public enemies: set the camera down and back away slowly

Sometimes I get excited about a movie and walk in the doors without noticing who directed it. This is a dangerous practice and I recommend it only for the strong-hearted. Who knows what dreck might be lurking behind an attractive poster? From the first shots, I ought to have known; the words MICHAEL MANN ought to have whispered themselves into my ear. In retrospect, it feels as if the director were standing in front of me, waving his arms around, shouting, "Don't look at the actors! Look at me instead!"

It's not dreck. It's a good story, and much of it is well-told; by some 50 minutes in, I was fully immersed. Here's the rub: it should not have taken that long. The story was good enough, the actors were good enough, I ought to have been immersed long before, if someone had, for God's sake, hogtied the camerman. Mr. Mann has joined my list of directors to whom I will send a tripod at Christmas with clear, easy-to-read instructions about how to use it. What's with all these ultra-ULTRA-close-up motion shots? Apparently Mann or his DP or his editor or SOME misguided sumbitch thought that was a clever way to introduce us to the characters, by showing us how massive his pores are as a piece of his face glides past the camera. Luckily, that stops after awhile. Maybe Mr. Mann (or his DP or his editor or whatever sumbitch sits at the desk where this particular buck stops) finally got engrossed in the story and in spite of himself just started letting himself tell it. Well done, Mr. Sumbitch. A belated realization, but better late than never.

This is not a film made by a director with vision, but a director with a longing to be visionary. He wants us to walk out of the theatre and say his technique is bold. OK, it's bold, and sometimes it works, but most times it detracts from all the things he did right, which are myriad. The period details, for one; I swear to God he Tardis-ed his cast back to the thirties to film this. The clothes, the cars, the apartments, the planes and motorcycles... details of both wealthy and poor seem right on. There's one scene where J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup! hurray) is giving medals to "young crimefighters". Granted, it's just a snippet of a scene, but kids are the hardest folks to displace in time because they haven't yet got the seasoned actor's self-awareness about the personal marks and influences cultural imprinting has left upon them, and these little boys I swear to God seem like they came from my father's generation and never touched an ipod or cruised online porn.

In fact, I wish I had the casting directors (let me check IMDB... Avy Kaufman and Bonnie Timmermann, it says) here right now: hearty handshakes and big sloppy kisses all around. The faces these guys found! Look around the room at the mugs on the Feds, on the Texas ranger guys, on the gangsters... great, classic mugs. On top of that, the pretty boys from my generation (Crudup and Depp specifically, but also Stephen Dorff and others) have reached that halfway-to-ninety point at which life has carved some hardship into the prettiness, or stretched it some with years of dissolute luxuriousness, and they're starting to look interesting instead of perfect. Crudup is spot-on as the fast-talking, obsessed Hoover, and Christian Bale, with the toughest job as the low-key, practical and hard-working Melvin Purvis, pulls it off with his usual adeptness, making the nonsensational crimefighter as interesting to watch as any mobster. My favorite bit might be a phone conversation between Hoover and Purvis, in which Purvis is saying he needs Texas rangers to finish the job right and Hoover keeps snapping, "I can't hear you," and Purvis keeps repeating it, patiently and stubbornly, until Hoover hangs up and the next thing we see are Texas rangers disembarking from a train (led by Stephen Lang in a really wonderful small role. As we left the cinema my boyfriend said, "Do you think he had enough lines that we could give him Best Supporting Actor?" He didn't, and that's too bad).

Mann's an odd fellow; his choices are odd. Some of this is filmed on video, or the film is overtaxed into graininess, and those places seem random. There's a shootout at a resort deep in the woods at night which is hypnotically lit by bursts of machine-gun fire, and that's all gorgeous, but then they run out into the woods and the moon becomes a very bright and very shifting light-source. Things like that don't matter if they work, if you're engrossed in the story and don't notice them. I guess I wouldn't care so much except for this unsettling suspicion that they were deliberate: that instead of making a film about John Dillinger, he's made a film about Michael Mann making a film about John Dillinger, and that kind of feedback loop just makes my head hurt.

