sorcerer: the gods live in the details

In Vera Cruz, an assassin wearing dark glasses and white patent leather shoes shoots a rich man in his apartment. (In this film, you can tell assassins because they have white shoes.)

In Jerusalem, three young men in yarmulkes (one is carrying white shoes) blow up a building. Only one of them escapes death or capture.

A rich man gazes out a window onto a Parisian street. He is troubled; life weighs heavily upon him; he is French. He and his intellectual wife of ten years talk a little philosophy, then he goes to sit in a hostile office and face corruption charges which will lead to disgrace and incarceration if he doesn't come up with a great deal of money very quickly. His partner in crime shoots himself, and we watch the rich man stumbling away up the road.

In New Jersey, Irish gangsters infiltrate an Italian Catholic wedding. The gangsters slip into a back room and rob the place, shooting a priest. They quarrel as they drive away; the car crashes. Only Roy Scheider survives to limp away. We see the Italian mobsters vow revenge.

When these four men recur, they are all inhabiting the same poverty-stricken mud-village somewhere in South America, a village ratfucked by the American oil company which is the only employer in the region. The only hope of escape any of our criminals have is to take on a suicidal mission: the company is offering bulky wages and proper citizenship to four men who will drive unstable explosives over terrible roads to quell an oil well on fire.

This, then, is William Friedkin's reimagining of Clouzot's classic Wages of Fear. It came out in 1977, and this, my friend, is how to write, shoot, and edit a film. The unvoiced details (do filmmakers even use those anymore?), like the bride's black eye as she promises to love, honour and obey, or the names painted on the old death-trap trucks they have to drive (one is called Lazaro, the other, which looks like it has teeth, Sorcerer), or the wary way the convicts eye one another while working in the village, each wondering which is the assassin sent for him, tell the story with minimal verbiage. The editing is flawless. Friedkin uses the camera to tell the story, shaking it only once, when it's running with the police to arrest the terrorists, and once we speed with it along a French street, and once, marvellously, at the end, we back with it away from a scene of peace in a ramshackle saloon, out through a screened window, then lift smoothly upwards and turn slowly to reveal the arrival of a crucial taxi. The camera movement communicates, somehow, that this is all destined. It is like a humbler but still quietly breathtaking version of Antonioni's final shot from the Passenger, which has to be on anyone's short list of the most magnificent end-shots to any film, ever.

It's closing in on the '80s, so there's synth music, but this time it actually works in the story's favour, a Tangerine Dream suspense-track which uses subtle dissonance to build tension. And tension there is. The rope/rotting wood bridge passage is nearly unbearable. Then there’s Scheider, with that classic, rugged, scarred but endlessly emotive face, giving another of his world-class performances.

Is it great enough to call it an overlooked classic? I think so. It's got some flaws: a few clichés, visual (the wasteland reflected in his windshield seems to swim around his head as he goes mad) and spoken (“What will you do with all that money?” “Get laid.”), but they are dwarfed, in the end, by virtues. Although it will always take a back seat to the Exorcist and French Connection, it's still one of Friedkin's greats, and one of Scheider's.

last night's double feature: bernie and exit humanity

Bernie: (2011. dir: Richard Linklater) I'd forgotten about Linklater, how he never gives you what you expect. I was thinking Jack Black, you know, I was thinking comedy, and there is some, but it's not laugh-out-loud, it's more a roiling, low-level amusement. This is half-documentary, half-comedy about a truly pleasant guy who is driven to a cowardly piece of butchery, his cover-up, his trial, and how it affected the little town of Carthage, Texas. It's based on a true story, and it seems that the townsfolk interviewed are unscripted, but they’re so brilliant, it's hard to tell.

Black does his usual scrupulously good work, but it's Matthew McConaughey who really cleans up. When is McConaughey going to be universally lauded as the master of comic acting that he is? The physical choices he makes for his character, a sort of ambitious, dastardly, low-life DA, feel true and appropriate while being simultaneously hilarious. The other guy who's truly funny here is not so much Black, whose character is really tragic, but one of the townsfolk, a guy in a bar wearing a baseball hat who has wickedly funny things to say about Texas ("the people's republic of Austin") and the folks who ended up on the out-of-town jury ("they've got more tattoos than teeth"), among other subjects. Is it scripted? If not, I want to hang out with this guy.

