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.

White by you (get it? bayou? see what I did there?)

  Elia Kazan almost completely dismissed his studio films made prior to Panic In The Streets (1950), but Pinky (1949) deserves better, and certainly is worthy of more attention than the cringe-inducing Gentlemen's Agreement (1948), the plot of which was summarized perfectly by one cynic (I paraphrase):  "Don't be mean to Jews, because they might turn out to be Gregory Peck."

But indoors or out, Kazan put his trust in actors, even when he didn't care for them or their training, and he was almost always repaid for that trust.  Pinky might be the great exception.  In the book-length interview Kazan:  The Master Director Discusses His Films, Kazan talks about his pleasure in working with Ethel Barrymore, how he learned to overcome Ethel Waters's hostility and racism, and his disappointment at the blank quality of Jeanne Crain's performance.*  Crain, a lily-white young woman from Barstow playing a mixed-race woman from a Deep South backwater had neither professional nor personal resources to draw on to create her character.  Kazan is quite right, that her work has a blank quality.  But this is an example of his misapprehension of the quality of film acting.

Kazan liked strong, demonstrative actors like Brando, Dean and Clift.  They give carefully worked-out performances, with explicit psychological through-lines and subtexts.  Contrast them with the Hitchcock, Ford and Hawks actors -- John Wayne, James Stewart, Cary Grant.  We're not talking about charisma and star persona here, I'm talking about acting.  All of these actors have a sense of incompleteness in their acting, of something missing, unexplained, even undefined which is supplied by the audience.  They leave room for the film audience, which a tense and detailed actor like Clift never does.  Many of the best actors in film do work that was undetectable to the people watching them being filmed, that only the camera could see, actors such as Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo and Steve McQueen.

In Pinky, stage vets Barrymore and Waters are acting up a storm.  Paradoxically, Barrymore playing an imperious tyrant is far more charming and loveable than Waters as a sweet Aunt Jemima grandma.  Given that Barrymore was a nice person and Waters was not, this effect might be attributed to film's X-ray qualities.  But in both cases, the actresses are visibly, palpably acting.  Crain simply performs the actions, speaks the word the story requires.  The audience has the opportunity and ability to provide the emotion.  Moreover, it is only logical that a black woman who has spent her adult life passing as white would have developed a mask, a cosmic poker face; she would avoid displaying reactions that would be a telltale giveaway of her identity.  The suppression of her selfhood is the greatest tragedy of her situation.  Acting in the Actors Studio sense of the word would have damaged the film.

Yes, the picture is shot on obvious stages and Joe August's lighting is quite theatrical.  But it suits the folktale nature of the story -- there are aspects, questions of inheritance and the transfer of property that are pre-echoes of Ossie Davis's play Purlie Victorious, which is explicitly meant to ape the modes of folktale and fable.  Pinky may have arrived at that style by inertia and indirection, but that does not make the film's creative choices invalid. 

Pinky ought to be a lot more dated than it is.  I was especially impressed with the character of Pinky's white fiancee, played by William Lundigan, doing some of his best work.  The man is unafraid to be seen embracing and even kissing a woman who is perceived as black in her hometown, but is nonetheless eager to move to another city in which her racial identity can again be secret, and they can live "normal" lives.  The film is remarkably frank that there is no "normal" path for a black person who looks white, and that is, for the most part, as true (if for different reasons) in 2012 as in 1949.
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* Kazan did not cast the film, having taken it over from John Ford as a favor to Darryl Zanuck.  Various reasons have been given for Ford's departure, from his disaffection with the script to clashes with Waters.  It was probably not racism, as Ford was a secret progressive, and made an explicitly anti-racism film, Sergeant Rutledge in 1960.

Don't grow accustomed to your face...

"...I said I'd make a woman and indeed I did," sings Henry Higgins in a reprise of "You Did It" (cutting off the song "Without You") late in the second act of My Fair Lady.  In that context, it was just an obnoxious solipsistic way of dismissing a woman's claim of self-sufficiency, by merely claiming that he had always wanted the woman to be assertive and independent, while in fact he could not tolerate anyone of any gender not bowing to his whim.