what i've been watching: june, part 2

In the Electric Mist: (2009. dir: Bertrand Tavernier) In the Philip Marlowe novels, Raymond Chandler managed to create a world in which the mass of humanity was darkly twisted and corrupt, where the apparently innocent were not innocent, where Marlowe retained a semblance of self-respect only by holding himself aloof and living strictly by a self-imposed code of honor. Although Marlowe himself often comes away from his adventures feeling unclean and depressed, we the readers do not; we are shielded from it by his stoicism and underplayed ironic humor, and most of all by the gorgeous poetry at the soul of him. This is all in tribute to Chandler, who was an undisputed master of his craft. His books never get old, and he, with Dashiell Hammett and a few others, spawned an industry that has erupted into monstrous proportions today.

Take, for example, James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels. I read a clutchful of these when I was early in the throes of my vigorous love affair with New Orleans. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead was easily my favorite because in it the stoical and sober-alcoholic veteran Robicheaux gets dosed with acid by Hollywood types and for the rest of the book has periodic, wonderful conversations with the ghost of a Confederate general who may or may not be a projection of his own best self. The Louisiana of the Robicheaux books is as dark and morally polluted as anything Marlowe or the Continental Op or even the easily detestable Mike Hammer ever faced, all tough men surviving in ethically slimy times.

French director Bertrand Tavernier has teleported the story into post-Katrina days and cast Tommy Lee Jones in the lead (I always saw Fred Ward, but the craggy face is the important thing, and Jones is no poor man's second). In fact, it sports an enviable cast, including Peter Sarsgaard, an actor I usually love but who is missing something in this role, some intangible but necessary thing. An almost unrecognisable Levon Helm (again, a man I love) is the Confederate general and the wonderful Kelly Macdonald gamely forces herself into the cramped little thankless role of a good-hearted but nonetheless tainted-by-Hollywood actress. In the end, in spite of the talent involved, there's something crucial lacking here. The awful seaminess of this world seems contrived and untrue, as it sometimes does, truth be told, in Burke's books. The characters are too often no thicker than two dimensions and all the acting skill in the world can't fix a story that's broken at its very foundation.



the Other Boleyn Girl: >SPOILER ALERT< This is a nasty tale of a heartless girl who seduces her sister's lover (while the sister is sequestered in confinement bearing his child, and at the behest of her very ambitious and possibly sociopathic family) using a dastardly yet effective tactic of ongoing titillation and withholding until he divorces his wife (meanwhile inventing Anglicanism) to marry her. Then, when the going gets rough, she sleeps with her own brother in a desperate bid to bear the needed heir to the throne, thereby condemning him to death alongside her, and nearly destroying her sister's life out of sheer petty selfishness.

An American film was also made from the same wildly popular piece of chick-lit which spawned this one, and I watched this British take first because the actors are top-notch: Jodhi May gives a manically spirited and eerily convincing performance as Anne Boleyn, and I always love Nastascha McElhone, even here in her non-role as watcher and Silent Wronged Woman. There's a lot of handheld camera and reality-TV private interviews in which the characters explain their motivations and feelings directly to us, and I suppose that's designed to make us feel right at home with these old Tudors, but instead it feels cheap. At the end we see the Tower today, tourists visiting the spot where Anne got her head chopped off, and that feels even cheaper.




My Dinner With Jimi: (2003. dir: Bill Fishman) Think of it as a morality tale for the fame-hungry: these are Howard Kaylen's remembrances of the most exciting days of his life, when the Turtles were touring England on "Happy Together" and hanging at the Speakeasy with the hippest of the hip, and yet the conversations are all as asanine and dull as you'll find in any high school cafeteria any day of the week. Moral lesson the second: all the hippest of the hip we come across (Mama Cass, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Graham Nash, Donovan, Brian Jones, the Beatles and Hendrix) are just as bored as everyone else, pursuing drugs and sex to fill the time until they can get back onstage again. Is this news to anyone? There are exactly two moments when this fatuous piece of flaccidity comes to life: the worst is when John Lennon (Brian Groh) unleashes a devastating barrage of unfunny wit against the Turtles' rhythm guitarist, inspiring him to put down his guitar and never play again for the rest of his life. The scene crackles with an electricity of mortifying cruelty and bears with it an awful pong of validity. The other is when we finally get into the booth with the spinach omelettes and the man we've been waiting for... And even then, it's not that he ever says anything profound, it just always feels like he's about to. And, frankly, Hendrix had so much damn charisma that it stretches across the years and out of the grave, and a guy playing him with enough truth (as Royale Watkins does here) is a thing you can't look away from, even when the dialogue is this grindingly tedious.

