valkyrie and the missing hamartia

This was the theatrical experience of tragedy as they taught it when I was a kid: it involved an emotional catharsis for the audience, which was set off by a character's reversal of fortune (or peripeteia), which in turn had been triggered by his own hamartia, or fatal flaw. Nowadays they're translating the Greek differently, I hear, and the hamartia can be something as simple as a mistake or an error in judgment, to which I say crap! utter rubbish. And I don't mean the translators are necessarily wrong, but that Aristotle was, if this is what he meant to say.

Valkyrie is a case in point. Why did it fail? One reviewer said the device of using British actors to play Nazis was too old and tired to carry a film anymore, but that's not it, not for me, anyway; I love it; I'll never get tired of that. That stiff upper lip thing slides right over into "Ve haf vaze ahf making you talk" wonderfully well, like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. "I ask you once more: is it safe?" Brrr! Chills me just thinking of it. (That said,-- sidebar here,-- it's one of the few genuinely Teutonic actors who has the most chillingly effective moment in Valkyrie: it's Thomas Kretschmann as the officer who must puzzle out what's going on and ultimately decide who triumphs, and the moment is the one in which he decides.)

It's a tough subject, the Valkyrie Plot, a moment so crucial in the German mythos that it in some ways defines the country. I understand the German reticence at Hollywood taking this hallowed story into its careless hands. A rough equivalent might be the Irish reaction if Roland Emmerich directed Hunger or the uproar in the Jewish community when Mel Gibson announced he wanted to film the story of the Maccabees (a film which I would give much to see and, alas, apparently never will).

The problem for me is this: sometimes I cannot surrender myself emotionally to a film. Usually the root of that failure lies in what might be called the Spielberg Hustle, in which a filmmaker uses every possible tactic to manipulate our emotional responses, employing elements not organic to the story or characters in doing it, and so abusing our trust and revealing an emptiness at the film's core where its heart ought to have been. Valkyrie, on the other hand, was a different matter: I mistrusted it because I knew the story, knew the vale of tears into which these people were headed, and I could not accompany them without withholding my heart. Afterwards I was disturbed by it: was the flaw in the film somewhere, which, from a technical standpoint, was very well done? or was it a flaw in me as a spectator? Have I become one of those yellow-bellied whingers who can only watch a movie with a happy ending? Surely not. After all, I know where Hamlet and King Kong are headed, and I throw myself full-force into the ring with those fellows with repeated zeal. Das Boot comes to mind: I know where they're bound, have since I saw it in the theatre, and yet I set off time and again in that claustrophobic little metal contraption and hope and laugh and fear and cry and emerge richer for it in the end. So why not Cruise's Stauffenberg on his ill-fated mission to assassinate the Fuehrer? What is it about Valkyrie that stopped me from committing?

I was cruising around the internet when I found the answer: it was on a website which outlined the basics of every known attempt on Hitler's life. In a passing remark, the webster wrote, "Stauffenberg believed that only he could accomplish it," and that set off the eureka moment in my mind. THAT was the fatal flaw which might have turned the pathos into tragedy. As the movie stands now, Stauffenberg's only mistake is in leaving the scene of the crime without verifying that Hitler is dead, a small error in judgment. If instead he'd been driven by the hubris of thinking only he could bring off this assassination, that it was a destiny of his and no one else should touch it, then there it is: the wound through which the gods enter. There's the flaw that makes him human and upon its back we can climb up to the heights of tragedy instead of wallowing in the mud of pathos, a state in which we are showed the horrors of life but given no exalting catharsis, no chance to come away from the cinema with that revitalizing awe which tragedy, when well done, inspires.