This is part of Linklater’s ongoing effort to record -- or possibly to decode, -- pieces of history from his own neck of the woods in Texas. Tuck it in there next to the Newton Boys, which is, however, a scrap of juvenilia in comparison.

Exit Humanity: (2011. dir: John Geddes) The crucial thing to say is that I'm right there in the crowd cheering for John Geddes; I think he's got great things ahead of him. This, noble as the effort is, is not one.

Listen to the idea: at the end of the Civil War, a zombie plague strikes and threatens to wipe out humanity. A good-hearted reb is our narrator, recording his terrible experiences in a book for posterity as he tries to find some road back into faith along with a way to end the horror.

I'll go out on a limb here and guess that it was adapted from a graphic novel, and not just because Geddes rather beautifully incorporates illustration into the action scenes, even using them to replace action entirely, which works surprisingly well. It also suffers from the usual graphic-novel maladies: a tendency to skim lightly over the top of a story instead of digging down into human interaction, an over-reliance on narration (which, in this case, is delivered by Brian Cox, so not so very terrible), and a truly appalling lack of inspiration in the dialogue, which is so flat and by-the-numbers it might have been scribbled on a napkin in the parking lot a few minutes before shooting when someone realized they needed to give the actors words to speak.

That said, newcomer Mark Gibson is splendid as the beleaguered soldier, mining a continual wellspring of truth from a role made out of bad lines and histrionics. The zombies are believable (in that they keep a sense of internal cohesion within their hive-character) and they look great. (It's nice sometimes to have the old-fashioned, shuffling zombies back; that's how zombies moved when I was a kid, pre-Danny Boyle.) The palette is washed-out, giving that old-fashioned, near-sepia look which actually works for this, emphasizing the intensely blackened zombie eyes and blood.

Stephen McHattie is wasted as a drunken doctor looking for a cure (and, speaking of McHattie and zombies, I'm still waiting for Pontypool to hit Netflix. Is anybody listening?), and, outside of the main guy, you never feel the other characters are thicker than paper-thin. Geddes also gets my goat by doing that shake-the-camera thing to indicate an action scene instead of actually staging a decent action scene and filming it well, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's doing it for budgetary reasons, and once he scores some major rich-guy backing he'll exercise a vaster ingenuity.

All that said, there’s something lovely about a zombie movie which first and foremost examinines the question of faith and its slow recovery after the world becomes a place of despair. I also love the idea of a zombie film in which most of the violence is suggested and the world is gorgeous.

In short, a lot of the stuff he got right. The next one just has to be better written, is all.

anonymous: pretty lies

Who could have expected such good, old-fashioned film-making from infamous schlock-meister Roland Emmerich? What a marvellous story, and so marvellously well told! No distracting camera movement, no moment of fat left to over-lengthen any scene. Olde London-town looks wonderful, true to life, dirty and lovely, and the details! like the theatre, and the way the groundlings take active part, pitching in to fight the French at Agincourt when so inspired, it's all wonderfully exciting. Historically, of course, the story is total rubbish; to paraphrase Himself, the story maintains so politic a state of rubbish that its lies will not allow any hint of truth to intermingle with them. But that's true enough to Shakespearean tradition, too, as the real Richard III would tell you if he could dust himself off and speak his piece.

And, ye gods, the actors those cold islands produce. What a lioness is Vanessa Redgrave as she ages! Last year she also gave us a dazzlingly original Volumnia in Ralph Fiennes' stripped-down and energetic Coriolanus, creating a woman who so longs to be a soldier that her salute near the end is nearly heartbreaking. Her calm, kind instruction to Virgilia in the arts of raising and loving soldier sons and husbands, so wonderfully matter-of-fact, is unlike any I've seen, with no trace of disdain for the weaker girl, a performance of completely assured genius. Here, as the aging Elizabeth, she paints a complex but believable portrait, managing to weave together the contradictory bits that writer John Orloff gives her. The way it's written, a lesser actress (that is, almost any actress) would have emerged with two dimensions, giving maybe a single glimpse of a third, but Redgrave is astonishingly good as the theatre-enthralled, flesh-loving, increasingly age-confused monarch who keeps a loose grip on her kingdom by bowing to her counsellors, those chilly, ambitious Cecils.

