Belief

This time around, the people of Oz will decide whether fear wins over freedom

Three films encountered over the past week grapple with the question of belief, not in the context of conventional religion, but along the porous border of Faith and Science which has become the new
demilitarized zone, except it's not so demlitarized -- bombs seem to bursting overhead every day.

As this is written Oz The Great and Powerful (2013) is the number one film in the US and worldwide.  Films can be successful merely by being fun, but this level of success suggests that Oz has some resonance for the audience, something beyond pleasant diversion.  The audience we saw the film with applauded at the end, and that is by no means a common experience anymore.  I believe that much of that resonance comes from the filmmakers' genuine respect for a central tenet of the L. Frank Baum legacy:  this is, above all, an American fairy tale.  Yes, there are princesses and witches, but the stakes are not so much personal ascension to prominence and wealth, but securing peace and freedom across a very diverse, and often strange and dangerous land.  Moreover, Baum was, more than anything, all about the dawn and the promise of the 20th century, a would-be tinkerer in the Age of the Tinkerer-King, Thomas Edison (who is rightly cited as an inspiration by Oz in the film).

The power of credentials:  cynical or self-affirming?

So, whereas the heroes of the 1939 MGM film (to which Oz pays much deep homage) were in search of personal redemption and rescue, and had to be exhorted to only believe in the powers that they already possessed, Oscar the hero of Oz must save the entire land and its varied peoples from tyranny and the rule of force.  And, taking a page from the classic film, he takes inspiration from the Wizard of Menlo Park to create an illusion of superior force and power, with the collaboration of entire race of Tinkers.  The day is won, then, not be actual superiority, but by its perception.  What can be more American than that?  We are the capitol of self-aggrandizemnt and humbug.  But as many have pointed out before, Oz wins by being the biggest and best humbug around.  And, in an improvement over the original, Oz enlists his people in creating many of the triumphal illusions.  Perhaps the people of the Land of Oz will lose their fear of magic in favor of mastery of technology.  (Will the Tinkers become the new priests of Oz?)  Arthur Clarke would weep in happy recognition.  (Clarke wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")

I suspect that those critics --and there are many-- who are describing the film as lacking heart and emotional engagement, saw the film in a screening room without "hot bodies" (as the stage director George Abbott described paying customers).  Those bodies warm up the film with their own enthusiasm and with the joy of making connections with the MGM film, most notably, the sepia Academy ratio prologue (in a drab Kansas) expanding to a full-color 2.39 widescreen image, the nod to the Yellow Brick Road, Dark Forest and Emerald City and most particularly the transformation of Theodora into the Wicked Witch, which is a worthy analog to the earlier film's transformation of the image of a troubled Auntie Em (the Good Mother) in the crystal ball into the cackling cruelty of the Wicked Witch (the Bad Mother).

Personally, I regret that the producers' number one and number two choices for the title role, Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, respectively, turned them down.  (I thought of them myself as I watched the film, and learned later they had a history with the property.)  Downey and Depp would have had the convincing theatricality to carry off the charlatan magician.  Mr. Franco is famous for pursuing his education, but he has a thick tongue, the California nasality that disfigures the speech of actors such as Kevin Costner and Chris O'Donnell, who sound inept in period roles, suggesting a surfer taking a pause between the waves.  Nor does Mr. Franco have the control of his hands and body that would be de rigeur for a working magician.  My hope is that he does not consider tackling the classics until he goes back to school again.

A society of mutual belief

Phillip Seymour Hoffman, for example, seems as though he could be a fine prestidigitator, especially with the façade of calm confidence he exudes in The Master (2012).  The faith of Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie in Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd is perfectuly understandable.  Dodd's faith in Freddie is the puzzling core of this puzzling film.

What writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson does with great facility is to create a complete and detailed imaginary universe right next door to the world we know, close enough so that we recognize a few landmarks, but very far distant in terms of human motivations and desires.  Given that his story is merely about the unfortunate and unproductive attraction between two men who cannot and will not do each other any good, it is unclear why Freddie needs an elaborate backstory in his World War II service, drifting and alcoholism, or why, for the purposes of the narrative, Dodd needs to have created a complex system of belief which brings both followers and the unwelcome attentions of the authorities, which chase Dodd and his believers all the way to England.  At least, we're told it's England, although what we see is a few hallways and an office with a big window--an architectural flourish you will never ever see in sunshine-deprived England.

The thing that gives the Dodd system the slightest bit of plausibility (leaving aside all the borrowings from the life of L. Ron Hubbard) is that it places itself at the intersection of medicine and magic.  The original medicine men were magicians and, when it comes to mental health, they haven't moved that far from those origins.  Thus, most patients require neither consistency or cohesion.  Relief from suffering is enough to trigger acceptance of all explanations.  But the story would have been just have effective if Dodd had been a singular fraud, a traveling charlatan who does Freddie some good despite the shady origins of Dodd's skills.  The whole invented belief system is an iceberg, the bulk of which is hidden from us, which is simply unnecessary.  Anderson has put a loaded gun in the drawer, occasionally taken it out to look at or polish, but he has never fired the gun, and my friend Anton Chekhov would be pretty darn steamed.

