A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
David Michod's film for Netflix is a fictionalized adaptation of Michael Hastings' The Operators, itself an expansion of the Rolling Stone magazine expose that led to the fall of General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in 2010. In real life McChrystal was ruined by Hastings' revelations of hard drinking by his staff, including the now-more-disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn, and open contempt for the Obama administration. All of this plays out, with the names changed, in War Machine, but the film fails to answer the main question it raises on its own: what has all of this to do with the film's main character, or, more pointedly, what does he have to do with the scandal or the ongoing quagmire in Afghanistan.
The fictionalized McChrystal, Gen. Glen McMahon, is played by Brad Pitt, a producer of the film. Pitt is in character-actor mode here, less interested in being a leading man than in making a character, or at least a performance, out of odd postures and a funny voice. McMahon's right hands is often contorted into a kind of claw, while he jogs with a lumbering stride, with his arms hanging almost limp. Michod and Pitt clearly consider the physicality of the actor's portrayal important to the story, showing McMahon shamble through army bases and European cities, but it's hard to figure out what exactly this illustrates apart from Pitt's commitment to the role. Likewise, McMahon's burly burr of a voice sticks out among the generally more naturalistic performances, but not in a good way. It makes McMahon sound like a cartoon character -- at times I thought it might be Pitt's impersonation of George Clooney playing a general in a Coen Bros. film -- when no one else does, except arguably for Anthony Michael Hall as McMahon's apoplectic right-hand man, the Gen. Flynn analogue. I don't know whether Pitt arrived at this performance from studying Stanley McChrystal, following Michod's direction or by making it up himself, but it's a huge distraction, and something is terribly wrong with a movie if you start to think of its star performance as a distraction.
It seems like a distraction because Michod appears to be trying to explain both the fall of the real general and the American failure to secure Afghanistan, but nothing in Pitt's performance really helps explain these things. In part that's a major failing on Michod's own part as the screenwriter, since despite the advantage of dramatic license the script fails to make his fictional general either exceptional (except for Pitt's eccentricities) or explanatory. McMahon himself doesn't really seem like a bad guy. He doesn't share in the excesses of his staff and he makes conscientious efforts both to understand the war from the grunt point of view and to be courteous toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president (Ben Kingsley). His main problem seems to be that he sees the war through a haze of organizational jargon and management theory that convinces him that there must be a way to win the war, when others recognize that Afghans will never acquiesce to foreign occupation, no matter what theory you apply to it. In short, for all his apparent virtues McMahon is clueless, but so what? It's not as if he started the war, and it's not as if he was in command long enough to make a difference one way or another, and because of Pitt's mannered performance it's hard to say whether he's a representative U.S. military man. For all I know, Pitt may have made his performance more eccentric than it needed to be because he realized that if he didn't do something to stick out the character of the general would be exposed as a void on screen.
While War Machine has a hollow center it's not a total debacle. When we finally get to see some war, Michod wisely takes the focus off Pitt and gives us a tense battle from the grunt's perspective, climaxing in a soldier's anguished realization that he called a strike on the wrong target. Even Pitt isn't a total loss. After two scenes I decided I'd rather see a two-hander consisting only of Pitt's general and Kingsley's Karzai interacting with each other. In late life Kingsley has become a king of character actors, -- dare I say a mandarin? -- and Pitt raises his game with that kind of partner, as he does during a press-conference showdown with Tilda Swinton as a persistent German critic. Those good scenes, however, expose War Machine as a fragmented collection of vignettes that never really coheres into a compelling story or a distinctive statement on America's Afghan war.
The history of slavery on film is inseparable from the fantasy of mastery. For that reason, any movie about slavery risks being seen as exploitation. It's always about what the master can do, potentially provoking prurient curiousity, as much as it's about what slaves endure. In the camera eye, the essence of slavery isn't merely exploitation; it is cruelty. The new film by the British director Steve McQueen, acclaimed by some as the best film ever made about American slavery, is no different. The true-life ordeal of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is upstaged, despite the best efforts of star and director, by the spectacle of the monster master. Northup, a free black from New York State who was kidnapped by slavers who enticed the many-skilled man, a husband, father and homeowner. As a free-born citizen of a free state, Northup didn't have to carry papers proving he wasn't a slave, so once taken south, he can't prove his free status. The film follows in the footsteps of Uncle Tom's Cabin as Northup first toils under a "good" but ultimately ineffectual master (Benedict Cumberbatch), then suffers under a Simon Legree type (McQueen alter ego Michael Fassbender). In effect, farce is repeated as tragedy, as one can only laugh at Northup's struggles with Cumberbatch's overseer. Paul Dano's performance may type him once and for all as cinema's designated whipping boy -- white division, of course. He's the nearest thing this film has to comic relief, introducing himself with an inanely offensive work song like something out of Blazing Saddles. He's so unmenacing a figure that it's hard to take him seriously, though his part of the film has a cruel punch line. Humiliated by Northup, the Dano character tries to string the slave up, only to be thwarted by an overseer who has promised to protect Northup. The overseer then leaves Northup to barely avoid strangling in the noose by standing tip-toe in mud until Cumberbatch can figure out what to do with him. In a telling shot, slave children play in the background as Northup struggles for life. McQueen holds the shots of Northup struggling for very long periods. It's a chancy tactic, since there's often a temptation to laugh when this sort of shot is held for too long. Northup's ordeal, however, is only a prelude for the over-the-top antics at Fassbender's plantation.
