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.

my cinematic a to zed: w - z

the Winslow Boy: (1999. dir: David Mamet) This is the least Mametish of any Mamet thing you'll ever see. It's based on the old Terrence Rattigan chestnut, enormously popular on the mid-20th century British stage and now long out of fashion, long on stiff-upper-lip Brit-talk and pretty much devoid of action. It's a courtroom drama that never walks into the courtroom; we hear about the proceedings secondhand. The younger son of an Edwardian family is expelled from a naval academy for allegedly stealing a postal order, and his family puts everything at stake -- wealth, health, reputation, the older sister's engagement -- to clear his name.

The oddness of pairing Mamet with this starchy old chamberpiece works amazingly well, as each entity finds its flaws negated by the virtues of the other. Mamet's usual tiresome quirks, for instance, -- the half-sentences and barked profanities, the masculine insecurities sublimated into cons, heists and powerplays, the cold and twistily-layered thriller plots, -- are none of them applicable here; rather, he submerges himself with an uncharacteristically slow grace into the world of the story, and with grand results. Likewise, intolerant of sop, he ruthlessly wrings every last bit of sentiment from the piece, inspiring wonderfully stripped down performances from his actors in the process. They talk in his favorite clipped, Mamet-speak staccatos, a tactic which works against the mawkish grain of the story to reinvent the piece into something new and strange and wholly sublime.






X-Files, Season Three, Ep.53, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose": (1995. dir: David Nutter) Alright, I don't have an "X" movie, so I'm using my favorite X-Files episode instead. This is the one with Peter Boyle as a life insurance salesman who has the unpleasant ability to see exactly how a person will die. It's got melancholy, it's got funny, it's got poetry and supernatural, it's got the late Peter Boyle in one of his great performances.




The Year of Living Dangerously: (1982. dir: Peter Weir) Gorgeous and phantasmagoric evocation of Sukarno's Jakarta in the early 1960s. To see it in the theatre is like taking a very sensuous drug trip, and even my dingy old pan-and-scan copy works some magic. It's more than that, though, with complex characters (and the setting, too) vividly explored, affording us glimpses of secret depths without presuming to show too much. This was Weir's first step toward Hollywood and a sort of climactic culmination after the building poetry of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Last Wave, and Gallipoli. After this, there would be glimpses of greatness but nothing near as good until 2003's Master and Commander. Linda Hunt won an Oscar for Billy Kwan, the strange, noble and a little bit creepy photographer with pretensions to puppet-mastery over the lives of his friends, and Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson are both at the top of their respective games. The story feels so rich and layered that after I first saw it I sought out the book by Christopher Koch to find out more, and decided that this is one of those rare films that outstrides its source material. Now, reading the rave reviews on Amazon, I wonder if I should have a second look.





Zidane, un Portrait du 21e Siecle: (2006. dir: Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno) A movie like a hallucinogen. On April 23, 2005, Real Madrid plays Villarreal at the Bernabeu, Madrid's home stadium. Instead of watching the match, we watch Zenadine Zidane, the tonsured gallic midfielder, up close and from distance. He is miked and at various times we hear his breathing, or the satisfying thump of his boot when he connects, or crowd sounds, or only the hypnotic overlay of heart-slowing music by Mogwai. A few things come clear about football when you're watching a single player; one is that it is very like war, involving long periods of vigilant inactivity followed hard upon by bursts of sudden violence. Another is the centrality of bodily fluids to the player's experience: spitting and wiping the face clear of sweat and snot take up a crazy amount of time. The mikes in Zidane's boots emphasize his endearing habit of dragging his feet during abeyant moments, and the occasional subtitle sharing quotations from interviews emphasizes his mystical side. And he is mystical, --equal parts mystic and warrior, barbarian and nobleman, I'd say, but maybe I'm prejudiced. He is larger than life, and it is as easy to romanticize as it is to demonize him.

In this match, he has one superb run up the wing and cross in for the equaliser, a fantastic play involving mad footwork through a bramble of defenders. When you are the famous Zidane, every time you gain possession you also get a thundering posse of foes galloping around you, and up close like this it genuinely feels like there's a threat of physical violence in it. Really the point scored is his; someone else did the easy part of heading it in. In the aftermath of the goal his apartness becomes apparent; during the whole of the match he seems only truly to connect with Roberto Carlos, with whom at one point he shares a joke we do not hear, and David Beckham, who seems genuinely fond of him. There is a lovely, soft-spoken moment after an unfair penalty has been given away in which Zidane murmurs to the ref, "You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed," almost avuncularly, without heat or vitriol. The vitriol comes later, in the second half, during which he sees more action than the first, and suddenly, from seemingly nowhere, he is engaged in a fierce physical altercation with an opponent for which they are both red-carded from the pitch. It seems a fitting end for a film which will no doubt survive as the most enduring record of his legacy, since we all know him not just as a great player but also as The Fellow Who Headbutted That Annoying Italian Man During The World Cup. I'm sorry. Are my prejudices showing again?

