PRISONERS took no prisoners, and paid the price

Back in September 2013, a challenging drama called Prisoners.  It was fairly well-reviewed and had reasonable commercial success, but by the time of the award season it had been swamped by such inferior material as American Hustle.  The only Academy nomination it received (and thoroughly deserved) was for Roger Deakins's cinematography, and although Aaron Guzikowski's sceenplay, written on spec, won a number of several script competitions, including The Black List and The Blue Cat, it got very little attention when prizes were dispensed for actual films.

What happened?

Before going any further, I need to say that you should see this film.  It is too visually and morally complex to adequately describe or summarize in a blog post like this, and it will repay your time.  Put it in your queue or get it from your library or borrow it from a friend, clear out an evening and watch this, preferably not alone.  And if you haven't seen director Denis Villeneuve's previous film, Incendies, go back and see that as well.  My guess is that like me, you will try and see all of Mr. Villeneuve's films in future.

Back to my question.  First, Prisoners is a godawful title.  Yes, it makes sense in a philosophical metaphorical way AFTER you've seen the film and had some time to think about it.  But most people don't want to see a movie about prisoners, unless they're American GIs breaking out of WWII prisoner camps.  Moreover, it is a confusing description in a literal level.  I am not going to exhibit hubris sufficient to propose alternate titles, but I know this one is absolutely terrible and had to have contributed to the general audience indifference.

Second, the film was marketed as a thriller.  In fact, it begins by employing thriller tropes, but by 45 minutes in, it is clear we are in deeper waters than the typical Liam Neeson movie.  (Admittedly there is a thriller-style twist ending, and the only hint I will give you is to pay close attention to the casting.)

Overall, Prisoners feels more like a neo-noir than a thriller, especially in its look, as in this clip.


More significantly, Prisoners shares the noir ethos that no one is in sole possession of the moral high ground, nor is any villain made of pure villainy; stylized as it is, noir recognizes that life is more mixed than melodrama would have it.

There are certainly allegorical or at least metaphorical aspects of the story, in that Jackman's character, a good guy who captures a boy-man suspected of kidnapping his daughter and brutally tortures him, is reminiscent of the United States succumbing to fear and cowardice and engaging in torture to combat terrorism.  But the allegory doesn't hold for long, because the film has more subtle and complex moral fish to fry.  (And that is a terrible use of idiom there.)

Next, as far as awards and nominations go, Prisoners does not end on a triumphal note (though the ending is not as ambiguous as a lot of obtuse people want to think), and the good guys and bad guys are all muddled up morally.  Moreover, the stellar cast is truly used as an ensemble, which makes handing out award nominations much harder.  (The National Board of Review actually nominated the cast AS an ensemble.)  If there is someone to be singled out, it has to be Jake Gyllenhall, with the best work of his I have seen yet.  Here's a little bit.



Prisoners is not a film that calls for a sequel, but I would like to see Gyllenhall play this character again.

If you're still on the fence about the rewards of seeing this film, I urge you in the strongest terms to click this link and look at this superb and detailed analysis, written by cinematographer Matthew Scott, of the look of the film and the depth of its craft.  As an example, here is the still I put at the top of this post, as de-constructed by Mr. Scott.

What, and give up show business?

The noxious barrennes of the San Fernando Valley

Just caught up with two small films set on the margins of show business that have a surprising amount of common ground, given their different milieus.  In both cases, the corrosiveness of dreams of fame give way to the pull of new and deepening friendships, friendships formed to almost deliberately spite the bitch goddess of showbiz.

Starlet (2012) by Sean Baker approaches its story from one direction, that of a seemingly aimless young woman befriending a very old woman who appears to be harboring secrets.  The irony is that the young woman has a much greater secret, namely, that between bouts of getting high and shopping she is a porn "model," an occupation which seems to mean nothing at all to her.  Certainly not as much as her friendship with Sadie and her dog Starlet, the first Chuahuahua I've ever seen that actually seemed more like a companion than vermin.

Sadie has a different secret than her young friend thinks, but it's worth your time to watch this mostly quiet, contemplative (and not sleazy, despite ts frankness) film.  One of its most striking aspects is Radium Cheung's anamorphic cinematography, which captures the burned-up, burned-out grey-green-greasy littered sterility of the San Fernando Valley, its oppressive openness and lack of landmarks or even directionality.  It is the most densely inhabited physical and spiritual desert in the world, and Cheung seems to have captured life near the bottom of this languid and rancid bowl.   

Clarence explains the music biz as if he knew something.

It makes a startling contrast with the virtually artless photography of Craig Zobel's Great World of Sound (2007), a semi-improvised dramedy about song-sharking, the art and science of taking money from people based on their hope of having a music career.  Where Starlet is set in the airless open sky of the Valley, Great World is shoved into cramped motel rooms, chain restaurants and airport lobbies, all lit by seemingly radioactive flourescent light radiating cancer into the souls of those who would feed on the hopes of others.

Martin and Clarence, having failed in other fields, wash up in a conclave of hopefuls summoned by a set of hucksters straight from Glengarry Glen Ross, substituting recording contracts for real estate deals.  Their job is to blow into town, advertise that they are looking for recording talent, let the folks sing a song or two, then get them to put some earnest money down towards a recording session, which will lead to a record release.  Whether the session or the release happen is no concern of theirs.

Martin is a well-meaning milquetoast who would like to be an artist, or at least involved with artists.  Clarence is a man who would to like to eat regularly and will say, well not ANYTHING, but a lot of things in order to make that happen.  After the expected friction, they arrive at a good cop-bad cop routine that gets the hopefuls hopeful enough to plunk down a few hundred or even a few thousand of the ready.

But for all its virtues, it is a film aesthetically at war with itself.  The engine that drives the movie is this Odd Couple relationship.  But the raison d'etre of the film is the prank at its heart.  The filmmakers really did advertise for hopeful musical artists, really did film their auditions and the sales talk.  (The last part was actually sort of brilliant, since it forced the actors to do their best to close the deal.)  After the "scenes" were finished, the situation was explained to the auditioners and the filmmakers got the releases, so there were no surprises when the film was released -- but two problems remain.  The scenes we are seeing are not really not part of the story -- they are honest-to-goodness pranks.  And secondly, the auditioners were rarely at a laughable level of awfulness.  Most of them are very good amateurs, not ready for a professional arena but not suitable for ridicule.  I suppose the message here is how very nice and decent people with some talent, if not blinding talent will let their ambition and naivete and belief in themselves will let them be tricked by cruel and ruthless hucksters.  Including the hucksters who made the movie.

Here's a roughly typical example of the level of talent that appears in the finished film:

What do you do with this? You're not overwhelmed, yet you can't dismiss it, either.  And that painful ambiguous knife-edge, resting on the line between competence and genuine art is a self-inflicted wound at the heart of Great World of Sound.

See it anyway, because the experiment was worth trying and nearly everyone in the film provides good company on the journey.

