dark was the knight: my two belated cents on the batman

>WARNING: SOME SPOILERS<

I was raised in a strictly Marvel household. Spiderman came calling regularly, as did the Fantastic Four and Thor, who sometimes brought along his Avenger friends. Those DC fellows were verboten, considered relics from another era, somehow out of touch with the modern world. Then, in 1986, DC and Frank Miller unleashed the Dark Knight Returns on the world and it was like an earthquake. There was nothing out of touch about this wounded fisher-king of a superhero. Suddenly it was Marvel left looking quaint and a little shopworn.

It took me a long time to watch Batman Begins, largely because I couldn't get a lather up about anything with such a pedestrian title, but also because the buzz that it sprang up from Miller's Dark Knight mythos wasn't borne out by the trailers. The Dark Knight graphic novels are all about aging: the bitterness, guilt, loss of idealism, all while watching one's body begin to decay and fail. Bruce Wayne is 55 when they begin, and has been retired and drunk since the second Robin was killed in action. The wormwood encounters between the silver-haired Wayne and the ever-buff, never-aging Clark Kent are brutal, particularly since Kent is an unquestioning soldier of the American government, entirely lacking in Wayne's agonizing doubt and introspection. What did these questions have to do with the young and virile Christian Bale version of the Batman?

It's too much to say I was underwhelmed when I did finally watch it; more accurate to say I was merely whelmed. I enjoyed myself, but let my itchy trigger finger stray to the fast-forward button during the climactic action scenes and also, decidedly, during the final walk through the rubble of Wayne Manor, when Katie Holmes gives her "Oh, Bruce, maybe someday, but not today..." yawners.

The Dark Knight, on the other hand, has upped the intrigue in the whole Batman matter considerably. Sitting in the darkened cinema, watching the darkened Gotham, it struck me that this might grow into something more interesting than the original novels. It's the scapegoat thing that really sold me: the idea that the Protector of the City must be so strong that he can and will, voluntarily, carry the entire shadow of that city, forego the name of hero, be hunted as a villain, all for the good of the city's soul. That's exactly the kind of axiology one wants to find whilst grubbing in the nightsoil of the Dark Knight's Gotham, and Christopher Nolan doesn't let down the side.

It was a bold move on his part to de-hyperbolize the place itself. This is the first realistic Gotham City I've ever seen-- stylistically, it was exaggerated even in Batman Begins. And there are good reasons for using exaggeration. You watch those old "Batman" shows on TV, or the other movies, there's no question that we're not in the real world, so you don't ask things like, "How the hell did the Joker manage to DO that?!" Now, suddenly, Gotham is a real city, in our real world, and nagging questions creep in, like, "OK. How the hell did the Joker manage to DO that?!" How do you plant thousands of bombs in the major hospital while the city is on a sort of terrorist red-alert and nobody notices until they go off? And If I tied up a soldier and stole his uniform to sneak into the Mayor's honor guard... again, while the city was on red alert for just such an incident in that very place... Well, I wouldn't get very far, even WITHOUT huge telltale scars on my face announcing exactly who I was. Things like that. Old Bruce pulls off near-miracles, too, but it's easier to shrug off. He is richer than Croesus, and rich folks with geniuses on the payroll can do stuff, end of story, or so those of us who scratch out a living day to day are prone to believe.

Most of the problems I had with the film concerned the Joker, in fact. Here's a fellow who claims to be the opposite of a schemer, the anti-schemer, the big spontaneous trickster guy without a plan, but he has HUGE plans (granted, he's also a big fat liar). Somehow his plans get carried out in spite of the fact that although his organization of petty criminals must be enormous, he has no right-hand guy, nobody he trusts... And yet he manages to keep complete control of these guys? Terror is a good discipline, certainly, but one guy? without backup? Hitler and Stalin and Capone had inner circles. All dictators and crime-bosses do. Nobody manages to stay on top of a criminal organization without trusted troops to do the wetwork... and, although the Joker is not one to shy away from the wetwork, there's no way he could do it all, not in an operation this size.