what i've been watching: june edition

Death Proof: (2007. dir: Quentin Tarantino) Kurt Russell deserves an Oscar just for the moxie it took to tackle this role. In fact, Stuntman Mike might, in another film, one that's interested in character, be very intriguing indeed. Death Proof is not that film. In fact, as a piece of cinema, I doubt that it rates highly on anyone's scale. As an homage to a cinematic era gone by, however, it's a little slice of genius. From that opening screen they used to show before all the drive-in movies to the editing glitches he inserts to mimic the hiccup between scenes that happened when they changed the reels and complete with old-film scratches, it's like stepping back in time. If only I had tinny old speakers to hang from my window-frame. He even caught the sound quality just right, although I don't know enough about the mechanics of audio to know why it seemed that way.

It's got the "id"-heavy plot that's short on sense but wallows in sordidness, which is very satisfyingly as it should be. Structurally, it's too loose and involves characters too adolescent to be truly engaging, but it's nonetheless got moments of utter, jaw-dropping fascination. My own favorite is the record-geek bit in the car as the doom-bound girls ride to their date with destiny, pleasantly drunk, all grooving to a perfect song and talking about Pete Townsend, oblivious to the autobeast hunkered and waiting, headlights off, just around the bend. Those early, creepy shots of Stuntman Mike's deathmobile at rest, too, are very effective, particularly when the girl goes out for a smoke and you can almost feel the car leering at her from its shadow in the rain.

It's too long, with a doubled plot, and the Tarantino-speak conversations between the girls don't have the zest and buoyancy of his best work, but it'll leave you feeling a little soiled (in a good way), just like those old bottom-of-the-barrel Russ Meyer or Last House On The Left double features did in the old days.


Dollhouse, the season wrap-up: (2009. creator: Joss Whedon) As promised in the wake of the initial disaster area of the first eps, I stuck with it through the end of the season. For those of you who didn't, it got good from the sixth through the ninth episodes ("Man in the Street", "Echoes", "Needs" and "Spy in the House of Love"), then put it on autocruise for the tenth ("Haunted"). The season enders ("Briar Rose" and "Omega") which apparently earned the show at least another season's reprieve from the chopping block from those mad headsmen at Fox, were wildly ambitious and very disappointing, largely due to one very important casting choice (I won't spoil it, but it's somebody we Joss-heads love playing a hithertofore unseen character we've been building up to all damn season long, and playing it underwhelmingly). In its favor, even the bad episodes have interesting things in them, and the best make good use of the unexpected in that wonderful old-time Joss way (like the revelation about Ben and Glory in the fifth season of Buffy, or Spike getting his soul back).


the New World (Massive Extendo-Version): (2005. dir: Terrence Malick) Even a devoted Luddite finds things about this new techno-age to cherish, and one of the best for me is that a movie can keep morphing long after its initial release. A few years ago I had a beautiful dream that Coppola would keep re-releasing Apocalypse, Now! every third year with a different shape and focus. It's possible that wasn't the best idea I've ever had, but here, in consolation, is another of my all-time favorites in a whopping new package. This ran 149 minutes at the theatre, the initial DVD was a petite 135, but all lovely things come to those who wait, and now we have the Big Monster Godzilla version, clocking in at a gorgeously self-indulgent two hours and 52 minutes. I accept, although I can't really wrap my mind around it, that even at its shortest it was too long for some folks' taste. However, for those to whom sensuality and the numinous are huffed up from the same feedbag, this new version is a three-hour retreat chock-full of spiritual rejuvenation.

