mchattiefest evening three: beauty and the beast

**"In the unconscious of every man there is hidden a feminine personality, and in that of every woman a masculine personality." -- Carl Jung, the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious**

In its first two seasons, it magnetized a sizable convocation of steadfast female fans, to the bewilderment of those outside its demographic. Its appeal was pointed and specific: it's an unabashedly mythological depiction of a woman's relationship with her own inner power, her own daemon lover. The beast-like but handsome Vincent (you gotta love Ron Perlman) exists solely for the sake of Catherine (Linda Hamilton), running to her side at the merest tremor across their perfect, empathic connection. Time apart from her is spent brooding in subterranean caverns, musing over poetry and dreaming of his Beloved.

To those of us whose archetypal buttons were not pleasantly pushed by it, it seemed saccharine and lugubrious, padded with syrupfest music montages, poetry recitals, and long, soft-focus shots of tunnels and mist-shrouded nights. Much as I love Perlman (head over heels in love with Hellboy, me) and Hamilton ("Hello, Dr. Silbermann. How's the knee?"), I couldn't generate the interest to stick with it beyond an ep or two.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Then comes season three, and all hell breaks loose. It's evidenced on Netflix: those hardcore fans denouncing it in harsh, betrayed wails... and I can see why. If it's a truism that a TV show necessarily jumps the shark when a baby is born into it (and I think it is: kids change everything, onscreen and off. It necessarily becomes a whole new ball of wax), then Beauty and the Beast's producers went whole-hog, no-half-measures, jumping over that baby-shark clear into a new, vast and interesting realm. No longer is the show about Catherine, who is killed in the first episode after giving birth to Vincent's child. Suddenly it's about the men who loved her (plus a very likable female FBI agent) who devote their lives to unravelling the puzzle of her demise, and to finding the baby, who has been kidnapped by a fascinating and malevolent tycoon.

Which brings us to Stephen McHattie, a maestro specializing in sociopaths of all rank and hue across a really impressive spectrum. This one, Gabriel, is one of his greats: quiet, deliberate, slow-moving, sinister, soft-spoken, controlled, seemingly fearless, spectacularly deadly. When he must address a necessary but disliked minion, the voice remains steady and calm but his eyes are so heavy with contempt it seems a Herculean feat to keep them focused. He uses everything at his disposal to communicate the stygian darkness of this man to us: the strangeness of his face with its angular bone structure and thin, curling smile, the vastness of his presence, and, most markedly, a wildly proficient wielding of stillness as a dynamic force.

As Gabriel slowly becomes obsessed with Vincent, the series comes to life. Once he is vanquished, the vitality drains from it and the final episode feels bland, colorless, pedestrian. Most of the characters in the series (Vincent included, beloved as he is) never achieve a full three dimensions, since each is written to have a single (or, at best, dual) driving motivation. It is Gabriel, despite spending the bulk of his time watching from the shadows, who does the most changing across the span of the season. We see him travel from an apparently invulnerable omnipotence down into the furnace of his own destruction, impelled by the depth of his own fixations, and that's an ancient and recurring motif that never gets old.

RATING: 2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 5 stars

mchattiefest evening two: a history of violence

In a 2005 interview at the opening of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Viggo Mortensen said, "I've been in probably forty movies... [and this is] probably the one I feel the best about. The most satisfied with." At the time, the words were startling from the man who was still the brightest new star in our cultural zeitgeist, the face of Aragorn himself. He was speaking specifically of the true collaboration onset between director and cast to enhance the final storytelling, but there is a second sense in which the Cronenberg film could be considered a better one than Peter Jackson's magnificent Lord of the Rings trilogy: LOTR may have been the perfecting culmination of a particular cinematic tradition, but History is a real maverick. You'd be hard-pressed to find its like, in Hollywood or elsewhere.

Michael Haneke rather famously made Funny Games to berate (sorry. To educate, I meant to say) us unthinking, slobbering American audiences who roar with pleasure and bloodlust at ultraviolence onscreen. Then he made it again, in English this time, using recognizable Hollywood faces in an attempt to reach those of us who are so brutish and slobbering that we obviously were not going to sit through anything with subtitles. Like some red-faced televangelist hollering from a pulpit that you're a sinner and going to hell, this type of cudgelling harangue is probably going to raise more sniggers than awareness, and I doubt anyone but the choir was converted. This ground abuts the slippery slope which Cronenberg is mining: instead of wagging a pristine finger at the bloodlusters, he looks instead to those of us who purport to abhor violence, and asks very reasonably just how firm our convictions are in that area. He does it insidiously and successfully, opening up our ethical shadow-places with a neurosurgeon's precision accuracy and leaving us with some intensely uncomfortable self-examination to do.