In the end, these are minor itches, and there are more things I love than hate about this Dark Knight: the script, its reversals and surprises, for starters. I even liked the car chases this time. I love Alfred's story about the Burmese jungle. I love Harvey Dent's speech about Rome and its protector, and I love the full and tragic human they've made out of Two-Face. I love the big thumpy music they play during some of the action scenes. I love the convict on the ferryboat who offers to bear the shadow for the whole boat, much as Batman will for the whole city. I've had to go back and watch it three times to decide finally, but I think Nolan has pulled off a triumph, one that might lead to increasingly wonderful sequels if he can keep his interest up. Even one, perhaps, when Bale is 55, playing a man who has been retired and drunk for ten years...

post-punk: radio on

Music feels sometimes like a gateway, or a catalyst for magic, particularly when you're young. I suspect there are few from any generation since vinyl came readily available that have not had at least a spell of their teenaged lives that was outlined, defined and painted into deep and velvet colors by the music of are what I was looking for, unless it was Adventure or God.

Radio On (1980. dir: Chris Petit) is a film that rises up out of that sensibility. Robert (David Beames) is a DJ so alienated from the world we not only never see him touch anyone, including the girlfriend who is leaving him and the German girl he picks up on the road ("Last night I thought we would have sex," she tells him, "but today I know that we won't,") he never manages to have a fully engaged conversation. This is the story--if you can call it that--of his road-trip through the bleak countryside of England as the snarling '70s were turning into the MTV '80s. Looking like a fellow that Paul Weller might hire to play keyboard for the Jam, he lives a nocturnal existence working at a tiny radio station, one of those DJs who so cares about music that he does annoying things like playing Ian Dury's "Sweet Gene Vincent" when someone has requested "Whatever Gets You Through the Night", because it's "better". (Hogwash. Not only is "Sweet Gene Vincent" not better than the simple but invigorating Lennon song, it's not even the best track on New Boots and Panties! Rant over; carry on.) His brother is dead under strange circumstances and he drives down to Bristol, ostensibly to check into it, but he never really does, not much. The death apparently had something to do with a rash of murders among a ring of pornographers, but those ends are left dangling, as are all others. This film is not about its story but about a sort of equal-parts bleak and joyous post-punk nihilism, and it survives across the years better than some of its more outre counterparts like Derek Jarman's ridiculous and cringe-worthy Jubilee from 1977, and probably better than my then-favorite, a little Susan Seidelman film called Smithereens which I haven't seen since it opened in 1982 but which I loved very sincerely at the time.

It is almost 1980 and the ferocious and fleeting moment of punk has flattened out into the electronic drone-pop of Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Devo, that sort of nowhere music which seemed interesting and odd at the time but was never designed to rouse one into greater life or passion. In fact, in one of the two spirited moments in the movie, Robert meets a petrol station attendant (played by Sting) who speaks with enthusiasm about his idol, Duane Eddy, but whose exuberance turns into a grimace when he hears the Kraftwerk on Robert's tapedeck.

It's an aimless and existential black-and-white ramble, less pretentious than most which answer to that description, and it captures a moment in time rather well. It evoked in me a nostalgia for that very alien and now lost England, before there was a Starbucks on every corner and the Millennium Bloody Eye scarred the landscape, back when you could no more find a well-made coffee than you could veg or decent condiments for your burger, but you could find a culture so different from the American that it was like, well, a foreign country.

The film's best bit is the opening, before we've met Robert, when the camera takes a leisurely look on its own around the dead brother's flat, focusing on a view out a window here, a photo and a bit of paper here, just a glimpse of the bathtub and its inhabitant there, and all the while David Bowie is singing the English/German version of "Heroes" in its entirety, a perfect song, one of the most buoyant songs ever recorded, joyful and tragic all in the same moment. And, as in the rest of life, it all flattens out a bit from there, because who can sustain perfection like that? Not even Bowie.

things i've been watching: july edition

The Mist (2007. dir: Frank Darabont): Bleak. Bleak. Decidedly bleak. Lovecraftian tentacles from space meet Shirley Jackson's venomous terror of provincialism and those who embody it. EM Forster (in Aspects of the Novel) once famously called Ulysses "a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud," and "a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell." Those words spring to mind when holding one's nose and lowering oneself into the sewer that is Stephen King's reality. Joyce's, anyway, was brilliant mud. Reading Stephen King is like a bad love affair with a dangerous drug: the thrills get secondary to nausea and disgust all too quickly.

