sweeney todd: the beauty of blood-letting

I don't do musicals, but I'll do Sweeney Todd, which is not so much a musical as a grand promenade through a Gothic Elysium. It's an instant midnight classic: Depp and Bonham-Carter are the king and queen of Goth, Tim Burton is its kingmaker. Had I seen this when I was 13, I'd have fallen in love and no doubt grown up with black hair and red smeary lips listening to Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux instead of the more healthsome Talking Heads and B-52s which passed as cutting edge music at my high school.

The demonic barber himself began life as an urban legend (the name was possibly inspired by Sawney Bean, the Scottish cannibal). Although Todd's story is set in Georgian times (think Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and dark, satanic mills), it didn't wend its way into print and onto the stage until Victoria was on her throne. Precursor to Jack the Ripper, Mr. Hyde and Stoker's Dracula, he first showed up in a penny dreadful, one of the original faces of gothic literature, behind the title the String of Pearls: a Romance. In it, Sweeney is a ghoulish and cackling monster without conscience or heart. The 1936 movie Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street follows in these footsteps, with Tod Slaughter in the lead, a man with a disturbing giggle who looks like he stepped out of an old Tenniel drawing from Alice in Wonderland, cravated and heavy-featured, huge-headed and ovoid like Humpty Dumpty.

Ray Winstone took a turn at the barber's chair a few years ago (Sweeney Todd, directed by Dave Moore for the BBC), a slower and less stylized look at a serial killer battling his demons. A barber at that time not only shaved your face but worked as a sort of emergency-room doctor for the lower classes, removing shot and kidney stones, amputating limbs. It was bloody work, and Winstone's Sweeney reminds you exactly how difficult and time-consuming it is to dismember a human body.

None of that heavy-limbed detail for the Burton tour-de-force, however. Customers slide down the chute, Mrs. Lovett drags them away, somehow her gowns aren't much sullied when she emerges from the cellar and she still has time to sing while she serves ale and pies between dismemberments and baking. Doesn't matter. Burton has created a world unto itself, a thing at which he excels, and given the Sondheim-penned musical a permanent home on the screen. The source material is fantastic: there's nothing insipid or Music Man about these songs. Weak as Depp and Bonham-Carter might have sounded on the stage, the intimacy of film magnifies them into crepuscular, creepy perfection. When they stand at the window, looking at passers-by and singing about the man-eat-man world, it's as spooky as any bloodletting. Sondheim has shaped the story into vastly more than a gorefest: blood there is, and buckets of it, but this is a tragedy in its deeper sense, and this particular Sweeney Todd paves the way to his downfall through his own hamartia. The final frames are perfect, a perfect culmination of Burton's parade of sanguinary aesthetics.

some reasons to avoid charlie wilson's war

NUMBER ONE. Raise your hand if you're weary to puking of arrogant, bellicose rich folk from Texas blithely spending your tax dollars on their warmongering.

NUMBER TWO. For anyone who's lost blood, kin or a lover in Iraq or Afghanistan, here are disturbing things. One scene in particular: raggedy Muslim guerrillas blow a helicopter out of the sky using an American-provided RPG. We're meant to cheer it, but it gave me a bad chill. Bookended with sentimental bits from a ceremony in which Congressman Wilson is given a medal, Charlie Wilson's War takes pains to remind us that back then the Afghans wore the white hats, as they were being invaded by the black-hatted Russians. But one leaves the cinema uneasy: where are they now, the three billion bucks' worth of weapons we gave the Mujahidin back in the '80s? How many were trained right back at us in Taliban hands? The weapons were distributed through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, whose golden boy in Afghanistan at the time was an eager anti-Western zealot called Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who received the lion's share of the weapons.(1) After 9/11, he was officially declared a global terrorist, heavily associated with both Bin Laden and the Taliban. How can we cheer the distribution of these weapons, while the war is not yet ended?

"This is a fight of good against evil," says Ned Beatty's congressman in a speech to the beleaguered Afghans, presaging very similar words spoken by another fellow from the White House after 9/11, only the black hats are on the Afghan heads by then.