The larger question The Master raises is, can acting performances be great when they story which embraces them is an intellectual cul de sac?  Can we applaud the actor's specificity and care of observation when the result leads nowhere and yields nothing?  I am perfectly prepared to find out I am wrong in a few years -- many people think other PT Anderson films are as empty as I think The Master is, so my mind may well change.  But for the time being, The Master is a film about belief which fails to induce it.

Kenneth asks Darius to trust him and she does.

I guess sincerity matters, because the characters in Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) may be just as insane as those in The Master, but they are clearly more earnest, well-meaning, lacking the narcissism and solipsism of Anderson's world.  Kenneth's claims are far madder than Dodd's, yet Kenneth has far less to gain personally.  He is not building an empire, but trying to fix the past.  Kenneth avers he has built a time machine, and rather than travelling in time, the whole movie is going to be spent trying to figure out if he's a genius or a madman. And to their credit, writer Derek Conolly and director Colin Trevorrow balance it pretty well.  Duplass seems both sincere and unstable; the government men following him seem both genuinely concerned and paranoid screwy at the same time.

Not surprisingly, Aubrey Plaza's role was written for her, because if her laser-like skepticism about everything in the world did not exist, it would need to be invented in order to tell this loopy story.  And given how rarely Plaza smiles un-ironically, the payoff is that much greater when she finally drops her guard, gives her heart and commits herself to belief in Kenneth.  Happily, unlike Looper, Primer and Timecrimes but like the careless shaggy dog indie, Sound Of My Voice, Safety need not ever address the paradoxes and inconsistencies of time machine movies.  We take it -- on faith -- that time travel is a matter of faith.

Then, sadly, the film blows itself up.  If you want to know how a film's conclusion can be both exhilarating and disappointing, watch Safety Not Guaranteed right to the end.  I guess I prefer ambiguity to certainty, which is why I prefer art to religion.

Under my head

A passel of young'uns snapping their whippers

As far as I can tell, the 2011 remake of Footloose is a pretty good for what it's meant to be, an excuse for tweeners to get out of the house and dream about how exciting it will be to be in high school.  (This sort of fantasy is always accomplished with the help of 27-year-old actors pretending to be 17.)  It is competently put together, with some moments of visual excitement which may be attributable to the skills of director Craig Brewer, who has made much more challenging films prior hereto (Hustle and Flowand Balck Snake Moan).  I am sure this was driven both by the paycheck and genuine affection for the original 1984 film, an affection I cannot feel, as I was already too old for the first film when that one came out.

Yet I see many films for which I am not the target demo, yet they reach me in some way.  I didn't mind Footloose, I didn't dislike it, yet I find it difficult to write anything about it because it felt like just a bunch of bits of film edited together so they would last an hour-and-three-quarters.  Nothing specific was communicated to me.  I know that was just me-- the film inspired both pleasure and displeasure from many, but I just felt a pleasant numbness.

What makes a film land or not land for any individual viewer?  I could say that I think the whole premise is phony and artificial -- that towns don't outlaw dancing, although specific religious sects do.  Director-co-writer Brewer tried to increase the plausibility factor by putting the fatal accident that triggers the repression at the front of the film (after a quite energetic title sequence), but a film like this is not meant to be believability, and such things almost damage the film.  I'm reminded of films that Laurel and Hardy made in the 1940s at the major studios, rather than the independent Hal Roach studio where they had done their best work.  The studios changed their make-up and lighting to be more natural and beelievable, and in the process destroyed much of what was charming about Laurel and Hardy.  They were always strange and fantastical characters, and to put them in the real world revealed them as aging, overweight men who seemed to be so simple that they should have been under medical supervision.  No longer golden fools dancing in the moonlight, they were old and pathetic.

Moreover, the film is not a musical.  Musicals I like.  Musicals I understand.  They have a special grammar and logic that appeals to me and bypasses the rational mind.  But Footloose wants to be rational.  The key, turning point scene consists of the villain and the hero making speeches.  Not singing, not dancing, but talking.  Talking about dancing.  But talking about dancing is not dancing.  This is an out-and-out confession that the filmmakers do not know how to make dance dramatic, or indeed even narrative.  Instead, dancing is appliqued onto a story of generation clash, and the same script could be used (and doubtless will be) for tagging, skateboarding or hang-gliding or whatever those wild kids want to get up to.  It would be unsurprising to see Tuesday Weld show up as a troubled teen.  In any event, the film is a romantic melodrama with comedy overtones and a lot of footage of young people dancing.  But not a musical.

The dancing, need I point out with overmuch emphasis (as Peter Cook said), is devoid of narrative content.  The boys and girls dance because they want to dance, because they are young, and because both in movies and the real world, dancing is a socially acceptable form of public foreplay -- almost communal foreplay.  Consequently, the single best sequence in the film is the "Let's Hear It For The Boy" montage in which the non-dancing comical sidekick gradually learns to dance, and with attitude and style.  That sequence alone gives me hope that Mr. Brewer will stop his flirtation with music and make a real full-out musical someday. 

