norman reedus film festival: beat and deuces wild

Beat: (2000. dir: Gary Walkow) Back in my beatnik-fascination years, I always thought a movie about either Joan Vollmer or Lucien Carr would be way more interesting than another tired trek down the Kerouac/Cassady path. And there it was, right in front of me: this one is about how Vollmer (Courtney Love) committed suicide-by-husband over Carr (Norman Reedus), set forward here as the possible great love of her life but too cowardly to pick up the gauntlet. Yeah, I don't buy it either, but it's great to see these two intriguing characters reclaim their well-deserved places in the foreground after all these years of padding out the indices of Burroughs/Kerouac/Ginsberg tomes.

It's not a good movie. There's something oppressive about it, and it never pulls together as a narrative. Everything is too pretty, there's too much sentimental music gluing it together, and it moves at an extreme reefer-amble rather than the benzedrine-gallop at which their hearts would have been pounding. It's been a long time since I read about Joan, but my sense is that they're playing fast and loose with the history here. She would long have been a junkie herself by this time, and certainly she was no glamour-puss with perfect maquillage, long-limbed and blowzy like Courtney Love. I have nothing against Love (OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I do: once when she was bartending at Blue Gallery she spent the whole night having a temper tantrum on the phone and I had to nurse a single beer through the entire second set. But I have nothing against her as an actress); still, she's not Vollmer. Yes, she brings intelligence to it, and there's a good, easy rapport between her and her husband (Keifer Sutherland). Regardless, this is the kind of dialogue they're having to wrassle with:

Ginsberg: Joanie, what are you doing?
Vollmer: What does it look like? I'm staring into the abyss.
Ginsberg: Don't you know that if you gaze too long into the abyss, it'll gaze back at you?
Vollmer: It already has.

See what I mean? These freaky poet-types bond on quoting Whitman, etc, and the whole plot, such as it is, tries to construct a conflict we'll care about out of post-adolescent drama-queen sex hysteria, which doesn't play well. It's almost impossible to make scintillating dialogue if all anyone's thinking about is why so-and-so-won't-sleep-with-me. I'm not saying people don't spend much of their lives in that kind of quiet desperation, and I'm not saying the beatniks didn't; I'm saying it's hard to make it into a coruscating piece of cinema.

Ron Livingston (Office Space, Drinking Buddies) is fantastic as Allen Ginsberg, and Keifer Sutherland finds a few master-strokes within his (admittedly over-emoting) Burroughs, no easy task. There's a sense of doomed venture about all beatnik movies, since we all harbor such exacting ideas about who they were, how they moved and spoke and acted. Reedus is well cast as the superficial but brightly-burning superstar Lucien Carr, the kid who gathered the disparate members into one room then committed the murder that sent them forth onto their various paths. He communicates Carr's weakness particularly well, and, yes, I admit, he indulges his Boyish Charm here, but, in his defense, Carr certainly would have used his own, constantly and to good effect.

The ending, although historically dubious, is a beautiful moment for Reedus, and should not be missed by the true fan.

Rating: two stars
Reedus Factor: four stars

Deuces Wild: (2002. dir: Scott Calvert) It's not a good movie. It's a nostalgia trip yearning for a place and time that never existed, and, even in fantasy, is not in the least appealing. Pompadour-haired, wife-beater-wearing gangs battle it out in a Brooklyn neighborhood. Their mothers are all crazy, some with grief and loss, others just crazy; their girls have that and nothing else to look forward to once the ring goes on the finger. The good guys hang out at the soda shop, do charity work at the Catholic Church for penance, are nice to little kids and dress up to go to weddings with their girls; the bad guys hang out at a pool-hall, sell dope to the weak and use little kids in their evil machinations. Then they all beat the crap out of each other, all but destroying their neighborhood in the process.

There's (surprise!) a Romeo & Juliet subplot, and Reedus is the baddest of the bad, the dealer who supplied the hot-shot that killed the younger, dreamier brother of our hero (Stephen Dorff). He's getting out of jail, Reedus, and bent on having his revenge on the guy he's sure snitched him out (again, Dorff). (It wasn't.) Gang-members are played by the likes of James Franco, Johnny Knoxville and Balthasar Getty, but only Reedus is really interesting, although not as much as he would be if he'd played it five years later. He's too young; his malevolence is merely two-dimensional. There is already, however, that fascination in the way he moves, that disquiet interplay of looseness and tension, the complicity between stillness and violence. In the end, because it's that kind of predictable story, he gets the crap beat out of him by Stephen Dorff, which doesn't really seem likely, does it?