It holds some surprises. Malick is notorious for shooting hours and days of an actor only to leave his entire performance on the cutting-room floor* (rumor has it that Viggo Mortenson, Martin Sheen, Bill Pullman, Gary Oldman, Lukas Haas and Mickey Rourke were all originally in the Thin Red Line). In this long version, Michael Greyeyes sees a great chunk of his role restored, and who knew Roger Rees was in it at all? Ben Chaplin, poor fellow, is still just a guy pulling an oar in a longboat, and we can only guess what his role originally entailed. The most important alteration is in Pocahontas' recovery from her grief over Captain Smith's supposed death at sea. In the old cut, we see her crazed with sorrow and then, apparently with the passing of time, she finds solace in good work and then John Rolfe casts his eyes on her and her salvation is complete. In this one, she is grief-stricken for a very long time and given up for hopeless by society. She decides to commit suicide but experiences a very beautiful and supremely Malickian moment of grace and her salvation rises up, crucially, not from the favors of John Rolfe, but from her own relationship with the divine. It seems so vital to the lifeblood of the story that I'm surprised Malick allowed it to be cut in the first place. No matter. It's back now, amid all manner of beauty else.

* Kills me that the cutting-room floor is only metaphorical now. I love to think of that little closet-like, windowless room with a pale, tireless person hunched over a Moviola and the floor crunchy with filmstrips.

star trek: it's all fun and games until somebody loses a planet

>SPOILER ALERT<

The first nightmare I ever had, or the first one I can remember, had Kirk and Spock in it. It involved the mixing of magic potions that looked like buckets of paint: the brown one was a healing salve and that was for Captain Kirk, the blue one was a toxin and that was for Mr. Spock. I, however, managed somehow to sit in the blue bucket and when I stood up and looked at my hands, three of my fingers were gone: two from the left hand, one from the right.

One of the many thousands of things my mother did right in raising us was that we watched the original Star Trek faithfully from the first episode to the last. I was two when it first aired, and I guess I slept through most of it, but by the third season I can remember a serious discussion between my older brother, my mother and me, about whether or not we'd be allowed to stay up for the new nine o'clock airtime on Friday nights to watch. (We were. She was and is a total champ.) I can very distinctly remember that first surreal time I saw Abe Lincoln sitting in the middle of space talking to Captain Kirk. I found the use of his word "negress" when addressing Lt Uhura slightly embarrassing although I couldn't place why. Apollo was the first Greek God I knew about because he's the only one who ever appeared in an episode. To this day I mistrust the Earps and suspect they were the worst of the bad guys at the OK Corral. You could say with some truth that everything I knew about life before the age of seventeen I learned from Star Trek, Shakespeare, or Hollywood.

Mr. Spock was my first great love, and remains one of the few fictional figures from my childhood who still resonates strongly in my underconscious as an adult. That's all prologue to the admission that I went into this new Star Trek with some trepidation, and emerged with wildly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't remember the last time I had so much fun sitting in a theatre. It had me from the first moments: that lovely, stoical Captain Robau (Faran Tahir) going to his death at Romulan hands, the woman in labor in the midst of deadly chaos while her husband sacrifices his life to save hundreds... I'm weeping just thinking about it. And after that, it gets downright delightful.

Here are some things I love: Simon Pegg is a brilliant Montgomery Scott, for one, and the Endorian Mud Flea vaccination scene between Bones (Karl Urban) and Kirk (Chris Pine) is hilarious. My sincerest gratitude and joy go out to Anton Yelchin and whoever wrote this script for turning Chekov into what he ought to have been all along. (Apparently this is the young man who plays Kyle Reese in the new Terminator movie, or "Kyle FRICKIN' Reese" as an outraged blogger put it in a recent rant. He seems an unlikely choice to carry the Michael Biehn sultriness, but after the perfection of his Chekov, I'll give the boy plenty of room to take his shot.) It's also exactly right, very satisfying, that Kirk gets the crap beat out of him again and again, like a repeating motif. It's the only possible counterweight to that young Kirk arrogance, and we wouldn't put up with him without it. The Lens-Flare-As-Futuristic-Aesthetic tactic is bold but works for me, and the Romulans are fantastic, with their ferociously antisocial look. I could gaze upon Eric Bana's mutated face for some hours and feel that my time was well-spent. There are fierce ice-bears! And crazy giant snow-lobsters! And how about Scottie's little sidekick, eh?