King pretends to be setting his fantasies within our modern reality, convinces us he is doing so by including references to brand names and current fads, but his humans are peculiar, I think, to his own mind. For instance, I've never heard of a Christian leader who cusses like a sailor in public. It seems to me a poverty of mind that the writer can't think of a way to make the Big Bad Christian Villain truly loathesome except by having her swear like the bedridden Regan in the Exorcist. The most chilling portrait of an evil Christian I ever saw was Paul Scofield's inquisitor in the Crucible, precisely because he exuded scientific rationalism. This one, in spite of the extreme talents of Marcia Gay Harden, is just a cartoon. But then, most of King's characters are. Our hero, well played by Thomas Jane, is an unabashed King alter-ego (well-to-do painter of fantastical movie posters living in a small Maine town). You come away with the impression that this story is peopled with caricatures as an exercise in revenge on King's part... the unschooled yokel who insulted him at the gas station, perhaps, or the African-American who accused him of racism in his books... the characters seem not so much people as little cogs in a personal vendetta machine.

(CAVEAT: Never having read the novella, I fully admit this may all have been peculiar to the film, for which he did not write the screenplay, in which case I'm being unfair to Mr. King and I duly apologize.)

In any case, the movie has much to offer. I will never forget the slow car-ride through the mist and the creature they see there. It also has the dubious honor of sporting the single most cynical ending I've ever seen in a motion picture, possibly barring Dr Strangelove... but that one was meant to be funny. This one is most decidedly not.




WALL-E (2008. dir: Andrew Stanton): I wept through most of this. Go ahead. Laugh. But once you accept that the robots are feeling and thinking, human in every capacity except biological mechanics, they seem so terribly vulnerable.

Of course, why would they be so humanlike? Why does WALL-E have such eclectic tastes and hobbies? Were they programmed into him? Why, since he was created as a trash compactor? Did he evolve into them over his 700 years alone on the planet? Then again, this is Disney, which is the answer to all these questions, including "and why is WALL-E so lovable?" Might as well ask why the cockroach living in the Twinkie is anthropomorphized. It's Disney! The real question is this: why do I have such a hard time accepting what my boyfriend calls "the Don't Asks" in this one? Maybe BECAUSE I was foully and egregiously manipulated into weeping through the whole damn thing, which strips one of any small vestiges of dignity. I suppose that Disney has been doing this forever (I remember the Incident Involving Bambi's Mom as being a traumatic but fruitful lesson in life's vagaries. If I were to watch it again now, would I experience it as PT Barnum-like emotional manipulation?) but it's been so long since I've watched one I'd forgotten that it treads the same emotionally blackmailing ground that Steven Spielberg frequents.

The first part, the bit on earth, is by far the best. There's some lovely silent (or, at least, quiet) comedy and WALL-E himself brings to mind an old favorite of mine, a little-lauded and independent sci-fi outing from the '80s called Android which also featured a robot enamored of old films and harboring eclectic and romantic tendencies.

Once the two robot-lovers rocket off to join the humans on the space station, the filmmakers' loving interest seems to fade a little, or the love gets superceded by the Message of the Piece. The space station is, however, where my favorite character resides, the little scrubbing robot called M-O. Adorable and hilarious.

All that said, I now feel unclean, and I'm going to watch some Peckinpah.




Weirdsville (2007. dir: Alan Moyle): I nearly turned this one off after five minutes. What saves it, what kept me watching, was the combination of Wes Bentley and Scott Speedman, so good they give actual dimension to the same stoner duo we've been watching in foiled-heist/drug-deal-gone-wrong/ODed-girlfriend-gotta-bury-her "comedies" for years. This one is just well-acted enough, just unusual enough, to keep me along for the ride. There's a Satanic cult, there's a gathering of dwarves involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, there's an abandoned drive-in, there's a kidnapped rich hippie played by the inestimable Matt Frewer. There's a metaphor about a rat flushed down a toilet that I just half-remember and maybe I made it up. Pro-drug? Hell, yes, it's pro-drug. You know those "relationships are hard but you gotta keep with 'em" movies? The moral of this one is, "Life as a drug addict is not easy but it pays off if you commit to it. Don't give up, bro."

pivotal double feature: one day in september and munich

September 1972: Munich is hosting the Summer Olympics. The Germans have high stakes in keeping proceedings light and positive, as less than thirty years have elapsed since the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler's Berlin Olympics are still impressed on the world's memory. On the morning of September 5, eight Palestinian terrorists from an organization calling themselves "Black September" climb over a short wall into Munich's Olympic Village, kill two and capture nine other Israeli athletes, coaches and referees.