If for no other reason, it's worth watching just to spend two hours in those lost streets and taverns and theatres, which feel tangible, sweat-smelling and mud-filled under Emmerich's magic paintbrush. He's wasted an extraordinary amount of time, ours and his own, in previous films destroying our world in vivid detail. Now that he knows the joy of creating lost worlds in equally acute detail, perhaps he will become the master of re-vivifying lost times, even if he does spend his time telling silly lies whilst inhabiting them.

*************

POSTSCRIPT:

As to the issue of who wrote Shakespeare's plays: just today I see that veteran actor Janet Suzman gives a good, solid poke in the eye to all the posh-boy Oxfordians in her new book. Those Oxfordians (that is, those who believe, as this film posits, that no low-born commoner like Shakespeare could have risen to such genius, and that therefore Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, must have written his plays instead), generally rest their argument on three major points: what they call Shakespeare's lack of education, the fact that Oxford is on record as having travelled, particularly to Italy, a country which Shakespeare loves to bring to life, and the eerie lack of books in Shakespeare's will when he died.

Suzman wrestles down the first two points (Shakespeare's education was, in fact, equivalent to that received in a modern university, and, as to Italy, there's a little thing called imagination, fed by maps and reading), leaving the question of the books. How could the greatest writing genius of all time die without leaving a library? To which I reply, he left no trace a library in his will, which is a very different matter.

Look at this: what kind of library would a man like Shakespeare have had? A vastly illegal one, for a start. It would have been filled with heretical tracts (hermetical works, books by Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, etc), not to mention Catholic works, works on occultism, alchemy, and probably no small amount of pornography, any piece of which could throw half a neighborhood into the Tower. Either the man passed it quietly on to a worthy successor before he died, or else his good, probably non-reading wife Anne burned them in a panic before they could be uncovered.

the skin i live in: permanent damage

Here’s my history with Almodovar: twenty odd years past, I went to an art-house in Portland to see Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and hated it so much I’ve resisted seeing any of his films since, in spite of some frothy encomia from critics. I have been leaning reluctantly towards giving him a second chance since Flower of My Secret, and decided at last to take the plunge with The Skin I Live In.

What did I hate about Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down? I was much closer to my college years then, and therefore more sensitive about sexist propaganda, having so recently had my feminist consciousness raised. The film as I remember it was a wacky romantic comedy about blossoming love between a kidnapper and his victim. I assume (as opposed to remember) that Almodovar was exploring inter-gender issues of dominance and power, but it seemed like a load of chauvinist crap. Granted, at the time I had precious little earned wisdom about inter-gender issues of dominance and power, and so smug self-righteousness was easy to summon.

Now: what is The Skin I Live In about? Inter-gender issues of dominance and power between a kidnapper and his victim! I am not kidding. Here’s my question for you: have ALL his intervening films been about this same thing, or did I just pick my moment with crazy prescient irony?

All that said, TSILI is an extraordinary film. It’s as if he decided to remake Eyes Without a Face and then took it way off on his own crazy Almodovar trip. Think Eyes Without a Face, only way, way more twisted. Nobody gets chewed on by dogs, but things that do happen make a dog-chewing seem like the happier alternative.

In fact, I didn’t realize how truly disturbing it was until I woke up this morning with my mind haunted by it. Because Almodovar has such a beautiful, unpretentious visual style, you don’t realize how rough the story really is at first. He’s like Polanski: a master story-teller, all his techniques just so. His pacing is fantastic. He carries you along seamlessly, without a bump, without a hassle, and your aesthetic sense is pleased by the scenery, and Antonio Banderas is so good, and the story is so strange and compelling, and then you wake up in the morning and go ye gods! my psyche is bent! Can I fix it, or is this permanent?

(BIG, BIG SPOILER ALERT: And as far as the feminist issue goes, all the men in this particular cinematic world are basically dicks, and the women deal with that depressing factor by dying. There is one single woman in this movie who successfully fights instead of throwing in the towel, and she turns out to be a man. I’m totally serious.)

bobby deerfield: the disappointment continues

I romanticize '70s movies; I know that. There's good reason for it. I'm convinced that film was undergoing a beautiful renaissance when I was a kid, and I was lucky to be learning how to watch movies at that time. One remembers the classics; one forgets about movies like this.