As with most fun, however, there's a downside. All credit to these guys for doing the research, learning the mythology, then creating a credible time disruption to explain the many changes they make. That said, I'm just not ready to live in a universe in which Vulcan has been destroyed and Spock and Uhura spend their time kissing. (Yes, you could argue that I've lived my whole life in a universe that didn't have Vulcan in it... but you'd be wrong.) It kills me that a whole generation of kids, maybe multiple generations, will grow up thinking that this alternate history is the true one, the important one, relegating the original, the Star Trek that thrives, a living universe inside my head, to the status of the passe, the mendacious, or, at best, the secondary. On the one hand, you have to admire any approach that brings this kind of vitality into what had become an inert franchise, but at what cost?

Consider Mr. Spock. The beautiful thing about Spock, one of the crucial factors which lift him above the meager ranks of Character and into the realm of the Archetype, is that he is, ultimately, the Man Alone. Because his Vulcan and human halves vie in neverending and always fascinating conflict, he walks alone, by choice and necessity. And as a direct result of it, he belongs to all of us. Any fantasy can be projected onto him; he can fit into almost any story; it's why so much slash fiction has been lovingly devoted to him over the years. He is a brilliant embodiment of the war between the left and right halves of the brain, that age-old moral dispute between making one's life-choices from the heart or from the mind. As such, he is a vital and never-aging animus projection whose ongoing drama offers lessons for anyone who uses the current homosapiens version of the bicameral brain.

This new Spock, I fear (very well played by Zachary Quinto, he of the impossibly kissable mouth... see above), will be reduced to the status of mere romantic hero. If he continues (in the inevitable sequels) on his current path favoring his human side over his Vulcan, Spock takes a step backward out of his previous greatness into a life of possible happiness, but little more. No doubt he will serve the Federation and Captain Kirk with loyalty and glittering hyperintelligence as before, but we as a people will have lost a hero of larger-than-life nobility, wisdom and self-sacrifice. At the risk of blaspheming, I'd like to submit into evidence the following example: remember the Last Temptation of Christ? The devil lets Willem Dafoe step down off the cross and live a happily married life with Barbara Hersey's Magdalene, and at the natural end of it he realizes with some horror that he has betrayed the very heart of what he was set on this earth to do, thrown aside his own greatness of purpose for some scant years of human contentment.

Call me alarmist, but I fear that our Spock is about to make a similar mistake.

in which the good guys win and all's right with the world

The week of panic and sleeplessness is done now. I've been waking up weary every day, not remembering my dreams, with only vaguely troubling recollections of nights poisoned by sisyphian tasks and trying to find my way through convoluted labyrinths of alleyways and dead ends. None of it had any obvious connection with football, but I remember. I remember World Cup 2006, recorded in my personal calendar as the Month of Adrenaline, Bar Food, and Heartbreak, and this week felt very much like it. Every few days I'd get an email from my friend Derek in Georgia, or he'd get one from me, saying something Hunter S Thompsonish like, "My fingernails are gone. I seem to chew them off in my sleep. Except that I don't sleep. Sleep has abandoned me. I wander in hallucinations in which Sir Alex Ferguson is thirty feet tall and has terrible sharp teeth and he walks the streets of Rome wearing a frock coat and holding a barely-contained cerberus on a leash, a cerberus with the snarling heads of Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo."

In short, yesterday was the Champions League final, the showdown at the Stadio Olimpico between FC Barcelona and the reigning victors and all-around bad guys Manchester United who have been managed for many thousands of years, or since the world was young, by the strangely intimidating and gum-chewing Scotsman Ferguson, and fronted by that freight-train of a power-striker Rooney and his rabid and blood-hungry monster sidekick, Ronaldo.

So much for the bad guys. The white-hats are FC Barca: Catalan princes, purveyors of beautiful football, passers extraordinaire, carriers of the Dutch tradition of triangles and constant motion. This is the team that stands for all that is anti-fascist and anti-Franco, the team that carefully kept its kits clear of advertisers for many years, then donated the space generously to Unicef when it might have gained several millions of Euros from some wealthy maker of plastics or driller of crude oil. (Man U's sponsor is AIG. The devil is at work here, my friends. He laughs at us.)

