blackthorn: elegiac

There is a small but effective subgenre of the Western which might be called the Elegiac, movies which long for times past. Kirk Douglas’ Lonely are the Brave is the best example, or John Huston’s the Misfits. There are more violent but no less poetic entries: any of Peckinpah’s Westerns, really, bears that mournful, near-desperate sense of loss, or Clint Eastwood’s long, hard look into the ethos of Western mythology, the brilliant Unforgiven.

In Mateo Gil’s quiet 2011 film Blackthorn, we have a new entrant into the field, exploring a late adventure in the old age of Butch Cassidy, escaped from the infamous showdown with the Bolivian military and quietly breeding horses on a ranch hidden in the Andes. The adventure begins when he decides to sell everything and return stateside to visit the orphaned son of Etta and Sundance.

The mood of the film is gentle and rambling and punctuated by moments of violence; to achieve it, Gil uses some grand photography and a pace set at a leisurely amble. And it is often enjoyable, which is all down to Sam Shepard in the lead, a man whose charisma has lessened not one jot across these many years, and who was surely meant to play this role (that is, an honorable old mischief-maker on horseback). He makes for marvellous company, and even sings some marvellous songs, sort of Daniel Johnston or Holy Modal Rounder style, some of which he wrote himself. (Clever Show-off Footnote: did you know that Shepard once played drums on a Holy Modal Rounders record? Indeed. On 1967's wackiest of forays into anarchic psychedelia, Indian War Whoop.)

Alas, the film never reaches its anticipated potential. Although there are moments which approach the sublime, as when a military official abandons a drunken Irish scofflaw (Stephen Rea in a lovely, haunted turn) to the mercy of the Old Gods of the Mountains, most of the dialogue just misses its target and slumps ineffectually to the ground. Eduardo Noriega feels wasted as the Spanish fugitive who tempts Cassidy from retirement, and even the English subtitles are not entirely to be trusted: one reads “goodbye and good riddance,” when the character is clearly saying, “hasta nunca,” which I suppose carries the meaning, but certainly not the spitting flair of the thing. Also, and lamentably, the flashback scenes to those salad days of Butch, Etta and Sundance never take any kind of flight, in spite of good talent involved (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau as the young Butch, for you Game of Thrones fans).

In the end, I call it a disappointment, although certainly no waste of time. This is Gil’s first foray into helming an English-language film, and his firm grasp of communicating a certain feeling-tone across the space of an entire story without sacrificing a flexible sense of dynamics bodes well for future efforts.

one horror, two adventures and a western

Woman in Black: (2012. dir: James Watkins) A surprisingly good and old-fashioned Old-Dark-Houser. It moves away from the cheap scares and hokum of the long-running play and delves back into the original (and also very good) novel by Susan Hill. No doubt its chief draw is the casting of Daniel Radcliffe in the lead as a grieving widower sent to rummage through legal papers in a truly spooky haunted house, but its main charms lie in its marvellous colour-chiaroscuro lighting, the genuine creeps it coaxes out of a collection of Victorian toys and furniture, and Janet McTeer in a seamless performance as a mother half-crazed with loss of her child. For a story whose genesis lay in the early '80s, it has an extraordinarily Victorian feel, including an ending which those old Victorians would call redemptive but can only seem macabre to those of us from a more cynical age. There is, in fact, a moment played straight in which the Ciaran Hinds character, a practical man, gently pooh-poohs the young solicitor's suspicions of ghosts: "We cannot give in to superstition. When we die, we go up there; we do not stay down here." It's a bit like being transported back into a previous (and grotesquely eldritch) age, and a fulsome shudder ran down my spine on more than one occasion.



Haywire: (2011. dir: Steven Soderbergh) Because it's Soderbergh, it's a notch above most "Bourne" pretenders. It's got Fassbender, Banderas, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton, Ewan McGregor and Michael Angarano, alternately trying to kick or save the tough-chick heroine's ass at one time or another. The bendy story is told clearly and well, and the fighter-girl who plays the lead (Gina Carano), while lacking the head-turning charisma of a Jolie, holds her own well enough. And Banderas, in a secondary role (really, everyone's role is secondary; Carano carries the bulk of it) has got a final scene displaying a subtle and vanity-less inhabitation of character which gives the film its satisfying full-stop.