Cumberbatch plays a cluelessly pious master fond of reading the Bible to his slaves yet ultimately lacking in Christian compassion, while Fassbender finds justification for his cruelty in the same book. He's archetypically dissolute and depraved, a figure who would not be out of place in such less respectable fare as the Mandingo movies or Django Unchained, except that he'd rather see his slaves dance than fight. Essential to his archetype is the sexual exploitation of slaves, and the object of Fassbender's questionable affections is Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o), a mighty mite of cotton-picking productivity. She can pick more than 500 pounds a day while Northup is lucky if he can manage half as much. Fassbender's wife despises Patsy, in one scene hitting the young woman in the face with a full glass decanter. Fassbender himself abuses Patsy as much as he romances her, to say the least. McQueen manages to make this less exploitative than it might seem by deglamorizing Patsy. Nyong'o is a petite woman with close-cropped hair who accumulates scars throughout the picture. No one in the audience, presumably, would fantasize about possessing the wretched Patsy sexually, so Fassbender's lust seems unfathomably strange. Fassbender's performance throughout is fearlessly over-the-top, as it must be to break the spell of fantasy around the character's mastery.
Ejiofor is brilliantly indignant in the lead role, but the film's fidelity to history limits the actor's opportunities to dominate it while screenwriter John Ridley's attempt to make 19th century characters, free and slave alike, more articulate and deliberate in their speech than we are may distance audiences from Northup's emotional experience of his ordeal. Fortunately the visuals more than make up for any distancing effect the dialogue may have on uncomprehending viewers. McQueen has an interesting eye, often focusing on familiar objects in disorienting close-up or landscapes rendered abstract by reflection or atmospheric effects. One especially effective shot turns the blades of a steamboat paddle wheel into a red maw of death as Northup is carried down the river. His long takes are endurance tests for the viewer that hint at Northup's greater test of endurance. Ejiofor and Fassbender top a talented or at least game cast, from Paul Giamatti's brief but chilling turn as a slave trader to producer Brad Pitt's self-congratulatory cameo as a good white whose intervention finally frees Northup. There's a strange irony in the ending that McQueen may not have appreciated or even noticed: even at the heart of slavery's darkness there is still a rule of law that pries Northup from Fassbender's grip. Once Northup makes contact with people who can make contact with authorities in New York, the law, even in a slave state, works in Northup's favor. I'm not sure what this might prove to the audience, or whether it contradicts any impression the film meant to make. It's clear, however, that Northup is miraculously exceptional in acquiring a Get Out of Slavery card, while Patsy and the rest of Fassbender's victims are stuck with him. Some critics have suggested that Northup's limited ordeal doesn't get to the essence of the slavery experience, and the film itself has another kidnapped black draw comparisons between victims like Northup and "born and bred" slaves who have no fight in them. On the other hand, Northup's ordeal probably makes him a better audience-identification figure while augmenting the horror of the story by protraying slavery as something that can happen to anyone -- we even see a white man temporarily reduced to debt-slavery under Fassbender -- rather than something only certain people are born into. If McQueen manages to inspire more nightmares of enslavement than fantasies of dominance, then 12 Years will have lived up to its already lofty reputation among slavery pictures. For now, McQueen should be satisfied with having made one of this year's best films.
Did you ever see one of the old time movie serials? The story builds to a climax every fifteen minutes or so and after an implausible escape the story moves on. Now, have you ever seen one of those feature films made by compressing a serial into 90 minutes or less? Usually they have all the cliffhangers while jettisoning much of the exposition and most of what little character development there was in the original. That's what World War Z is like. To be fair, Brad Pitt and Marc Foster have closer to two hours to work with and manage to fit more exposition in. But there's the same sort of perfunctory sensationalism to their production, notoriously troubled but eventually modestly triumphant at the box office. Action scenes -- for this is an action rather than a horror film -- arrive with a telegraphed inevitability that smothers any suspense the filmmakers hoped to generate. Much like the film's "zekes," the film itself is energetically lifeless, taking for granted that our empathy for "family" or our adoration of Pitt will keep us emotionally involved without director, writers or actors really doing anything to engage us. The irony of the project is that the zombie at its heart is Brad Pitt. Repeatedly, Pitt has proven his versatility and charisma as an actor, from the subtle villainy of his Jesse James to his sublime idiocy in Burn After Reading, but his ambition as an actor seems inversely proportional to his ambition, as a producer, to make money. He seems to think that, to be a hero, or at least an action hero, he doesn't have to develop an interesting personality. His protagonist is an automaton, though he looks like a professional wrestler (it's the hair, mainly) bereft of the gift of gab, barely personalized by the era's prevalent reluctant-hero cliches -- yet perversely, this character, if it can be called that, dominates the story in a way that no one, or so I understand, dominates Max Brooks's source novel. As Pitt trots the globe, abortive characters threaten to form around him, only to be abandoned, with the exception of a female Israeli soldier whose infected hand he helpfully amputates during the great bug-out from Jerusalem. You get none of the abrasive interaction of personalities in distress that defines the zombie movie as much as the zombies do. Everyone involved with the project seemed more interested in the novel ways they make the zekes move, but it is all too often rendered from too great a distance and too much in the manner of video games to seem as strange as it's supposed to, let alone frightening. Foster proves incapable of generating real thrills, and his commitment to a PG-13 rating denies viewers even the simplest pleasures (gore, that is) of zombie films. Sure, the fate of the world's at stake, but when isn't it in movies? The real question is, when have you cared less?
First things first: the most commented on aspect of Andrew Dominik's adaptation of George V. Higgins's Cogan's Trade is the writer-director's politically pointed decision to update the time of the story from its original setting in 1974 to 2008. The location apparently has not changed, though Dominik filmed the picture in New Orleans rather than Higgins's Massachusetts. He set the story in 2008 rather than "Present Day" so he could use speeches by George W. Bush and Barack Obama as part of the soundtrack. In Dominik's imagination, the nation hung on every word of that year's presidential election; speeches and political commentary can be seen or heard everywhere, including at a mob card game. While Dominik's own political commentary is not, with one bludgeoning exception, as heavyhanded as critics have claimed, his constant invocation of the 2008 election and the economic crisis that preceded it is understandably seen as an invitation to see his adaptation of Higgins as a mirror of history, an analogy of the crisis. But what does Higgins's tale from 1974 tell us about 2008 or 2012?