And this year the Football Gods have made their choice clear: Barca has taken the treble. First, they won the Copa Del Rey in a truly inspiring victory over Athletic Bilbao, then they secured the number one spot in La Liga, and last night they took home the big-eared superdaddy of them all, the Champions League UEFA Cup Trophy.



Having managed to avoid watching Man U play all season, they somehow grew in my mind to become a vast, unstoppable force. When I turned the TV on early before yesterday's match, natterer after natterer predicted a hands-down, unequivocal win for the English side. Not a soul had any vision at all, or was willing to lay money on poetry winning over Mammon. (Of course, this is ESPN we're talking about. Anyone who watched their coverage of the last World Cup associates the words lame and asinine with the ESPN empire.) I wish I'd taped those cynics. I'd like to see them eating their left-brain, pragmatical, evil-wins-because-it-has-more-money words on a hefty Catalan platter today.







It's hard to say what did the trick, exactly. Man U hit the pitch all gangbusters and superpowered, controlling the game for the first ten minutes. Granted, Barca have a sort of tradition of starting slow, probing and exploring, finding their passing rhythm before making their first move, but in those first ten minutes I think Ronaldo created at least three chances for himself... all saved by my boys, of course. (The backline played tremendously yesterday. Sylvinho and Pique were downright heroes, and Carles Puyol is a damn superman, reining Ronaldo in over and over and getting continually battered for his troubles. I hope he's sitting today in a hot-tub full of supermodels. Certainly he's earned it.) And then somehow Cameroonian marvel Samuel Eto'o slipped up the touchline with the ball at his feet and tapped it past keeper Van der Sar into the net, ten minutes into the match, and I've never seen anything so quickly and finally turn an entire tide. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. Like all the life drained right out of Ferguson's men, and they were transformed in that one instant from a smoothly-oiled fighting machine into a pile of disengaged parts, still fighting, but without effect.



If you've never seen Barca play, you're missing a great pleasure. The footwork, the pace, the aesthetics of the passing... Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez are like two halves of a single person when they move the ball between them up the pitch. Much of the greatness of Barca lies in its youth training, a school known as La Masia. Boys are trained early in the ways of Beautiful Football, and a great many of them stay with the team for many years, a rarity in these days of nomadic players following the siren call of their bank accounts. Both Iniesta and Xavi rose up out of this youth program, as did manager Pep Guardiola (seen flying, below), first goalkeeper Victor Valdes and superstar Argentine forward Lionel Messi, as well as more recent additions Sergi Busquets and Gerard Pique. Intrepid Captain Puyol has been a staunch Catalan for nearly his entire career.



But these are the giggly mutterings of the near-exhausted. I've got that same empty feeling I had after the marathon that was the World Cup, this time with a patina of happiness washed across it, but there's that melancholy, too. The season's over. I'll have nothing but World Cup qualifiers, never my favorite dish on the menu, for a good three months. Add to that the prospect of three more months of nothing but summer fare at the cinema (GI Joe?! Trans-frickin'-formers?!) and I'm at a loose end. I've been watching the first season of Alan Ball's True Blood, which I'm enjoying (cajun country, vampires, and all those stellar character actors that get work on HBO. What's not to like?), but I'm jonesing for an obsession. My immediate impulse is to go out and watch Star Trek again, see if I like it as well as I thought I did the first time, put off Terminator Salvation for a few more days, and hope that if I leave myself open and vulnerable, some god or other might show up in the form of a flash of brilliant inspiration. Here's hoping.

there are times when tim roth is my freaking hero

Everybody knows him. If you're American, you probably didn't see him first in those early, gritty films about poverty and thuggery in England (Alan Clarke's Made In Britain, Mike Leigh's Meantime), but Quentin Tarantino saw to it that his laugh is etched in your mind from a moment that may have altered cinematic history in our time: in Resevoir Dogs, when the guy whose ear Michael Madsen's just taken during his little torture-dance asks Roth, "How do I look?" I may be misremembering my timeline, but it seems to me that a whole new Comedy of the Grotesque was invented in that scene, the repercussions of which have yet to play fully out. Roth has worked with Tom Stoppard on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Vatel, Stephen Frears on the Terence Stamp comeback vehicle the Hit (available this month for the first time on DVD), Robert Altman on Vincent and Theo, and Francis Coppola on Youth Without Youth. In all these many years, I have yet to see him act badly, but there's one performance that stands like a giant over them all.