Runaway Train: (1985. dir: Andrey Konchalovskiy) It's a movie from that brief moment when Eric Roberts was still being lauded as a new-rising DeNiro, a movie which was, interestingly, based on a Kurosawa script. It begins as a prison break-out but only hits its stride once the two escapees jump a train whose conductor simultaneously has a heart attack and they find themselves speeding through a frozen landscape on a driver-less machine towards an apparently inevitable catastrophe. (OK, it's an allegory, see?)

Roberts is so vulnerable as to be painful to watch, which I very much mean as a compliment, and Jon Voigt gives a career-crowning performance as a character who is larger than life: half monster, half demigod. The end-shot, in fact, achieves a nobility and transcendence which is magnificent to behold.



The Return of a Man Called Horse: (1976. dir: Irvin Kershner) This is the '70s version of Dances With Wolves, in which a rich white guy (he's an English Lord, trapped in this huge castle with a mess of people to wait on him hand and foot and a woman -- albeit, admittedly, white,-- who loves him faithfully, and an endless amount of money to spend; a terrible existence; we see him crumpled in a corner screaming in agony over it at one point, and I'm utterly serious about that) finds personal fulfillment in leading a helpless band of Good Indians to find their self-respect in victory over the Bad White Men (Evil French Trappers, to be specific) and their Bad Indian cohorts. It's better than the original Man Called Horse, which had a weaker story, and this one has at least one great scene (when he dandies up to avoid rousing suspicion while doing recon in the fort) and other good ones, including an intensive sun-dance.

It's darker, it's got less sugary coating than Dances; it's still the white man's fantasy. But Richard Harris was a fine actor, no two ways about it, and Geoffrey Lewis hits just the right note as the malevolent chief canuck trapper guy.

melancholia and tree of life: twins from different fathers

How odd that last year's two best films, Melancholia and Tree of Life, made by the most incredibly disparate filmmakers imaginable, should be such complementary companion pieces. It's as if they're opposite sides of the same artwork. Both are perfect: technically brilliant, and each so flawless a personal communication from its filmmaker that it can't be rightly judged in the normal sense. That is, it is impossible to say with any truth "this is bad" about either film, even about any element of either film; one can only say, "I prefer this," or possibly "This one resonates more fully with me."

I believe both films ask a mystical question and both answer in lovely, unambiguously articulated ways. Terence Malick, that beautiful mystic, says, "Life is hard; humans rub up against one another in sometimes awful ways; even with success in our society comes often unbearable loneliness; but, in the end, we are all one -- God, nature, humans, -- all one, and so all is well." Lars Von Trier, that crazy, wonderful, ever-vivacious pessimist, says, "Life is hard; humans rub up against one another in sometimes awful ways; even with success in our society comes often unbearable loneliness; but, in the end, life as we know it will be destroyed, and the universe will be a better place for it, and so all is well."

Malick fan that I am, Tree of Life was not easy. Suburban America in the fifties is not a compelling setting for me, and the only woman in the story is a highly-idealized mother seen through the gauze of nostalgia. That is not a criticism: it is an integral outgrowth of the shape of the story, and so inevitable, but the fact remains that I'm not terribly interested in vague, romanticized female characters, even when romanticized by such marvelous company as Mr. Malick.

Melancholia, on the other hand, was an enjoyable romp in the woods for me, but it was the kind of romp that kept me up half the night thinking on it, with its images seething endlessly in my sleepless brain. It did not leave me, not for days afterward. At no moment during the entire film did I know what was going to happen next, or even lift myself out of my suspension of disbelief long enough to ask the question. Like all Von Trier films, it was not easy, but this time he did not go out of his way to make the road so unpleasant that I felt soiled afterwards, and I'm heartily appreciative of that. My friend Carolyn complained: "Who cares about rich white people panicking at the end of the world?" and she has a valid point. The film seems to be set in France, but in that snow-white Amelie-verse which is completely without ethnic diversity, and, ultimately, who really does care that much about rich white people?