In an essay on tragedy, Edith Hamilton(*) writes, "Undeserved suffering is not in itself tragic. Death is not tragic in itself... It is not Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle that is tragic. It is his power to feel. Change all the circumstances of the drama and Hamlet in the grip of any calamity would be tragic, just as Polonius would never be, however awful the catastrophe. The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly -- that and only that is tragedy." It's possible that Cruise gave us too much noble action figure and too little true feeling; it's possible that the fault was in the script and not any of his. It is also possible that the same political correctness which lambastes filmmakers when they try to examine Hitler as a human being instead of a mere monster (as in the initial outcry, later tempered by some, to 2002's underrated Max) may have stripped this particular Stauffenberg of the very humanness which might have raised him up onto the giddy heights from which tragic heroes gaze forlornly down at us.

* see Gilder et al. Theatre Arts Anthology, Theatre Arts Books, NY 1950

what i'm watching: march edition

>SPOILER ALERT<

Let the Right One In: (2008. dir: Tomas Alfredson) I remember the day I gave up coming-of-age films. I was in high school and sitting in the Varsity watching a French film in which (as I remember it) a teenaged boy arranges for his older brother to get burned across the ass on a heater to keep him from sleeping with the object of his (the teenaged maimer's) affection. The brother sleeps with her anyway; it's unclear why the girl sleeps with the brother, except perhaps that she is enigmatic and French; and I thought to myself, "No more French coming-of-age films. I've reached my saturation point. Enough." By the time I was outside the theatre, that resolution had expanded to include ALL coming-of-age films not made in the U.S. and most of them that were, and I've stuck with it fairly well, missing Cinema Paradiso and My Life As A Dog and countless others that have been advertised as the best thing since canned beer.

This ruthless tenet by which I've lived for so many years combined with the fact that Netflix sent me this movie when I really wanted the Star Trek episode that was, in fact, at the top of my queue (yes, yes, I know how that sounds, no need to rub it in) stacked all my cards against liking it when I sat down to watch, grumpily wishing that Mr. Spock or Q would make an appearance. And still it won me over. My worst fear was that it would be Twilight on steroids, but it had more in common with some unflinching philosopher's body of work, Kierkegaard maybe. Like all good vampire films, it's not just about blood-sucking, although there are copious amounts of blood. You could say it's about being loved in spite of what you are, and also about the importance of activating your own dark nature, but saying it out like that makes it sound less than it is. I hear you now, groaning, "Oh, is THAT all?" It's not all. In fact, the parts that lifted it from good into great for me were in the last section: the attack by the cats, the vampire suicide, the way the massacre at the pool was filmed. There's something balletic about the film, and by that I don't mean the boring parts of ballet but the grace of it, the graceful interweaving of sound, vision, and action. The director has a complete vision, and he does not waver.





The Last Tycoon: (1976. dir: Elia Kazan) Man, this should have worked. De Niro was in the perfect place to play this role: he's got the effortless charisma, he's sexy as hell, he's still got the old intensity but he's relaxed enough that he can enjoy the genuine niceness of the character. He's Monroe Stahr, a version of Irving Thalberg as seen through the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald during his unhappy screenwriting stint in Hollywood. The book was unfinished when Fitzgerald died suddenly, and it's still a good read.

My first thought was that it ought to have been filmed either twenty years earlier or twenty years later. Kazan directed; Pinter wrote the screenplay. Pinter had even at that time adapted at least two other books into film (the Go-Between, the Quiller Memorandum), so he was no greenhorn. Kazan hadn't directed anything for years, and nothing great for twenty years. Here's a man who ought to have been able to give us an interesting look at the studio system... and he just doesn't! Like, out of perversity or something. Or had he just lost the touch? Or maybe his power had been so stripped in his time away that he hadn't the resources... Your guess is as good as mine. Regardless, the old Gadge magic is nowhere to be seen.