Perhaps it all comes down to Walton Goggins

Boyd Crowder changes hiI'

I'm not the first person to notice that Walton Goggins is the most palpable link between the most fêted films of the current Oscar season, Lincoln (2012) and Django Unchained.  But maybe Mr. Goggins's progress from unrepentant scoundrel Billy Crash, through the ambiguously wicked Boyd Crowder in Justified through the conflicted Clay Hutchins is itself a microcosm of good and evil in the morally compromised landscape of American history.  (And, incidentally, am I unjustified in suspecting that an actor named Walton Goggins who has a certain unpredictable quality will never play a character named Bob Johnson or Tom Smith?)

As portrayed in Tony Kushner's screenplay, Hutchins is swayed to vote in favor of the 13th Amendment by a promise of employment as a postmaster, given that his re-election prospects were virtually nil.  (A Democrat in post-Civil War Ohio was virtually a non-person.)  There has been a lot of harrumphing written about the horse-trading involved in getting slavery outlawed, as if Doris Goodwin or Tony Kushner had invented corruption in the 19th century, when everyone was obviously more pure and good than they are now.  (Which is why they had slavery and child labor and oppression of women and minorities and no labor or product safety regulation.  'Cause folks used to be good and we didn't need all them pesky laws.)  Much of the pleasure of the film is observing the amount and manner of deals that must be made in order to get mediocre people to do great things, a fact confined neither to history nor to the present moment. It is all very well for great people to lead us, but they are going to have to appeal to the desires of the mediocre.

And Clay Hutchins, at least as portrayed here, is no better than mediocre.  So Mr. Goggins, over the past year of his work, moved from the straightforward sadism (probably rooted in self-hatred) of slavemaster Billy Crash, through the amoral Boyd Crowder, who cares nothing for others, but is uninterested in cruelty for its own sake, to the wavering Clay Hutchins, who is willing to do the right thing if there's something in it for himself as well.  Perhaps this is the most accurate representation of the ways in which a democracy moves toward the moral light, through the historical odyssey of Walton Goggins.

Before I go, a couple of random observations about both theatrical features. 

One of the most admirable aspects of Spielberg's Lincoln is how little it looks like a Spielberg film.  I see him as the master of camera movement and manipulation, and it is amazing how quiet and calm the camera is in Lincoln -- even more than it was in Schindler's List.   Evidently, Spielberg discerned that a text this dense was going to require some stillness so that the audience would absorb the words and not be distracted by shifting images.  It's not static by any means, and the shenanigans of Mr. Bilbo are especially entertaining.  (Despite the uniqueness of that patronimic, I can find no connection between William Bilbo and Theodore Bilbo, the odious white supremacist Senator of the 20th century.)

Does anybody else think this is the darkest Spielberg movie yet?  Not in mood or philosophical outlook, but literally low in footcandles?  Good thing we don't have drive-ins any more.  The film does make it clear what a shabby and ramshackle place the Executive Mansion was and how dark most places were after sunset.  Spielberg has called on cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to be quite a chameleon over the course of their work together, and in this film he impersonates Gordon Willis, the Prince of Darkness.

And one bit of trivia about Django.  This is a measure of exactly how big a movie geek Quentin Tarantino is.  The lettering of the opening titles, is not just old-timey-Western sort of lettering.  It references a specific period of late 50s-early 60s B Westerns released by Columbia.  The specific shade of red, the splintered-log style letters, all shout "late Randolph Scott (mostly, but not always directed by Budd Boetticher)!"  This is the definition of Too Hip (or Too Lame, depending on how you want to see it) For The Room.  It's mostly of interest because the critics have only referenced spaghetti Westerns, but of course Django is no dish of spaghetti.  For one thing, it's way, way too talky for a non-English-language Western (not to mention that the lips are synchronized with the sound, which is not true in Italian and German Westerns).  And the talk is interesting and tasty and probably dominates the visuals, which is odd for a Western.  Which takes us right back to Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher and The Tall T, a Western which, for about two-thirds of its running time takes place in a small circle around a campfire.

So what will it take to get Mr. Tarantino to write for the stage?

Surprises from the pre-classical era

I've only just gotten around to The Phantom Carriage (1921) which has been rediscovered and hailed as an early landmark of Swedish and of silent cinema.  As for the content of Victor Sjöström's remarkable and haunting film, I don't have anything to say beyond the reams that have been written, either about the contemplation of death-in-life, nor about the impeccable in-camera double-exposure effects that seem incomprehensibly impossible before the advent of the optical printer.

But it is always a pleasure to see films made before styles and studio procedures were set into the hard expectations of the market and of genre itself, which is one of the principal rewards of early silent cinema itself.  The filmmakers were still working out the rules, syntactical, stylistic and commercial.  And one of the issues that most concerns the producers and exhibitors is making sure that the actors are clearly visible at all times, so that the audience knows that they're seeing the people they paid to see.  This is no concern of the filmmaker, who is driven primarily by narrative (which is not the same thing as plot or story).

So look at this still, which (unlike many production stills) is an accurate reflection of this scene in the film.  The low and partially obscured light source perfectly sets the hushed, anxious yet warm tone of the scene.  Is there any question that this is a deathbed, albeit not a frightening one?  This is the deathbed of a person who is lived well and wishes to die well.  The light is neither evenly balanced, as Classical Hollywood would demand, nor is it dramatically expressionistic, as in Citizen Kane and its film noir offspring. The effect is oblique, but not in overstated way. The light throughout Phantom Carriage is rarely realistic, yet it often seems that it is, because--although it is NOT expressionistic--it is highly expressive of the inner states of the characters.  A photographer like Julius Jaenzon becomes a true co-author in a work like this, especially in silent film, in which dialogue is not a significant factor.

Students and even devoted film lovers are always resisting silent film, perhaps sensing that it requires closer attention and is therefore, harder work.  But without a stream of chatter, sound effects and music closely synchronized to the image, the viewer is forced to shut up and look.  And when it comes to film, the pictures, there's where the goodies are.

Way out there in the blue

Looks like Scar had a white daddy, or at least grandpaw...

This blog has been quiet for a while, partly because I've been preoccupied with launching a new film-oriented course, that is, Social Justice and the Media.  This week, we've just finished looking at The Searchers (1956) and I assigned my students to write a reflection on how a visual device or idea is used to support or explicate a theme in the film.  These sorts of ideas are new to my students, so I created a model, and although The Searchers is one of the most written-about films ever mind, I thought I'd share my hair-brained little ideas with you, my friends here.

The overriding theme of The Searchers is a racism which accepts without discussion that European whites and Native North Americans cannot co-exist on the same vast continent, let alone the same home and hearth. (This belief proceeds from both sides.)  The separation among them must be absolute, and any suggestion of crossing the line between those groups brings expressions of anger, contempt and disgrace.