BUT technically it was yes! pefect! with wonderful contrasts between the shaky-cam, starkly-lit wedding-party inside and the Wagner-soundtracked, gorgeous-velvet-lit temporary escapes into the night-time outside. It is a story told through women, and the Kristen Dunst character is not only full and true, a magnificent achievement, but those around her feel full and true as well. Charlotte Rampling's character is one I've never seen before, an unapologetic powerhouse of anti-maternal energy, and I am still marvelling at her. Hollywood would give you this kind of character only in an archly comic way, and even then she would relent and show her softness before the end. Not so Von Trier. I think I am falling in love with this man.

My belief is that if you showed these as a double feature, the audience would leave the cinema buzzing with numinous energy. Indeed, certain more highly-evolved members might actually disintegrate and transcend this physical plane, using this double bill as a gateway onto a higher plane of existence. You might bear that in mind when choosing who sits alongside you while you watch.

last night's double feature: torn curtain and mother lode

*SPOILER ALERTS, BOTH FILMS*

Torn Curtain: (1966. dir: Alfred Hitchcock) Nobody's favorite Hitchcock, I think, but even lesser works from the master are worth watching. Hampered by a padded and halting script, John Addison's sour-making treacle-score and a dearth of chemistry between its stars, Hitchcock still pulls off some interesting stunts. First, it's mostly done in exquisite greens and golds, and his camera, as always, flows in fascinating ways into interesting angles. Paul Newman's eyes have never looked lovelier in the ultra-saturated color (reminiscent of North by Northwest), and he and Julie Andrews give it the old college try, but they're fighting an uphill battle in this little Cold War spy-story about a brilliant physicist (you can just buy Newman as such, just barely) who pretends to defect so that he can winkle crucial secrets from a communist counterpart behind the Wall. A lesser man would've had a total hash on his hands, but Hitch manages to coax some suspense out of sometimes ridiculously forced situations. I suspect Andrews, who at first seems wildly miscast, was chosen for the very innocence with which we all associate her, as we must buy her naievete in misconstruing her lover's actions, then her sheer and utter niceness as she comes to understand. Most actresses might bring too much spunk and vitriol to the table, whereas Andrews keeps the emotional content clean and simple (and, alas, fairly humdrum).

The best parts are satellite to the leads: Wolfgang Kieling as the leather-clad Soviet goon assigned to shadow Newman, for instance, a man who romanticizes New York City and has a lighter that won't work and a taste for American slang. His death scene is one of startlingly protracted violence and suspense, albeit with cartoonish elements. (An OVEN? Seriously? Is that supposed to be a joke?) Lila Kedrova gives a heartfelt turn as a Polish aristocrat prowling for American "sponsors", and she enjoys a good deal of solo camera time, so we can watch her face as it twists and melts in a sort of dance, as if she's decaying and reforming in constant motion before our eyes. The way the camera registers the ballerina recognizing the physicist in her audience is chilling, effective, and just plain odd. The ending, like many of the plot-turns which have preceded it, feels stilted and incredible, but by that time there's already been a big scene on a bus which has so stretched even the most elastic sense of credulity that by the time the end comes we've tossed our common sense overboard and we go where the ship takes us, disembarking gratefully wherever it finally decides to dock.




Mother Lode: (1982. dir: Charlton Heston) Heston directs himself in a vanity project from a script by his son, and, to be fair, he has a mother-load of fun as a half-crazed, eremitical Scottish miner protecting his claim from greedy-bastard interloper Nick Mancuso and tag-along girl Kim Basinger. The bad news is that the script is utterly lifeless until Heston speaks (or John Marley, who turns a lovably crotchety deus-ex-machina fisherman into some pleasant company for a few scenes). Mancuso and Basinger fuddle around speaking listless lines which would clunk on the floor even delivered by the greats, and this was back when Basinger, bless her heart, was still learning how to act, with a flat, whiny delivery negating any good emoting she might do. On the upside, she's got terrific hair.