What follows is unmitigated horror by any but the most barbaric standards. And West Germany, hampered by post-WWII lack of a trained terror squad and a constitutional ban on German troops entering into Bavaria, stumbles through an 18-hour nightmare of fumblings, boners and missteps, culminating in conflagration and tragedy during a muddle of a rescue attempt.

I was eight years old and it was my first Olympic Games. It was also the first time the event was broadcast live, but I didn't know that. It was interesting: Mark Spitz and Olga Korbut and the America v Russia basketball travesty. The hostage crisis seemed unreal to my child's mind, like war footage randomly interspersed with the more readily understandable sports coverage. This was the moment when I first heard the word "Palestinian", and, more than any other, despite Vanessa Redgrave, despite Karen Armstrong and the abysmal and bloody complexities of the situation, it is the moment that will forever ensure that Americans of my generation always feel, in a pre-thinking and primordial way, that the Palestinians are the bad guys. A kid knows some things instinctively, on a one-situation-at-a-time basis: that men with moustaches are not sexy, for instance (sorry, Mark Spitz), that messing around with the clock during a basketball game is unfair and uncool (hand over the gold, U.S.S.R), and that the guys with machine guns who invade a place of peace and kill the unarmed are, unequivocally, the Bad Guys.

One Day in September is a brilliant documentary. Its official narrator is Michael Douglas, but the thing is so adroitly assembled from archival footage and new interviews (including one with the only terrorist involved to have escaped death both at the airport and in ensuing years at the hands of Israeli vengeance squads) that Douglas speaks maybe thirty sentences during the whole piece. The tragedy and horror of it are extreme, and the end, when the camera hesitates on old footage of the evil and triumphant smile on the young terrorist's face, leaves you hungry to know what happened next, if justice was served, if the horrors were avenged.

Enter Steven Spielberg. Munich, catapulted into the world amidst a roar of controversy, follows one of the Mossad death-squads launched specifically to track down and assassinate the instigators of the tragedy. Based on the ostensible memoir of one of these commandos (George Jonas' Vengeance), it's a tough story to tell, spread out across years and continents and therefore involving a whole ton of exposition. It's tough in other ways. The catalyst event was short and focused: a few days in Munich. The retribution, on the other hand, comes across as an unending and unendable thing, a continually ascending and increasingly bloody spiral, in which every man killed is replaced by another in need of killing, and every act of violence is a terrible act of faith in one's possibly faulty, possibly devious informants and commanders.

Eric Bana is downright poetic in his controlled intensity as a man on a journey from innocent patriotism and righteous outrage towards haunted obsession and justified paranoia. By film's end, I was wrung dry of my initial bloodthirst, no longer occupying any particular point along the spectrum of Palestinian v Israeli enthusiasm, feeling nothing but a sort of empathetic exhaustion for both factions in their frantic and neverending tarantella. Obviously Hollywood is no place to learn your history (ask ten people who the Pharoah of the Exodus was; all ten will say Ramesses II, better known as Yul Brynner) and you can place pretty safe money on a guess that no more than, say, a fourth of any historical movie is strictly "true", but Munich succeeds in one important venture: it lifts the proceedings up away from the Bush-y "yer either fer us er agin us" black and white of self-righteousness to examine it in differing slants of light.

in bruges: slow-cut revolution

I have been, increasingly and for many years, disgusted with the action film genre. Gone are the days when "action film" means that action takes place in FRONT of the camera so that we can see it.

In the parlance of this particular movie: whatever cunt was it decided we'd only know an action film if the camera was in constant motion, so ye not only can't falla the action, ye can't falla the story neither? was it the same fookin' fella who started cuttin' fight scenes in those short, close-up chops so a person can't see if it's that Bourne eejit or t'other one that's gettin' his pate knocked sidelong? and speakin' o' that, what mess of blind monkeys was it gave both Oscar and BAFTA to the spastic retard who edited that last Bourne rubbish? It's like if yer at a race an' you give the trophy to the fella who spun around in the most circles instead of the one who crossed the finish line. It's like a whole section of the filmmaking industry has got its collective head stuck up its collective arse.

All hail, then, Martin McDonagh. You gotta love a guy who errs on the side of lyricism in making his mobster film. There's Peckinpah in him: he's not scared by the weight of violence, nor is he cowed by poetical beauty or mixing the two together. He's as irreverent as Tarantino and far wittier. He loves his characters, loves telling a good story. This is his first full-length film, and my guess is that, after he's got a few more under his belt, he'll look back with regret on some of the scenes he left out or left in. By all means watch the deleted scenes on the disc. The impression they leave is that the original film was going to be a darker, more brooding observance of a young man who's committed a damning and unforgivable mistake following his fated path into hell and destruction, and it was lightened up along the way. No matter: the movie works as is.