But five characters are bound together visually by their distinctly blue eyes, which “pop” in the bright color process of the mid-1950s – the eyes of Ethan, the angry hater; of Martin Pawley, the “half-breed”; of Laurie, Martin’s probable bride, who turns out to be an unthinking racist and therefore more worthy of contempt than Ethan’s knowledgeable fear and loathing; of Debbie, Ethan’s niece, who might have been and might actually be Ethan’s daughter and the eyes of Scar, killer of Debbie’s family and possibly her husband. The suggestion is that Scar himself may have been the result of miscegenation, bringing further contempt from Ethan’s burning eyes. Their can be no question that director John Ford chose to use a non-Native actor not just because he didn't know any Native actors who were right for the part, but because he wanted those blue eyes and almost Aryan appearance. And in the final analysis, these characters form a strange family-- uncle/father – son – bride – husband, each connected to all, directly or indirectly.

Moreover, the blue of those characters' eyes are mirrored by the bright blue Western sky under which so much of the action takes place; even though the events are dark and the seasons are varied, the blue sky remains a near-constant from first shot to last. (Even the winter scenes and night scenes are played in shades of blue.) Thus, blue becomes the color that unites and embraces the universe of The Searchers, and while Ethan begins the film in a red shirt of anger, at the end,wearing a deep blue tunic, he lifts up his niece/daughter, clad in a long skirt of blue (or perhaps that is the blue blanket Marty wrapped her in); the blue of loving eyes, of the long horizon into the future, of the harmony of creation itself, sky and sea, embracing all living things.  

A bit grandiose, perhaps, but the more you watch The Searchers, the more you see the balances and resonances in it.  Time with this film is never wasted.

Clowns in my coffee, clowns in my coffee

Kevin explains it's all part of a cosmic pattern and it is.

Jeff, Who Lives At Home (2012) is part of the subcategory of Shaggy Dog Stories in which everything takes place on one magical day after which Nothing Is The Same.  Such conceits carry a high component of whimsy (and as Groucho said when told he was full of whimsy, "Can you tell from over there?") but that is somewhat familiar country for the Duplass brothers, as is stories about battling brothers in different places in their lives and the struggle for meaning and purpose.

But Jeff pulls off a neat trick which I can only analogize to Hitchcock's feat of switching audience sympathy from Norma Crane to Norman Bates in Psycho.  As the film starts, one gets the impression of a nascent stoner comedy, with Jason Segal, as Jeff,  trotting out his pathetic man-child yet again.  But he is not so pathetic as he is poetic.  He is part of the half of the human race which thinks everything makes sense cosmically and in the long run and that everything eventually connects.  I just have to point out that this is a natural bias for an author, who has the power to make his or her universe do just that thing, connect, make sense and explain itself.  I would advise authors subject to that trap to spend some time doing group improvisation, let go of the need for control and see what it does for their writing.

In the book of interviews Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock discusses his troubles with the part of the audience he calls the "plausibles."  He dismisses criticism about coincidence, asserting that life is full of coincidences, but rejects convenience, by which the creator makes things too easy on himself and gets the snake to swallow its own tail.  I can't accuse the Duplass Brothers of making things easy for Jeff, but they do permit some self-satisfaction on the basis of a single selfless and, indeed, heroic act which does not do a thing to address the serious problems in Jeff's life, and which in fact, he seems to use to justify his continued aimless existence.  Nonetheless, warm fuzzies all around.

And speaking of coincidence, a man was fished out of his car the very day in the very city I saw this film.  As that provided no benefit to me, I guess Hitchcock was right.  Coincidental, but not convenient.

It is interesting to see the way artists like Les Freres Duplass can enter the mainstream partly because the type of actors they need to execute their ideas, actors like Jason Segal, Jonah Hill, Ed Helms and John C. Reilly are available and bankable (at least for Duplass-level budgets).  A nice case of artistic temperament meeting the zeitgeist.

Speaking of the zeitgeist, can we put to bed, the term "mumblecore."  All it means is a low-budget film which is dialogue based.  That defines at least 80% of low-budget films, because the cheapest thing in the world to shoot (and safest) is people talking to each other.  Untrained actors often don't have the most distinct diction, just like actual humans.  And maybe if film writers stop using the term mumblecore, the Duplasses will no longer feel obligated to fool around with the zoom on the camera constantly.  In at least one case in the film, the zoom felt like a "meta" comment on what was happening, like Jimmy Finlayson swinging his head around in a big vaudeville doubletake in a Laurel and Hardy movie.  This zooming doesn't make the film feel natural, it feels just the opposite, constantly saying to the viewer, "Don't get involved, don't get attached.  This is just a movie, it's all fake."

I direct plays with novice actors and I have to teach them that one of the most unnatural-feeling postures on stage, standing straight with your arms at your side looks the most natural on stage, far better than folding one's arms or clasping hands.  Try it.  Try standing with your arms hanging straight down and doing nothing.  Feels weird, right?  Doesn't look weird.  So in film, it seems artificial to take a camera, pick an angle and plonk the camera down on a tripod and leave it alone.  Almost theatrical, setting a frame around the actors and events.  But on screen, it looks natural, just as cutting between opposite angles looks natural.  Perhaps we've grown accustomed to these conventions, or they are inherently natural, but they pass by our eyes without objection or comment.  Shooting hand-held, whipping the camera around to catch the action and fiddling with the zoom and focus ARE natural, but LOOk unnatural.  So, Duplasses, your next movie, however low the budget, get a tripod.  People will start treating you like grown-ups.

What is left unsaid

It is fascinating to see film writers go after what they consider implausible in the couples-counseling-comedy Hope Springs (2012), a procedure they would never consider undertaking for, say, the latest installment of the Batman franchise.  That is because they think that movies obey different rules according to genre, but the fact is that all narrative adheres to the rules of narrative, and genre merely denotes the existence of conventions, merely a framework of expectations between audience and filmmakers, not a genuine difference in the rules of storytelling.  So it is not necessary to debate the real-world plausibility of this kind of film, but merely examine its consistency according to the rules it sets up for itself.  But because Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones do not dress up in black rubber suits and ride in a jet-powered automobile, the critics seem to expect Hope Springs to be some sort of documentary, rather than an entertainment.  

What is remarkable about a film driven by its script and acting is what it accomplishes by non-verbal means, and by that I don't mean merely the panoply of grunts and shrugs that make up Tommy Lee Jones's performance.  Most especially there is the mise en scene, from the careful calibration of familiar middle-class locales--the home with too-large simulated antique furniture, the spare EconoLodge room, the fussy but delightful New Englande Inne, the spruced-up shabbiness of a New England town undergoing a mini-boom.  There is the extremely careful costume design by theater great Ann Roth, particularly for Meryl Streep's Kay, who nervously vacillates between revealing herself as a woman and trying to cover herself and disappear into the woodwork.  (How interesting that Roth emphasizes Streep's weak point as a film actor--her too-small eyes, by giving her heavy-rimmed glasses to hide behind, so as to better bring off the reveal when those glasses come off and we get a gander at Meryl's baby blues.  And additional kudos to Ms. Streep's hair stylist, who offers similar character hints.)  And I would guess that Tommy Lee Jones's wardrobe was bought entirely at Sears and/or Kohl's, while Steve Carell has been outfitted at L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer, as would be appropriate for a casual professional in Northern New England.