Heston does some nice aural things with creaking beams and faraway bagpipes, but there is some hideous electronic music to suffer through, and the pace is a leisurely one, to say the least, with lots of cross-fades and lingering shots of pretty country, which effectively quashes any claustrophobic tension he might otherwise have forged inside those rickety mine-shafts. When we finally get to the climax, though, we get to see Heston barrelling around in full-on axe-wielding mode, and he gives himself one of those awesome Monster Death-Roars we used to get in the '70s (see Duel, and Jaws, et al), and I call that good fun.

drive: controlled doses of morphine

*SPOILER ALERT*

Drive: (2011. dir: Nicolas Winding Refn) Drive is ridiculously seductive, nearly impossible to resist, even if you sit there cognizant of the dishonesty lurking at its heart while you watch, even then, resistance is very nearly futile. It begins well, with good lines, an enigmatic, slowly emerging and engaging situation, and with an early nod to Vanishing Point.

Its style is so flawlessly smooth and unimpeachable and cool and jazzy that one doesn't even notice the flaws in story or short-comings of character development; one floats easily along in the effortless current Winding Refn provides.

Its palette is Teal-and-Orange, that omnipresent pairing of puke-colors which seems to be irrestible to production designers these days. (Read about the hideousness here, and join the resistance.) This is, in fact, the Teal-and-Orangest movie I've ever seen, and we've all seen a lot lately, haven't we? It's an absolutely shameless color design, almost to the point of inspiring sardonic admiration, a downright fascistically duo-chromatic piece.

Although this director is relatively new to Hollywood, Drive seems to be full of Hollywood in-jokes, such as the presence of a skilled and savage killer who began as a movie producer. Certainly the scene in which the Driver stages an act of brutality in a room encircled by naked, impassive women must be some kind of in-joke, particularly the lingering shot of a deadly hammer held quivering at his hip-level so that it seems to hover in front of a naked breast. Either it's funny or it's some graphic-novel shade of misogynist nutso (see Vampires review for further rant, below).

It is a great pleasure to see Albert Brooks again, finally manifesting the full complement of humor and darkness which has always played just underneath his facade, and Bryan Cranston is fantastic as the Driver's wrecked and doomed mentor. A lesser actress than Carey Mulligan might have been disastrous in the girl-role, but the girl-role is unworthy of Carey Mulligan.

Part of the impeccable style rises up from short-cut scenes, which leave you with an Impression, while avoiding any messy descent into emotional depth. This style is made entirely of perfectly-deployed and cool distancing devices, in fact, which is what makes such a horrifically violent film so sugary-sweet to swallow. In one of only three or four scenes in which we actually witness a conversation of any emotional depth, this one between the Driver and the long-time mentor who has unwittingly betrayed him, a sort of "I coulda-been-a-contender" moment, Winding Refn lifts us in and out of it, cutting away and back, very gently dropping us out of the scene and back into it so that we... well, so we don't get too upset. So we don't get too emotionally involved. He uses audio in the same way, uses it like a great master, sometimes to build tension, as in the scene where the sound of a stopwatch ticking in silence becomes very nearly unbearable. Mostly, though, he uses it like exact dosages of morphine, so that (for instance) a well-placed, hypnotic song lifts you just far enough above an ugliness that you are untroubled by it.

The film "feels" a little like Soderbergh's hypnotic the Limey and a little like 2010's the American, that George Clooney euro-esque existenz-noir, both of which were probably inspired by le Samourai and those old existential gems from the '60s. I prefer the American to this, largely because it was not so exquisitely controlled, and both the script and the actors were given some room to breathe and move around, with questions raised and left hanging, allowing the coldness of space between characters a very palpable influence.