First point of order: you don’t get to be a Formula One champion without being a little bit obsessed with cars and driving. You don’t even get into the top twenty without that factor at play. Never having met the man, I will pretty much guarantee that Sebastian Vettel has never gone a week in his adult life without driving, tinkering with his car, or going crazy not being able to drive. Certainly he’s never, no matter how much in love he is with whomever, gone a day without thinking about driving. It’s not just racing: Nadal plays tennis in his head when he’s not on the court; Jack White channels constant music, even when he’s not touching a guitar. Since he was old enough to walk, I’d put money on it that Lionel Messi has never gone a day without touching a soccer ball, romantically blissed out or no.

Then there’s Bobby Deerfield, the eponym for this film. This guy is the racing champion of the world, and he doesn’t really seem to be that into racing, at least after the first half-hour of the film (which is, not coincidentally, the best part). How absurd is that? His big issue, according to the crazy woman with whom he falls inexplicably in love, is that he is too cautious in life. Too CAUTIOUS? A Formula One driver? Yes, sometimes a Felipe Masa might lose some edge after getting clonked on the head by a flying spring and bashing into the tyre-wall, but would you call the man cautious? He still gets into a Ferrari several times a year and dodges other crazy-assed adrenaline-freaks at speeds of several hundreds of miles per hour.

I know what you’re thinking: she means cautious about relationships. But he’s not. Quite the opposite: she’s the one who keeps running away. This movie has no internal cohesion.

On the other hand, this is Pacino before he expired: Pacino back when he was young and not only cared deeply about acting well but did it, with grace and a certain constancy, with quiet, introspective displays, before acting for him became synonymous with Being Loud. This was Pacino sandwiched between Dog Day Afternoon and And Justice For All, and so he was still a pleasure to watch whilst just teetering on the brink of his expiration date as one of the greats.

On the other hand, the scene where he does the Mae West impersonation is every bit as excruciating as it sounds, and this is Pacino stuck in a badly-scripted, stupid story. It purports to be about a Formula One champion who spins into an pit of existential angst when his team-mate is killed on a stretch of track which should not have been dangerous. Instead, it’s really about the crazy, dying German woman (badly played by Marthe Keller) with whom he supposedly falls in love (although there is no spark of onscreen chemistry between them) and her annoying, insulting manner towards him. She constantly accuses him of cowardice, calling herself brave for climbing into the basket of a hot-air balloon and simultaneously calling his racing “boring”.

I don’t for a second believe there’s an outstanding athlete in the world who will put up with the company of a person who so denigrates his passion, much less one who will give up, without a word or a trace of regret, his career to schlep around being in love with her while she’s dying. This movie is closer to Love Story than to Grand Prix, only it’s the BAD version of Love Story. Wrap your mind around THAT.

hopes dashed, and vast disappointments suffered

*SPOILER ALERT*

Deep Blue Sea: (2011. Dir: Terence Davies) I love Rachel Weisz. I love Tom Hiddleston, and I love Simon Russell Beale. Also I have an ancient and abiding fondness for that old English parlour-room theatre. So why was this movie such a slow trudge for me? The trouble can be laid at the doorstep of the two Terences, I suspect: director Terence Davies and original playwright Terence Rattigan.
The thing that Davies has always done extraordinarily well is to create an atmosphere of stunning beauty, with astonishingly convincing period details. Rattigan was a madly popular playwright in the first half of the twentieth century who fell out of favour alongside the rest of the Old Guard during the hip and with-it sixties.

Davies gets the details right again, or convinces us he does, which amounts to the same thing, but the story itself is moribund and lethargic, starting in the middle of a coma-like depression and never rising up from it. First of all, he’s coloured the whole thing in burnished golds, which looks museum-y and awful, and he’s put poor Rachel Weisz in soft-focus through nigh-on the entire thing, which tells me that either he doesn’t recognize her considerable beauty, which is just insane, or else it’s a clumsy comment on the character (she’s FALLEN out of FOCUS, baby). Whatever: it’s distracting and distancing, and, trust me, we don’t need further distance from these characters.

One of my favorite films of all time is Mamet’s version of Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy, but what Mamet got right, Davies got all wrong. First off, this script has been much rattled around: it is not a direct descendant of the original play, which one might think would make it better, more cinematic, but this one is still a miss, still a deadly bore. On top of that, he allows it to zombie along at a comatose depressive’s pace, which is bold, but doesn’t work. If the dialogue were more interesting, alright, but these folks have very little of any interest to say to one another. The finale is a foregone conclusion from the get-go; it’s all one very long and not very interesting coda.