Rating: one and a half stars
Reedus factor: three stars

norman reedus film festival: a second look at the conspirator

(2010. dir: Robert Redford) In this massive waste of a colossal amount of talent, the fatally ambivalent clusterfuck that was Robert Redford's the Conspirator, Reedus trumps everyone in his uncompromisingly hard portrayal -- really, just a glorified cameo, with only a few minutes' screen-time, -- of Lewis Payne. Payne, or Powell, as was his given name, stands out in the annals of the assassins as the hardest and strongest of them, a sort of embodiment of Confederate malevolence. His attack on the aging, already wounded and prone Secretary of State William Seward was of such brutality that it's difficult to read its description without flinching. To see it onscreen is to understand it better: once committed to the act and within the house, Powell's pistol misfires, so he must resort to blunt force and the knife's edge, his ferocity fueled by adrenaline. And still it's impossible to watch without cringing.

Lewis Powell (he was tried under the name Payne, which he chose as an alias when forced to sign an Oath of Allegiance to the Union. I used to hope it was a sort of punk-rock choice, but really it was the surname of a family he'd befriended during his time riding with Mosby's Rangers) is perhaps, in retrospect, the most interesting of the conspirators. While Boothe's motivations, although his politics were genuinely heartfelt, were puffed out of proportion with vanity and dreams of self-aggrandizement, Powell was a soldier of no small courage and excellence, a gentleman known for his gallantry to women (except for the time he was pulled up before the Law for battering a black housemaid), and the son of a Baptist preacher with some intention, before he found his true calling with the Troubles, of taking up the cloth himself. Enlisted as a spy for the Confederacy late in the War, he met Boothe and the others through Mary Surratt's son John, and the rest is history. Up to the end, even from the gallows itself, he swore with some passion that Mary Surratt was not guilty, possibly because it was his own bad timing, arriving in disguise at her doorstep just as Union officers were swarming about the place, which probably sealed her doom.

If you watch no other part of the movie, and there's a good argument to be made that you should just check out a few books from the local library on the subject instead, watch the hanging scene. Inaccurate in detail as it is (think that crowd was silent and somber like that? not a chance. Think all four died instantly like that? the thick-necked Powell struggled for above five minutes before death finally came), the way Reedus' version of Powell faces his doom feels shockingly real and completely original, with no hint of cliche or play-acting.

Rating: two stars, for bits of accidental greatness amongst the shambles
Reedus Factor: four stars. With this performance, he officially becomes a national treasure

glimpses from the walking dead: charm, violence, and some other thing

*SPOILER ALERT (if you're not yet through the second season)*

The thing about Norman Reedus, the real clincher, is the boyish charm. Not just that he has it, -- most successful actors do to some extent,-- but that he never employs it. It's there; we can see it; he just never wields it as a tactic. That's bold, since wielding your boyish charm is one of the easiest ways to win our hearts. The sex appeals of Dean and Brando were founded on it. Today, someone like Franco is good enough to pretend he doesn't need it, but he still uses it when he's backed into a corner. There are actors who style their whole careers around it (see Michael "observe my boyish charm" Madsen). Even John Wayne had to be pulled aside by Howard Hawks during the filming of Red River (when the Duke was 41!) and told that he had to stop doing that thing, the thing where he crumples his forehead and lifts his eyebrows and widens his eyes. It was the Duke's stock gesture indicating Boyish Charm, he used it in pretty much every film before then, and Hawks must have convinced him, because, as far as I can tell, he rarely used it after that.

Reedus is the toughest bad-ass on the modern screen. He can give us a sociopath of such unmitigated ice and deadpan ferocity that he makes the young Lawrence Tierneys and Richard Widmarks of the world look like Archie and Jughead. He's so good at it that you have to be careful how you cast him. Awesome as he is in Messengers 2, he's best in ensemble, where you don't have to worry about his civilized veneer slipping long enough for him to chop off the wrong person's head with any handily-placed machete. This guy belongs in Resevoir Dogs, which may be why the Walking Dead is the perfect vehicle for him, and it's why the decision not to emphasize the boyish charm takes guts and discipline.

Here are three of my favorite, most telling Reedus moments in season two.

MOMENT #1: It's towards the end of the first real Daryl-Dixon-dominated episode, "Chupacabra". He's been through hell. Thrown from his horse, he's twice tumbled down the same cliff-face and had to climb back up with an arrow stuck clean through his side. Barely alive, he has to waste two Walkers with scant weaponry, and then he takes a bullet on his way back to the farm. This moment is later, when he's in bed, recuperating. The woman whose daughter he nearly died trying to find gives him a brilliant compliment. After she leaves, the camera lingers on him huddled under the covers, his face an enigma. He's not doing anything, and yet, there he is, exuding boyish charm, without moving a muscle, without playing it at all.