Grant that Cogan's Trade has relevance beyond the time it was written, and grant that Dominik saw relevance to the present. Here's what happens: two lowlifes knock over that card game at the instigation of an ex-con who depends on any robbery being blamed on Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), the man who actually hosts the game, since Trattman actually had staged a robbery of his own game in the past, but had been forgiven for it when he confessed some time later. Cogan (Brad Pitt), a fixer for the regional boss, the moribund Dillon, is called into town to get to the bottom of the mystery, and quickly decides that Trattman needs to die even though he probably isn't guilty this time. Trattman needs to be sacrificed in order to restore confidence in the card game so people can make money again. Of course, the perpetrators and their instigator need to be tracked down and killed as well. For Dominik, I assume, the idea of killing a scapegoat to reignite confidence in a crooked economy rang with awful contemporary relevance. Does that make poor Trattman a symbol of someone or something in our time? It's hard to tell. We know where Dominik stands politically thanks to an ugly appendage he attaches to Higgins's conclusion so Brad Pitt can rant contemptuously at Obama's victory speech, reject the idea of Americans as a united people, and make the shocking -- shocking!-- observation that "America is nothing but a business." Rest assured that Dominik doesn't put these words in Pitt's mouth to make us agree with them. Rather, if Pitt equates America with Cogan's peculiar idea of "business," then Dominik equates Cogan's trade with "business" as practiced in 2008. Yet the 2008 context invites a reading of Killing Them Softly possibly far from whatever Dominik intends. For those few apparently bothering to watch and interpret the film, Killing could just as easily be seen as a critique of the great bailouts of 2008 and 2009, not by equating any event in the story with the bailouts, but by seeing Markie Trattman as someone who, in another context, might have been seen as "too big to fail," given his card game's role in the underworld economy, yet is not bailed out. The clean sweep carried out by Cogan -- one of the robbers escapes with his life only because he gets arrested for heroin dealing -- could well be seen, by analogy, as what should have happened with the big banks, but didn't. Is that what Dominik wants people to see? Somehow I don't think so. The problem with Killing Them Softly from a political standpoint isn't that it's partisan or heavyhanded, apart from that Chaplinesque finish, but that its political symbolism is hopelessly muddled.
Fortunately, Killing Them Softly is otherwise a reasonably faithful translation of Higgins's novel, though it lacks much of Higgins's distinctive atmosphere. Perversely, Dominik, whose last film was nearly three hours long, gets his latest done in little more than 90 minutes. But a truly faithful adaptation of a Higgins book needs more time to breathe. We won't see too many faithful adaptations, however -- this is the first one in almost 40 years -- for the simple reason that any writer who adapts Higgins's prose faithfully will be accused of aping Quentin Tarantino. Cogan's Trade is full of rambling, digressive, occasionally trivial conversations that literally are the atmosphere of Higgins's underworld, but Dominik prunes most of these scenes to the bone. The nearest things to exceptions are the scenes Pitt shares with James Gandolfini, the latter playing a hitman having an alcoholic breakdown just when Cogan needs him the most. These scenes come closest to the authentic Higgins flavor and keep alive a spark of Higgins's true theme, which is that many self-styled badasses don't live up to their hard-boiled talk. Coming to Higgins from conventional crime fiction is like walking into a trap. You expect someone like the novel's Russell, a thuggish sounding Vietnam veteran -- transmuted by Dominik into a wretchedly-addicted Australian, to be a dangerous badass, and the gradual revelation of him as a hopeless idiot comes as a surprise, if not a disillusionment, that's diluted by the actor Ben Mendelsohn's portrayal of him as a wreck from scene one. Because Gandolfini is still Tony Soprano to many people, and Dominik gives him a portentous slow-motion arrival at the airport, you do expect him to be some kind of super hitman, and his breakdown has just the right shock value for anyone expecting a conventional crime movie.
Higgins left Dominik a sturdy hook to hang a movie on, and Dominik leaves us a sturdy if thorny little picture. He's guilty of more than rhetorical excesses. Most of the action is well-shot and bluntly effective, but there's a big exception in mid-picture. Shooting the murder of Trattman, Dominik succumbs to the temptation to turn at least one killing into a cinematic set piece. For no obvious reason, once Cogan starts firing everything goes slo-mo, including the bullets going through Liotta's head. Liotta himself is reduced to a slo-mo mannequin as a tow truck smashes into his car. For Dominik this is an ecstasy of exploding plexiglass, but it's also blatant self-indulgence and show-offery at odds with the tone of the rest of the picture. He works more simply and to the point when Cogan finally catches up with the mastermind of the cardjacking, filming the first shot from a distance as the man gets it through a car door. Higgins seems better served by relatively objective direction, as in Peter Yates's Friends of Eddie Coyle. Bits like Liotta's death scene make Killing Them Softly more Dominik than Higgins. But there's still enough of Higgins there, and enough strong performances from Pitt -- a star who I can say honestly vanishes into his vile role -- Gandolfini, Liotta, Richard Jenkins as Cogan's local liaison, and others, to make the picture worth sitting through its awkward moments. It doesn't live up to Dominik and Pitt's epic western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but the talent is still there, and despite the new film's apparent flop -- it was a small crowd at the multiplex this afternoon -- I look forward to the two working together again someday.