1995 was the year of the Scottish film. Before Braveheart, there was Rob Roy: a sentimental, epic blockbuster evincing traditional Republican family values, hard work, stoical persistence and physical courage, the importance of living by a personal code of honour, and taking up arms against The Man if you're feeling oppressed. I watched it several times in the theatre that summer, partly to take a long and vicarious holiday in Scotland, but mostly because Tim Roth gives one of the most polished, fantastic performances ever put on film.



His name is Archibald Cunningham. From the moment he walks into view, languid, limp-wristed and sleepy-eyed, less like a fop than somehow like a little girl, his mouth a rack of bad teeth periodically displayed in a smile that is simultaneously insulting and obsequious, he commands the screen, stealing the film from powerhouse presences like Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange as well as formidable Brits like John Hurt and Brian Cox. The character is very finely written: a poverty-struck bastard with courtly ambitions, only a total lack of conscience and an unearthly ability in a fencing match to recommend him. Roth turns in a perfect double performance: there's Archibald at rest, when he is out of sight of his superiors, and there's Archibald with courtly airs and careful jibes when in. As if that's not enough, there are various shades in between, when Archibald is in the presence of inferiors or those he has not yet placed in the social hierarchy (the cage in which he lives), and Roth captures them all with a breathtaking effortlessness. He communicates with the motion of a facial muscle or cast of the eye as much as if he were to deliver, Shakespeare-like, a soliloquy directly to the camera. There is no moment when we do not know what he is doing or thinking, although his words often belie the truth, and he never becomes predictable. I'm happy to go out on a limb here and call his final swordfight against Rob Roy McGregor (an excellent vehicle for Neeson), who is brandishing a huge two-handed Claymore against Cunningham's quick sabre, the best duel ever put to film. Not only are acres of nuances exquisitely captured by the camera, not only is the action given plenty of space and punctuated with just the right amount of close-up, but Roth keeps communicating his character to us, silently, while he fights.

He was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for it, losing out to Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. Watching it again after all this time has reminded me of a thing that was chewing at the edges of my mind while I watched Heath Ledger as the Joker. Something felt wrong to me, just off-kilter, and I could never put my finger on it; Archibald Cunningham has snapped it into focus. There is no moment in Roth's entire performance which is not absolutely clear: no gesture, no grimace, no spoken word. Every choice is clearly made and clearly delivered. Next to it, Ledger's Joker looks out of focus and unfinished, as if he had all the right instincts about the role but needed more time to rehearse, to set his choices finally and completely, to deliver them cleanly.

Nowadays you can see Roth any given Wednesday night on Lie to Me, one of those 1001 All-Cops-And-Federal-Agents-Are-Smug-and-Self-Righteous shows we apparently love in this country (I hope to God that real cops aren't as obnoxious as the ones on TV. Can you imagine if your husband was killed and Vincent D'Onofrio walked in, turned his head sideways, started playing with your earrings while standing way too close, and asked if you secretly wanted your husband dead?). He plays a specialist in body-language who can tell instantly if you're lying. I've watched one ep. Frankly, it makes me nervous. I've seen too many fine actors lose all love of craft and joy in the process while picking up that astronomical weekly check from those bigwig studios. (And here, insert a wistful hello to my once-beloved Vincent D'Onofrio.) I wish him well with it. His kids will have their choice of expensive universities, and that's nice for him, but I don't give a crap about it. I'm selfish, and I'd rather he keep on acting well.

che part two: revolution as a protracted slog through increasing hardship into utter defeat

Yes, I did indeed see it without having seen part one, which was showing during the weeks that my Sweet Man had his heart attack and super quadrillion bypass surgery (which all seems to have come out just fine, gods willing, and thanks for asking)...