MOMENT #2: This one is not about boyish charm, but something else. It's a few eps later, and Shane picks a fight with him when tempers flare in front of the Walker-barn. They start to fight, and just as they're separated by the others we see Daryl's face go slack and quiet, with just a hint of pleasure in it. It is so convincingly the mask of a dangerous man switching into psycho-mode that we wonder if Shane realizes how lucky he is for the intervention. The only face I can think of as scary is Clint Eastwood in the Unforgiven, when he's storming the bar with the shotgun, fueled by drink, his eyes insanely ablaze with fury born of anguish.

MOMENT #3: This one is harder to quantify. It's in "Pretty Much Dead Already", when Glenn tells everyone at breakfast about the barn full of Walkers. We see all their faces, and most of them give the reactions you'd expect. But look at Reedus, in the back. Tell me what he's thinking. Tell me that's not a brilliant, enigmatic moment.

norman reedus film festival: messengers 2: the scarecrow

(2009. dir: Martin Barnewitz) Alright, I'm tempted to call it the Citizen Kane of creepy scarecrow movies. Two things stop me: first, I haven't seen them all, although I'm working on that, and second, the actors who play the farm family are wrong. They're not bad, the wife and daughter and little boy; they're just city-slickers. You can't picture any of these people involved in the kind of constant chores a farm demands, anything beyond hauling the occasional picturesque bucket of apples across the length of the porch. The wife's role needed a Patricia Clarkson type: someone sexy and strong, but hard-working enough to exist in a place far beyond mere glamour. Even Reedus in the lead, although you absolutely buy that he grew up on a farm, is obviously new to this particular farm, or relatively new. It's as if they left out the part of the story where John Rollins and his family moved to the city for ten years before returning to buy a ramshackle farmhouse and a downtrodden (haunted) cornfield. I guess they left it out for reasons that would be apparent if I watched the original Pang Brothers movie, which I may, but there's little chance it will be as good as this.

First of all, it won't have Norman Reedus, who is equally convincing as good guy, trying desperately to save his family while all they can see is him stalking through the house with a sickle in his hand, and bad guy, raping his wife, then wanly apologizing. Reedus is the fascinating, enigmatic core from which the movie emanates, and the camera loves him. We start with a view of the farmhouse from the cornfield. There's a man in his Sunday clothes standing still on the porch, looking out as his corn. The camera moves in and we see he's holding a Bible behind his back. Meaningfully, he sets the Bible down, strips off his coat, and ventures forward to ruin his fancy duds by working in the soil; it doesn't matter, as he won't be going to church anymore. In this first moment, he steps away from the conventional God who has abandoned his farm and family to ruin, and opens the door to a different, darker, telluric god, the one who will raise his fortunes, but at a terrible price.

Other than Reedus having to spend too much time spinning around disoriented amongst the corn-rows (but he and his editor both have the chops to carry it off), this movie looks great. The camera pulls in on him alone, with few exceptions giving us only his perspective, and it works like gangbusters. It sounds great, too, with good music well-used and a great drone of insect noises, not to mention the unsettling sound of a scythe-blade being dragged across the ground. The symbolism stays uncomplicated and unpretentious ("daddy, the scarecrow is you!"; "you planted your seeds, now reap your reward") and Richard Riehle is just avuncular enough as the troubling neighbor to convince us to trust him although, let's face it, we all know we shouldn't. Just the look of the scarecrow is creepy as hell, and when the little boy whispers in dread, "It knows that I know," a chill goes up your damn spine.

Rating: four stars
Reedus Factor: five stars

welcome to my norman reedus film festival

Since you're reading this, I'm going to assume a few things: that you know the Walking Dead is more than just a show about zombies, for a start. That it is, in fact, not even primarily a show about zombies, but rather about societal collapse, and how do you refigure the rules of civilized human behavior once civilization is gone? At least, that's what it's about in the end of the second season, which is where I stand right now. It's an ensemble piece, no question, with few or no weak links, but would it still carry the magic it does if Norman Reedus' Daryl Dixon wasn't there? I'm not sure it would.