One of the most anticipated films of 2012, promised for a Christmastime release, is Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, the writer-director's melding of the spaghetti western and "slavesploitation" genres starring Jamie Foxx. In a sign that Django might start a trend, the Saratogian newspaper reports on the plans by Brad Pitt's production company to make a true-life slavery movie. Plan B Entertainment is still in pre-production on Twelve Years a Slave, which would be the British Steve McQueen's directorial follow-up to his highly acclaimed features Hunger and Shame and will reportedly feature Michael Fassbender, the star of both films, along with Pitt in a role to be determined and UK star Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, a man who lived through an African-American nightmare. Born free, Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery, which he endured for the title duration before managing to escape and publicize his ordeal. It seems such a naturally cinematic story that you wonder why Hollywood hasn't done it before.
So do two films make a genre? Hard to say; the pedigree behind Twelve Years doesn't imply an exploitation approach but the material is potentially so provocative that any treatment might qualify as an exploitation film. In cinema, slavesploitation denotes an allegedly insensitive emphasis on the degradation of slaves, particularly the violence inflicted on them and the sexual servitude to which they were reduced. Its roots are in literature, from William Styron's ambitious Confessions of Nat Turner to Kyle Onstott's Mandingo and its sequels, as well as global interest in the U.S. civil rights movement and race riots of the 1960s. Its magnum opus is Jacopetti & Prosperi's time-travel shockumentary Goodbye Uncle Tom but its best known product remains Richard Fleischer's 1974 film of Mandingo -- though some might include the Roots TV miniseries as part of the trend. The genre as a whole has a bad reputation because of the subject matter's provocative and potentially prurient nature, the horrors of slavery allegedly arousing some viewers while enraging others. I expect just such a response to the Tarantino film, as no doubt Tarantino himself does. Whether Twelve Years a Slave, or whatever it finally gets called, will position itself as the respectable, responsible slavery picture, or whether it will milk the outrage that any viewer should feel over Northup's story to controversial effect, is impossible to say right now -- it's still possible that the film will never get made. Still, it's an interesting coincidence to see two slavery films in the works all of a sudden, and I wonder what it says about 2012 compared to the combustible years when slavesploitation first cast its shadow across theater screens. I look forward to finding out in either case.
It's a simple enough story. A husband and wife react to the news that their son has died. Some years later, the anniversary of the death finds one of their surviving sons, now a businessman, in a funk, or more of a funk than normal. He has a tense chat with his still-living dad over the phone and spends the day brooding over his childhood, idealizing his mother and somewhat demonizing his father, not in small part for being what the son himself has become. The son comes to terms, for the time being, by visualizing a place of universal reconciliation where his mother (living or dead in the present?) receives a kind of apotheosis and everyone else is forgiving and forgiven. By doing so, he seems to be following his idolized mother's advice. And from there, life goes on.
The film is not so simple. That's because Terrence Malick made it. The Tree of Life is Malick's fifth film in a 38-year directing career (the sixth is reportedly already in post-production) and since his acclaimed debut with Badlands in 1973 each new Malick movie is treated as a major event. None was more major, at least in theory, than 1998's The Thin Red Line, Malick's third feature and his first in twenty years. It proved a divisive film, admirers praising its pictorial grandeur and spiritual concerns, critics calling it both pretentious and crass in its casting of big-name stars in small roles. Seven years later came Malick's Jamestown epic The New World, again divisive though in my view a significant improvement on The Thin Red Line, and six years after that comes the new picture.
Malick divides audiences because he defies many of the narrative conventions of mainstream cinema. He's a writer-director who recognizes that cinema is essentially something different from theater and has thus striven to make cinema a mode of expression unbound by the conventions and expectations of theater. He deals with themes that can't be resolved in a single decisive conversation, but he also uses images (some say in profligate fashion) to evoke mood or provoke thought or feeling. If you expect every frame in a film to advance the plot of a story in some quantifiable way, Malick's work will increasingly rub you the wrong way. It will seem self-indulgent, and sometimes leave you wondering what the point of some scenes are. The Tree of Life forces the issue frequently, most notoriously already in a bridge sequence from the brooding of the adult Jack O'Brien (Sean Penn) to the major flashback sequence of the film. The bridge is a sequence illustrating the creation of the universe and life on Earth, culminating in a scene in which a dinosaur menaces, then spares an injured rival. The sequence leaves many viewers scratching their heads, and I'm not sure how much I can help them. My problem with it is that I'm not sure whether it's the vision of Jack O'Brien or the vision of Terrence Malick. The difference matters, but the distinction between subjective envisioning and directorial intervention is blurry throughout the film.
The mystery of Tree of Life is whether it's essentially a character study of Jack, in which case we can comprehend (if not understand) all the visions as emanations from his troubled mind, or a philosophical statement by the director, in which case the visions are presumably meant as assertions of objective truth. The distinction is more crucial when we think about the philosophical and emotional states represented by Jack's mom and dad. The difference between them is first stated in the voice of Jack's mother (Jessica Chastain), who posits (in Malick's preferred manner of voiceover rather than dialogue) a difference between the "way of nature" and the "way of grace." Perhaps controversially, she identifies the way of "nature" as a state of perpetual narcissistic resentment; the "natural" man resents life itself for its limits and the way it limits his aspirations, and takes his frustration out on others. This is clearly how Jack sees his father (Brad Pitt), a would-be classical pianist and inventor who toils in an unfulfilling white-collar job and spends his downtime trying to harden his three sons into disciplined, realistic and self-reliant men. Mother herself represents the "way of grace," which is pretty much the practice of unconditional loving acceptance of all things and all people. Her initial utterance seems to pose a stark choice between the two ways, but Jack himself, reminiscing in the voice of his younger self (Hunter McCracken), confesses that impulses in both directions are constantly pulling at him. Fair enough. But is this just what Jack believes, or is it what Malick himself believes? To ask it differently, does Malick believe that Jack is right? Does Malick see life in terms of nature versus grace, and does he recommend grace? Or is his ultimate point, Jack's closing epiphany (itself problematic; if Jack's father is still alive, why doesn't he visualize an older Brad Pitt on the beach?) notwithstanding, that like Jack, we all have to wrestle and to an extent reconcile the two great impulses? I can't answer for certain.