History is extraordinary even from its opening moments: locusts drone and the camera moves listlessly across a ramshackle motel facade as we watch two evil men, a serial-killing twosome, emerge from their room. They move as listlessly as the camera, heavy with heat and moral ennui. One lights a cigarette and, chillingly, pauses to straighten a chair with the same impassivity with which he is about to kill a child. These are not just killers, but men so entirely without empathy and conscience as to have approached a near-zombie state. Even the high school bully who prides himself on toughness slinks away from them at a look. They radiate evil and lethargy. The only thing that brings them into any sort of life is when they besiege Tom Stall's cafe at closing time, seeming to feed and grow strong on the terror they arouse. One of these characters is played by Stephen McHattie.

He's an old hand at villains, McHattie is; he has a genius for them, and Cronenberg exploits it. When McHattie's Leland barks that he wants coffee, terror fills the room. I swear to God, it's the sound of civilization's tenuous veneer falling with a thud to reveal the ravening beast behind it. Nobody who's watched McHattie's previous powerhouse baddies will be surprised by the forcefulness at his command. The abominable druglord Whitehale in 1987's Caribe comes to mind, who throws the heroine around by her bra and whose recurring signature coda is "Fuck me in the heart." It might sound like comedy on the page, and the movie is a third-rate thriller at best, but with McHattie in Whitehale's shoes, the character comes across like an Act of God in the term's most negative and devastating sense.

So the black-hats take over the diner, whereupon Mortensen's Tom Stall leaps into action and emerges a hero... and the conversation is begun. How much violence is OK? Cronenberg asks. Is it OK to kill a little girl? no? then how about this: is it OK to kill two men while defending innocents? yes? alright, then, what about a nice kid beating the crap out of the kid who's been bullying him all year? still OK? And on it goes, acts of violence that garner our approval all the way up to Tom Stall's really brilliant killing spree, complete with snapping necks and welling blood and holes in the head, and there's Cronenberg watching us cheer him on (and we do, we do; how can we not?), saying, "So that much violence, that's still OK, then? Under certain prerequisite conditions, of course?"

Cronenberg has said his goal in casting a role is to find the guy of whom people will later say, "Nobody else could've played that." He's succeeded in that with Viggo. Not only is he one of those rare actors who we find ourselves liking both as villain and hero, but he has entered the realm of the mythical for us. One of Cronenberg's subtle, masterful touches, one that grasps us firmly by the scruff of the subconscious to lead us around, is in the music. Early on, before we know about Stall's complexities, composer Howard Shore gives us a noble, melancholic theme (what is that noble-sounding instrument, a bassoon?) reminiscent of LOTR, which Shore also scored. Inevitably we are reminded that this is Aragorn, the hero we trust above all others, and so are more apt to follow him in his subsequent twisting trail of misidentities and gathering uncertainty.

When I first saw it in the theatre, I was full-on flummoxed for the first half hour. There was that initial, doom-laden introduction to the killers, but then we flash straightaway to the Stall family, with whom we spend most of the next twenty minutes in a state of cloying, unalloyed sweetness culminating in an embarrassing let's-pretend-I'm-a-cheerleader sex scene. Had I been in lesser hands than Cronenberg's, I might have lost faith and left early, trudged home to wash the treacle out of my soul. In subsequent viewings, I can see the set-up is perfect. Our introduction to the Stalls is in the little daughter's bedroom, who has just had a nightmare and everyone gathers to reassure her: there are no monsters, daddy says, and big brother tells her to leave the light on because shadow-monsters are scared of the light. It's almost too simplistic, but there's no question we're in the midst of people who have banished darkness too entirely from their existence, and as any qualified Jungian will tell you, the dark gods of the psyche will not stay banished indefinitely. There is always a balance demanded, a teind to be paid for the light. By the film's end, the pendulum has swung clear over into the dark and is (perhaps) coming back to rest in a more profound, fuller way of life. Even in the midst of the darkness, a new health and vigor can be seen in the infamous staircase sex scene, violent and bruising but mutually passionate, for my money one of the best scenes of sex ever filmed.

This is one of McHattie's best, one of Cronenberg's best, one of Mortensen's best. Not to be missed.

