the blackcoat's daughter: slow-burning doom

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2017. dir: Osgood Perkins) Two girls, abandoned by their parents over the school holiday, are left largely unattended in a snowed-in boarding school. The atmosphere, made of ambient sound and ominous, underplayed music, the institutional ugliness of a Catholic girls' school, the loudness of an empty place which is usually overcrowded with life, and a keen instinct for the unsettling image on a par with Kiyoshi Kurosawa's, makes this an exercise in psychic oppression that's hard to shake off. It might work as a metaphor for the America who voted for Our Vainglorious Dickwad, in fact. A weak person, feeling abandoned and unvalued, invites a devil in, finally finding purpose and a recourse for her stemmed-up tide of withheld strength in a terrible freedom. There's a stunning moment following the exorcism in which she watches the devil across the room and says plaintively, "Don't go." It's like the bullies who feel permission now, flowing down from the bully-culture of a White House and guided by the example of a Russian dictator, to emerge from the cocoon of civilization and bring the violence to whatever victims happen into their paths. To the undisciplined mind, even evil purpose feels better than none at all.

It's what they call a "slow burner", which I find to be its most impressive aspect, in the end. Long, hushed passages in which the girls' inner lives are quietly active and complex, brilliantly photographed by DP Julie Kirkwood for odd angles and discomfort. A subplot with really good turns by James Remar and Lauren Holly, neither of whom I recognized, seems at first at odds with the main story but, in the end, it turns out it's just very bold editing, very bold storytelling, all culminating in that bleak light of day which arrives after the monster has abandoned one to one's previous emptiness.

It gave me nightmares. It gave me an awful feeling before I slept that something unholy might come uninvited up the stairs, or, worse, something I'd invited by watching the film. It's the kind of thing that's so oppressive it feels like your life is a little changed, a little worse, and maybe a little bit doomed, once its images are in your head.

brimstone: pretending to be a woman's western

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2017. dir: Martin Koolhoven) Hollywood is having a problem creating "the Women's Western". So far there hasn't been a successful one, unless you count Sam Raimi's ancient and giddy paean, the Quick and the Dead, which succeeds as a feminist venture only because it ignores the formality of "women's issues" and gives us a fully-formed, wonderfully flawed woman whose strengths, after great travails and temptations, triumph over her weaknesses.

Don't get me wrong: I applaud the effort as well worthwhile. Sooner or later, someone will succeed, and the world will be a better place for it. Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff is a magnificent film, approaching the Western from a woman's point of view, while presenting life on the Oregon Trail as a sort of continuing apocalypse, in which women, men, and children must band together as equals in the (often frighteningly mundane) fight for survival, like an old-timey Walking Dead.

The more recent, more conscious efforts to redefine the Western saga from the woman's perspective, have so far failed. The Homesman, fascinating in both its bleak outlook and its main character (brought to life by the inimitable Hilary Swank) who is strong in her ideals, not all of which jibe with our current politically correct norms, ready to take on work harder than anyone else will do, and who ends in suicide. The movie turns out to be a man's film, after all, because it is only the male character who has the autonomy to make mistakes and live with them. Jane Got a Gun seems to have been spoiled by too many cooks in the kitchen, too much pulling of punches, and a contrived ending arrived at by disingenuous means. I like the Keeping Room, a small film which survives, without flinching or anachronism, the incredible obstacle which is Political Correctness, while telling the story of black and white women colluding without men in the southern states. It has strange turns and beautiful moments and terrible violence.

Brimstone is that insidious thing, a movie purporting to tell the story of a woman's strength while in truth revelling in her torture and death. By the end, I was convinced that this guy really wanted to make an S&M movie, giving it an Old West gloss for funding purposes. It is the portrait of a sexual sadist, a diabolical Dutch preacher (who may or may not be the actual Devil, as we see him with his throat cut and body burned at one point before he magically reappears to haunt our heroine later) played by Guy Pearce. Two generations of women in his family FIND THEIR STRENGTH IN SUICIDE, as told in dubious narration by the third-generation girl. It resembles a Victorian Gothic, in that the woman is meant to be the angel who finds her strength only in passivity. Dakota Fanning seems to specialize in these characters. In fact, there is the obligatory scene in which she overcomes and kills the beast (again!) who is bent on defiling her daughter, and she does it in an absurd moment of apparently supernatural grace (the only kind of triumph allowed a female in the old Victorian Gothic tradition). Kit Harington gives a robust try at the Almost-Knight-in-Dubious-Armor, he who almost saves the girl, almost provides a love interest, but ends up a non-character. The whole thing is interesting, with some lovely story-telling turns, good visuals, interesting editing and back-and-forth in time, so it's a shame one feels ripped off in the end.

the divorcee and the magnificent robert montgomery

(1930. dir: Robert Z. Leonard)

Robert Montgomery is one of the best actors you'll ever see on film. Why isn't remembered, then, outside the narrow boundaries of TCM? Maybe because he never made a really great movie. Every time I see him he astonishes me with his abilities. His face is so responsive an instrument that he can communicate a thought across the room without moving more than the tiniest muscle. His physical discipline is exact in that effortless manner of Cagney or Kirk Douglas. When he plays a serious role, as he later did in his own directorial projects, he has to make concentrated efforts to make himself stoical, and achieves varying levels of success. In his late noir, Ride the Pink Horse, adapted from a work by the great noir writer Dorothy B. Hughes, his portrayal of a bone-weary gunman with nothing left to guide him but vengeance is the more convincing because the mask of stoicism which comes so naturally to a Bogart or a Mitchum takes a toll on him, working toward the overall effect of an exhaustion so great it leads toward despair, even madness.