In short, it was meant to be funny and it was.

It's not funny and not meant to be in The Skin I Live In (2011) the creepiest and most perverse variation of the Pygmalion myth I've experienced (leaving aside straight-out horror movies, which are usually intentionally risible).  To use a phrase I loath, "SPOILER ALERT."  (I don't bother with this idea because (a) the concept of this blog is to have a conversation with the reader about films, not to review them, and respecting the distributor's marketing plans is not part of the agenda here; and (b) because the idea that the main interest in the narrative is the surprise in being caught up with the twists and turns is a 20th and 21st century perversion of the ancient art of storytelling, which consisted in keeping the listener rapt EVEN THOUGH the listener knew the story, knew all the stories, and wanted to see what you do with it.)

(Continuing this exegesis -- theatergoers do not want Hamlet to come out all different and surprising, and do not want their Mozart piano concertos to have trick endings.  These sorts of demands for endless novelty are, I maintain, MARKETING considerations, NOT artistic ones.  And there is research to show that people enjoy stories better when they already know the ending.  More of this in my next post.)

Luckily, Almodovar understands at the deeper level what he's doing.  The story, which is appalling as any Greek myth, tells of a man who mourns his dead wife by converting his hysterical and suicidal daughter's rapist into a fireproof replica of her.  Take that, Medea!  Represent, Oedipus!  Clearly this is not meant to be accepted as events that could have actually happened at any real time in any real place.  Almodovar signals this with the make-believe production design -- all solid colors, mostly primary, surfaces unblemished, a kitchen with no mark of ever having been used, a lecture hall that looks like it was completed minutes before shooting.  There are no signs or indicators of real life here, of the quotidian details of existence.  This is the stuff of myth, which is the only way Almodovar could get away with it (if only he did).

Two other observations and I think I'm done.  One is that the entire first half hour and the double meaning of the title are virtually a red-herring.  Much footage is devoted to the perfection of flame-proof skin, presumably as a reaction to the protagonist's wife's terrible death in a flaming car accident.  But that ultimately is of no consequence.  That gun that Almodovar puts in the drawer in the first act is never taken out again.  The experimental subject never encounters potential injury by fire, fire is no part of the plot.  Frankly, the details of gender-reassignment are of far more significance.  And when Banderas's boss tells him to stop this line of experimentation, he does, without complaint and without secretly carrying on, like any decent self-respecting mad scientist.

Yes, the title is there because of what the characters do, the guilt they bear, the burdens they carry, all the questions of identity that such a title raises.  But the double meaning it reaches for is by way of a cheat, of a plot situation that is simply grafted onto the story.  That really should have been re-thought.

Finally, I have no idea what Banderas is doing in this movie, other than that he has a history with Almodovar, they helped build each other's careers and there must be a sense of mutual obligation.  Because he is clearly miscast.  What Banderas does is contained fury.  That's his brand.  The script calls for contained madness, a note not within Banderas's range.  There is never a thing to suggest to irrational, or even really the dangerous quality of this character.  In an effort to contain the insanity of the story, Banderas exhibits a calm impassivity which registers as indifference, especially when he casually abandons the experimentation that is supposed to be the premise of the film.  Banderas's face does not yet have the visual complexity to convey two thoughts at once (compared to, for instance, an Anthony Hopkins or a Kevin Spacey), so for most of the film he seems to be merely obeying the script's dictates, without any conviction that there's anything to them.

Almodovar has always wanted to marry insightful drama with scenes of revulsion and horror, but backed to the wall on this film, he seems to have settled for the latter.  Pity the better film lying just under the skin of this one.

In case you were wondering...

...this is the greatest film ever made.



It just never gets old.

Meander is not just a river in Turkey

Co-writer director Terry Gilliam, when asked about the genesis of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) said something to the effect of "I wasn't really thinking about telling a story." In that goal--not telling a story--Gilliam succeeded admirably. (The comment was made during a Q&A sponsored by Creative Screenwriting Magazine, which can be heard here. It's a great podcast series, incidentally, which you really should check out for yourself.)