My uncertainty is based in part on Malick's almost pre-modern reduction of his family to archetypes. Jack's parents don't even have proper names; they are addressed (at the father's insistence, we learn) as "Father" and "Mother," and in Jack's own mind his own brothers are usually addressed as "Brother." Despite Malick's attempt to base his verbiage in character, it results in impossible sounding voiceover utterances -- especially impossible in a child's voice -- like: "Mother, Father: Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will." Moments like that tempt you to think that Malick means the O'Briens to be a symbolic family representing the general human condition -- in which case we're presumably not seeing the subjective reveries of a particular troubled person, but an oracular directorial vision of which the O'Briens are just a part. On the other hand, Malick gives the film enough detail to keep the O'Briens particular personalities -- though Mother is pretty much too good to be true. So no matter what Malick intends, there's still room to see whatever you see as the product of a particular mind of a character film rather than Malick's directives on how to live. For some viewers, clinging to Jack's subjectivity may make Tree a more tolerable experience, while treating it as Malick's sermon might render it intolerable.
Because Malick has such a strong directorial stamp, his movie probably won't please people who prefer seamless narrative illusions. Visually his style has become more cumulative than narrative, building impressions with collections of fragmentary images and vignettes rather than with theatrically linear and conventional dialogue scenes. Throughout his career, he's been fond of voiceovers to an extent that's bordered on the anti-cinematic, as if he didn't trust his images and incidents to convey the right message. Since the debacle of The Thin Red Line, he's grown subtler in his use of voiceover, to the point where The Tree of Life arguably employs what might be called unreliable voiceovers. Whether you agree with me depends, again, on whether what we see at any moment is a subjective memory of Jack's or an objective statement by Malick. I'm inclined to think that it's all subjective, including the supposed voiceovers by other actors. When Hunter McCracken reads that awful line I quoted above as a voiceover, for instance, it's my belief that it's actually the adult Jack "speaking" in his younger self's voice. Moreover, since we have no proof of any intellectual ambition on the part of Jack's mother, and we never see her speaking with such sophistication in dialogue, I'd suggest that the opening lines about the ways of nature and grace, spoken by Jessica Chastain in voiceover, are also actually expressions of Jack's nostalgia, if not his own projection onto his mother of a philosophy she may not necessarily have stated explicitly herself. On the other hand, since Malick doesn't write dialogue in a theatrical way, we could interpret the voiceovers not as representations of what a character is thinking at a given moment, but as abstract summations of characters' personalities. If so, Malick might deserve credit for finding a way to give voiceovers more cinematic potential by unmooring them from the here-and-now of any given shot and thus liberating them from redundancy. The project may still need work, but I think he's making progress.
But if all this commentary about technique and philosophy is scaring anyone from the film, let me draw you back in by saying that what Malick does best in Tree of Life is pretty easily comprehensible for anyone. The core of the film is a recreation of childhood, and while it's based on a specific, lost moment in American history (the 1950s) it's still incredibly evocative in ways just about anyone should recognize. Malick recaptures a multitude of little moments that everyone has experienced, though I may be speaking for boys rather than girls, and that authenticity is the essential foundation for everything else he attempts. The fragmentary, fleeting way in which he presents these moments also looks like a fair match for the way we remember the past, not in a dramatically linear way but more by bits and pieces, in haphazardly holistic fashion. I suspect that anyone who takes a chance on Tree will come away with an appreciation of Malick's solid achievement in this area, even if other aspects of the film leave them reeling or merely baffled. I'd also say, despite my own reservations, that any self-described fan of cinema (as opposed to those who just go to see a story) should take the chance and give Tree of Life a try. It's this year's ultimate in summer counterprogramming, and if not necessarily the year's best film it'll certainly be one of its most ambitious.
Before putting the disc in the machine, I asked my friend Wendigo whether time has passed Anne Rice by. I asked because it seemed to me that the trope identified with her, the vampire story told from the vampire's point of view, has been eclipsed by the avalanche of "urban fantasy" and "paranormal romance" that re-established the "victim," however willing she usually proves to be, as the point-of-view character. Wendigo answered that the change in narrative perspective is just a shift within a generic framework that remains Rice's handiwork. To the extent that urban fantasy and paranormal romance concerns itself with vampire societies and similar supernatural subgroups, they're still working with Rice's paradigm. To the extent that current authors' vampires aren't utterly accursed creatures, or not even undead, they remain, in essence, Rice's vampires. As far as Wendigo is concerned, there are two towers of vampire literature: Dracula and Interview with the Vampire. Twilight and its sequels piled on one another don't reach the historic heights of those seminal volumes. Stephanie Meyer, Charlaine Harris, Laurell K. Hamilton, the writers of White Wolf Games, etc., all labor in Rice's long shadow.
Anne Rice turned the vampire from a horror to a fantasy. It didn't happen all in one book; Wendigo says the change had been accomplished by the end of her third vampire novel, TheQueen of the Damned. The first novel, published in 1976, hints at the social theme but remains focused on an individual vampire's guilt-trip of alienation and damnation. You can see some of Rice's own thoughts at the time in the interview clipping to your right. Louis' character arc makes Interview a horror novel in Wendigo's opinion. Rice adapted it for film, but by the time Neil Jordan directed, it 18 years after the novel appeared, the lavish production, more than anything else, turns Interview from the horror the novel was into the fantasy the sequel novels became.
Brad Pitt as the Interviewee, with the back of Christian Slater's head.