NUMBER THREE. Julia Roberts has been given an impossible and thankless task. She plays a wealthy and powerful conservative Christian who has thrown all her considerable political weight and fortune behind the cause of arming Afghanistan out of old-fashioned rightwing born-again anticommunist ideals. She tells Congressman Wilson straight out that she's been saved by Jesus Christ and that means a great deal to her. Then, for the remainder of the film, she's Mae West. Her decolletage is as low as her morals. She'll match you highball for highball, casually bed you if you take her fancy, call the younger girls 'sluts' for no apparent reason but jealousy... In short, this is Hollywood's traditional way of winking at us about humans of faith. "She's not really a Christian," Hollywood is whispering to us. "She's a big sinner like the rest of us, so it's OK to like her." I'm no Christian, and I'M offended by it.

NUMBER FOUR. In fact, there is much to offend most thinking women, not just Christians, but also feminists (are there still feminists?), strippers and bellydancers. In this alternaversion of 1980, if anyone had ever burned a bra it was because there's not a woman in the world with a tit unperky enough to need one. Congressman Wilson unabashedly surrounds himself with a provocatively-dressed posse of eye-candy. Because Aaron Sorkin wrote it, his gaggle of bunnies manages to channel CJ Cregg long enough to punch out a press release during a crisis, but mostly they exist to make Wilson look smart by confusing Pakistan with Afghanistan, startle visitors with dirty talk, gaze at him with starry eyes, surreptitiously provide his endless intake of whiskey, perhaps do the odd strategic bellydance when a state official needs distracting. Mike Nichols has a post-feminist party with it, letting his camera linger leeringly on their asses, gleefully fomenting an undercurrent of catfight between the bunny-gaggle and Roberts' aging beauty queen... because what's more fun than women fighting over men while men do important stuff like talking about guns?

ALL THAT SAID, THERE ARE GOOD THINGS ABOUT IT. A generous third of this movie is very funny indeed, in that Aaron Sorkin way, with the magnificent one-liners that catch you by surprise, and these three actors--Tom Hanks, Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman--use just the right underplayed spin to zing them home. Hoffman is invincible at this kind of thing. I wished his part was better. (Did anyone NOT know he was going to break the window, about five minutes before he broke it?) Had anyone other than Hanks, that soul of affability, played Wilson, it'd have been a shambles. There'd have been too much sleaze... as I'm certain there was in the real-life version. Somehow Hanks emerges unsoiled. In a hottub filled with strippers and Hollywood slimedogs, cocaine everywhere, nobody wearing anything but stiletto heels, Hanks comes away with an air of gentlemanly forbearance, as if he's only there out of politeness, to let the kids have their fun. Anyone else would've seemed either satyrlike and randy or sheepish and embarrassed. (Imagine Val Kilmer in that hottub. Now imagine Michael Madsen. Now Joaquin Phoenix. See where I'm going with this?)

When it comes down to it, Charlie Wilson's War is troubled by a schizoid self-image. It wants to be a serious political essay about what we did wrong in Afghanistan; it wants to be optimistic, sentimental and pro-American; it wants to be a lighthearted sex romp. If the war weren't still going on, even while we're here, sitting in the dark in the theatre, there'd be a chance they might have carried it off. As it is, it doesn't work. It'll be one of those things that you catch on cable in years to come and think, "Oh, that's pretty funny. I'll watch until the next commercial."

(1)Junger, Sebastian. Fire: "The Lion In Winter", WW Norton, NY, 2001.

open range: lies, damned lies, and sodbusters

There are two basic good guys in a Western: the gunslinger and the sodbuster. Think of Shane: there's Alan Ladd and there's Van Heflin. We admire them both. They both work hard, live by a code of honor, risk much. The gunslinger gets romanticized because he's untouchable. He rides into town silently carrying the burden of his past sins, kills the bad guys so we don't have to, and when he inevitably rides back out, our sins have been added to his load. The Jason Robards character in Once Upon a Time in the West has this to say about him: "People like that have something inside, something to do with death. If that fellow lives, he'll come in through that door, pick up his gear and say adios." The sodbuster, on the other hand, is about life, which is less glamorous but (as the Magnificent Seven will tell you) the more important job in the end. He's devoted to his family, his land, his crops, and will do anything to see them thrive. It is this very devotion to life for which we admire him, and also which makes it impossible for him to take on the bad guys.