MOVIE: 5 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 5 stars

mchattiefest evening one: a triple feature

Von Richthofen and Brown (1971. dir: Roger Corman) 1971 seems like a strange year to make a film about World War I dogfights, until you figure Corman was using leftover planes and sets from the garish (but oddly endearing) Julie Andrews musical Darling Lili. It's the genius of the man: if it's sitting around, he'll put it on film. And so Corman can add Stephen McHattie to his list of extraordinary discoveries; this was McHattie's second film, after the (as far as I can tell) unattainable anti-drug rant the People Next Door.

The moral of this tale of war (and what aspect of war is more glamorous than Sopwith Camels and Fokkers dancing together across the sky?) seems to be that war today is not the honorable and lovely thing it once was. John Phillip Law is surprisingly warm and human as the uberaristocratic Baron, a believer in ethics and boundaries in battle. Don Stroud is lumpen, dour, and without charisma as the Canadian who brings him down, making himself unpopular amongst his own with his constant eeyorisms about how warfare must be total, unrelenting, and soulless in order to be effective. Once the Baron has been killed, the point is hammered home when one Hermann Goering takes over command of the German squadron.

Stroud is an interesting fellow. He was one of that group of near-stars who had a moment in the sun in the early '70s then a lifetime of TV spots. You'll recognize him as the OTHER priest in the original Amityville Horror or the mod-ly dressed gunman who pisses Clint Eastwood off in Joe Kidd. He grew up surfing Waikiki,-- indeed, according to IMDB, was once ranked fourth best surfer in the world. He started as a stunt double for Troy Donahue then moved to L.A. where he was a bouncer at the Whiskey A Go-Go before finding his footing in front of the camera.

McHattie plays Werner Voss, has about ten minutes of screentime speaking in a heavy accent, and I'd swear at least part of it is dubbed. It's not a terrible film, and the dogfighting can be fun, although it's edited in such a slapdash manner that it's hard to tell who's getting killed and who's on whose tail. On a scale of one to five,

MOVIE: 2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 1 star (not enough screentime)


Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976. dir: Sam O'Steen) You didn't know there was a sequel, did you? Believe me, it must be seen to be believed. Patty Duke Astin is the histrionic Rosemary, Tina Louise takes a glamorous turn as a dark convert, but mostly Ruth Gordon and Ray Milland have a barrel of cantankerous fun as those satan-loving old Castavets. McHattie plays the devilspawn himself, just coming of age, and if he weren't so interesting to watch, this might be a long haul, indeed... unless you're stoned, I mean, in which case I suspect it's hilarious. Highlights include Donna Mills dressed in a Big Bird suit (it's supposed to be scary) and McHattie in what I lovingly call his Evil Mime Birthday Dance. Nonsensical, ultra-low budget, quite possibly made by people who were dropping acid throughout the shoot. The director was one of the great Hollywood editors, who'd worked not only on the original but on such classics as the Graduate and Chinatown. Go back and look at those. Fantastic editing. Some of the best ever. Proof, I guess, that genius in the one field doesn't necessarily carry you in the other... or possibly it was the acid holding him back.

MOVIE: 1 1/2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 4 stars
CAMP VALUE: through the roof


Salvation! (1987. Dir: Beth B) Possibly the worst film either McHattie or Viggo Mortensen have made, and that's saying quite a lot. It's a mean-spirited punk-hipster joke about a woman who blackmails a Pray-TV minister into letting her perform on his show. McHattie is the malevolent preacher, Exene Cervenka the evil-minded woman, Mortensen her belligerent husband. There's not a spark of humanity in it, not a single moment of insight. McHattie puts his back into it, finding just the right tone and bearing for his evangelist, but nothing can lift the leaden and entirely unfunny script by Beth B and punk extraordinaire Tom Robinson. Viggo was just snapping into full-focus at that time: the Reflecting Skin was still three years in the future. And the lovely and talented Exene cannot, alas, list acting skills among her many creative achievements. The sole upside of this waste of matter and energy is that this is where Mortensen and Cervenka met and fell in love. Which brings up that age-old Shanghai Surprise question about why films in which stars meet and fall in love are rarely any good.

MOVIE: no stars.
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 3, but not worth the slog.