Rice inevitably has to telescope events to fit the novel into a two-hour screenplay, but she also foreshadows future stories and imports a resurgent Vampire Lestat from a later novel so that Tom Cruise can take a final bow and Jordan can give viewers a final scare. Strangely, for a film that I presume was meant to be a tentpole or a launch for a Lestat series of films, with or without Cruise, Rice and Jordan eliminate Lestat's role in ratting out Louis and Claudia to the villains of the Theatre des Vampires in Paris, which keeps Cruise off screen for nearly an hour. The entire Paris episode is streamlined (as is the larger European tour of the novel) and the romantic angle between Louis and Theater impresario Armand is downplayed to the point that it's unclear exactly why Claudia feels jealous. Leaving Lestat out of it undercuts the character's villainy. In the original novel, Wendigo tells me, he's a real hateful bastard who you'd want to see destroyed for the ways he torments Louis. In the film, he ceases to be a bad guy by a certain point simply by being absent, reappearing in 1988 as a pathetic character whom Louis has clearly outgrown -- though Wendigo informs me that the characters would enjoy a happy reunion later on.
Rice probably inherits some of her sensibility from Southern Gothic literature, which leads her characters in intimately strange directions with slaves (above) and one another (below).
Inevitably sacrificed is a lot of the novel's notorious homoeroticism. While Rice's vampires are sexually dead, they still experience intense romantic longing, and the feelings are mutual between Lestat and Louis, and later between Louis and Armand. It's less a case of Rice censoring herself, in Wendigo's opinion, than of Jordan failing to invest the appropriate scenes with the appropriate romanticism, and resistance from the lead actors. Brad Pitt, as Louis, seems especially determined not to have chemistry with either Cruise or Antonio Banderas as Armand. As we mentioned, where in the novel Louis is romantically obsessed with Armand for a time, in the film Pitt simply seems concerned with pumping Banderas for information.
Vampire dining tips from an indulgent Tom Cruise (above) and a dieting Brad Pitt (below)
Wendigo actually thinks that Pitt does a good job overall. He has a handle on Louis' personality, his sense of having fallen from grace and his perpetual regret. While casting Cruise as Lestat had caused controversy initially, Wendigo was as worried about Pitt, whom he then saw as a pretty boy whose primary attribute was his long hair. He was happily relieved once he saw the movie.
We didn't realize that Lestat's death scene was played by an animatronic robot until we saw the DVD documentary. Is that a tribute to Stan Winston or an insult to Tom Cruise?
Rice herself originally protested Cruise's casting, -- when she wrote the book, young Rutger Hauer was her ideal Lestat -- though she recanted quite publicly before the film came out. As Wendigo notes, Cruise is really playing the more rounded, developed Lestat of the Chronicles series as a whole than the villain of the first novel. As such, Wendigo thought he was at least as satisfactory as Pitt, though he notes that both men were really too old, already, for the characters they played. That aside, Wendigo was impressed by the range Cruise showed, especially in the 1988 scene in which Lestat is a frightened, confused wretch. I thought he made a good effort, too, though I felt he slipped into Tom Cruise-ness whenever the character had to become angry and shrill. Because I respect Brad Pitt now as a character actor and a comedian, I find him dull here in the straight role, and I find myself wondering strangely how the film would have worked with the lead roles reversed.
"Do you suffer from allergies? Or congestion? Then you shouldn't go about without a top on!"
The Nineteenth Century Nasonex Medicine Show de Paris
Perhaps surprisingly, Wendigo is most disappointed with Antonio Banderas as Armand. The character is supposed to be beautiful like the other vampires, and Banderas may have seemed more natural casting than either Pitt or Cruise. But Wendigo felt that he lost all his advantages once saddled with wig, red robe and heavy makeup. As an actor he did the best he could, but for Wendigo he's too palpably uncomfortable in his costumes to give the kind of performance the character requires.
For many viewers, the film was stolen from all of these actors by Kirsten Dunst as Claudia. She's really the central character of the central part of the film as the woman trapped in an immortal child's body exerts a femme-fatale influence over Louis while conspiring resentfully to destroy Lestat. For all that she's a more ruthless and vicious vampire than Louis, she's still his main reason to "live" rather than throw himself into a sewer and subsist on rats. The role made Dunst a star thanks to her uncanny performance, which sells a character concept that must have been nearly unimaginable to the little girl. I wouldn't be surprised if she's been driven to drink at least partially because people still tell her that this was the best work she's ever done. And it still might be.
Claudia's demise (above), and happier days (below).
Rice's genre innovation is fueled by a desire to get into the mind of a vampire, and its reflected in print by the vampires' desire to understand their own nature and history. Wendigo feels that losing a lot of Louis and Claudia's European tour also loses this aspect of longing for knowledge, self-understanding and community -- which would come to define post-Rice vampire fiction. This is one of several instances in which Jordan sacrifices theme and character development for spectacle and shock. Jordan was near the height of his powers at this time, with The Crying Game just behind him and Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy yet to come. He seemed like an inspired choice to direct Interview, but Wendigo feels that Jordan undercut the mood of the story with heavyhanded bits of black comedy, usually involving Claudia and her victims, and with scenes of pure silliness, as when Stephen Rea does a Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling of an overpass to impress Pitt. Indulgent bits like these are part of the film's overproduced quality. While it has to recreate the past, Wendigo thinks that the production goes overboard: too many extras, too much decoration, too much stardom. None of those things are necessary to get at the essence of Interview or any of Rice's novels -- though the lower-budgeted version of Queen of the Damned proved a botch for different reasons. While Wendigo still recognizes Jordan's Interview as a good film, he'd like to see someone try it again, as part of a complete Rice series, only with less money, fewer big names, but more integrity.
"Ford is a young man, about 22 years of age, and looks like a verdant youth from the country. In appearance he is a mere boy, and is the last person in the world to be taken as the slayer of the famous outlaw."
The New York Times, April 4, 1882.
It was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward.
I wonder how he feels.
"Jesse James," American folk song.
