conceptual art and avant-garde music and their perilous work of shattering bourgeois complacency in a world (Manhattan) that is only fitfully interested in having its core aesthetic beliefs wrenched about, and only then as long as the prices are sufficiently high to bespeak serious marketplace significance. Our protagonist, Adrian Jacobs, is a composer of willfully difficult music that plays to audiences only slightly larger than his three-piece band. He not only pounds the piano with his elbows, arms akimbo, like Cecil Taylor and his eighty-eight tuned drums (plus the inside of the piano, duh), he also hands out pages of composition to his musicians that look not unlike Mr. Taylor’s hyper-complex diagrams of burbled chaos that might well be the diagnostics of UFO engines, and is perfectly rendered by Adam Goldberg with dead serious slacker intensity and simultaneous lassitude in both gait and demeanor. After a particularly poorly attended and remarked-upon concert of new material culminating in his waving the American flag aggressively at the near-empty theater, Adrian is introduced by commercial artist brother Josh to Madeleine Gray (played by sexy human bunny rabbit Marley Shelton), the attractive owner of a high-end Soho gallery who supports her outré showings of seriously far-out but-is-it-art? by pedaling Josh’s banal amorphous-pastel-fields-featuring-dots to hospitals, hotels and the like. Madeleine’s gallery features artists like English eccentric Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones in anachronistically quotidian dress), who does the Damien Hirst thing w/ dead animals crashlanded on household objects, and the borderline retarded single-named Monroe, who just puts his name on the household objects, in one case a blank white gallery wall itself, like an autistic Marcel Duchamp. After his disastrous performance, Madeleine takes to Adrian, whom she sees as a fellow traveler and prospective fuck-buddy (much to the chagrin of Josh, to whom she will not offer an opening in her gallery or bedroom), and he, for his part, is interested in sampling the sound-collage that is her wardrobe and in particular her squeaky leather skirt, which she happily offers up before jumping his bones. When Adrian starts to see his music made to analogically parallel worthless (to him) art that is worth a lot, he becomes seriously divested of his illusions and stages a John Cage 4’33-style pièce de literal résistance instead of the commissioned work involving kicking of bucket, rattling of chains, and a particularly nonplussed Russian opera singer. It takes this immersion within a world where art is both commodity and piss-take for Adrian to become unsettled about the value of his own work. At least until a beautiful epilogue (in fucking Nantucket, no less), which may or may not find him w/ cause to rethink things in the very real human terms that he perhaps started thinking about them in the first place. The real trumpcard in (Untitled)’s hand is that it has brought in real artists to provide the music and art so that what we are seeing and hearing is pretty damn close to the stuff that is actually out there. There is no too-easy mockery being dispensed here, but rather genuinely bemused relish in all the absurd majesty of this millennial art world rumpus room where dead-earnest craftspersons pound away at immortality while everybody else kind of wonders if the whole thing is a joke. We cannot tell if Madeleine is crazy, a flake, or a genuinely thoughtful and worldly woman precisely because she is all of these things. One minute she seems like a daffy duck and the next she is expertly explaining the difference between art and entertainment: “entertainment never posed a problem it couldn’t solve.” The best part of the whole film is the almost afterthought ministrations of cast member Lucy Punch, who as Adrian’s bandmate and friend (and lover?), is known only as “Clarinet,” and who walks through the film w/ that eager small town energy to engage people writ all over her face always on the verge of toppling into punked disbelief and quiet exasperation at all the bizarre goings on. You always see this person at parties, mouth open, head nodding, trying to be interested in what someone who is either drunk or crazy or both is saying and not wanting to be impolite and just get the fuck out of there. (Untitled) knows, and is in fact finally about, how she feels. She features in the final shot, eating quiche, eyes wandering impassively around a crowded Nantucket art opening, ever the game observer. You want to hug her. (Untitled) is not a hysterically funny movie, but you may end up wanting to hug it too.