But the greater challenge is the sequence of scenes in Carell's office which are the principal expositional device.  Although there must be at least six or seven of those scenes in the same locale, never once is it lit in the same way, altering not only the pattern of light and shadow but the color temperature, which lends variety to the costumes and even the actors' skin tones.  It would be interesting and instructive to lay screen grabs of all of the office scenes next to each other to see what cinematographer Florian Ballhaus, with the collaboration of production designer Stuart Wurtzel, has done to reinforce and illuminate the narrative thrust of each of those very different scenes.  They range from a warm and sunny red-to-yellow range after the couple has had a rapprochement to a virtual film noir Venetian blind-shadowed look when they are closest to crisis.  And I wonder how much of the audience even noticed.

The most frequent criticism of the film is that its resolution seems unmotivated or unexplained.  I think what people are feeling but not saying is that the resolution is not verbal, not logical and rationalized.  It is the product of non-verbal, nay pre-verbal passion, the very basis of all such relationships.  Such things are not easy to dramatize, and perhaps this one was not well prepared, but it doesn't change the fact that for this viewer, who has lived and been married about the same time as these characters, the ending made perfect sense to me.  Essentially, Jones's character says to himself, "the hell with what I've been fronting all these years, it's better to just be happy.  Never complain, never explain."

The final vows on the beach are utterly charming--I urge you to stay through the whole film.  But I can't think of a beach in Maine that looks anything like the one in film, not surprising since it was shot in Connecticut.  And after all, what would "Hope Springs" be doing in Coast Maine?  Natural springs virtually never occur that near the shoreline of the ocean.  This is a landscape of the heart.

Without a song

You can see this is a model of happiness and tolerance

Pariah (2012) could be considered a feel-good movie for middle-aged middle-class white guys like me, because it makes clear that we are not responsible for all the bigotry and intolerance in the world.  Hooray for us!

Seriously, writer-director Dee Rees has done a brave thing, dramatizing intolerence within a group that has historically borne discrimination.  I am reminded of the flack Spike Lee got for revealing skin color discrimination among blacks in School Daze. 
I don't have a lot of original observations to make about this film -- it is remarkable how much was accomplished with color-coding in the cinematography (by Bradford Young) while appearing to be a realistic, documentary-style film.  By color-coding I mean that different environments were given different color temperatures, but in a much more subtle way than in, say, Steven Soderbergh's Traffic.  Her

What surprises me as I scan the credits at imdb is that there does seem to have been a music department.  I honestly cannot recall music in the film and that was a problem for me.  The film very honorably steers clear of melodrama and theatrics.  The big confrontation scene with the mother became a revelation of character, not a celebration of conflict.  So the director was not going to call for a big dramatic score that tells the audeince how to feel from moment to moment. 

But I really can't remember any music, other than the diagetic music in the nightclubs and parties.  And this is a film that does not let the viewer in on what the characters are thinking and feeling.  It keeps its distance and relies on the audience's observation of behavior to draw its conclusions.  The result for me was that the film felt closed off and chilly.  Dees was so scrupulous about not overstating her case, that she barely bothered to make any case.  I could not help but feel that a music cue or two would have helped make an emotional connection between the protagonist, Alike, and the audience.

Because dialogue, counter-intuitive as it is, is historically a distancing element in film storytelling.  In the silent era, the character and audience made a direct, pre-verbal connection which made it easier to ignore distances in time and setting and culture.  Silent film inherently brings out the universality between characters and audience and music helps bind that relationship, if it is properly done.  Silent film at its best represents the interiority of the characters as a novelist does, in contrast with the spoken words of the playwright.

To dispense with that interiority is to keep the audience at an arms length.  Perhaps that was Ms. Dees's intention.  Perhaps she did not want sentiment and pity.  But it was also hard to feel identification.  So I felt for Alike's dilemma, but I had no doubt she and her family would work it out and eventually it would all be OK and where should we go for a snack, I could really kill for some ice cream...

Chill of death

Is this how a brother looks at a sister?

If nothing else, Shame (2011) all by itself justifies digital filmmaking.  I daresay the film would be impossible by any other means, with Sean Bobbit's camera gliding smoothly as it does over the surfaces of the Manhattan night, resting for long, long takes which measure the vast distances between people, even people who have known each other well.  A cut, even to come closer to the faces would disturb the frost as it grows up between the isolated figures on the screen.  The camera is rock-solid steady.  I would bet there was not a handheld shot in the film -- if there was, it didn't call attention to itself.

This has to rank as one of the chilliest films ever made about sex, bathed in a bottle-green palette, and frequently accompanied by Glenn Gould's recording of The Goldberg Variations. 

Moreover, the Brits who made this film, including director Steve McQueen and actors Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan are using New York not as an environment, as a native filmmaker does, but as a location; a location to be explored like the caves of Lascaux, both quaint and dangerous.  It's OK that Fassbender and Mulligan not completely convincing Americans -- it's like those movies where you can tell they're speaking German because they have a German accent.

Perhaps most interesting is how the film keeps moving without an appranet narrative engine.  Nobody has anything they need to accomplish in a set period of time.  Nobody is looking to change, although Mulligan's character would probably like to get her own apartment and a steady gig.  Fassbender does not bottom out.  He does not go into treatment, or fail in treatment.

I would argue that, the title notwithstanding, there is no evidence that the character does feel shame.  A little self-hatred, a sense that what he's doing isn't working, a fear of getting caught.  But no sense that Fassbender can or wants to do anything about his addiction.  Not even after getting a beating.

It's really not a movie.  It's a snapshot.  But just as the young woman at the bar, who has come with her boyfriend, stares rapt at Fassbender's lewd proposition like a mouse staring at a snake, we can't take our eyes off the thing the protagonist has become, a thing which sheds the characteristics of a human being as the film progresses until it (he) has no reason to live other than the next pointless encounter, like a shark endlessly swimming in search of prey.  And a shark's life doesn't have to have meaning.

They really could have titled this movie Dead Man F******.

Steven Spielberg, film historian

Echoing "Night of the Hunter"?

Written reactions to Steven Spielberg's film version of War Horse (2011) is virtually a litmus test of each writer's film history knowledge.  Youngsters who think Titanic is a classic old-timey movie dismiss the film as sentimental slop, riddled with cliche and overstatement.  A few recognized some quotes from Gone With The Wind, usually misattributing the palette and compositions of the film to Victor Fleming, the named director.  But Fleming essentially directed the actors.  The look of the film was designed from top to bottom by William Cameron Menzies with the collaboration of cinematographers Ernst Haller and Fleming's favorite, Lee Garmes.  These would be the source of the oversaturated colors behind near-silhouetted figures as in, for instance the final shot of War Horse.