Recording by Vernon Dalhart (1925), uploaded to YouTube by cdbpdx
Robert Ford is an archetypal American traitor. If an American Dante were to stock his Inferno with his fellow nationals, we might expect to find Bob, if not his brother Charlie, smack at the bottom, gnawed on by an icebound Satan along with Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth. In his time, he was seen not only as a traitor but as a conspirator and a mercenary. The most interesting thing I found out while researching the historical side of this review was the way the "assassination" of Jesse James impacted the career of Missouri governor T. T. Crittenden. In 1886, four years after Ford killed James, Crittenden was being considered for a diplomatic post. President Grover Cleveland rejected him, reportedly explaining that people back east would object because of Crittenden's role in James's death. Regardless of what people thought of James, many recoiled from a politician's employment of hired killers to solve a law-enforcement problem. Imagine if an elected official today was revealed to have hired a hit squad to take out alleged terrorists on American soil. Some would lionize him, but many others would condemn him. The people who made the latter of the two movies discussed below may have understood or even encouraged the analogy; they at least play up the political aspect of James's death more than the other film does.
But while the men who did that theoretical official's dirty work might be vilified as mercenaries or mere thugs, they certainly wouldn't be thought of as traitors, even if they were "radical" Muslims turning on their own kind. Bob Ford endured as a villain in the American consciousness long after the scandal surrounding Crittenden was forgotten mainly because he was seen as a traitor of the most venal kind. But Americans also have a tendency to play devil's advocate. There's a curiosity about why people do wicked things, why they betray, even if it boils down to a banal assumption that everyone has his reasons. You see it in the reluctance in many Jesus movies to portray Judas as a pure villain. Of our proposed victims in the lowest circle of American Hell, probably only Booth is denied this kind of consideration (as far as I know). So it was probably inevitable that at least one writer would follow up on the folk singer's rhetorical wondering and attempt to reconstruct what made Ford tick, what he really thought of James, and how he felt about what he did to the bandit antihero.
I Shot Jesse James (1949) is Samuel Fuller's first film as a director. Despite the title, the movie isn't told by Ford in the first person or even fully from his point of view. Ford's story is sometimes overshadowed by the fitful romance of the two figures who with him form a triangle; his fictional girlfriend Cynthy the saloon singer (Barbara Britton) and sometime lawman Kelly, a figure very loosely based on the man who actually killed Ford in 1892. Kelly is played by Preston Foster, an implausible leading man at the time but top-billed just the same. Ford is played by John Ireland, who'd just made an impression in Red River the year before and would make another in All the King's Men. He looks a little old to play Bob, but that actually adds emphasis to the quasi-oedipal motivation Fuller gives him.
Bob Ford (John Ireland) is torn between two kinds of love, for Barbara Britton (above) and Reed Hadley (below) in I Shot Jesse James.
The liner notes for the Criterion Eclipse edition of I Shot invite us to see a homoerotic subtext in the relationship of Bob Ford and Jesse James. The film does leave room for speculation, but the vibe I got was more parricidal than homoerotic. Fuller's James is played by Reed Hadley, an actor out of radio with a voice of generic bland authority. He sports more of a beard than Brad Pitt will later and it gives him a patriarchal, Lincolnesque if not Jesus-like look. His most provocative scene has him taking a bath, Bob bringing in fresh hot water by the bucket. Jesse uses this occasion to give Bob a revolver as a present, not knowing that Bob is already studying to kill him. But Bob can't kill him with the loaded weapon while contemplating Jesse's naked back, and when the outlaw somewhat impatiently demands to have his back scrubbed, Bob obeys.
Why does Bob want to kill Jesse? It's nothing personal, at first glance; he wants the bounty money so he can afford to marry Cynthy. His tragedy throughout the film will be his repeated attempts to earn Cynthy's hand by all means necessary, his belief that going to the maximum, to the point of murder, proves the intensity of his love, even while his romantic ruthlessness repels her. By making Jesse's death the precondition of Bob's hoped-for marriage, Fuller makes it look as if Bob has to prove himself a man (to himself, that is) by destroying a paternal figure. Jesse's naked back in the bathtub doesn't represent homoerotic temptation as much as it does the oppressive intimacy of the family household to a cranky adolescent. Bob has to look at Jesse's clothed back before shooting him, but Fuller makes a point of having James say that he "feels naked" without his guns as he climbs the stool to adjust the painting. We don't get a flashback, but we can assume that Bob's thinking of that humiliating scene with the tub as he lays poor Jesse in his grave.
Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) seems almost by design the opposite of Fuller's film. Dominik's film is lavishly budgeted while Fuller's is an indy B film. Assassination is almost exactly twice as long as I Shot, and the proportions of pre and post-assassination story are reversed, 3/4 of Fuller's film playing out after James's death while Dominik dedicates only about 1/5 of his epic to the aftermath. At first, Assassination promises a drastically different interpretation of Robert Ford, but in broadest terms both films come to the same conclusion about him.
It worried me to see Ford (Casey Affleck) portrayed as an obsessed fan of Jesse James (Pitt), even though we know that Bob did idolize the outlaw as a boy. His use of the slightly anachronistic term "sidekick" to describe his desired position in the James Gang didn't exactly boost my confidence. It seemed as if Dominik was imposing a 20th or 21st century character archetype on a 19th century legend. Fortunately, Bob's character evolves, albeit under duress. His fandom (his collection of newspaper clippings and dime novels) becomes an object of ridicule within the gang, including brother Charlie, who humiliates him in front of Jesse by telling tales of Bob's childhood worship of the bandit. Amused, Jesse presses Bob for more stories, goading him into a painful recitation of a host of Lincoln-Kennedy type resemblances between Jesse and himself. All of this puts Bob on the road to another kind of parricide. Treated contemptuously as a child by his peers, he has to prove his manhood by repudiating his idol -- or destroying it.
