Death, beneath all

Private tragedy forced, painfully, into the public arena

The highest compliment I can pay to Life, Above All (2010) is that I was startled to learn that the film is based on a book, on a book by a man, on a book by a Canadian man.  It feels so authentic, so personal, so finely observed that it feels as if there is no distance between the finished film, its characters and the events of their lives.

And yet, for me, the film kept recalling that most formalized and schematic of modern dramas, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, because of the respective society's attempt to use shame to crush non-conformity or dissent.  What Life's protagonist, Chanda, has to navigate through is burden enough, especially for a 12-year-old, but its taking place under public scrutiny increases the pain exponentially.  The social stigma of and ignorance about AIDS proves more debilitating than the disease itself.

The story is built on incident virtually without plot.  The net effect is that neither Chanda nor the audience know what to look forward to, which means we share her feelings of frustration and even hopelessness.  The film does end on a note of reconciliation, but it comes without preparation, and feels a bit tacked on, although, personally I'm a sucker for Zulu harmony singing, so it got to me.

My only other observation is that cinematographer Bernhard Jasper has taken the trouble to work out how to photograph dark-skinned people in dark rooms.  They are vibrant and present and far more visible than in many more celebrated films.  Cinematographers need to study this one as an example of how to shoot black skin--in fact, it might even have made some very sick characters look too beautiful!

Death hovers just below the surface of We Bought A Zoo (2011), which is probably not mentioned very prominently in the marketing materials.  But that may be what gives the film a peculiar gray emotional undertone, and gives the rather chaotic and sloppily assembled screenplay some unity and resonance.  Without the presence of death, this could be filed next to those made-for-Saturday-matinee movies they turned out in my childhood, like Clarence the Cross Eyed-Lion and Hello Down There.

It seems truly perverse that an intended family entertainment is so death-ridden, beginning with the death of Matt Damon's wife (before the story begins) which is the inciting incident for him to buy a zoo, and continuing through the acceptance of the death of old tiger as a healing mechanism for Damon to accept his own loss.  That may be kind of weird, but it is one of the things that unquestionably works in a script riddled with red herrings, cul de sacs, extra characters, scenes and situations.  It has the marks of a three-hour script having been cut down to two, and not all that comfortably.

One note in its favor -- the film literally features lions and tigers and bears and doesn't cute them up.  The only monkey is a fleetingly viewed capuchin, and most of the other animals seem hazardous or just not people-friendly -- exotic porcupines, snakes and camels.  The "awwww" factor has been reserved almost entirely for Maggie Elizabeth Jones, as Damon's 7-year-old daughter.  Jones is ridiculously cute without ever being cloying, although she is made to say the title of the film too many times.  (Under my son's secret rules, when you say the name of the film, the film must end.  Clearly this rule was promulgated under the influence of The Importance of Being Earnest.)  But there are some impressively scary shots of big scary teeth in POV shots which omit the principal actors, but had to pose some hazard for the photography crew, at least.

Ultimately, it doesn't make any sense.  It's never really clear why owning a very marginal zoo (are there such things in the US--privately owned for-profit zoos?  The real story took place in England) is such a happy resolution.  It just seems like buying more trouble.  Perhaps sensing this, co-writer-director Cameron Crowe cooks up a finale with the departed wife rejoining her now-happy family in the cafe where husband and wife first met.  Given that we have only seen Mom in still pictures or fleeting glimpses until now, the whole scene has an odd overhang, like a cantilevered canopy that threatens to fall on the people underneath.  The movie ends with scads of happy people in the happy zoo and Matt Damon having been kissed by Scarlett Johannson (the little hussy), and it feels fun, but it never ever really feels right.