But Gone With The Wind is just the beginning.  War Horse draws from the work of David Lean (who Spielberg evoked brilliantly in Empire of the Sun) but also other epic filmmakers of the 1950s George Stevens and Fred Zinnemann.  But it also goes straight back to Lewis Milestone (specifically All Quiet On The Western Front), and silent filmmakers F.W. Murnau, Frank Borzage and especially King Vidor, director of The Big Parade and The Crowd as well as the 1956 War and Peace.  Spielberg does not do DVD commentaries (a sensible position), but I would love a commentary by really knowledgeable film scholar who could annotate the sources, whether overt or sub rosa.

Which is not to say that the film is pasted together from film references like a Brian DePalma movie.  Spielberg has thoroughly absorbed this vocabulary, like an author deliberately writing in an archaic style.  With all the fuss about last year's The Artist, I would love to see Spielberg make a substantially silent film--I think he is the director most qualified in the world to express himself in that challenging and classical form.  The exquisite no-man's-land sequence, designed by Rick Carter, would not be out of place in an epic of the mid-1920s, and the dialogue (with a German fluent in English) might have played even better on title cards than being heard.

Which is not to say that Mr. Spielberg doesn't know how to use a soundtrack.  For one thing, John Williams has written his best score in many years, although, he, like Spielberg, is creating in a borrowed idiom.  In this case it is the work of early 20th century British composers such as Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Bax, Walton, Britten and Grainger.  Again, there is no actual plagiarism, but the full immersion in a particular language.

Non-musical sound plays a part in one of the three-shots in this film that I would nominate for all-time greats in film history.  That is the moment when two young German deserters have been discovered and are being shot on the spot at late dusk or early evening.  The camera suddenly jumps from the base of the windmill in which the boys have been ensconced to high in the air, just the other side of the windmill's sails.  The boys are lined up with their backs to us.  The officer calls "Fire" and at that very instant a windmill sail obscures our view.  We hear the gunshot and the sail has passed revealing the bodies strewn on the ground.

Earlier in the movie there is a shot that would have made Eisenstein weep in recognition of a brother filmmaker.  The British are making an insane, under-manned, under-weaponed charge on a German encampment.  (The sequence begins with a brilliant shot of the officers mounting amid tall grass that obscures  the horses.)  At first, the Brits seem to be triumphant until they reach the end of the open field and the edge of the adjacent wood.  There the Germans have hidden their automatic guns, with which they proceed to demolish the British cavalry.  But we never see the falls.  We see the moment of recognition on the cavalry officers' faces that they have made a devastating miscalculation.  Then we see riderless horses leaping over and past the German guns.  Back to the mounted charge.  Back to the empty horses.  The audience puts those two shots together with that beautiful mathematics of film editing:  (Shot of mounted officers charging PLUS shot of riderless horses leaping past machine guns EQUALS officers falling dead from their horses.)

My next is a throwaway, but it simply demonstrates that Spielberg breathes the syntax of film.  It is an establishing shot of a person entering the stable in which the title character, Joey has been hidden.  We see the person first as a large, dark, convex reflection.  Then we realize it is a reflection in Joey's eye.  It is not only an inventive way to open a sequence, but it reminds us that the film is really about Joey and that we are always viewing the world through Joey's eyes.  All of this work, I have to presume, is executed with the superb collaboration of Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's cinematographer since Schindler's List.

We knew that Spielberg is great with young actors and he has done his usual sterling work with Jeremy Irvine as Joey's faithful friend Albert and most especially with Celine Buckman as Emilie, the beautiful and tragic young protector of Joey.  But one must add to this the evocative "acting" of the horses playing Joey and Topthorn.  Be it the work of handlers and experts, Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn have put the shots together so as to simulate acting that is more convincing than many a so-called human actor.

The climactic reunion between Albert and Joey is most frequently acted as ridiculous, sentimental, implausible.  Again, this demonstrates an ignorance of this classical mode of storytelling.  It is not meant to be journalism, nor is it meant to be startling or surprising.  The mechanics of the scene were carefully put in place in the first act (my wife and I remarked to each other that the particular device would doubtless return in Act III).  The genre is closer to fable or legend than to film realism.  That is not an accident -- it is a choice.

Not only is War Horse one of the best World War I films I have ever seen, making it clear what a price nearly every person in Europe paid for that bit of insanity: I would list it as one of Spielberg's five best films, with Empire of the Sun, Jaws, Munich and Duel.  Yes, it's a perverse list, but hey, this is my blog.  Make your own list on your own blog.

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.

Squinting with your eyes open

Obviously, everything's going to be completely all right.

I don't have many observations to record about the chilly, dark spy picture Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011).  It seems to be less of a film, and more of a simulation of the experience of being a spy.  Nothing is stated outright, nothing is explained, no one is identified, no one reveals their thinking.  If anyone has feelings, you won't hear about it.

Even better, screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have dispensed with those two popular crutches of the modern spy film.  First, the voice-over of the protagonist, explaining the arcane non-verbal transactions going on.  You know the thing, "Sturgess gave me a glance that could only mean one thing" blah, blah, blah.  Second, the big explanation at the end, "You see, Collins, I knew as soon as I saw Verdoux wearing the ring, that Operation Fuzzball was going to be scrubbed, because..."  Clearly, the writers and director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) decided to have respect for the audience and challenge them to lean forward and come to the film, instead of being overwhelmed by it, as in a Bond or Bourne film.

The story is often referred to as "complex", but it's not so much complex as it is sub-contextual. Here is a very visual film -- the soundtrack by itself would tell you almost nothing-- the very opposite of a standard spy film, which is all explaining and a couple of gunshots at the end.  But the story is relatively straightforward if you understand two things.  In LeCarre spy stories, there is no there there.  It's never about a secret that has to be stolen or protected.  It's about the process of security -- who works for whom, who is who really who they say, who can be trusted and who will betray.  What they are protecting is immaterial and never discussed.  Questions of loyalty are about the security force that claims your allegiance -- MI6, CIA, KGB, not the countries who have created and harbor these forces. And loyalty to the very idea of security and the discipline security requires.  And the time sequence shifts, but that is clearly laid out in the form of Smiley dictating a memorandum, so confusion as to time only lasts seconds at most--if you are paying attention.

The characters communicate in literal and dramatic code.  Information is conveyed by a look, a shrug, a cock of the head, or of the eyebrow.  But the film is not slow.  Information arrives rapidly and in profusion, once you understand how to interpret it.  It is quiet, but densely packed.

My favorite shot--a recurring sequence of a packet of papers rising, by itself, in a sort of document-dumbwaiter, acknowledging that information is the real protagonist, that data is more important than people in this universe, deserving of its very own private elevator.

The film has a wonderful visual uniformity, oddly reminiscent of Welles's The Trial.  It was interesting to learn that that uniformity was achieved in a similar way as it was in Welles's film.  Nearly all of The Trial was shot in a single abandoned railway station in Paris.  Nearly all of Tinker Tailor was shot in an abandoned military base in England.  This provided a number of structures with a wide variety of purposes and spaces, but a single gloomy aesthetic that supports the tone of the film perfectly.