Daryl is a bow-hunting redneck with a genius for survival; probably an outcast and loser back when the shirts and ties were still running the world, but it all belongs to Daryl now. He's politically incorrect as they come, surpassed in this only by his no-good, one-handed, Harley-riding, possibly dead older brother Merle (played by Michael Rooker, which tells me he has to be coming back). (Merle last showed up in Daryl's hallucination, warning him that he's become a "bitch" to the "pansies, nigras and democrats.") When his compassion is roused, as when a little girl goes missing, Daryl becomes the strong beating heart of the group, the only one who believes she can survive because he did, himself, when he was abandoned in the wilderness at her age. On the other hand, once he loses faith and begins to distance himself, he shows tendencies towards Colonel Kurtz-dom, with grisly trophies (a necklace of zombie ears, animal bones strung outside his tent) and an extreme lack of social grace.

The first I saw Reedus, I was flipping through channels and stumbled across the middle of Messengers 2: the Scarecrow. I was on my way to a soccer match, and so didn't want to linger, but I'm sucker as the next guy for a spooky scarecrow movie, so I paused for a minute, and then I couldn't look away. Not because it was so great (although it is, in retrospect, possibly the Citizen Kane of creepy scarecrow movies; see separate review), but because I could not for the life of me figure out if the Norman Reedus character was a good guy or a bad guy. I assumed I knew the story: decent but flawed family man moves his family to the wrong farmhouse for a new start, and the Resident Malediction begins to chip away at him via his various Achilles heels until he loses control and has to summon all his strength to overcome it and save his family. Right? But this guy is usually played by Dylan McDermott or Jeff Fahey or James le Gros, a role probably soon to be taken over by the James Marsdens of the world. One look and you see what's up: a good guy deep down, just got some weaknesses, but basically well-meaning.

But Reedus? You can watch him forever, at least in a well-written role, and never make up your mind about whether he's a good guy or a bad guy. Every time you think you've got him pegged one way or the other, he does something to plant a new doubt. Nurturing a crush on him is problematic. He invites the darkest kind of animus projection, and triggers anxieties more often than romantic fantasy. I've seen him described as "gorgeous", but he's not that, not at all. He's scary looking, with a face like a Halloween mask. There's something just slightly wrong about the sunken eyes, the puffy flesh, the dank helmet of lifeless hair, but it doesn't matter. His sex appeal, troubling as it is, is undeniable, as is his talent, and the boldness with which he uses it.

The thing is, there's nobody else like him. And how many actors can you say that about?

three near misses, so close you can feel the wake of the bullet whizzing past you

Cosmopolis: (2012. dir: David Cronenberg) I like it when Cronenberg goes all heavily stylized; it's one of my favorite things about him. Sometimes (Crash, Naked Lunch) it works better than others (eXistenz), but even when the effort falls short, you gotta love the moxie behind it. Cosmopolis is a return to form in that respect after the more -- what's the word? not "normal", for sure, not when you're talking Cronenberg. "Traditional", I guess, until I think of a better one, -- approach to his last three (a Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises, a History of Violence). (All three of which, by the way, were awesome in their own individual and respective ways.)

Cosmopolis, alas, left me a little cold. I never fully breached the distancing trench he built into the stylization, although the camerawork and blocking were amazing (consider that most of the thing takes place inside a stretch limo), and all the performances very much arisen from the same stylistic world, no mean feat. I couldn't give a crap about the whole yuppie dilemma concerning the search for life's meaning once you've already conquered the world, and although I'm generally disposed to favor Robert Pattison, he faltered this time, crucially, in that protracted, climactic scene. He seemed lost, as if he had no handle, ultimately, on his character's final experience.

That's a minor gripe, I guess, and I do enjoy an outrageously metaphorical story, as long as it's boldly done, as this one is. The editing was crucially lean, dropping us right into the center of the action in most scenes; otherwise the methodical pace would have killed the venture off cold. As it is, Cronenberg gives us the sense that we are treading, slowly and surely, alongside his antihero, a coldly pre-destined path.

And I genuinely enjoyed three elements: Samantha Morton, the voice-activated gun, and the thing about the rats.

a Field in England: (2013. dir: Ben Wheatley) You've never seen another movie like this, I guarantee it. Imagine a cross between the Conqueror Worm and Waiting for Godot. Low budget but interesting to look at, with a soundscape which brought to mind Valhalla Rising (among other things that were just right with that movie), it keeps your attention without, how do I say this? without overly engaging you. It's not a horror film, although it incorporates at least one (protracted) image which fully creeped me out (when the alchemist's assistant finally walks out of the tent). In the spirit of old-timeyness, Wheatley uses tableaux-vivants (see the '70s Masterpiece Theatre miniseries Lillie or Terence Davies' House of Mirth for brief examples of that lost art-form) to separate his acts. In the spirit of Led Zeppelin, he uses psychedelic mushrooms to further his plot.