Oh, and speaking of Miss Scarlett, in this film she takes on the new role (for her) of Workboots Girl.  Workboots Girl is the inverse of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she performs the same plot function.  Where MPDG unleashes the protagonist's inner desire for freedom and creativity, Workboots Girl teaches the dreamer How To Do Practical Stuff.  She is a bit like the Hawks Woman, but the Hawks Woman does not need the man, nor does the man need her.  Workboots Girl, on the other hand must solve the protagonist's problem, or she will not be.  In this Syd-Field-Robert-McKee, we must never have a character who is just enjoyable to be with--they all must have A Function in the Story Arc.  ("Arc! Arc!" The cry of the Hollywood development executive...)
One last thing--few directors or producers seem to realize how damaging it is to film to be deliberately unclear about where it is taking place.  There seems to be a fear that if a story is grounded in a particular geography, no one who lives anywhere else will relate.  This is too obviously ridiculous as to spend any time refuting -- all identification is rooted in specificity.  The events of We Bought A Zoo took place in England, but evidently Cameron Crowe would have been uncomfortable with that, or Matt Damon signed on early, but for whatever reason, the zoo got moved into some strange landscape that bears no resemblance to any urban-suburban-exurban environment in the United States.  There are no landmarks, no local characters, no sports teams, no TV stations, nothing to ground it anywhere.  The "charming cafe" where Damon met is wife is so generic that it can literally be in any town in the world.  So when you read that the factual basis of the movie has been completely twisted and distorted, you're not surprised-- this story really feels like it never happened, and it really never happened no place.

Codes and silences

At the very least, The Town (2010) settles the issue: Ben Affleck is a real movie director, not just an actor who takes an occasional flyer behind the lens. Gone, Baby Gone was extremely accomplished, but whether because of its modest scale and star (Affleck's brother Casey) or its downbeat and somewhat ambiguous tone, it did not make a big impression in the film business community. Still, every talented actor probably has one pretty good film in them. Affleck came roaring back with another entry in the evolving sub-genre of films set in Eastern Massachusetts, wrapping his drama of growth, loyalty and betrayal in a hard boiled heist-move coating.

Frankly, the coating is more convincing than the gooey center of the film, which tries to suggest that a career criminal can win the love and loyalty of a Good Woman and then completely quit being a thief. But although that premise is hard to take, Affleck's depiction of what FBI man Jon Hamm's character calls "Irish omerta" is utterly persuasive, especially the strong ties between Affleck's character and that of Jeremy Remmer (Hurt Locker) a probable sociopath who is nonetheless fiercely loyal and, in his own way, trustworthy.

Most impressive is Affleck's handling of an urban car chase midway through the film reminiscent of the best aspects of John Frankenheimer's Ronin. Shot and edited with an economy, lightness and realistic scale that make it more convincing than many more hyperbolic sequences (e.g. The Matrix Reloaded). The light, swift style in which all the crime-action scenes are put together heighten their plausibility, even though the premise of the climactic sequence, an attempted heist of Fenway is prima facie ridiculous.

The economy of the shooting is mirrored in the elliptical dialogue (Affleck is also co-writer of the final shooting script with Aaron Stockard). Here's how we learn of the loyalty of Remmer's character (James) to Affleck's character (Doug):

Doug MacRay: I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.
[Beat]
James Coughlin: Whose car are we gonna take?

And later they discuss the big job that could set them for life, either as wealthy men or permanent prisoners:

Doug MacRay: You know if this thing goes right, could be your turn to step away, too.
James Coughlin: Yeah. Sure. What am I gonna do? Dougy, huh? Go down to Margaritaville, drink half a yard and fall off the [bleep]in' bar stools?
Doug MacRay: Do me a favor, the weight of this thing...pack a parachute at least.
James Coughlin: You know the funniest thing about being in prison guys pretending they wanna get out. I can't do any more time, Dougy. So if we get jammed up, we're holding court on the street.

The criminal mastermind in The Town runs a flower shop as a front, as does one of the rival gang leaders in what is often cited as the film that kicked off the gangster film cycle of the early '30s, the romantic Underworld (1927).

Journalist and future screenwriter Ben Hecht concocted a hard-boiled story, is first for the movies, of a gangster's rise coupled with a bit of romantic rivalry, trying to be as true as he could be to the real Chicago gangsters he new personally. Paramount assigned the story to the struggling young Josef von Sternberg, who had established two reputations, one as an efficient technician and "movie doctor" and the other as a visual poet with less interest in narrative than in pictures. Luckily, this was a perfect qualification for a director of silent film, in which the best stories were the simplest ones which could be explored in purely pictorial terms.