Now picture this: the Van Heflin character purchases a fancy sidearm and rides off into the sunset in gunslinger's garb to seek foolish destiny. That, in a nutshell, is Open Range, and it is embarrassing.

This is the story of Boss (Robert Duvall) and Charley (Kevin Costner), free-rangers who have been driving cattle together, or so they would have us believe, for ten years. I include the caveat because I submit to you that everything these characters tell us about themselves is a lie.

Charley (he tells us over and over, ad nauseam) is haunted by terrible, largely unspecified crimes he committed in his mercenary past. In fact, he spends so much time insisting we look at his prodigious badness that it becomes awkward. He is like the skinny kid at the prom bragging drunkenly that he can hold his liquor. You blush, scowl, avert your eyes. Charley is, in fact, a sodbuster in gunslinger's clothing.

He tries in various ways to act the part. In one particularly awful scene he shoots up a saloon because he can't get served, a time-honored Clint Eastwood move, but he does it with such hurt and prideful self-righteousness that it's just, well, embarrassing.

He also works overtime to convince us that he possesses the trademark gunslinger laconicism.** Silence is crucial to the gunslinger; it sets him apart, preserves his mystique. "In Westerns silence, sexual potency, and integrity go together," writes Jane Tompkins in West of Everything: the Inner Life of Westerns (p54).1 "For the really strong man, language is a snare; it blunts his purpose and diminishes his strength." (p51) The cowboy hero's very inarticulateness has made for some of the best cinematic poetry Hollywood ever conjured up. There is, to be sure, a parallel tradition of the garrulous gunman (McQueen in the Magnificent Seven, Kilmer in Tombstone, Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but he acts as foil to his quieter and more dangerous partner (Brynner, Russell, and Redford, respectively).

So Charley's got high stakes in convincing us he doesn't talk much. This he tries to do by talking about it.

Picture Eastwood riding onscreen. You know after a few minutes that he doesn't talk much because he doesn't SAY much; it's not rocket science. These guys, Boss and Charley (if, in fact, those are their real names; we only have their word for it), talk a blue streak, claiming they've ridden in tandem for ten years without finding out the merest detail of one another's pasts. Hard to swallow, since they do nothing but jaw. They talk about what they'll do, what they have done, about no goddamn thing at all, and, most appallingly, about their feelings. Behold.

"Charley," Boss asks at the nadir of the film, "you all right?"

Charley is kneeling and heaving. "I'm fine," he replies. "I just got some old feelings coming up."

These are sensitive cowboys. Lee Van Cleef would sew their hides into his boots and chew on their pristine livers.

Let me be clear: I have nothing against a homesteader. I always feel for Van Heflin and am pleased when he keeps the girl. But if these guys had any gumption they'd own up to what they are. They're happiest when they're choosing patterns for tea-sets and buying chocolates. When they finally decide to settle down, get the girl and buy the saloon, it seems such an obvious choice you wonder why they made such a fuss about it.

There's a good thing about this film: the shoot-out near the end. It's well-filmed and engaging. Then they start talking again, all too soon.

You're thinking right now that I have a THING against dialogue. I do, in fact, when it's written as badly as this. These cowboys say things like, "Let's rustle up some grub," and "This ain't the way, pard," and "Sticks in my craw," and "We got no quarrel with none of you folks." As if that isn't awful enough, there's the speechifying. Somber speeches, endless, endless, droning on and on and never catching fire, sentence after sentence falling to the ground with a thud and expiring without a twitch. Here is one the unfortunate Annette Bening has to speak: "I don't have the answers, Charley, but I know that people get confused in this life about what they want and what they've done and what they think they should've because of it. Everything they think they are or did takes hold so hard that it won't let them see what they can be..." That's not the end of it, not be a long shot, and it's not atypical here in Range-world. This script is full of them.

Remember the long, crazy silences of the best Spaghetti Westerns? The wealth of nuance and detail they communicated? Don't look for that here. I defy you to find one thing--an aspect of character, a plot-point, any detail at all--that is communicated visually without being spoken aloud afterward, just in case we're too dim to get it.