AND AN AFTERTHOUGHT: It occurs to me that a sizable wedge of humankind will know McHattie best as the manipulative psychiatrist that Elaine dated for four episodes of Seinfeld in season four. He's also the guy on the alien autopsy train in the third season of X-Files...

welcome to my stephen mchattie film festival

When I was fourteen and got the reading list for my English class, James Michener's Centennial was on it, and it looked like a load of wank. As luck and the gods would have it, someone was making a miniseries, and it was due out just in time for me to get the gist without wading through a lot of bollocks about how the rock formed under the Rockies. The miniseries was a brand new form at the time; there had been Roots a few years earlier, but mostly only Brits had used it for Masterpiece Theatre. Certainly it hadn't become the precision form of entertainment it is now: Centennial is, in fact, twelve two-hour episodes long. Ponderous, to say the least. Even I, its great fan, I who own it on VHS, have never watched the whole thing. I get up to the episode where Cliff De Young finds redemption for his father's sins by driving cattle across the plains with Dennis Weaver and I'm done for every time despite every good intention. Then again, by the time those beeves get to walking Jake Pasquinel is already dead, and that might have something to do with my loss of interest.

Every now and then, a character not only steps off the pages (or off the screen) and into your imagination, but wraps itself in archetypal clothes and seems rather to step from your own psyche and manifest before your eyes. Jake Pasquinel was such a one for me. He first appeared (in his Stephen McHattie, grown-up form) at the end of the second episode, and in those few scenes, I was electrified. In retrospect I call him my first major shadow animus projection, but that's just blather when you're fourteen and fall in love. In fact, I was so felled by the stroke of this character that I made an unprecedented decision: a conscious choice never to know the name of the actor who played him. You have to have known me as a kid to know how crazy that is. I grew up in a theatre town, poring over season programs, fascinated by the arcs and shifts actors made in successive performances. This is the one and only time I ever decided the purity of a character as it existed in my mind was far too important to risk its devitalization by watching its actor exist separately.

Eight years later: I'm sitting in the Varsity watching Belizaire the Cajun and enjoying it very much, but an actor is driving me nuts. I KNOW this guy, I keep thinking. I KNOW his FACE; who is it? The penny drops during Armand Assante's long scene as Belizaire on the gallows, a great scene, in which he taunts the man who has falsely accused him. It comes to me, just like that: Jake Pasquinel. Look at that face. How could it not stick in your memory, even when he's no longer paint-darkened to look like a half-breed Arapaho renegade? (Ah, the political incorrectness of the '70s. At the theatre in my hometown, a world-class place, white men played Othello all the way until 1973.)

And so when I discovered Stephen McHattie, he'd already been lurking around in my subconscious for several years. Even without that kind of introduction, it's hard to imagine spending life as a filmgazer without noticing him. He's one of those actors who, particularly in his salad days when he was unspoilt by cynicism, makes the kinds of choices that indicate the very best of theatre training and probably some youthful tutelage by Stella Adler or her cohorts. He's the kind of actor who can take a piece of crap and elevate it a little or a lot, depending on his role, or possibly on his mood. A few particular shining moments spring immediately to mind: as a cop in the misconceived Melanie Mayron/Helen Slater comic vehicle Sticky Fingers emerging from a public toilet in drag or later when he says, "He's got great hands." In his episode of the sadly disappointing and short-lived Magnificent Seven series when his Cletus Fowler walks defiantly into the fire. As James Dean, picking up a one-legged woman or reciting from the Little Prince. The way he says "milk" in his throwaway role in the Ultimate Warrior.

He's got a bucketful of dross splashed across his resume, to be sure. He hit the streets running back in the days when an actor chose between the big screen and the small; you couldn't do both. If you did TV, you didn't graduate to movies. Not during the seventies. It could be done in the '50s, a crossover, or the '60s, then again in the '80s when all your faves got their chops down on soaps and sitcoms (Demi Moore! Meg Ryan! Robin Williams! Tom Hanks!), but there was some weird Berlin Wall that crept silently up in the earliest part of the "me" decade and ne'er the twain would meet, not for several years, during which my boy Stephen was caught on the wrong side. He made TV movies, back in the days when you looked up the word "crap" in the dictionary and it said "noun: tv movie." Even so, he belonged to an elite and amorphous category back then, young actors of whom much was expected; they were gonna be stars, if only on the small screen. They had the looks, the charisma, the ambition and the skills. Most of those guys turned into character actors instead, if they survived at all. McHattie is without question one of the best, and with his powerhouse role in David Cronenberg's 2005 masterwork A History of Violence, it is just possible that he's poised for a renaissance. Over the next few weeks I'll be writing about some of his best and worst. If you're really lucky, I'll let you sit in while I watch his old Starsky and Hutch and Walker, Texas Ranger episodes.