That's really all I can say.  The film has been too brilliantly dissected and explicated by David Bordwell, and if you are a serious student of film, you have to read "Tinker Tailor:  A Guide for the Perplexed."

My own parting advice-- don't watch this for relaxation, but for stimulation.  Put away the wine and brew some coffee.  The film is worth a little lost sleep.

As time goes by

Facial hair can indicate clinical depression

Forget five years -- 124 minutes!  There's a reason that romantic comedies, which The Five-Year Engagement (2012) is not, uniformly last 90 to 100 minutes.  The ground has been covered, no matter what it is, and once the audience has sussed out your new twist or gimmick, it's your obligation to get off the stage as quickly and entertainingly possible.

But, as previously asserted, TFYE is not a romantic comedy.  At times it is only a comedy the way Uncle Vanya is a comedy, which is one reason I regret it was directed by the crass Nicholas Stoller, whose last credit, Get Him To The Greek , was dedicated to the proposition that there is nothing funnier than Jonah Hill's butt crack.  Moreover, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Segal seemed to be so busy acting and directing that they did not notice the fairly easy cut they could have made which would have lopped off 20-25 minutes to this film and substantially improved it.

(The cut I mean is to go from Jason Segal's character learning that his fiancee has kissed her boss straight to Segal returning to San Francisco.  That would have omitted the disgusting attempted adultery-with-condiments scene and the disgusting frostbitten toe.  The Apatow crowd seems to be stuck in the pubescent phase of confusing bodily fluids and food plus a fascination with bodily mutilation.)

On the other hand, Segal and Stoller have to be applauded for trying to make something different and better, even if they didn't succeed.  The idea is that relationships are hard and don't match ideals, that we fail and fall short and we still love each other.  Not new, but needs to be repeated for each generation.

Because TFYE is really, at heart, an example of what art historian Stanley Cavell termed the "comedy of remarriage" of which Noel Coward's Private Lives is the modern progenitor. (Cavell finds its roots in Shakespearean comedy.)  In TFYE, the break-up and reunion happen in the context of an engagement, rather than requiring divorce and remarriage, but that is merely a function of changing social customs and movie censorship.  The principal is the same.  Unblemished happiness cannot survive, will not survive.  The characters must be tempered, must be chastened, punished perhaps (maybe that's why the frostbite) so that they may learn.  It might even be considered a comedy of lessons.

What makes TFYE disconcerting is that whereas Coward masks his character's pain in badinage with only the briefest of lapses revealing the truth, the characters in Segal & Stoller's script talk the way real couples having real trouble really talk.  Which is fine, except for the sort of style problems raised when such material is in juxtaposition with the Apatow brand of not just fall-on-your-prat humor, but fall-on-your-prat-in-poo-three-times-over humor.

That said, I laughed not infrequently and there is one Hall of Fame scene between Emily Blunt and Alison Brie.  They are arguing about the long engagement and marriage in front of a young child, and have therefore adopted (rather poor) imitations of Elmo and Cookie Monster, respectively to conduct the argument, which concludes, "'C' is for condom!"

One other odd element -- the cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe, who not only has never shot a comedy before, but is responsible for some very dark horror films and thrillers (The Road, The Others, some of the Twilight films).  TFYE looked very dark, with many rollicking comedy scenes in half-shadow and the comic violence invoked real terror and pain.  Now the fact is, I saw the film in my neighborhood theater, which is a little old and shabby, and it just may have been that the projector bulb was dim and that the film is very bright and cuddly and cheerful.  But honestly, when a comedy film's characters get depressed, should you be just as depressed as well?  I sure was.

Fresh meat

First feature films, especially independent films,  have such distinct qualities in comparison with other films that they might almost comprise their own genre.  

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) feels accomplished beyond its writer-director's resume because of his adherence to a couple of simple principles.  First, Dance With The Fella What Brung Ya.  For genre directors, that means you must obey the rules of your stated genre.  You can include other elements, you can stretch the borders, but sooner or later you must satisfy audience expectation.  For a more nuanced drama like M4, that means ruthlessly adhering to the spine of the film, not being distracted by other interesting related ideas.  It requires confidence that you will make another film, that you do not have to cram every possible idea and every directorial skill into this, your one testimonial to the world.  Because if you do make only one film, like Charles Laughton with Night of the Hunter or Leonard Kastle with The Honeymoon Killers, your discipline and fidelity to the central idea of your film will ensure that you are remembered as a great filmmaker, even with only one directorial credit in your obituary.  

Thus M4 sticks to its one powerful idea using one powerful structural device.  A young woman, stunningly played by Elizabeth Olsen, has escaped from a cult and found refuge with her somewhat distant sister.  In the cult, as in most cults, the leaders have erased any awareness of time.  There are no clocks or calendars around, no time-based goals, no sense of an end of something approaching, no promise of something new to start.  So director Sean Durkin has engineered a film which seamlessly blends past and present in the mind of Martha, so that the implied threat of the cult never really fades away, no matter how long Martha spends in her new haven.  Rarely has a film subsisted so completely on a diet of suspense without offering any sort of clear timeline; the result borders on a horror film, so terrifying is what Martha has escaped.

The other principle that Durkin has observed, at least from the point of view of a person who can only view the finished film and not the process of creating it, is forging a strong alliance with a talented and dedicated director of photography.  For someone who has not been involved in filmmaking, it is impossible to understand how key the selection of a DP is, and how important it is for director and DP to develop an intuitive collaboration.  On the most practical level, the DP is the single greatest determinant as to whether you will finish your film, finish on schedule and have coherent footage you can cut together.  But past those rudimentary considerations, the DP determines whether the movie will look like the movie you have in your head or, if you're lucky, better than that movie.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is the most striking looking independent film this year.  It may be that great noir texture is only possible on 35mm, with bold asymmetrical framing and strong key lighting that would make Edward Hopper weep in recognition.  Durkin and DP Jody Lee Lipes stage a number of scenes in a single take with a locked-off camera, an approach seen mostly in Jarmusch films or from the first year of talkies.  The result is not stasis, but a feeling of inherent tension fixed within the boundaries of the frame.  Instead of fearing some surprise from outside the camera's view, the threat seems to hover inside it, from the unexpected action of a character.

The frame above is a nice example of Lipes's effects.  It looks underexposed, but only in the sense that Gordon Willis movies are underexposed.  Faces move in and out of the light, mostly in shadow and intentions and feelings must be sussed out by the audience from subtextual hints.

It's not a masterwork, but it is assured, consistent and reliable with a dead perfect ending,  and it announces Durkin, Lipes and Olsen as artists to seek out in future.  And M4 also benefits from the reliably creepy John Hawkes, who is also seen in Higher Ground (2011), the directing debut of actress Vera Farmiga, based on a real-life memoir.  Like Martha Marcy, it centers around a woman trying to shed a belief system.  It also takes place in an underexamined rural America, not in the heartland, but in upstate New York. 

