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.
