the conspirator: mothballs

*SPOILERS, but nothing you won't find in a history book*

I leaned over to my boyfriend after seeing the preview for this and like a smartass said, "I guess the sun was so young then it hadn't learned how to shine properly." I'd always assumed the photographs back then were dim and mud-colored due to caveman camera technology, but director Robert Redford & Co would have us believe (or perhaps don't trust us to otherwise suspend our disbelief) that things looked that way in real life. This is my boyfriend's two cents: he says they filmed The Conspirator to look as it would have looked had there been movie cameras at the time of Lincoln's assassination. Whether it was a good idea or not, he says, they pulled it off swimmingly.

Alright; he's the expert. For the record, it was not a good idea. Instead of experiencing the world with the color and immediacy with which folk of the day would have experienced it, we are forced to walk through a museum piece, all dust and sepia tones, which acts as a sort of Brechtian distancing device to keep us from immersing ourselves too deeply into the story.

Fat chance of that, pal. What WAS a good idea was to tell the story of Mary Surratt. It's still a good idea, and someday, someone will tell it. This, on the other hand, is a message with the trappings of a movie stuffed around it to create a two-hour padding. The message is simple: even in wartime, even under the direst and most emotional of circumstances, everyone, even the guilty, deserves the dignity of a fair trial. Good, timely message. Redford feels passionately about it. My time would have been better spent if he'd gone on TV and said it once, then sent me a good book on Mary Surratt from which I could actually learn something.

After a short preamble to show us what a noble and effective soldier our hero was during the War, we plunge right into the evening of the assassination, seeing it from many viewpoints, many threads pulling together into the single tragedy. Even Americans don't always know the whole of it: that as well as Booth there were assassins dispersed simultaneously to kill both the Vice President and the Secretary of State in attempt to unravel the entire fabric of the government. The fellow assigned to the VP lost heart, skedaddled and got drunk. Lewis Powell, on the other hand, made an attack so vicious on William Seward that it was a wonder he survived. It's a fascinating story. There's a book called Manhunt that you won't be able to put down, it's so compelling. It begins in the same place as this movie, on the fateful evening, and follows up through Booth's run through the hinterlands and final showdown in the Garrett barn. I mention it in case you decide to watch this, because afterwards you'll have a million questions about what really happened. You come away from this movie feeling like you're only getting a few glimpses of the real story, that things crucial to your understanding are being obscured from you, perhaps deliberately. A film director is like a dictator, hopefully a benevolent one; when we step into the darkened cinema we are entering into a covenant with him, trusting that he will reveal everything we need to know so that the film will make sense as a full experience, even if that experience is only for entertainment purposes. When there's a message he wants delivered, as there is here, that covenant's importance is heightened: he is trying to change the way we think, and so has an obligation to lay the facts out plainly so that we can make up our minds. On this count, the tyrant Redford lets us down.

Poor Robin Wright as the beleaguered Mary gives us not a person but a plaster saint, pulling her face into a beatific, slightly pained mask, as if she hadn't so much created her character as purloined her from looking at paintings of the Virgin Mary and various martyred and anorexic saint-girls throughout the ages. Contrast this Mary Surratt with her speechless but fully alive counterpart in John Ford's Prisoner of Shark Island. That movie is about Dr. Mudd, but even in just glimpses we see a fuller woman than we ever do in Redford's bloodless, lifeless and stubborn-jawed soapbox harangue. I don't blame Wright; I blame Redford. Going in open-minded, one emerges with the uncomfortable notion that Surratt was guilty as charged but that Redford is not comfortable saying so, that he doesn't trust us to swallow his medicine unless he sugar-coats it with a suspicion of innocence and maternal saintliness. In the end, although her guilt is not important to his message, it certainly is to us, his frustrated audience. The long time he spends on the execution is wasted time, except insofar as the period details might be educational. Involving us emotionally in these deaths would depend on our giving a crap about the defendants, which in turn would depend on our having got to know them in some way, and we don't, not at all, not even Surratt. The bits of humanity we see of her are sphinxlike and inconclusive, and until we have made up our minds (which we never do, finally, until we go home from the cinema and crack open some books) about her actions and, more importantly, her intentions concerning the assassination attempt, we will not commit our emotions one way or the other.