Is it possible Farmiga remembered these rural New York locations from Down to the Bone, not to mention that film's DP Michael McDonough, who also shot Winter's Bone?  This time out McDonough is asked to work with a sunnier palette, mostly insuring that all the actors' performances are seen clearly.  This is an actors' film, especially in comparison with Martha Marcy and vacillates in style and tempo, which we can presume is intended to mirror the spiritual vacillation of the central character played by Farmiga.  I will leave aside the spiritual struggle that drives the narrative; the film itself is set in a concrete world of making ends meet, of trying to keep marriages and best friends alive.  That materiality keeps the film from spiraling into a pointless debate about faith, which ultimately defies visualization and dramatization.

Fireflies in the Garden (2008) relies on that staple of independent film, the family psychodrama, complete with controlling father, enabling mother and siblings differing on how to handle them.  There are some minor variations, but nothing to explain how writer-director attracted Willem Dafoe, Ryan Reynolds, Hayden Panatierre, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Watson and above all, the non-indie Julia Roberts to this fairly routine run-through of the land between Cheever and Salinger.  Once again, Kingston, New York is on display, leading one to wonder if there hasn't been some kind of big tax dodge going on in Ulster County over the past few years.  I don't feel as if I can make definitive observations about this film, as the internet reports that 30 minutes and a music score have been cut from the film between 2008 and 2011, the year of the US release on DVD, which is how I saw the film.  The worst thing I can say about it is that it has a fatal sense of restraint and good taste.  Usually, I like those things, but dammit, I could have used some full-on weirdness and grossness to shake this film out of its well-made torpor.  

What finally sinks it is that it is a film about writers, and much of it is based on an argument about writing.  College professor Dafoe looks down on son Ryan Reynolds who writes popular romance novels.  The son's disgrace as a boy revolves around the attempted appropriation of the title poem by Robert Frost.  There is a barely-articulated argument about what is considered good writing.  And when has that ever been a good subject for a film.  At least if they were painters, we'd see their paintings.  Writers are pretty much non-starters as film characters.

And Roberts appears so briefly and for such over-dramatic reasons that it smacks of stunt casting so that her name and face could be put on the video package.  

All first films are calling cards, but some demonstrate real promise as filmmakers, and some demonstrate a future as hucksters and hype artists.  But that's better than no talent at all.

Pictures that move the viewer

About 20 years ago, the Japanese network NHK co-produced a great documentary about the history of cinematography called Visions of Light, primarily to demonstrate the quality of the high-definition television system NHK was developing. (Ironically, this film is not available in a high-def format, at least not in the US.) That film did more to change me from a movie fan to an analytical viewer of film than any book or college course. It was a powerful wake-up as to how important the actual images that make up a film are to the impact of the film and the significance of the cinematographer in the history of not just film style, but narrative itself.

Another film that performs a similar function IS available in high definition (which is the way I saw it on Netflix) is Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (2010). As the photographer of Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and African Queen, Cardiff is probably the first consistently great photographer in Technicolo(u)r. US studio technicians such as Leon Shamroy and Harold Rosson were very good, but they were primarily decorative. Cardiff's work is deeply expressive, and he became an indispensable collaborator with his directors (most famously Michael Powell).

I don't have a good clip to post for Cameraman with its marvelous mix of clips and interviews and especially Cardiff's incredible work as a painter. But here is an excerpt from Black Narcissus that demonstrates why his work with color as a storyteller has never been equaled to this day:



And if you want to see all of Black Narcissus or Camerman, they're both on Netflix streaming, so you could go there right now (as well as The Red Shoes and Cardiff's best film as a director, Sons and Lovers).

If they don't open your eyes as to what color CAN mean to film storytelling when it's not taken for granted, then you probably knew already.

The Reticent Camera

One of the pleasures to be found in Sofia Coppola's return to form, Somewhere (2010), might be called the resonances of the reticent camera. In bold contrast to the film-school boys, whose cameras track and swoop and fly all around the place, including through many places that don't exist, Coppola's camera seems to be not just nailed, but lag-bolted into the floor.

The great classical filmmakers, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, all favored a camera mounted on a tripod and set at roughly eye-level. Wilder openly disdained shots "through the fireplace." Hawks specifically sought to make the audience forget that the camera existed. And Ford always knew there was exactly one place to put the camera, creating an often painterly or theatrical composition. The New Wave and its American followers took the camera off the tripod and, to begin with, began running around with it, trying to catch the action as it walked, jogged and sometimes streaked past. People complained about the jittery, sometimes nauseating effect of handheld camera work, so we got the Steadicam and the Skycam and the Louma crane and more and more cheaper and faster ways to move cameras smoothly and effectively, often in the service of telling the story. There is no serious argument that the Steadicam shots in The West Wing convey the dynamism and perpetual workload of leadership of a major world power. It's not a frill -- it's part of the ethos.

The other side of the coin is that these toys are fun to play with. I've been on the set and I know. And I also know how setting them and lighting for them is an incredible time eater, often to produce effects that do not enhance story, setting or any other elements of the film that the audience cares about. So I welcome Sofia Coppola's static camera. Which is not there just for indolence, but to suggest an objectivity, a literal distance from the characters that is instructive, clear, ironic and sometimes downright funny. When you have a static frame, people and things can move in and out of it, instead of being the subject of the camera's relentless pursuit. Instead the camera lays back and says, in effect, "I'll wait for her. She's going to come back." And then she comes back, satisfying the expectation that's been set up and the audience and the camera are co-conspirators, knowing a little bit more about this person than she knows about herself.

So the opening of Somewhere gives us a sports car literally going nowhere, moving in and out of frame because it simply doesn't matter. Why follow the path of a car that has no destination, that will end where it starts? Why not just wait at the starting point and let it come back to you? We have not met the driver, who we will discover is the protagonist, but we already know he is literally aimless.

There is much criticism (mostly by young viewers) that nothing happens in Somewhere. This will be the case if you are the kind of person who has difficulty "reading" other people, their thoughts, moods and feelings, especially by looking at their faces. If you need "stuff" to happen, dramatic revelations, snappy dialogue, Somewhere is going to disappoint you. But if you are sensitive to the movements of the heart, you will recognize the signs of deepening levels of love and trust between father and daughter, especially since the daughter is played by Elle Fanning, who rates as MVP for young actresses in 2010-11.

Rabbit Hole (2010) also employs a somewhat reticent camera, not so much because it is waiting patiently, as in Somewhere, but because the foreground is packed with emotional action. Rabbit Hole demonstrates that the true provenance for the digital RED camera may be the actor-based film which rests on the interplay among faces, an interplay best captured within a single take. With the RED cameras, an operator can be put on each actor, and even another on a master shot. There is no "stock", so the cost of continuing to roll is marginal. Some directors don't even slate between takes, they just ask the actors to do it again without a pause. The result can be a single performance shared among several cameras, with the actors each reacting to exactly the performance you are seeing (as contrasted with having to react to an actor or even a tech sitting off-camera feeding the lines), and perfect, seamless cuts among them.