Von Sternberg took Hecht's gritty story and made it an operatic love triangle, a competition between two spiritual brothers, one "Rolls Royce", representing Mind, and the other, "Bull" representing Body, for the possession of the sensual yet ethereal woman, evocatively called "Feathers" (and covered in them most of the time). Von Sternberg's reputation rests on his exploration and exploitation of actor's faces, of subtle details of eyes and corners of mouths. But he is also the master of light and shadow and the moving camera. The sequence below begins with what is quite clearly an attempted rape, without showing anything which could seriously disturb a censor.



If you don't want to take the time for this entire clip, start at about 4:00 and see how von Sternberg absorbs the lessons of German cinema in staging and lighting, and how he allows his audience thrill to grotesque violence without showing it directly (yet without cutting away). Then von Sternberg exercises a superb economy, cutting straight from the murder of Buck in his flower ship (just like The Town) to Bull's sentencing; from one kind of justice to another.

One of the toughest things about watching dramatic silent films today can be the long focus on faces which seem to be barely changing. In sound film, a silent reflective moment can be effective, but when all the action is silent, long close-ups can seem really languorous. But von Sternberg keeps the story alive even as we see thought flicker over the characters' faces. I don't know of a silent feature which is so consistently engaging and absorbing, even with its simple characters and symbols. (Look, for instance, at the confetti which covers the floor of the Criminal's Ball like a thick soup of moral squalor.)

But powerful as it is, Underworld doesn't really feel like a true ancestor of those rise-to-the-top gangster films like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and the original Scarface. (And incidentally, every fan of The Godfather, Wiseguys, the Scarface remake and The Sopranos owe it to themselves to see those primitive antecedents, many sequences of which are still blood-chilling.) Bull Weed is a well-established success at the beginning of the film, and Underworld has more to do with choices and loyalty than about the role of the gangster in society and the manner in which he gathers power, which is at the heart of the 30s cycle.

That trope is, however, central to the latest remake of The Public Enemy, the South African crime epic Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema (released theatrically here in 2010). Although it incorporates real-life story elements such as the collapse of apertheid and the use of rent strike law to acquire title to real estate, the film still feels like a long-distance echo of the old Warner Bros. classics, for which black skin stands in for Irish heritage and cocaine substitutes for illegal booze. The central character even dies of a fatal gun show surrounded by cops exactly like Jimmy Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. All that is needed was for Kunene to gasp out, "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Lucky?" Jerusalema is even directly derivative of Michael Mann's Heat, as Joburg gangsters imitate one of the key MOs in that film, plowing tractor-trailers into armored trucks.

The one truly original. element is the first half-hour of the film, depicting the future gangsters as clueless and inept youngsters, stealing trucks they don't even know how to drive, and planning to hijack drivers while standing under a sign warning drivers that they are likely to be hijacked in this area. The mix of English, Zulu, Afrikaans and pidgin is also quite interesting and illustrates the slippery social distinctions of the South African criminal world (specifically, the depredations of the refugees from Ghana).

But for all the trappings, the elements of gangster films remain the same: poverty, lack of opportunity, violence, family, loyalty and betrayal. I don't think any of this is going away soon.

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika

One of the hallmarks of 80's cinema was the well-meaning drama scolding South Africa about what terrible and unjust meanies they were with their bad apartheid. As if the US had never fostered racially-based injustice. It was a good thing we had limited communications with the old South Africa, or they would probably have jumped up and punched us in the nose for lecturing them.

Now that the new South Africa is almost 20 years old, it does seem to make sense to assess what has been happening there. (I had to look this up, but although Mandela was released in 1990, he did not become president until 1994.)

Disgrace (2008) has, at least, a partially South African perspective, although the filmmakers are Australian and the star is American. It is a very dark, perhaps pessimistic work. I choose to read it as a metaphor for the position of minority whites in the new South Africa. Malkovich is morally compromised (he sexually abuses a black student--sort of colonialism in minature), and retreats from the city to land he owns in the country, to become, literally, a Boer, the Dutch word for farmer which is the black South African word for "white" or specifically "white oppressor." He is at the mercy of his black neighbor, Petrus, who begins as a tenant and eventually becomes the owner. His daughter Lucy, is sexually assaulted by three black ruffians while he is helplessly locked in the bathroom (and briefly set on fire). She will not report the assault, and Petrus turns out to be the patron of the principal villain. Lucy even decides to go ahead and bear the child conceived in the assault. The only useful work Malkovich can find is to help the local shelter euthanize unwanted animals. As Malkovich holds one poor dog as its life ebbs away, one can't help wondering if he doesn't seem himself fading away and becoming nothing in this South Africa.