The Divorcee is one of several films he made with Norma Shearer. It has the high energy of a Fitzgerald story, a great twenties bash with all the dated rompings and laughable slang terms. Then, when it turns to tragedy, it does so with equally high energy. We begin at a country party, where Shearer agrees to marry her playboy beloved (not Montgomery, who is the groom's best friend, a charming roue). Everyone piles into automobiles and barrels back to town, but a jilted beau of Shearer's gets drunk first and drives into tragedy. This scene is wonderfully photographed, the speed and barely-withheld chaos communicated so that it still feels dangerous, more so than any cut-and-dried blow-out you'll see in a Fast and Furious movie.

Shearer is terrible in the beginning, becoming more convincing as her marriage turns serious and complicated. When her husband turns up unfaithful and claims it means nothing at all, she speeds off with Robert Montgomery to "balance the accounts" in a wonderfully rendered series of silent scenes: the two of them drinking in a club while she ponders darkly, the two of them riding in a cab in sensuous but not yet decisive embrace, then a shot of the curtains of a room being pulled shut. The rest of the movie explores how the same fellow who insists his wife disregard his infidelity as a small mistake ruins both their lives from wounded masculine pride when she retaliates. We follow her through the divorce and her lost times, finding her path again and reconciling. The thing is so well directed that even if the thing had a different title we'd know the marriage was doomed from the sepulchral look of her as she's escorted up the aisle, wrapped in veils that seem like shrouds.

Montgomery worked a ton in the thirties and forties. He was often the co-star of choice preferred by the great leading ladies of the time (Shearer, Garbo, Lombard, Crawford), and yet when he is remembered now, it is as the father of Samantha in Bewitched. The Big House, Forsaking All Others, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Mr. and Mrs. Smith: he shines in all of them, and yet I wouldn't watch any of them a second time. The only time he ever left me completely cold, in fact, was in the just-post-war They Were Expendable, and you can see my rant about that elsewhere. (Spoiler: like so many things, it's all John Ford's fault.)

tom hardy double feature: warrior and oliver twist

Warrior: (2011. dir: Gavin O'Connor) This is a good example of a project doomed from the start. The premise is contrived, hackneyed, gluey with sentiment, --impossible to redeem, even with the combined efforts of Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, so much talent in one space it ought to have worked magic. And, indeed, O'Connor does enough right with it that it edges up from the Hackneyed Hogwash into Watchable But Disappointing. Hardy and Edgerton are brothers, long estranged, who both, coincidentally, enter a super-contest for Mixed Martial Arts fighting. There's also a telenovella turn with a drunken father, now sober, but still unforgiven. Knowing just that much, you can guess the script, the plot-turns, you can fill in all the blanks without having seen a frame and hit pretty close to home. One brother has a wife, well-played by Jennifer Morrison, the same thankless wife-role that women have been playing since Calpurnia tried to talk Caesar into staying home on the Ides of March. The age-old Hollywood version goes something like this: "Please, please, DON'T do this very brave thing to save our family. I love you too much to watch... but I WILL watch, because I love you even MORE now!" There's a monstrous Russian fighter, NEVER DEFEATED, a great, hulking primate of a man without a hint of humanity in him, who offers one of the several cliched challenges to the brothers' dream of achieving their five-million-dollar paycheck. (Not from greed! Not from sloth! One brother has been cheated by the bank and his house will be repossessed within three months, despite his hard work as a professor of high school physics; the other brother is an AWOL marine hero-- justifiably so, as his whole platoon was wiped out by friendly fire --who needs to provide for his dead best friend's helpless family. They are both so noble! The heart is torn! For whom to root?) Frank Grillo (Rumlow in the Captain America movies) gives an excellent performance as one brother's trainer. Nick Nolte is creditable as the disgraced paterfamilias, without doing anything unexpected, or being given anything unexpected to work with in the script, outside a Captain Ahab trope (again with the hackneyed).

Even with all the crap working against it, Hardy is so great, both in the "cage" and out, that you get sucked in. His brutality while fighting is weirdly exhilarating, and he has two other extraordinary moments: one when he tortures his sober father back into drinking again, the other when he finds him the next morning, drunk and despairing, and puts him to bed, cuddling him in an understated, childlike manner.

