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.