You know how in some lesser Tennessee Williams plays (OK, even some of the greater ones, from a particular vantage point), a female character only makes sense if you re-cast her in your mind as a man in drag? I’m thinking of Eccentricities of a Nightingale in particular, but you could even argue about the Ava Gardner/Bette Davis role in Night of the Iguana. I’m getting a similar sense with this. There’s something about this terrible, fatally doomed love affair which makes no sense as filmed. She tries to off herself because he forgets her birthday. Well, alright, I guess I’ll buy that, but I won’t pay much. She keeps saying that he doesn’t love her, and yet we see him romancing her in ways which are obviously more than merely sexual, with tenderness and attention, certainly pointing to a man in love. Then she says he doesn’t love her “in the same way” that she loves him. Well, alright, but the way it’s filmed, it looks like some pretty nice love to me, and I’m losing some patience with this girl.

There is a suggestion that one of their issues is his lack of culture: the same sort of thing you find in a Tennessee Williams play. She is a classy gal slumming with some rough trade. But Hiddleston, for all his talent, is so very sharply-cheekboned, so veddy veddy upper-class, that it’s impossible to buy that one, not for any amount.

When at last they part, it’s so flatly written (“The old blue serge.” “Your shoes need a clean.” “I’ll miss you.” “Be safe.” “Be good.”) that even the myriad skills of Hiddleston and Weisz fail with some bedragglement.

The rare moments it snaps into top gear are when these two are fighting, or in those few moments when Simon Russell Beale is trying hard to reach out to his estranged wife. Again, he’s hampered by a soggy script, but he gives a good hard try.
Davies, as always, gives us interesting framing and a convincing portrait of post-WWII depressing London, but it’s not enough, not by half. It starts nowhere, goes nowhere, and the characters never rise into life.

*BIG SPOILER ALERT. But you know you’ve already seen it.*

The Dark Knight Rises: (2012. dir: Christopher Nolan) Wow. Did I watch the same movie everyone else did? Is there one good version they send out to most of the country, then a lame edition they send to the ass-end of Oregon? Because that's the one I had to sit through.

The best thing I can say about it is that it had some great, great moments. When Scarecrow is acting Fouquier-Tinville in the marvellously surreal kangaroo court ("Death or exile?"). When Bane is confronted by the squirrelly little rich weasel Daggett and he sets the back of one enormous hand on Daggett’s shoulder and asks in that weirdly avuncular voice, “Do you feel like you’re in charge?” When the President makes a speech that Gotham will not be abandoned, and when asked what that means, Commissioner Gordon says, “It means we’re on our own.” When Catwoman vanishes silently and Batman says, “So that’s what that feels like.”

I am also assured that if you watch the whole trilogy together, the tight-weave of interlacing themes and storylines is extremely pleasing. I believe you, but I’m not going to test it.

All that allowed, the story is full of absurd plot-turns that make no sense, defying not only laws of physics but of common sense. The great thing I remember about the Dark Knight graphic novels was that Bruce Wayne was a bitter man dealing with his mortality. Nolan makes a nod to this (the doctor’s visit in the beginning when he’s told he has no cartilage at all in his knees, which alone should leave him a near-complete cripple, immediately after which he dives out a window and rappels like an Olympian down the side of the building), but then with every life-threatening wound (a broken back? Are you kidding me? And then he, what, walks barefoot across the desert all the way to Gotham? Without money, or food or shoe-leather? And gets there in time to save the world? Get out of town, Nolan. And at the end: he just had a brutal fight with Bane, got gut-stabbed by a true professional, and yet he can jettison from the Bat miles over the ocean and, what, swim to safety wearing his bat armor? GET out of TOWN, Nolan!) it’s like they’ve forgotten that he hasn’t got real superpowers, that he’s a superhero solely by virtue of will power and rich-boy toys. Supernatural healing powers are not supposed to be part of the Batman package.