It's an all-around ill-considered venture, filled to busting with great actors in supporting and cameo roles, and therefore redolent of great expectations sadly unfulfilled. The dinner-table conversation between Kevin Kline as the Secretary of War and Tom Wilkinson as the southern Senator Johnson, the only man who recognizes the dangers of sacrificing Surratt's civil rights to placate the ravening crowd, made me long for an altogether different film. Stephen Root delivers another knock-out in a long series of small roles made great through sheer mastery of his art, and Norman Reedus in a tiny role as the loathesome Lewis Powell is single-handedly worth the price of admission.

I'm a James McAvoy fan ever since watching the double-punch of his Dan Foster in the original, magnificent State of Play and his Joe Macbeth in the dazzling Macbeth portion of the appallingly ill-conceived series Shakespeare Re-told (it's not the stories which make those plays great. He stole those from all over. It was the writer's extraordinary insight into human psychology, as well as a certain facility he had with words). In the Conspirator, this badly-edited, badly-timed hodgepodge, McAvoy is the young lawyer roped into a terrible gig and wanders, lost but well-intentioned, reiterating his bewilderment as people ask him again and again why he's taken on this lose/lose case which will destroy his career and reputation regardless of outcome. The scriptwriter can't seem to think of anything else to talk about, and it makes for extraordinarily dull playing. My greatest moment of delight is in fact at the end, when we're told that this seemingly ill-fated, sad-sack character went on to become an early editor of the Washington Post, no doubt wreaking a great deal of havoc-like vengeance on the system which had so betrayed him in his idealistic youth.

the master in his youth: dirk bogarde and once a jolly swagman

Apparently everyone but me knows that this title is the opening line from "Waltzing Matilda"; "swagman" is Australian slang for a hobo who wanders the Aussie bush. The movie is about Speedway motorcycle racing in the forties, a sport that originated in Australia and exerted a Nascar-type appeal over blue-collar English communities. The old, tired champion racer is Australian, although he doesn't speak with an accent (nor does his sister, who winds up marrying Bogarde's character), and he listens to the Australian anthem while shut up in a rest-home trying to recover from his career-ending injuries and resulting depression. That cleared up, the title still makes no sense, and, in fact, it was later changed to the more appropriate but truly awful Maniacs on Wheels.

This is a strange little film. Although it's British, it has one of those Hayes-Code-type internal wars going on: all the energy and excitement comes exclusively from the racing, with the rest of the world portrayed as grey, dull, and uninspired, a place to be escaped at all cost, but the pounding, reverberating moral to which the film keeps returning is something like, "Better to be miserable, broken, poverty-stricken and depressed than make a huge fortune from racing bikes." When the Bogarde character at the end bows to the moral and makes the decision to leave behind the one skill he has, the one thing in the world he does well (and he does it very well indeed), already having proven to himself and the world that he can find no other way to support himself much less the pending family he's about to father by returning to his estranged wife's arms, it feels like the most ridiculous, anti-rational decision in the world. Then, magnify the absurdity with the fact that the wife is perhaps the most astonishingly non-existent character I've ever seen take up more than a cameo's corner of space in a film. She recurs throughout, but her decisions never make a lick of sense. First she loves him, then she hates him, then she returns to him, then she leaves him,-- all well and good, humanity being the fickle and passionate thing that it is, except that the way it's played and the way it's written seem random, like William Burroughs' cut-up writings.

Characters and morals aside, the races are well-photographed, even incorporating POV shots from the bikes themselves, quite a feat at a time when cameras were huge, unwieldy beasts. There's a nice bit in the middle where Bogarde and Cyril Cusack spend a peaceful time on a naval ship in the midst of a war, woolgathering and watching clouds go by, and I was pulled along through the unfolding story by my own wonderment about whether it was ever going to make sense. A moment that stands out with particular horror is when our hero's mother takes him to the window to explain life to him, showing him girls and women caring tenderly for children, then showing him a group of boys fighting and tussling. This is what women do; that is what men do. Spine-chilling in its implications, and delivered up completely without irony: like a black-and-white jail cell that no one can escape.