I could go on. There are evils here upon which I have not touched. (The bad guys, for instance, or the dog. Man, don't even get me started about the dog.) The point is that these ills are merely symptomatic of the hollow inauthenticity yawning at the nonexistent heart of this film. It may be that the Unforgiven spoke the last word on the Western, that there's nothing more to say in its wake. I hope that's not true. I hope people keep trying. Just, please, not Costner.

** David Milch has famously stated that the gunslinger's laconicism was a result of the Hays Code and nothing more,--that since John Wayne wasn't allowed to curse, he had to stay quiet. It sounds logical, but the archetype of the stoic with the hip-holster runs so deep that Milch himself can't bring himself to break away from it. In his own magnificent town of Deadwood, there are two true masters of the sidearm--Seth Bullock and Bill Hickok--both notoriously close-lipped, sometimes comically so. You can trace the quiet gunman to the beginnings of the Western, to Owen Wister's the Virginian, even to George Armstrong Custer's description of the real Wild Bill, a man "entirely free from all bluster or bravado."2

1 Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: the Inner Life of Westerns, Oxford University Press, NY 1992
2 Miller, Keith. "The West: 'With a Draw from Either Hand'...Gunslingers of the Old West", George Mason University's History News Network Website, 4/12/2002.

(reprinted by permission from Nightmaretown, 2004)

things i've been watching

Juno: It'll warm your heart or make you puke, depending on the elevation of your preciosity threshold. You might hate the script's glib affectation, but the actors are warm, precise and engaging.

Lilith: Sexual hysteria in an early '60s madhouse. Good supporting cast includes Peter Fonda as an innocent in love with Uberdestructrix Jean Seberg. She does well, but Warren Beatty is badly used, unconvincing as the mother-fixated, passive-aggressive Vincent. He's too damn strong and healthy, seeming perpetually a little embarrassed by his character's incipient dementia. Nicely photographed in black and white over a self-consciously cool jazz score.

Bodies at Rest and in Motion: Certain films capture moments central to a generation. My generation has Cameron Crowe for that, but this is another movie that touches a chord, conjures up a particular memory-tone. It's decent in a quiet way, with a lambent palette and generous amounts of space allowed around lines and scenes giving it an unhurried assurance.

Seraphim Falls: Underappreciated tale of vengeance in the Old West giving equal time to the obsessed hunter (Liam Neeson) and his dogged prey (Pierce Brosnan), both characters painted in shades of grey. Loses a few points for the Sam Shepardesque ending in which everything turns to metaphor, and the devil comes a-callin' in the beguiling shape of Anjelica Huston.

carl dreyer on ambiance

"If we are, through some occurrence or another, brought to a state of great tension, there are no limits to where our fantasy can lead us or what strange meanings we can ascribe to the real things which surround us... Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we realize that a dead body is standing behind the door. In the same moment, the room in which we sit begins to change, and each everyday thing in it looks different, the light and the atmosphere have changed without having changed physically. It is we who have changed, and things become what we perceive them to be."

Neergaard, Ebbe. En Filminstruktors Arbejde, Atheneum, 1940, p.52

small town cinema agonistes

Here's the thing about living in the sticks: I can list my top ten films of last year, but I haven't seen half of them yet. I'm still waiting for I'm Not There, There Will Be Blood, the Orphanage, Margot at the Wedding... Hell, I'm still waiting for Sunshine to hit the theatres but since it's out on DVD now I may have to relinquish that particular dream.

These are some I loved:

No Country for Old Men
3:10 to Yuma
Zodiac
in the Shadow of the Moon
the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Eastern Promises
Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait
Pan's Labyrinth
Michael Clayton
Into Great Silence

This was a great year for walking out of the theatre thinking, "I've never seen a movie quite like that one before." No Country was one of those. Much eloquence has already been spilled upon it so I'll just mention Garret Dillahunt, whose name gets lost in the brilliant shuffle of its credits. He's the deputy in this one, also giving up a wrenching and poetic turn as the doomed Ed Miller in the Assassination of Jesse James. Possibly you recognize him as the slow-witted lowlife who gunned down Wild Bill in the first season of Deadwood or the deeply introspective whorekiller from the second. He's one of those actors, like John Carrol Lynch and Gregg Henry, who make a decent film better and pull a bad one up a rung or two just by being so interesting to watch.