McDonagh's biggest strength as maker of violent and very funny plays is that in every character, even the most corrupt, he sees the innocence, and likewise in the most innocent he sees the corruption. It's the secret ingredient that allows so intense a mixture of tragedy and comedy to work smoothly and without giving offense. In a McDonagh piece, the men who live by the strictest code are often the most violent, like the Ralph Fiennes character here, and the less morally certain the character is, the more relaxed and less apt to blow your head off.

Not that he toes the line when it comes to incorrectness. His targets are myriad. In this movie, retards (when's the last time you heard that word?) come into a lot of flack, as do Americans (after decking an American: "That's for John Lennon, you yankee fucking cunt,"), dwarves, gays, drinkers of half-pints ("one gay beer for my gay friend, one normal beer for me,"), militant non-smokers, fat people, priests, and every fookin' one else. Somehow it's all joyful and stumbling and just plain funny enough to be non-arrogant and non-offensive.

Most importantly, there's not a choppy bit of editing or nervous, jostly camera in the whole film. It flows easily and well, perhaps a bit slowly, but this is the final journey of a damned fellow into hell, and so the stateliness lends an air of reverence. The action is still there, and the violence has the weight of real violence for being in real time. Brendan Gleeson is an all-out champion, Ralph Fiennes is a prince among actors, and Colin Farrell has finally found a project worth his hard-working efforts. Because McDonagh was a playwright, this script has alongside its snappy dialogue actual visual themes running through it. Headlessness is one. The Day of Judgment is another. The Boschian endgame goes just up to the top without falling over it. It's funny, and sad, and well-photographed, and chilling truths are delivered in the same breaths as the funniest lines.

Here's hoping it revolutionizes a very weary old genre. Longer scenes! Stiller cameras! It's my new battle-cry: tripods for everyone! For God's sake, set the damn thing down!

mchattiefest evening five: and yet another triple

The Lady's Not For Burning (1974. dir: Joseph Hardy) Filmed plays are problematic. Not only do they tend to feel static, the actors often haven't made that full jump to a cinema-friendly style. This one has those faults, plus the added hardship of a bicontinental cast (Brits and Yanks don't always play well in the same theatrical sandbox. Results are too often wildly unbalanced, if not in quality, then in style).

For about ten years, from the end of the thirties until the kitchen-sinkers stole all the theatrical thunder in the early fifties, verse drama made a gangbusters comeback with T.S. Eliot at the forefront of the poetical revolution. Christopher Fry was one of the most popular in his wake, and this was his grandest success. John Gielgud originated the lead, here played by Richard Chamberlain. Chamberlain and costar Eileen Atkins (and, in fact, McHattie in a secondary but delightful role) give lovely and strong performances, making most others in the cast look like high school kids in comparison. It's a tough play to do, a whimsical and melancholic comedy set in a peculiarly nonrealistic medieval village, but it's a charmer when it comes off right, and this production ultimately does. Hard to find and not recommended for the jaded, cynical, or anyone with a short span of attention.

MOVIE: 4 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 5 stars


Roughnecks (1980. dir: Bernard McEveety) Dull, awful and overlong outing about oil-rig drillers. McHattie is young and gorgeous, still dolled-up in his James Dean charisma, but most of the acting here is bad (including performances by Vera Miles and Harry Morgan) and the production values are maybe one step up from a Walker, Texas Ranger episode.

MOVIE: 1 star
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 2 stars


James Dean: the Legend (1976. dir: Robert Butler) For a guy who looked like nobody else in the world, Dean has managed to inspire some dead-on performances, including this one by McHattie, who puts all his joy and elan into it. This is probably the centerpiece performance of McHattie's early TV years, a great success, far outweighing the mediocre screenplay that supports it. Bill Bast was a college roommate of Dean's and wrote one of the early memoirs about my-life-with-Jimmy, culminating in this TV movie. It's got some bad acting (by Brooke Adams and Michael Brandon, to name a few who ought to know better) but a few successful set-pieces that linger in your mind afterwards: Bast's reaction the night of the East of Eden premiere rings true, there's an interesting if melodramatic dream sequence at the outset, and there are lovely moments in which Dean reads from the Little Prince or takes Bast out for seedy adventures. A must-see for McHattie aficionados.