Undaunted, and convinced that these were films that ought to be given the fullscreen cinematic treatment, I took my seat in the darkened house after the Cuban revolution had been won and just as one shaven-headed Comrade Guevara (Benicio del Toro) was wending his way to Bolivia to do his level best to see communism proliferate throughout the new world. The upside is that I got to see it in its fullscreen cinematic glory. The downside is that because I'd missed the buildup in Cuba, the whole venture seemed doomed from the outset: two hours plus spent with a band of patriots getting scragglier, hungrier, more discouraged and disease-ridden, with nothing but camaraderie and noble rhetoric to buoy them up. Even if you didn't already know that Che left a handsome young corpse in a Bolivian mountain village, you're not long into the film before you can see they're heading inexorably for a bad end.

That said, this is not a gruelling film (as are, for instance, Synecdoche, New York in an interesting way and Australia in a gruelling way). It's not difficult to sit through, it doesn't feel too long, and it's done with such a deft, light touch and a facility with the unexpected that one becomes engrossed in spite of any nagging political misgivings or preconceptions.

The politics of Guevara's legacy (hero of the people? bloodthirsty egoist chasing his own martyrdom? are the two mutually exclusive?) are of course endlessly debatable. Although this camera tries to keep an objective distance, one cannot avoid the magnetic draw of Benicio/Che's effortless and unswerving charisma, and I daresay even the most pacifist among us feels, almost unconsciously, a certain disrespect toward the leader of the Bolivian communist party (played by Lou Diamond Phillips, a yuppie sweater slung across his absurdly natty outfit as he trudges through the jungle to meet with Che) who refuses to endorse an armed revolution.

The script is startling in its utilitarianism. It hasn't got a funny moment. It has no small talk in it, except early on at a Cuban party, shot very much like it might have been in an early-70s docustyle (aka Medium Cool or the Candidate or fill in your favorite Robert Altman film) where the director gets all the period details right in costume and setting then wanders around listening in on what folks are talking about. Other than that, nobody says anything that's not about the matter at hand, which is usually something like what will we eat tonight? will we pay them for the pig or just take it? where is the ambush set? where can we cross the river safely? we need medicine. Do the villagers trust us? can we trust them? how can we bolster morale? and that may be a pretty fair depiction of jungle guerrilla warfare.

This project was originally slated for Terrence Malick to direct (a human who I sometimes in giddier moments think I love over all others, unless you count Mr. Spock as a real person). Soderbergh gives a few tips of the hat towards the other director in some moments of gorgeous nature cinematography (a shot straight up at overhead trees took me back to that brilliant final shot of the New World, and one from above of water reacting to soldiers wading through it might have been lifted directly from the Thin Red Line), but you'd never mistake this for the Malick version. For one thing, the inimitible Terrence tends to take the bones of history, dissemble them, and let them resettle in new and interesting shapes as he shoots. This one feels more structured by events as they have been set down in The Stone Tablet That Is History. (Please note: I do not mean that is a bad thing. I enjoy the playing-fast-and-loose-with-history only when it is a mad, visionary virtuoso like Malick doing the playing.) Also, although the jungle is a major player, here is not that strange and wonderful Malickian sense of man, ants, tree-limbs and musk-oxen being equal parts of one and the same vast and mysterious entity.

So much for what it's not. What Soderbergh DOES give us is a story intriguingly told via almost random but chronological dips into the daily lives of these soldiers, in short pieces with little attention to follow-up, scenes edited tersely but without sacrificing breathing space. And, of course, he gives us the preternaturally photogenic Benicio del Toro (I've always thought that Johnny Depp would love to look like del Toro; lose the obstacle of his extreme prettiness without losing photographability). The bulk of the film is done in medium or long shot with an apparently populist view to avoiding an overemphasis on the man himself, so when we finally get a sustained closeup (during an asthma attack about 2/3 of the way down the road), he is almost hypnotically fascinating to watch, a godsend and a revelation. During those final, quieter scenes of imprisonment, I found myself wishing for a different film, one in which I could spend more quality time with Che... Although, in retrospect, I think it's more time with Benicio I'm really looking for, and that, I'm happy to say, will soon be satisfied when the long-salivated-for Wolf Man movie comes out.