Still, if you're going to exert iron-fisted control, do it with the mastery that Winding Refn does here. There's a shot, an absurd shot, really, but so brazen I cannot resist it: the Driver has just taken his full plunge into the violence which will subsume him by killing two thugs who have been sent to a motel room to take him out. In the silence amidst the carnage afterwards, his face gore-slimed, he looks around a corner for an extended moment, then slowly backs into the shadow, then around so he disappears, inch by inch, behind the door jamb. It is an absurdly obvious visual metaphor, yet, as is so much of this film, almost euphorically enjoyable.

Winding Refn's last film, Valhalla Rising, seduced me utterly, largely with its use of music and sound, and also, of course, with the ineffable Mads Mikkelsen. In that film, I bought the violence: it seemed he caught the physical heaviness of brutality without flinching but also without overemphasizing it. Drive is a horse of s different color, its exploding heads and gratuitous acts of cruelty pushed to cartoonish extremes, which in itself is a distancing device of another stripe. If you convince us to laugh at the violence, we will not feel its brunt.

maximilian schell-fest: evening four

St Ives: (1976. dir: J. Lee Thompson) A Philip Marlowe story, but about a different guy and set in a later Los Angeles. Charles Bronson is Ray St. Ives, a down-and-out crime-writer with a penchant for backing losing football teams. He takes a typically Marlowe gig: acting as go-between when a rich fellow needs to buy sensitive personal items back from a thief. Then he starts getting framed for murders, and beat up by thugs (in this case, Robert Englund and a very young Jeff Goldblum as a wide-eyed, first-time offender). The story probably doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but the twists are enjoyable. Jacqueline Bissett is badly cast, her talents largely wasted on this femme fatale, and Schell is the rich fellow's shrink who winds up, like everyone else, being both more and less than he appears. A highly enjoyable waste of time.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Vampires: (1998. dir: John Carpenter) A throughline of easy blues acts as rigging to episodes of intense brutality and the kind of half-baked misogyny which generally only springs up from the world of graphic novels, although this one seems to have found that pubescent level on its own. James Woods is the Catholic Church's chief Vampire Slayer in America, and the bulk of his team gets wiped out early on by a rogue Master. The verbiage and wisecracking are akin to tough-guy, less clever Buffy; the slaying is uglier and messier to clean up. The acting is good, especially Sheryl Lee as a hooker who takes a bite early and spends most of the film in bondage to one of the Baldwin brothers while she's making the transition. Graphic novel romance is often like this: stunning babe winds up with the guy who inhabits a space further down the food-chain because she is brutalized, tortured, and forced into love, all for her own good. Schell is the presiding Cardinal, and, as always in Hollywood horror films, any Catholic holding the office of Bishop or higher is always in league with the Devil, or, anyway, working against the good of mankind. (Seriously. Check it out. Always happens.) I suppose Schell took the job because he has a seriously creepifying moment towards the end where he gets to rejoice in his bland, cold evilness. The best I can say about it is that it's not the worst vampire movie I've ever seen: the music is invigorating and the palette is rich and warm.

Heidi: (1968. dir: Delbert Mann) Apparently Julia was not the first Schell movie I ever saw, after all. Apparently I was watching him play Heidi's amiable Uncle Richard from a time before my memory fully reaches. How could I forget this? That little paraplegic girl, abandoned and dragging herself across the face of an Alp? I would think that would have scarred me, made me mistrust adults entirely (and, now I think of it, maybe it did and I JUST DON'T REMEMBER. How disturbing is that?). I don't recall the book, but this film seems to be a message about how all of our troubles, even being crippled and wheelchair-bound, are self-inflicted, and with sufficient mental prowess, strength of will, and societal cooperation, all can be overcome. It sounds like a Nazi thing when I say it that way, either Nazi or New Age. In any case, it's not much of a film, in spite of Schell, Michael Redgrave, and Jean Simmons; the kids are too simple and the adults exist solely as foil and help-meet to the young 'uns. The only bit I really enjoy is the piece of class-obstructed love story between Schell and Simmons' governess, played with dignity and restraint on both parts. The scenes in which they acknowledge their awkward feelings, then backpedal miserably in order to save face, are sweet and, alas, never satisfactorily resolved, because the kids' issues take precedence.