Jesse James wasn't the all-out Western I was looking for (never mind: I got that in Yuma) but it was a creature unlike any I've ever seen. It most resembles a Gus Van Sant film, from, say, ten years ago. Strange and slow, it digs with unyielding temerity into the methodology of psychological warfare. To work for Jesse James, first you hand him over all your power. The backwash of THAT is that he's attracting men like Ford (Casey Affleck, so good at this that he's painful to watch) who are unformed and looking to him for some magical galvanization to kickstart their Real Lives. James is an adroit psychological terrorist, masterfully tyrannizing the Ford boys into submission using time-honored tactics: random swings between affection and violence, constant surveillance, playing one off the other, and we watch as they become eaten away and etiolated like battered wives. The real stroke of success here, though, is how simply and silently Brad Pitt makes us understand and sympathize with his Jesse, who wants friendships like everyone else and must settle for sycophants because it's the bed he made himself and now he's gotta lie in it.

There was talk when Michael Clayton came out that it had the feel of a '70s film because of its strong emphasis on plot and character. That's not '70s; that's a good film. They just knew how to make 'em back then. And it IS a good film, well worth watching. There were bits I loved as much as anything I've seen this year: the thing about the horses, the credits over the cab ride at the end (nobody in the theatre moved until it was ended, even though it was just a cab ride, he was just sitting there, doing nothing, riding in the back of a cab, for God's sake. And yet it was fascinating. The silence, Clooney's face at rest after the long, impossible journey). Then I got to thinking about how this movie would've been made thirty-five years ago. First off, production values: this was NEVERMIND to the '70s' BLEACH. All slick: none of the gritty realism of Dog Day Afternoon or the French Connection. But the big difference was the lack of what I will call for want of a more perfect term Existential Angst. Think of the Conversation or the Parallax View. Back then, this story would never have jumped around from the inside of one head to another like this does... One minute we are in Tilda Swinton's head, the next we are following the assassins, then we're back with Clayton. It still makes for a good story, but some of the tension is wrung out of it, because we've seen the bad guys, been in their heads and know their flaws, so the menace does not seem overwhelming and unimaginable as it did in those old films. Of course, the ending would've been very different back then. No relaxed cab ride in those days for the existential hero, no sir. Witness the Verdict. Back then, even when you won, you really didn't. I tell you what else they'd have done: the assassins wouldn't have looked like they'd been chosen by central casting. How much scarier would it have been if they didn't look like aryan thugs, but ordinary joes making a living?

Zodiac makes me so happy I could spit. We've all known for many years that David Fincher is brilliant, but this is the first time he's let up on trying to convince us of it, making his tricks and shock techniques the real stars of his movies. They're still here, all his brilliant moves, but he's relaxed into them. Like he's finally found a story he's eager to tell for its own sake, and so he does it as effectively as he can, which is damned effectively. And it's a nigh-on impossible story to tell. It's shaped wrong, with lumps in odd places and long, arid stretches, and (here's the killer) it has NO REAL ENDING. A lesser man would have focused on a chunk in the middle of the Zodiac killer's spree, the most eventful chunk, and manufactured some kind of false climax. What Fincher has done is brave and, ultimately, well, brilliant. It's eerie, it's fascinating, it has an aura of truth about it; I've seen it twice so far and I suspect it will never get old.

As for the rest, docs about astronauts and monks and footballers are exactly my cup of tea, and there are few men I love with greater paroxysms of euphoria than Cronenberg and del Toro. (Zidane and Pan's Labyrinth are I think officially from 2006, but I didn't have access until last year, so... you know. Watch them anyway.) Meanwhile, Sweeney Todd has finally opened here, and I have high hopes for Daniel Day-Lewis showing up next Friday, so I reserve the right to change my mind as often as I want.

some other names i considered and discarded

The Unknown Grave Next To Arch Stanton. Smoulder and Fume. The Ludovico Technique. Sfumato. Sparagmos. Truth or Solace. Small Town Cinema Agonistes. The Unflinching Gaze. Flicker Fusion Threshold. Qu'est ce que c'est 'deguelasse'?