It seems there is nothing left for the whites but acquiescence, due to their pre-existing guilt. I have read various places that the film ends on a note of tentative hope, but I don't see it. It seems to be muddling-through, South-Africa style.

The filmmaking is similarly bleak. South Africa looks bleached and parched, the countryside a barely habitable desert, the city a collection of walled-in spaces. Malkovich's accent is very insecure, but his arrogance and lack of empathy is solidly in place. As usual he asks neither for pity nor sympathy. Is there an American star who cares less about whether the audience likes him? That attitude pays off at the end, since one can grudgingly admire his fortitude at carrying on in spite of his trials.

Disgrace is a hard movie to watch It is uncompromising, unsentimental, unsparing to its characters and its audience. But it is never dull and it is often rewarding.

Invictus (2009) comes off as a feel-good picture by contrast. Much of it is of the "sports overcomes racism" vein, like Remember The Titans and going back all the way to The Jackie Robinson Story. It frequently takes time to repeat its ideas (Mandela is a healer--he wants to preserve white dignity to ensure their participation in the new South Africa) and to congratulate itself for its noble mindedness. I am left with these questions as I watch it?

1. Why Clint Eastwood to direct and why was Eastwood's work so anonymous? On the plus side, it omitted some of the langours of Eastwood's personal projects, but it never gave much scope to the acting, which is Eastwood's hallmark. There were really only two pieces of virtuoso filmmaking, and I wonder to what extent they were scripted. One comes in the sequence when Damon's rugby team visits the prison Mandela inhabited for more than 20 years, and we see the ghosts of the former inmates. This is particularly moving as it is coupled with the words of "Invictus," a poem for which I have a soft spot. (I have recommended it to many students, especially athletes, as a credo, and it is never not been embraced by them.)

The other striking sequence is the one picture here, in which the predominantly white players conduct a rugby clinic in a township, where the game is not familiar, and we literally see the spirit of play transcend other human boundaries. There was nothing new, but it was exhilarating all the same, especially in contrast with the noble talk.

2. Why Matt Damon if he was not going to be given a character to play? If wonder if the plan wasn't, "Hey, there's no character here! No problem--we'll get a well-liked American star and nobody will notice!"

3. If South Africa has a bright future, why does the film look blasted and whitened like a post-apocalyptic film?

4. Why cast Leleti Kuhmalo (the original Sarafina on stage and screen) and not give her a chance to shine? It was lovely to see her again, and she is lit from within, like she swallowed a small star, but it is way past due to feature her in another film.

5. Why the whole subplot about integrating the white and black bodyguard teams? The problem was stated in seconds, and then they kept repeating the trope over and over. It never even really resolved. It was all okay at the end, but not a real resolution.

6. Why no twists or turns after the first 45 minutes or so, when the move to abolish white rugby is turned back by Mandela and he sets the course to win the World Cup? We know they're going to win, or there is no movie, but they seemed to win by becoming the Little Rugby Team That Could.

7. Why not an African music score? Somewhere after the one-hour mark we got a little taste of African music, but up until then, we had the standard generic Hollywood movie cues. (Hint--the first composer listed is named Kyle Eastwood. I don't mind hiring family--it's good to work with people you are familiar with, it saves time and you are often sympatico, but Kyle's imdb page indicates he has not worked for Any Other Director Ever. Might make you think that the rest of the industry doesn't think he can cut it.

8. Why not teach us something about rugby? All games look slightly ridiculous to everyone who doesn't know how they work--there's always some arbitrary and irrational element that looks silly. One could have gotten past that by creating a character who provides a

9. Point of view! There are so many foreign and historical elements to the backstory of this movie than an American journalist or attache or some such character would have been much more useful to the story than the boring security detail subplot. They could have been our eyes, our explainer.

The result is a kind of uncommitted, detached feeling to the film, as if to tip us off at the outset that everything is going to turn out fine, so there's no reason to get worried or upset.

All it needed was Bobby McFerrin singing, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." (And that would have been better music than what was on the track...)