(Read about the "Heidi Football Game Controversy" on Wikipedia.)

maximilian schell-fest: evening three

The Deadly Affair: (1966. dir: Sidney Lumet) What is it with John le Carre and faithless, nymphomaniac wives? This government snoop, played by James Mason, might be George Smiley under not so very different circumstances. As usual with le Carre, there's espionage afoot to be coaxed to the surface and crushed under heel by a rather ordinary, unassuming, and secretly heartbroken civil servant. This time it's communists causing mayhem in mid-'60s London, and we get to venture more than once into the thriving heart of the theatre scene in pursuit of the bad guys, running into Lynn and Corin Redgrave and David Warner en route, Lynn Redgrave in particular giving a lovely, warm turn as a committed but ditzy stage manager.

As in most le Carre, the world here is a shabby one, peopled largely by schmoes of one stripe or another struggling to find some dignity in day-to-day life and largely failing. The plot and characters are engaging, albeit slightly depressing (again, welcome to le Carre's world), and for the most part well-played (how I love Harry Andrews, this time as a patient, hard-working DCI with a menagerie in his bachelor flat, no tolerance for guesswork, and a marked tendency to nod off when between tasks). If this screenwriter had found the graceful device which last year's Tinker Tailor did, in which we never experience the heartbreaker wife directly but only through the husband's perceptions of her, the story might more readily have found its wings. As it is, the subplot of uxorious devotion and its continuing betrayal, although germane to the story at large, clunks awkwardly along the ground because le Carre's cheating wives tend to come across as wafer-thin and falsely reported, as this one does.

There is one especially wonderful piece: a climactic scene taking place in the audience during an RSC production of Edward II, in which Schell gives us a magnificent, tacit soliloquy of intensifying emotions as he figures out what to do. After that, his soft-spoken end-scene is just right.

Judgment at Nuremberg: (1961. dir: Stanley Kramer) For years I have railed against the unfairness of a world which refused to give Paul Newman his richly-deserved Oscar for the Hustler, tossing him instead a belated bone for his pale reprise in its sequel, the Color of Money. This seemed to me a plateful of contumely which no such beloved and hard-working Hollywood royalty should be forced to stomach.

Although I still love that performance, I have suffered my moment of revelation while watching Nuremberg for the first time in many years, and for the first time in its entirety. Schell's Oscar-seizing performance as the brilliant defense counsel for the Nazi judges inhabits an area just short of stunning, particularly in its context. Imagine, if you will, a huge studio venture starring Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, and Judy Garland. Imagine going to the cinema to see it on its release. Now imagine the shock of seeing, against the backdrop of this collection of Hollywood's Eminences Grises (all accomplished to the point of greatness, but in that comfortable, studio manner), a performance, delivered in a language not his own, with such intelligence, exactness of gesture and spontaneity of expression as Schell gives here. It must have knocked the Academy sidelong, and suddenly it looks like a gesture of uncharacteristic honesty, lauding the new European kid on the block over our own beloved blue-eyed boy.

I left Montgomery Clift off the list because the scene in which Schell gently and ruthlessly dismantles his slow-witted baker's assistant is one of the most painful you'll ever see, and that's due as much to Clift's spontaneous gestures of vulnerability as to Schell's easy mastery. My favorite scene, though, occurs not in the courtroom but in an antechamber: Lancaster's prisoner has declared he will make a self-damaging statement and his lawyer has this one chance to talk him out of it. Schell's monologue is a perfect blend of emotional honesty and the lawyer's tendency to histrionicize, and I think I will never tire of it.

Kramer is already playing with the extreme camera moves which will make Ship of Fools so visually striking, using slow pans behind characters and the occasional quick zoom to arresting effect. The way he reveals Dietrich in her final scene is perfect, and the moment in which, after extended and stubborn silence, Lancaster rises in the courtroom to demand, "Are we going to do this again?" is one of the greats in cinema.