MOVIE: three stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: five stars


POSTSCRIPT: Sorry if this one seems a little rushed. No doubt I'll seem distracted for the next few weeks until Euro 2008 is done. Who can get excited about movies when La Furia are playing their gorgeous, mercurial, and bewildering brand of football? If you like, follow along with us at a pretty move...

mchattiefest evening four: another triple feature

Kaw (2007. dir: Sheldon Wilson) *SPOILER ALERT* Not very scary, not very good, but well-acted and rather beautifully lit Canadian revisitation of the Birds. After feeding on Mennonite mad cow carrion, ravens get clannish, anthropophagous and very, very smart (smarter than the humans, who sit around jawing instead of boarding up the damn windows). McHattie enjoys a rare benign turn as the village sad-sack, a demon-rattled alcoholic who ultimately sacrifices himself to destroy the murderous threat, although I'd be hard-pressed to explain just how setting himself and a single gas pump on fire put an end to an entire sky full of mad birds. Ah, well. It's one of several nods the director gives toward the earlier Hitchcock film, including a stunt at the end which leaves an unpleasant, jokey taste in one's cinematic mouth. Still, it's far more enjoyable than I expected it would be, with Rod Taylor as the small-town doc, the Young Indiana Jones himself as a likable small-town lawman, and one surreal little piece of nightmare involving a woman and a pit full of pig carcasses.
MOVIE: 2-1/2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 3 stars



Mary and Joseph: a Story of Faith (1979. dir: Eric Till) McHattie steals the show as firebrand zealot Judah, preaching war and the advent of a Messiah who will emerge from the clouds dressed in full battle armour to smite down the foes of Israel, until Mary (who knows better) plants an interesting doubt in his mind. Either they're drawing on apocryphal works I don't know (entirely possible), or someone's making a bunch of stuff up in this chronicle of Mary and Joseph as they meet, fall in love, and embark on the hard road to marriage and ultimately the manger (in this case, a cave with some sheep in it). It's odd: some historical details they go to great lengths to get just so, others seem insanely off-kilter. Would the Jews of the time really have stoned to death a pregnant woman, regardless of her crime? Every monotheism I know veers wildly to the rescue of the unborn innocent, and both early Islamic and early Christian executions of adulteresses and other unacceptable women were carried out post-partum.

Also, there's something annoyingly contemporary about the way these people pray, something "Dear God, please let Levi ask me to the Prom" about it. As far as I know, the sympathetically-nodding God who pats our heads as we leave church was not yet conceived at that time. Yahweh then was still the guy who'd ordered Joshua and his heirs to rub out every man, woman and child in Canaan in a multi-generational pogrom. Somewhere in the Zohar it says, "God is not nice. He is not an uncle. He is an earthquake." You want the earthquake on your side, certainly, but you don't chat casually with it like it's your buddy.

Similarly irritating is this version of the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel speaks in the even, mellifluous tones of a DJ on a Muzak station... when we all know perfectly well that the angel Gabriel sounds like Christopher Walken.
MOVIE: 2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 4 stars



Belizaire the Cajun (1986. dir: Glen Pitre) Fantastic independent film from pre-Soderbergh, very-early-Sundance days when independent films were both low-budget and largely unwatched. Using the amount of money Spielberg probably spends on catering, Pitre recreates life in 19th-century rural Louisiana to a degree that feels like you got there in a tardis. It's the little details which convince: things like the powder (what is it? cornstarch?) they throw on the dance floor before the party starts, a card game using pecans instead of money, a neighborhood gathering announced by a rider carrying a red flag. Filming on location with natural lighting and no tricks or tomfoolery with the camera, the result is an unostentatious and authentic world... but that's just the backdrop. The real focus is on the story, and it's a good one. Armand Assante is better than perfect as trickster and healing man Belizaire Breaux: perfect is too sterile a word to describe this joyful and mischievous performance. McHattie plays (with his usual eclat) James Willoughby, the dastardly and dim-witted fellow who has married into wealth and will go to extreme lengths to keep it. (In one of my favorite scenes, the jailed Belizaire tricks the wary but uncomprehending Willoughby into making him rich.) Against rollicking Michael Doucet songs and a historical moment in which the "Americains" are trying to oust the Catholic and French-speaking Cajuns from their swampland homes, the movie is adventure, romance, and whodunnit all at once. Happily recommended.
MOVIE: 5 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 3 stars