The best bit in the book is a meeting between Stahr and a high-falutin' British writer who's been recruited to the studio and is miserable, can't understand the first thing about making movies. Instead of trying to explain it, Stahr tells him a simple story about watching a girl walk into a room and perform a series of simple but strange tasks (empties her purse on the table, puts two dimes back in, lights her gloves on fire, etc). He tells it simply and it has no end, but both the reader and the recalcitrant screenwriter are intrigued. Pinter also recognized its power, placing the telling of it twice in his screenplay: once where called for in the book, again during the improvised, montage-like ending. And the story doesn't work in either place. I don't blame Pinter. In the book it has power because it is simply told in a quiet voice, and one can feel the screenwriter being drawn in by Stahr's personal charm. Kazan doesn't trust his actor enough just to let the camera stay steady on him while he speaks -- and what would you rather look at than De Niro, back then, sitting still and telling a story? that magnificent face, and the wonderful, subtle things he did with it -- and so has him running around the room, miming actions, and the focus is lost.

And so it goes with the rest of the film. Pinter obviously has great respect for Fitzgerald's original dialogue, which deserves it, and uses great chunks of it where he can. Again, it ought to have worked. Again, I blame Kazan. The editing is lousy, and the sound is lousy. It looks and sounds like a TV movie. Not the kind now, which can be good, but the '70s kind, which was not. The sound is unbalanced and weird, with background noise mitigating focus during important moments (again, not in that Conversation-style early '70s-realism way, but in a lazy-assed way). Add to that a cast of over-the-hill studio players doing cameos, it's even more movie-of-the-week, and it all comes out looking cheap and wrong.

The best parts of the film, as in the book, are when we follow Stahr during his work-day, responding to dailies, giving advice on films. Thalberg was a genius in his own specialized way, and Fitzgerald has caught it with his pen. The notes Fitzgerald left for the end of the book are best ignored (it gets Grand Guignol, with hitman murders and airplane crashes and tuberculosis), but Pinter tacks on an unsatisfying non-ending which, although it has the virtue of unpretentiousness, really doesn't play. By the time it comes around, though, things have been going wrong for long enough that it doesn't much matter. There's a bit with Jack Nicholson which ought to have been fabulous: Nicholson is the guy from New York who's come to talk the studios into unionizing the writers. Seeing him with De Niro promises much, and delivers nothing. It's the writer's fault; they have nothing to do. You ask yourself: why did this guy fly all this way to sit and say nothing? He never talks to Stahr about anything, just answers his questions in monosyllable, endures his drunken taunts, decks him, and leaves. In the book, this character is a communist off the street with whom Stahr on a whim arranges to talk, which explains the lack of motivation, but doesn't make the incident any more interesting.

In the end, it's all very frustrating. If you're having a De Niro-festival, you can't miss this one. Otherwise, alas, you can.




Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: (1974. dir: Sam Peckinpah) Ah, Sam, Sam. I love you, man. But your movies about the relations between men and women... ah, Sam. Leave it at home, will you? Like that Ballad of Cable Hogue nonsense. You seriously wanted this to be part of your legacy? Not that old Alfredo here is on that same low par; this one has much to recommend it. Warren Oates, for one, who may be the perfect Peckinpah stand-in, a fellow who never takes off his sunglasses, who brings a near-unbearable poignancy to the defensive, barked phrase, "Nobody loses ALL the time." Then there's the strange, timeless Mexican estate from which the death sentence is issued, a place that has one foot in the 1800s and one in the modern day, none of it in the real world, a place where a daughter's illegitimate baby is celebrated even as news of its father's murder is rewarded. There's Gig Young in one of his creepily convincing sadist roles. There's a baby-faced Kris Kristofferson, who reshapes a single-scene, Harley-ridin' rapist into a poetic, romantic hero. But then... are you listening, Sam?... in the Peckinpah-'verse, no woman is raped who doesn't really want it, and their long-suffering men are held up as virtuous martyrs for fighting for them anyway. Heavy sighs all around.

It's a slow and unwieldy film, with big chunks of dully-written dialogue, and yet it unwinds with such a strangeness that it weaves its own magical spell. If nothing else, you'll be left reminiscing about the good old days when a person could check a human head through customs and still make it onto the flight to Mexico.