Thus I think the best audience for this film are groups of happy 8 and 9 year olds watching the movie in large basement rec rooms watching the screen and aping the dance steps as they go along, although I shudder to think of the kiddie hip grinding that is likely to ensue.  Maybe the film should be issued in a karaoke dancealong version.

Ultimately the point is that there is no point in reading anything anyone writes about Footloose.  Because it is called Footloose, the name of a 1984 film, you know almost exactly what this is and you are capable of deciding whether you will like it or not, based on that fact.  That it is decent and professional is gratifying, but irrelevant, and people like me are irrelevant as spectators.

I hope it earns Mr. Brewer the privilege of making something closer to the heart -- his and mine.

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.

What? Apocalypse again?

As I write this post, the second sperm-donor-comedy is opening in theaters. (The Switch with Jennifer Aniston--don't look forward to a post about it.) The Book of Eli (2010) opened earlier this year as the second post-apocalyptic road movie, after The Road. Next to The Road's stripped-down elemental narrative of survival, The Book of Eli, with its action staging, dynamic protagonist and twist ending feels like Mad Max Goes to the Twilight Zone.

All of these films owe something to Sergio Leone, who took the vast and varied space of the American West, so dramatic and poetic in John Ford and turned into a blasted heath for an army of angry Lears to rail on. Strong, reticent heroes, reluctant to turn to violence until absolutely necessary, like Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott gave way to gun-toting sadistic psychopaths. For Washington and company, it's shoot first and ask questions later, strange for a character whose chief function in life is to safely transport a copy of the Bible. Sure, we had bible-thumping psychos before, most notably Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. But he was the villain and an obvious hypocrite. Denzel is a sympathetic hero.

And what's with the religion thing? In a John Ford western, the church and the schoolhouse arrive with womenfolk, the end of the frontier, and the beginning of family life, stability, order. In Eli, the Bible introduces further mayhem, jealousy and covetousness.

The movie is one of those Sixth Sense deals that has an outrageous twist at the end that changes everything that went before it. Sixth Sense played by the rules. A second viewing reveals taht it never violated the story point that was revealed at the end. But although I have no desire to watch Book of Eli again to verify it, I am fairly sure that a number of the events and scenes in the movie are impossible or at least ridiculous in light of the final story twist.

It's not surprising given that this is also one of those movies that is so extensively treated in post-production--color drained, background elements CGI-ed in, that nothing in the film can be believed or trusted. And that is what is most disturbing about the fantastic possibilities of post-production CGI--nothing can be trusted, nothing can be relied on. If live-action film becomes no more convincing of its own reality than a fully-animated film, then why bother with it at all?

The road to . . . what?

Taste of Cherry (1997) could be titled "Several Conversations About The Same Thing," but that would make it sound tedious, when it is instead strangely riveting. Perhaps it is the question itself, or the very fact of that question being posed in an Islamic context. The question: Can suicide be a positive good? Obviously, the Qu'uran answers with a clear "no," clearer even than Judaism or Christianity.

But even more strangely riveting is the way these conversations are conducted. We are not sitting at a table as in My Dinner With Andre, nor trapped in a radio station as in Mother Ghost. Instead, the protagonist, Mr. Badii is driving around Tehran and environs in his Range Rover, meeting people and giving them rides as he asks their help with his suicide. The crunch of the gravel under the tires, the turn of the steering wheel, Badii's searching gaze, lend a hypnotic rhythm to his quest. Writer-director Abbas Kiarostami eschews hand-held, subjective or any sort of experimental shots in favor of rock-steady, smooth motion. Even Badii's careful hand-over-hand handling of the wheel contributes to an air of calm contemplation.

Although this film is cited as an inspiration for Goodbye Solo, it has nothing in common with it other than a car and thoughts of suicide. Whereas the would-be suicide in Solo has made his decision, and settles into a sour funk, Mr. Badii is on a spiritual quest, albeit one with a possibly negative conclusion. But Mr. Badii does not offer a reason for his desire to end his life, he shows no bitterness, exudes no air of failure or disappointment. He seems in search of a higher purpose to the ultimate act of negation.

He meets a number of other men in this journey, all of whom are engaged in significant work, even if it is dull or repetitive. All are making a contribution. The most engaged is the Turk, Mr. Bagheri, who works with his hands and appreciates the palpable physical pleasures that, to his way of thinking, God has made for his children to enjoy. And those joys should be enough, given that any pleasure, probably savored, bespeaks infinity. As seen in the illustration above, Mr. Bagheri's care for other people and appreciation of life seem to earn him entrance to the gates of Heaven. (They're actually the gates of the university, but I'll take a visual metaphor where I can get it.)

The film does not conclude, but merely stops, borrowing a Brechtian trick seen before in films such as O Lucky Man!, The Imposters, The Maids and even the films of Mel Brooks. I have no idea what it is supposed to mean in this context, but it is disappointing, because until then, Kiarostami was on the path to achieving the impossible, making a film, not of a story, but of the process of thinking and of making a decision.

And if this film depresses you, and it shouldn't, just swipe a plum from the fridge. There it is, all the goodness of the world. So sweet and and so cold.