Halloween II

Despite the fact that Rob Zombie the screenwriter keeps preemptively shooting Rob Zombie the director in the foot a priori via sub-Tarantino character-development-as-pop-culture-reference and on-the-nose stabs at satire that land as cheap, bloodless farce, this does not diminish his not inconsiderable mastery of the murder tableau. It is in the treatment of violence at the site of its realization and psychic excitation – the zone of person-to-person overlap where it engenders ruptures, fissures, traumas, and transferences – that Zombie emerges as a genuine artist of insight, empathy, and radicalized spiritual connectivity. His original Halloween film was less a remake than the humanizing biopic of a famous fictional archetype, focusing on how violence is communicable, tragically passed on generation-to-generation and person-to-person (it starts at home), which built up to an exquisitely executed ending where Michael Myers’ unknowing sister Laurie/Angel comes to a point of neural equivocation, circuit overload, and ecstatic merger w/ her deeply repressed brother. That film becomes, at its explosive decisive-moment point of exhaustion, a film about tragic connection and poisoned affinities at the site of violence’s implantation of its legacy. Zombie’s new sequel begins minutes after this point of ego-collapse and circuitously brings us to one year later, where the once virginal and innocent unknowing sister has sublimated the abject brother, decorating her room w/ dour Goth furnishings and death’s heads, unconsciously absorbed within the family Id whereby she continues to psychically merge w/ brother and undead matriarch. Ego-collapse has led to a zone of umbilical virtuality where dreams are shared and individuation collapses. This is a film about how the traumatized retraumatize themselves out of confused love and monstrous devotion; how profound traumatic disruptions explode the striated construction of self and open up smooth fields of psychic interpolation; about the bonds that preserve and double developmental perversions. Zombie and DOP Brandon Trost have added to the film’s intimacy by shooting it in 16mm not to feed off grindhouse nostalgia so much as to bring to attention the film’s grain, its haptic physicality, its tactile skin. The dark, ashen texture of the film allows wounds within the frame to bleed stabs of pale light. It has a very specific feel. The film is often focused on touch. While men and older women are dispatched suddenly and w/ cursory matter-of-factness, only to be lingered on, felt, and absorbed, young women receive heightened attention in a manner that bespeaks something more complicated than misogyny. First they are made subjects. We are put in their nervous systems at the precise moment their sensory-motor apparatus is overloaded by the onset of horrific violence: they perceive in slow motion, sound is cut out so that the soundtrack quietly throbs; they become locked in a double-movement w/ Michael Myers, the subjectivity becoming doubled, interchangeable; the attention to touch, contact, returned gazes is exhaustively detailed. Death is reciprocated through the gleam of serene, druggy relief of the eyes and sanguine skin. There is a rigorous detailing of gestural interchange, each death enacting a mimesis of the very real transference of identity, drive, and affection from Michael to Laurie/Angel. What Zombie creates w/ this film is a horrifying remonstration of exchange value within a violently transgressive libidinal economy. It is a subversive notion for a slasher film: we are all ready to return the gaze of violence, to turn the trauma around, to secretly enjoy its return, to share in the vile acts that define us, to die or to kill (or both) w/ real selfless ecstasy.

The Box

The Box, the film that nobody is talking about, is Richard Kelly’s third film as director and also his third film to commit apocalypse. This is quite a track record. Each film – the preceding two being the wet-behind-the-ears / water-on-the-brain debut Donnie Darko and the reviled closed-circuit new-media celebrity-TV-centric mindfuck Southland Tales – plots out the terminal cartography of a network brought down by a computer that takes itself out; each apocalypse revolves around a symbolic suicide. In each film one (or more) character(s) exist(s) through whom the whole grid’s frayed, spark-spitting wires are exposed, broken rebar juts out, a rupture is opened, and the metaphysical Open itself gapes. Suicide is traditionally the most efficient way for the individual to annihilate the whole world of others and objects. In Kelly’s films it is also always a kind of secular-humanist sacrifice with spiritual resonance played out on an ethical vector traversed by metaphysical currents (like in late Tarkovsky, whose final film, The Sacrifice, must be an influence and could easily be made to share its title w/ any of Kelly’s). The Box finds boyish Corvette-driving aerospace engineer Arthur (James Marsden) and pretty, deformed Sartre-misrepresenting English teacher wife Norma (a woefully accented Cameron Diaz) playing a game of freewill unto death in a preset terminal loop. Norma teaches No Exit to private school kids and comes to disprove Sartre’s hypothesis (and that is what it is) that hell is other people. The Box undercuts Sartre’s basic arrogance and psychotropically rebuts: hell is us – the self is contaminated in its very helixes. We are the embodiment of hell in our basic species activity, in possession of the opposite of grace: preordained extinction one computer, one vector, at a time. The Box embodies surrealist father André Breton’s notion of “pure psychic automatism” in its free-associative death-dream trip, it’s characters seeming to scuba dive through its berserker setpieces as in an aquarium that is the frame. There is no freewill in dream as in life – only the nauseating, floating inevitable. The Box ends w/ an extreme tenderness for all its incendiary bleakness: a death-embrace of mutual affirmation and stunted acquiescence, husband and wife intimately cooperating in the not-at-all-intimate succumbing of the whole world to the pathogen from which it can only be delivered by surrendering to total collapse. Though its narrative engine is asleep at the wheel (the film fundamentally abiding by oldschool surrealist tenants), the machinery of apocalypse is no less systematically consummated for its basis in a kind of monstrous catatonia. The Box will remain, in its twilit zone of mid-seventies digital-era-dawning art-direction (Donnie Darko style), one of the most messed-up and memorable films of 2009. You have my word on that.