It's not a rousing victory, but you should watch it anyway, because well-done oddities like this one are sometimes the way everything changes.

Swamp Water: (1941. dir: Jean Renoir) It's Renoir's first American venture, and he goes flying right past the usual suburbs and city life straight into the vast Georgia swampland with its backwoods inhabitants. He's conjuring up a dark Southern Gothic, and goes a long way towards succeeding.

His opening shot is a baleful cross set up in the swamp and topped with a human skull. This, it turns out, is the boundary beyond which there be dragons, and if a wanderer loses sight of the cross, he will lose himself forever to die "gatored" or "snakebit". The grim fenland is filmed as a place of peril, almost a fairy-tale sinister forest in which princes become entangled and lose their powers. Walter Brennan is the convict on the run who survives in the place through grit and cussed determination. Dana Andrews is the good-hearted boy whose fortunes become entwined with his, and Walter Huston his old fox-hunting dad who becomes obsessed with uncovering the identity of his wife's lover (John Carradine in yellow-bellied weakling mode) and taking his revenge. Anne Baxter is Brennan's near-feral daughter, allowed to live amongst the townsfolk but little else, trying to find her way into adulthood without any love or guidance. Ward Bond and Guinn Williams are the lumbering, sociopathic Dorson brothers who wreak much of the havoc, but there's a separate underbelly of unthinking violence to this eerily insulated community, including ugly vigilanteism instigated by the wrath of a young woman scorned.

Although Renoir digs into the darkness with both hands, both cinematically and plot-wise, the characters in the end seem a little too simple, the story-ends a little too easily tied up, the two-dimensional happy-ever-after lacking that haunted taste which the best Gothics leave lingering on your tongue. (In the director's defense, apparently Darryl Zanuck wrested control away and condescendingly happy-fied the film for his American audience.) Not a success, but even so, a fascinatingly murky piece of Americana from a Gallic point of view.

human desire: the femme's side of the noir

*BIG SPOILER ALERT*

(1954. dir: Fritz Lang) This may be the coldest noir I've seen. It troubles me.

As good as it is, with the camera making great use of train-yards and hot metal hurtling down tracks, not to mention the bleakness of the little house in the hell that was suburban America in the fifties, as good as Gloria Grahame (stunning) and Broderick Crawford and Glenn Ford are, this film is disturbing to watch.

Part of it is the sugary counterpoint: Ford is a train engineer just back from a stint in Korea, looking for a quiet, stable life (or so he says) and rooming with a Leave it to Beaver perfect family of good friends, a coworker and wife and nubile teenaged daughter who is in love with him and now physically mature enough to be a contender. This saccharine top-coat, with its casually tossed-off truisms about the jealously-enforced proper-placement of women, and with the women themselves spouting the most egregious lines ("All women are the same. We just have different faces so men can tell us apart"), feels poisonous in its browbeating cheeriness. It brings to mind that amazing scene in the original Stepford Wives, when, after Tina Louise gives her heartfelt lament over the sad state of her marriage, the discomfited replicants begin shrilly effervescing over the joys of household cleansers.

Gloria Grahame is our femme, and she is indeed fatale, or heading that way. We hear about her briefly before we see her, but she doesn't show up until a good twenty minutes in, after we've met everyone else and seen the "nice" side of things. When we do see her, it's her gams we get a load of first. She's on her back with one elegant leg stuck languorously into the air, and we know there's going to be trouble. What this noir does differently from every other I've seen is that it shows us her side of the story, shows us how even the "nice" guys mistreat her and mistrust her, and does so while still quite brilliantly keeping her a mystery until her endmost scene. It's a good trick, and well pulled off, and our sympathies abide with her in ways that we never allow with, say, Jane Greer in Out of the Past or Mary Astor in the Maltese Falcon, even Barbara Stanwyck or Lana Turner. In the end, when we at last get that long-anticipated, deepest look inside her psyche, because we've shared her journey, her darkness seems, in the circumstances, strangely reasonable.

I find this ending utterly chilling: Glenn Ford (driving the train as it plunges coldly, heedlessly along predestined tracks) smiles easily as he thinks of the teenaged girl he will take to the dance, waves in a friendly manner to strangers as he passes, and, meanwhile, the woman whom he has so recently sworn he loves is being murdered a couple of cars back on the same train. It took him about five minutes to get over her, with no consequences, no permanent damage. Meanwhile, she's getting dead over it.

Fritz Lang was a damn genius.