All that said, my esteem for Bogarde grows in leaps the more I watch him, and I'm excited about these old things being scraped up out of some old vault and newly released for public consumption (Simba, Esther Waters, the Singer not the Song, So Long at the Fair, the Spanish Gardener). Watching this one feels very much like stepping back in time, into that post-war gloom that loured over England like a hunkered vulture until the Beatles single-handedly dispersed it and restored colour to the world. (Anyway, that's the history as it was taught to my American generation.)

last night's double feature: snow white: a tale of terror and the cabinet of dr caligari

Fairy tales are meant to be dark. Scrub them up, Disney-fy them, they are sweet stories which buoy the desperate, everything-will-turn-out-OK optimism we try and foist on our kids. Even so, the only reason you still remember those Grimms' and Andersen's picture books from your earliest childhood are that baneful images from those stories got planted deep in your fertile child's mind.

There's a horse's head nailed to a gateway in "The Goose Girl", but it still sings to the princess. Cinderella's wicked stepsisters cut off their heels and toes trying to fit into that insidious slipper. "The Little Match Girl" details her final hallucinations as she freezes to death in the street. In "the Red Shoes", a girl cannot stop dancing until she convinces an executioner to chop off the feet to which the shoes in question have attached themselves like malevolent parasites. Even Disneyfied, Pinocchio and Geppetto still get swallowed by a damn whale, and that's pretty creepy. One of the things Disney did best (when I was a kid; maybe they still do) was to keep one very disturbing image in each movie to balance out all the sweet la-di-da and whistle-while-you-work. My mom remembers being scared to tears by the witch in Snow White. My personal scared-crapless nightmare came from the Banshee in the otherwise innocuous Darby O'Gill and the Little People. And, like JFK and John Lennon, everyone remembers where they were when Bambi's mom got killed.

All that is preamble as to why I looked forward so long to Snow White: a Tale of Terror, a television thing that came out in the nineties and only this past week showed up on Netflix. A horror film coaxed from a fairy tale is a fairy tale taken one step further in its original direction. I was genuinely excited when I heard that last year's Red Riding Hood was in the works, and genuinely bummed when I realized the intention was not to explore the sinister implications of the original tale, but to use it as a reboot of the Twilight dynamic and reap some more pocket change from adolescent girls.

In the end, this Snow White is a disappointment as well; it's a good story but badly told. The new twists and murky corners explored are intriguing, but the dialogue never rises above a pedestrian level. Sigourney Weaver pulls out all her magnificent stops in bringing to life the world's worst stepmother, and Sam Neill is creditable in his straight-man role as little Snow's father, well-meaning enough but always a step or two behind the ladies in their Electra-complex death-match. The "dwarves" have become miners, men scarred and bent by the class-struggles of the time until they dropped out to seek their fortunes digging in the earth. The "handsome prince" is a young, aristocratic doctor who turns out to be easy prey for the dark side, as anyone reading closely always suspects those handsome princes, with their implied ficklenesses and impetuosities, might be.

The sets and costumes are richly detailed and the castle glooms and shrinks into a claustrophobic prison as the queen cuts loose to run mad within it. The terrible mirror is an inexplicable but entirely believable character on its own, a force which wreaks havoc by reaching into the minds of those who peer into it. There are lovely, baleful visuals here as well. Sometimes, though, you'll find yourself fast-forwarding through the dialogue to reach them.



Caligari, on the other hand, is one of those classics which is so strange that it feels like walking through a dream. Every time I watch it I fall asleep and have to rewind to previous scenes, not because I'm bored but because there's something wonderfully hypnotic about it, and I always put it on late at night to encourage its vulpine grip on my subconscious. Those crazy, crooked sets! Like you're walking around in a dollhouse built out of cardboard by a maniac. Conrad Veidt's first close-up as he's waking, -- that face!-- and then again when he goes into a mad lust for the girl. That sinuous way he has of walking, slithering along the wall as if still half-asleep. The Kafka-esque convention that authority figures (policemen, the town clerk) sit on exaggeratedly high chairs, reconfirming the powerlessness that is at the heart of all the myriad insanities. It's a big slice of visionary genius, and, nearly a century after it was filmed, retains the power to blow your mind. There's a classic book written (From Caligari to Hitler by Siegfried Kracauer) which discusses at length its importance in any exploration of the collective German mindset which led to the weirdness of Hitler, so I won't belabor it, but it's difficult to watch Caligari or Mabuse without picturing that blackened fury twisting beneath the surface of history, preparing to erupt.