If you ever saw Mel Gibson’s the Passion of the Christ, you know that at some point (the point, I think, is different for every spectator but comes for everyone sometime) during the protracted, yea, interminable suffering of Jesus at the hands of the Romans, you’re empathizing, you’re empathizing, and then at some point you just kind of shut off, just go, “OK, no human could possibly withstand this much. Therefore you are not human. Therefore this whole thing is a kind of charade. You’re kind of cheating us into empathizing with you, Mr. Superhuman Christ Guy.” And there’s a certain disappointment in that. When the First Council of Nicea declared that Christ was Made of the Same Substance as God, and therefore birthless, deathless and eternal, it robbed the passion of a certain power, ie: that of a genuinely human suffering, which by definition a god can never truly know.

I reached that point somewhere in TDKR. Someplace, relatively early on, I think, it became apparent to me that if Bruce Wayne was really suffering this, and if Bruce Wayne was really just a very powerful but mortally human man, he would be dead or incapacitated. I found the recovery in the hole (despite Tom Conti, whom I was very glad to see again after all these many years) to be an absurd waste of time and energy. Plus, anyone who’s ever seen a Star Wars movie would be able to tell you that doing it without the rope was the big secret. And you still don’t buy it, do you? Because why should you? It has nothing to do with this particular physical reality. This whole movie doesn’t. In the unfairly maligned John Carter, we the audience are introduced to the alternate laws of physics on a different planet (ie: on Mars, gravity has a very different grasp). In Nolan’s Gotham, we are being told it’s an adjunct to our own world, and yet impossible things happen twice a minute.

And that’s not even addressing the politics, which I originally took to be egregiously plutocratic. (We poor folk can’t make good decisions ourselves; we need rich men like Bruce Wayne and scofflaw policemen like Commissioner Gordon making our decisions for us. Otherwise we’ll place ourselves in the hands of evil Occupy Wall Street types like Bane, arm ourselves and start killing the good, downtrodden authority figures.) Later I decided the politics is meant to be a shambles, another evidence of darkness in a very dark world. Nolan’s Gotham incorporates a populace, both rich and poor, that is greedy, potentially violent, kind of horrible. Which is fine, except that it leads to my biggest disappointment.

My biggest disappointment in the whole disheartening morass is the cheat at the end. The whole thing, -- the whole trilogy, -- is building up to Bruce giving everything, sacrificing his life for the good of Gotham, for our good, despite our unworthiness. (And, yes, it is a Christ thing, thanks for asking.) I cried at his funeral, OK? When the Dickens was being read. And then we find out he slipped the noose and is living the high life in Italy with Catwoman? Cheater! It’s like in the Last Temptation of Christ, when Christ forgoes his destiny to live a long and pleasant life.

When all's said and done, you want to go to Florence just long enough to ask Wayne, “Why did I give you so much of my time, if you’re just going to choose the normal-guy life? And can I have it back, please?”

*SPOILER ALERT*

Red Desert: (1964. dir: Michelangelo Antonioni) This is the kind of movie we’ve been arguing about at work lately, since the new top ten directors’ and critics’ lists have come out. (How important is innovation when ranking a film –- read: Citizen Kane -- once those innovations have been subsumed into the common cinematic language?) Red Desert won the Golden Lion at Venice the year I was born, and you can see why: it must have felt intensely modern at the time, wonderfully inventive. But is that enough to make it a great film across the long haul? It’s a movie shaped from unique and exciting camera-work, with wonderful use of color, and even that can’t make up for the boredom of being annoyed by a crazy woman for two-plus hours. She’s the kind of crazy woman who exists only in movies directed by men, the kind who looks like Monica Vitti, writhes sensuously when in real life she would be freezing rigid and stone-like (some directors get that right. See the Skin I Live In, or Puzzle of a Downfall Child), the kind who plays crazy by indulging in random twitches and vacant stares, but without convincing that there’s anything behind that stare except, “Man, I wish he’d call cut.” Richard Harris in his prime is wasted in his Observer role, and obviously uncomfortable acting in Italian. Like many Antonioni films, it ends where it starts, and her great realization (spoiler alert here! get ready) is that the secret to living is to accept what happens to you as Your Life.

winter kills: overlooked classic, my lily-white ass

*SPOILER ALERT: LOTS OF BIG, BIG SPOILERS HERE*

They say it was shunned as unclean by the studios, and only got shot when wealthy marijuana tycoons stepped up, paying expenses in cash. They say those who worked on it remember it with a certain fondness. Its proponents claim that it was buried at the box office because America wasn't ready for so cynical a view of our beloved Kennedys at that early juncture. My own distant memory is of reviews lauding its daring in taking on the Kennedy mystique. Young and uncynical and festooned with high hopes, I sprinted to the cinema to see it, only to emerge both hangdog and disgruntled. Some things, though, you just don't get when you're a kid, like broccoli, and cigarettes, and why there was no possible way that Shane could stick around the Starrett Ranch.