The movie's great downfall is that Edgerton, the physics teacher, wins match after match against insurmountable odds, but the fights are not sufficiently well-photographed to convince us that he really does deserve to win. Why does the Russian tap out, since he has NEVER BEFORE BEEN DEFEATED? I can't answer that. I'm not convinced they actually showed us why, or that the character, as presented, would have done so. He does it because the plot demands it. We all know he's going to do it, because the brothers must face off against one another, so the Russian fight is a sham, ergo completely uninteresting. Even the end-fight between the brothers is uninteresting, badly shot and edited, and it, also, feels contrived. What we're waiting for is that sentimental-hogwash embrace after the fight, when they're stumbling down the hallway with their arms around each other. That's the money-shot this movie wants us to cheer, but they cheat too much in the build-up, and so miss the target.

Oliver Twist: (2007. dir: Coky Giedroyc) We all know Oliver Twist, know him from earliest childhood. "Please, sir, I want some more." Even if you don't read the novel, you watch countless film and television versions. It's considered fare for children; they make cartoons out of it. At a young age I knew its message: that if you are good, and polite, and stand by your principles, if you have a good heart, then you will be rescued from the iniquities of life and be rewarded with wealth, comfort, and ease in the bosom of a loving family. I knew this message subconsciously before I could put it into words. How is it, then, that it's taken half a normal lifetime for me to realize that the thing is actually a hideous, classist snob-fest, the REAL message being that if you are born with blue blood in your veins, your true quality will out even if you are surrounded all your life by criminals and yobs. Symmetrically, if you have a good heart and good intentions but the wrong parentage, you are doomed to whore and thieve and betray your friends from a cowardice inherent in your character, eventually dying bloody at the hands of your abusive boyfriend. Dickens, it turns out, was kind of a dick. Do I dare revisit my childhood favorite, A Tale of Two Cities? Was that transmitting some hideous message into my unsuspecting child's brain, as well?

The dickishness of Dickens aside, Tom Hardy is the best Bill Sikes ever, absolutely understanding the cowardice involved in the psychological make-up of the bully, and the rest of the cast (Adam Arnold as the Dodger, Julian Rhind-Tutt as Monks, Sophie Okonedo as Nancy) is well-chosen. The pace is never allowed to slow in the clutches of its authors sidetracks into moral lessons, and, in spite of its political awfulness, there's a reason this story has been retold continually for centuries. You never quite know where it's going next, and the characters still have the power to move one. You even swallow the most ridiculous coincidence: the one guy Oliver gets falsely nabbed for robbing, he turns out to be his long-lost granddad? Seriously? Except that it's NOT a coincidence, because IF you are blessed with the bluish in the veins, then GOD IS ON YOUR SIDE, and no mistake.

two-minute warning: the dawning of a bleak era

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1976. dir: Larry Peerce) About the time that Star Wars and Jaws were about to change the face of Hollywood, two variant strands of popular cinema were fading away: the blockbuster, cast-of-a-thousand-stars, disaster film (the Towering Inferno, Earthquake, the Poseidon Adventure), and those brilliant, American Paranoia films which began darkening the landscape as the sixties turned into the seventies (the Conversation, the Parallax View, culminating in All the President's Men). Two-Minute Warning, which seems to have taken its inspiration from Peter Bogdanovich's low-budget Target, is a clumsy attempt at the first, but finds its few bleak moments of epiphany when rising into the second.

It's Superbowl Sunday. We meet various folks, many of whom will be dead before the movie ends, follow their various paths to the Coliseum: a pair of pickpockets, a middle-class family whose paterfamilias has just lost his job, a pair of lovers, a schlub whose life depends on L.A. winning the game, a priest. We also watch, from the killer's point of view so we never see who he is, a random bicycle-rider shot dead from distance, through a hotel room window, using a sniper's rifle. We watch him, as well, pack his weaponry into a coat and smuggle it into the stadium.

As he stations himself above the crowd and the cops become of aware of him, we find ourselves trying to guess at his motives and his targets. It's all standard fare until the head cop (Charlton Heston, naturally) tells the the SWAT team honcho (John Cassavetes) that he's ordered all the politicos (mayor, governor, president) smuggled quietly out of the crowd. Cassavetes asks why, to which the stolid Heston responds, "To get rid of potential targets," and Cassavetes, in his best, flat-practical, cynical voice, says, "Everyone's a target."

It's interesting. It marks the dawn of a new era. Heston never gives up trying to make sense of the slaughter, finally shaking the dying shooter, demanding reasons, but all he gets is, "Don't hurt me. Don't hurt me." Cassavetes is right. In the end, we don't get our answers. Was he there to shoot the President, or the first black quarterback to lead his team to the Super Bowl, or someone against whom he had a grudge we don't know about, opening fire on the crowd when his plans were stymied? We never know. Cassavetes' nihilistic end-speech, which I wish to God I'd written down, is a baleful portent of our ongoing state of emergency today: there is no reason, there is no logic, and, by extension, no real hope.