It's natural enough for Gilliam, a visual artist by training, to begin with images; but eventually there needs to be something else; if not narrative, character, if not narrative or character, a clear thematic or philosophic center. But something, please something, more than a whole lot of pretty pictures. Gilliam does seem to be saying something about making choices between sort-of evil and sort-of good, and there is a severely anemic conflict between a sort-of devil and a sort-of Prospero-type wizard. But Gilliam makes movies like an old man telling a complicated story, wandering down numberless dead ends and then saying, "What was I talking about?" and doing it so frequently that none of us can remember what he was talking about.

I am prejudiced toward Gilliam: Monty Python's emergence in the US was a central part of my college cultural experience. And Gilliam nobly upheld the group ethic to defy, or rather to eschew, logic, explanations and anything that resembled a point. But Python was stringing together brief segments into a 30-minute entertainment. This is no way to approach a full-length work that is meant to have some resonance for the audience.

Gilliam has always worked better with collaborators with complementary talents--Tom Stoppard for Brazil, Richard LaGravenese for Fisher King (the latter project also having been initiated and produced by a very disciplined team, Debra Hill and Linda Obst) . Left alone with pets and pals like Charles McKeown (who co-authored Baron Munchausen--didn't anyone see disaster looming again?) Gilliam feels free to dally and ramble among fantastic visual elements and effects, leaving the audience behind. We are engaged with no character, nothing is at stake, nothing much happens.

There is a widespread notion that the forced re-casting of the central role after Heath Ledger's premature death, by which the part is now shared with Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, saved the film. If by "saved" you mean "made more incomprehensible," then yes, the film was saved. At least when Bunuel double-cast a role in That Obscure Object of Desire he was deliberately setting out to confuse and annoy the audience. Here, that's just an added bonus.

Also, will somebody tell me when Christopher Plummer became the go-to old guy for animation, fantasy and generally weird film projects? The problem with Plummer is that he does have a wonderfully fruity voice and a highbridged nose, but not much more than that. When Gilliam cast Ralph Richardson as God in Time Bandits, you had a wonderful character--the fussy old London-club-armchair Colonel Blimp type that could really run a universe. Plummer's performance in Imaginarium suggests that God (or goodness or poetry or whatever his character is meant to represent) is nothing but a ham actor, all paint and feathers and fancy verse. No real competition with Tom Waits's more focused and charismatic Mr. Nick.

With a solid script and a firm production hand, Gilliam is a strong individual voice in film, an important if secondary director. But no director, even the visually decorative ones such as Vincent Minnelli or Tim Burton, can make the pantheon without a real commitment and adherence to character and narrative.

Warming up in the bullpen

Lee Daniels has two great assets as a director, a poetic, at times spellbinding visual sense and an awe-inspiring rolodex. Daniels is famous today (and deserves to be) for Precious. Shadowboxer (2006), his first feature release has a marvelous assurance for such a strange film, beginning with its completely odd cast.

Daniels first made his mark as a producer, most notably of Monster's Ball, which leads one to wonder if his knack for offbeat casting is not opportunistic. One would not ordinarily think of Helen Mirren as a hitman as she plays in Shadowboxer, but would think of her for the role for which she was cast in Precious, an acid-tongued social worker. Except that Mirren wasn't available, so Daniels cast Mariah Carey. He seems to have a crazy, fling-it-against-the-wall attitude toward casting which so far has paid off.

Mirren's consort is Cuba Gooding, Jr. Their doctor (to patch them up from assassination-related injuries) is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and his girl friend, called "Precious" is played by Mo'Nique. The ease with which these actors, who presumably all share Daniels as a mutual friend belies the awkwardness of the gathering. The whole thing is bound with a dream-like visual style, linked by close-ups of eyes and bound together with an eclectic score by Mario Grigorov (although I also detected some Piazzolla tangos as well).

The story is preposterous, but has a truth of a fable. I don't know about anyone else, but seeing Shadowboxer, I would have given him the money to make Precious. IMDb lists his future projects as including something called Selma as well as Miss Saigon. I'd like to see those.