Bearing all this in mind, I watched it again last night, and I’m here to tell you that adulthood just makes it worse.

It’s one big circular muddle. Nothing makes sense, and it goes round and round with one nonsensical thing NOT leading to the next. It can’t decide whether it wants to be a dark, muddly comedy or an angsty, existential drama (aka Parallax View, which is certainly what I wanted it to be), and it goes bouncing back and forth between the two, never quite crossing either line fully, or, anyway, successfully. The body count is incredibly high (or so we’re told, but is it true? No narrator is reliable in this shifty, trickster power-play world) but at the end you’re still not sure who, if anyone, is pulling the strings. And how does John Huston wind up falling off the balcony? Is that a suicide? And if so, why for the love of mike would such a man do such a thing? And can you still call a thing a conspiracy if everyone on God’s green earth is part of it? And who the sam hill is the gum-chewing lady in the red coat on the slow-motion bicycle with the little kid who seems to be either an angel of mercy or a harbinger of doom?

These questions and more go unanswered in this unenjoyably illusion-webbed conspiracy-theory plot which makes no sense and goes nowhere not particularly fast. It’s not funny, and not gripping. The plot-turns are random and unsatisfying. Our hero (Jeff Bridges) is the black-sheep, non-political brother of a young, charismatic president who was assassinated in a motorcade in the ‘60s. He lives an absurdly coddled, ultra-wealthy lifestyle and yet has somehow remained ridiculously innocent well into his twenties despite growing up in a sort of harem in which both satyr-like father and satyr-like brother vied for the most extensive collection of venereal diseases. John Huston, the family patriarch, is a powerhouse wearing the Joseph Kennedy shoes, Anthony Perkins is his spidery master of arcane information. You get cameos by the likes of Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Eli Wallach, Toshiro Mifune, Brad Dexter, Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Boone, but you frankly don’t get much more than that. Certainly you get no new insight into the Kennedy assassination or even into the Weltanschauung which might have made it possible. Once you get to the end and realize that EVERYONE is playing on THE SAME EVIL TEAM, the fact that the whole thing got instigated in the first place becomes the real puzzle (WHY did Richard Boone bring the dying confession of a second gunman to the younger brother? What did he hope to accomplish?).

Now I ponder it, it puts me in mind me of Anonymous. As history, the Emmerich bard-drubbing is patently and unabashedly bughouse-nuts, but its very brashness (plus its access to top-notch actors) makes it attractive to the uninitiated. Winter Kills, in heading way over the top in its Kennedy-bashing, was the '70s equivalent of spray-painting a moustache on a holy statue while trying to hide behind a veneer of high-brow satire.

The thing is, it’s all a mess. It’s got some fun (Anthony Perkins has a gnomishly mischievous scene in which he plays with our naive hero’s mind), it’s got some good actors, it’s got some very dated costumes (did yuppies really ever wear the sweater draped over the shoulders as they do in movies back then? It looks so fakey, like the massive shoulder-pads that would infect women’s fashions in ‘80s TV shows) and some soft-focus for the aging starlets, it’s got enough reference to the Kennedys to pique the curiosity but not enough to make any sense. It’s got attempts at M*A*S*H / Catch-22 type anarchic humour without coming close to pulling any of it off.

What’s it missing? that elusive thing, mise-en-scene, for a start. (“What is Mise-en-scene? It is what an Auteur has. What designates an Auteur? He is a director who has Mise-en-scene.”) In something like the Parallax View, even though things remain obscured to us, there is such a firmness of vision on the parts of director and writer that one feels helpless at the end, almost devastated by the cold distance its gods keep from its world. Winter Kills, on the other hand, is like one of those observe-our-weirdness! TV adventure-dramas where one bizarre thing happens after another until at some point the hair goes up on the back of your neck as you realize that THEY DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY’RE GOING WITH THIS. THIS IS ALL JUST PADDING, ALL SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.