Digital cameras still do not have the range of high and low light that fine 35mm cameras have, but they are coming close. And they do not have to yield the grainy look they did ten years ago. Look at this warmly lit scene as husband Aaron Eckhart tries to soften the mood between himself and wife Nicole Kidman, both in mourning for a child lost in a random accident eight months earlier:



Note that, as casual and intimate as the scene is, the cameras are still on sticks, the relative sizes and juxtapositions of the characters perfectly conventional. No dollies, no odd angles, no jittery handheld work here, because the director has put the load on the actors and their words.

To this end, Nicole Kidman appears to be a perfect film actor, better to me than a Meryl Streep, who is always putting on a persona, which I can see her taking off at the end of the day. That is not to say that Kidman is a personality actor like Cary Grant, but a character actor without the eyepatch and the limp, like an Ingrid Bergman, who just shows up on screen as the character and nothing else. She is beautiful, but her beauty doesn't feel like a presentation, but simply a trait, like a cowlick or a birthmark (which perhaps it is). Interestingly, as one looks at this clip, Kidman's expressiveness is not centered around the small movements of the eye as is typical on film, but in body posture, tilt of the head, eyebrows, perhaps some widening of the eyelid, all tools of the stage actor.

Here is another example of digital's ability to capture the interplay of two (or more) simultaneous performances. The actors overlap and react easily and naturally. It also represents the film's wit as mother and daughter share the lighter side of losing a child:



The setups are conventional and locked down, leaving ample foreground space for the acting. Stage director John Cameron Mitchell cannily uses the old trick of keeping the actors' hands busy to deflect their attention and the audience's.

This scene does bring out a point I want to share with you. If you have heard of this film or the play, but haven't seen it, you probably think, like I did, that you are going to be pull down into a spiral of grief and conflict. I promise you this -- it won't. And if you go with it all the way to the end--and I can't imagine why you wouldn't--you will feel lightened, relieved, uplifted, especially if you are going through any kind of trial. I don't know a film that does the "life will go on and even get better" think better than this, and the reason points up an interesting contrast between stage and film.

(Incidentally, this film is a model of stage-to-screen adaptation, especially one done by the playwright. Offstage scenes are brought on stage, long static scenes are broken up into chunks, different characters move the scenes from different places, visual analogs for verbal ideas are often engaged, and a couple of brand new ideas introduced, most memorably the scene in which the husband botches the sale of the house by sharing too much. The economy and precision of what should have be been talky and indulgent is admirable.)

Both versions end with the same speech by the husband, but for a small cut which seemed redundant. (This frequently happens in the transition between stage and film -- it's possible to cut back the words both because a facial expression can substitute for the words and because we are sitting closer to the actors and we hear what they say better, which means they don't have to nail the point home the way they may need to on stage.) The husband makes a prediction of what they will do, the little gathering they will have for family and friends. The point of the speech is the ordinariness of the events he is forecasting. But on film, we can see it, we can see the warmth of the smiles and embraces, the children playing, the calico tablecloth, the food prepared and the food consumed. The beauty of plain ordinary life is there for us to see and we weep in recognition of how good those simple joys are if we will just think about what it might be like to become numb to them, as these parents did.

And the scene ends just as it did on stage, with the couple facing out and holding hands ready for the future, but now, on film, we see the yard and the tablecloth and the remains of the party. On stage, we projected our hope on them. On film, hope is made manifest.

A brilliant blend of cinema elements

I've finally had the opportunity to see a film I've been after for over 40 years, the original 106-minute version of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a variation on the Faust legend which has been traveling around in 99- and 84-minute versions as All That Money Can Buy, which isn't that bad a title. Having finally seen it, I'm wondering if I shouldn't substitute it for the rather chilly Citizen Kane as a demonstration of how the elements of classical studio-style filmmaking could be orchestrated for a stunning and complex total effect.

That would make particular sense since so many key Kane craftsmen were involved in DADW, including editor Robert Wise, sound recordist James G. Stewart, effects artist Vernon Walker, and most critically, composer Bernard Herrman, here earning an Academy Award for his second film ever. Cinematography is by veteran Joe August rather than renegade Gregg Toland, but August has clearly absorbed Toland's lessons in deep focus and strong sources, added to a penchant for chiarascuro already evident in August's career.

Exhibit A, the entrance of the devil, known as Scratch, from an unidentified source so bright and smoky as to suggest a back entrance to Hell. His musical accompaniment is an electronic distortion of a recording of wind stirring some humming high-voltage wiring -- extremely avant for the Spring of 1941 when it was filmed. Add to that the unemphatic fire effects of Mr. Walker and you have one of the devil's best film entrances in film history:



Notice the daring rapidity of Wise's cut at 2:23, harking back to silent film technique. Speaking of rapid cuts, check out this sequence as the Devil's seduction advances at a country dance. Scratch has provided the hero with a new seductive housemaid in the person of Simone Simon, whose film entrance is kneeling in front of a hearth that looks as though it were a portal to sulfurous fires somewhere below. Here he is tempted to dance with her in order to hold her body, while the Devil fiddles to a hellish mix of a four different recordings of the same violinist improvising to "Pop Goes The Weasel." Again, Wise goes to town, especially starting at 1:09 in this clip.



Take that, Charlie Daniels!

The supernatural elements, work of Wise, Stewart and Walker and the career-rescuing performance of Simone Simon also point the film forward toward the low-budget horror films produced by Val Lewton later in the 1940s, such as Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher and I Walked With A Zombie, especially in its use of suggestion and dark and light. (Lewton upped the ante with his use of off-screen sound to dramatize the unseen.)

The film is co-written by Stephen Vincent Benet, based on his own story. Benet was popular in the 20s and 30s for his use of American folklore to reflect on then-contemporary themes. The result for this film is an unparalleled mix of Americana, surrealism, theatricality, mysticism, horror and Christian myth. That might seem like an unpalatable mix, or at least a rather lumpy stew, but the result is completely coherent, moving easily from Daniel Webster's lecture about freedom to the hero's son straight into his pleading to a jury of the damned including Blackbeard and Benedict Arnold for the soul of the hero.

The only flaw in the film is the unfortunate necessity of substituting the incomparable Thomas Mitchell, who was injured in an on-set accident, with the more limited Edward Arnold, who despite best intentions, and whether through his own shortcomings or our memory of his other roles as a slimy business comes over as a bit greasy and pontificating for the role of Webster, who is meant to be well-educated but homespun (a stand-in for Lincoln, who was a very popular character in Depression culture). But despite Webster's titular billing, he is not central to the film, and Arnold is adequate, not terrible and does not demolish the film.

Let's leave the last word to actor Walter Huston, director William Dieterle (best known to me for being fired from The Adventures of Robin Hood for working too slowly) and most of all, Bernard Herrman, who really gets to show off his vivacious and sharp-elbowed musical voice in this final moment of the film, as Scratch considers his next "customer." The music looks forward to Herrman's classic Hitchcock scores, the iris-out looks backwards toward D.W. Griffith, and Huston's gaze into the viewer's eyes must have been bone-chilling projected on movie screens in 1941.