Nearly everyone treats Bob (Casey Affleck, on the floor) like a child in The Assassination of Jesse James, including Jesse (Brad Pitt, on the couch)
In the middle of this, there's a bathtub scene, either a homage to the Fuller film or just another version of a historical incident. There's no back scrubbing, though. Instead, Jesse uses this moment to ask Bob, "Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?" By this point in the story, the answer is probably neither. The major difference in content between Assassination and I Shot is that the later film gives Bob plenty of reasons to repudiate Jesse. For all we know, Fuller's Jesse James is no more and no less than the folk hero turned patriarch. Dominik and Brad Pitt's Jesse is gradually revealed to us as a monster. His constant sense of bemusement emerges as a depthless contempt for everyone around him. He's a genial paranoid who infects everyone around him with fear and distrust of each other. It'll sound strange to some of you, but the long, brilliantly written and acted scenes when Jesse probes for weaknesses, embarrassments and self-betrayals reminded me of nothing so much as accounts I've read of the inner circle of Josef Stalin, where the dictator enjoyed seeing his cronies make abject asses of themselves, while they understood that the wrong word could cost them their lives. The big difference is that Jesse James settled scores in a hands-on manner; maybe he was more like Saddam Hussein in that respect. At the same time, Dominik's Jesse has a clear death wish, as if his paranoia about betrayal was in part a matter of wishful thinking. It's as if he felt there was nothing left for him but to wait for murder, so he might as well make a game of it and enjoy himself a little longer. Brad Pitt nails the subtlety of James's menace, playing the legendary outlaw as something more sinister than the legend without turning him into a blatant psycho. I've liked Pitt best in his smaller comic roles, when he abandons the cool of stardom (he's brilliant in Burn After Reading, for instance), but for now Jesse James is the best work I've seen from him.
So why does Bob Ford want to kill this Jesse? For self-preservation, mainly, since he'd killed Jesse's cousin Wood Hite and assumes that James will kill him if he ever finds out. For all he knows, Jesse might just kill him for no good reason. Killing James is also part of a bargain with Crittenden (an uncanny cameo by James Carville); a pardon for Hite's murder in return for killing Crittenden's enemy. At the same time, killing his idol is essential to differentiating himself from Jesse and thus, like John Ireland's Bob in Fuller's film, proving himself as a man.
Dominik's Bob also kills Jesse for fame just as he joined the gang for fame. Celebrity is the subject on which Fuller goes most astray from history. In real life, Ford toured the nation recounting his exploit and re-enacting it on stage. Dominik shows him leaping off the stage to attack a heckler who called him a coward. But Fuller shows us a Ford who can't make it through the first night of the tour without having crippling guilt-ridden flashbacks of the real Jesse. Fuller's Ford hits the boards just to make money, the same reason he does anything, while Dominik's revels in fame until the backlash against his "treachery" breaks his spirit.
Art imitates Art imitating Life: John Ireland prepares to make his exit (above), while Casey Affleck prepares to take a bow (below)
Both Fuller and Dominik show Ford struggling with guilt and defensiveness about his deed. Both films introduce a wandering musician who sings the historic folk song about the "dirty little coward" without knowing that he's serenading the subject of the song. In I Shot Bob interrupts the song in the middle to identify himself, then forces the reluctant performer to finish the tune before walking away. By the time a drunken Bob hears the song in a crowded bar in Assassination, most of his fight is gone after fights with hecklers. He listens to the full performance before identifying himself, throwing a gun at the singer's feet, correcting him on the number of Jesse's children, and taking a swing at a complete stranger that nearly knocks himself out. Fuller still has a lot of story to tell after the song, but Dominik closes his film soon afterward with a purposefully perfunctory narration of Ford's meaningless death. His Bob does eventually say that he's sorry for what he did to Jesse, but Fuller's Bob tops that. His dying words to Cynthy are "I loved him."
"People don't really like it that much."
Beyond its interesting conception of Bob's motivation and Ireland's earnest interpretation of it, I Shot Jesse James is weighed down by its lacklustre love triangle and the narrative limitations of a first-time director. It opens dynamically with an aborted bank robbery and has a fair climax as Foster enrages Ireland by showing him his back, but Fuller's early attempt at an adult western is a pale preview of the genre explosion unleashed by Anthony Mann and others just a year later. I felt that way before I saw The Assassination, so please don't think I'm judging a B movie in light of an A. As for Dominik's film, it lived up to its slow-building reputation as the best western of the past decade. It is lavishly visualized in classic widescreen style in a manner that had seemed to die with the debacle of Heaven's Gate. Roger Deakins's cinematography is stunning in nearly every scene, but particularly in an early train-robbery sequence that presents the passage of the night train through the woods as a spectral apparition attended by hooded spirits of the darkness. How's that for poetry? Trust me, Deakins's visual work is much more poetic, and dramatic. Kudos are also owed to art director Troy Sizemore and everyone else who contributed to the film's classic look. This is only Dominik's second feature. That may look like he's far ahead of where Fuller was when he made his Ford movie, but the older director's overall record is still something Dominik can only aspire to match for now. At least Dominik can say he made one of the best American films of 2007, that best of many recent years for American film. He has me looking forward to his future work.
Cinematography by Roger Deakins. How hasn't he won an Oscar yet?
Whether there's more to say about Robert Ford is another story. Based on what I've read recently I'd say there's room for another version that focuses on his adventures after James and his fatal feud with the real Kelly (or O'Kelly). What Dominik's film in particular tells me is that there's room yet for another full-scale account of Jesse James, whose most recent major biographer described him as an "American Terrorist." There may not be room anymore in the American consciousness for Jesse James the folk hero (see Henry King's 1939 saga for that), but if we still tell stories about James, Bob Ford will still "eat of Jesse's bread and sleep in Jesse's bed" as a footnote of American folklore.