what i've been watching: february

Paranoid Park: (2007. dir: Gus Van Sant) I have a memory of driving to the first Lollapalooza festival with my boyfriend and his college roommate, who was from Bellingham. When he found out I was from Portland he said, "How could you ever leave?" and launched into a deleriously romantic love-speech about a place he'd never been but planned to live as soon as he could manage it. The Portland in his head bore small resemblance to the city I knew because he'd learned it from Van Sant films like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, and so was a sort of paradise for the youthful, unkempt and disenfranchised. And now it probably is that, and Van Sant probably had a lot to do with it.

Paranoid Park unites this Punkerliebe thread with another running through the director's work: the Gerry / Elephant / Last Days use of a true-life tragedy through which he enters the psychological states of those involved. He launched into these low-budget psyche-forays on the heels of Good Will Hunting, Psycho, and Finding Forrester, by which time I was good and ready to write him off as useless and done. For all the strangeness and flaws of this later "Death" trilogy, it was a brave and soul-saving direction to take. Last Days in particular I found electrifying, the only convincing portrait of a suicide I've ever seen.

This one is humbler, with the feel of a short story padded into novella length. It also feels like Van Sant's paean to the beauty of skatepunk culture, reminiscent in its slow-paced lyricism of those old Bruce Weber canticles to glorious masculinity Let's Get Lost and Broken Noses. He uses all non-actors, none of whom feel comfortable in front of the camera, but it will no doubt strengthen the appeal to the youthful disenfranchised to whom he is addressing the piece. The brilliant experimenting he's been doing with ambient sound is here but seems randomly placed, like filler, whereas in Gerry it heightened the sense of danger and the terrible smallness of a human before nature, and in Last Days it served as an unequivocal portal into the head of the suicide.

In short, it's not the most interesting thing he's done, but it will exert an unending pull on a particular demographic, taking its permanent place on the shelf next to Dogtown and Z-Boys and Tony Hawks games, the shelf with the Rebel Skates stickers plastered over it.





The Visitors: (2003. dir: Richard Franklin) >SPOILER ALERT< Australian outing in which Radha Mitchell is attempting a round-the-world solo in a boat with just a cat, an increasingly distant relationship by radio with her fiance, and her own hallucinations to keep her company. It's a great idea, following the intricate entanglement of hallucination and reality of an isolate at sea, but it comes to nothing. All she does is work out the inner demons with mum and da, both recently deceased, and decide to chuck the cheating, patronizing man who's holding her back. Ho hum. The best things about it are the camerawork and the cat, who speaks with a palpably supercilious British sneer.





Australia: (2008. dir: Baz Luhrmann) Yeah, we saw it. We saw it in the theatre. We saw it THE VERY NEXT NIGHT after seeing Synecdoche, New York, and that's a double feature that'll curl your damn toes.

It's not just dreadful, Australia, it's three damn hours' worth of dreadful. Shameless. Shameless. Its very shamelessness is what keeps you from throwing your rotten produce at the screen... that and Luhrmann's obvious deep heart-love of the project. He loves it! He does. You can feel it. Like Miss Amelia's inexplicable love for Cousin Lymon in the Ballad of the Sad Cafe. I read somewhere, and I wish to God I could remember where because a truer thing has never been said about ANY film EVER, how Australia the Movie runs at the audience with arms flung wide yelling love me! love me! Even as we were walking home from the theatre I could feel it tugging at our coats. Is there anything else I can do for you? steamy romance? Jackman wet and half-naked? adorable kid whose mother tragically dies saving his life? wartime separating lovers? shine your shoes? scrub your lintels? how about a fourth hour of unrelenting sentimentality, sweeping music, doctored landscapes and heartstring-tugging?

I've seen it defended as a Tribute To Old Films, to which I reply that the road to the deepest circles of hell is paved with lame-assed rationalizations, and this movie is probably forced viewing on that particular trip, now that I think about it. Nicole Kidman, bless her heart, throws herself headlong into a truly terrible role. The first half is like the worst parts of old studio comedies without any of the good stuff: the strong actress forced into a buffoonish stereotype, plenty of charmless banter, the vulgar but lovably masculine lower-class stud ready to take his rightful place as boss of her while claiming he wants nothing but independence, the adorable and clever orphan teaching her the ways of maternal love. Then, when you think you're free, the movie starts OVER again as an amalgam of the Sundowners and Pearl Harbor, and I'm not certain, but I think it never did end. I think it's still going. Maybe I'm still sitting in that theatre, and this is all a psychotic break, a futile dream of escape like in "Occurence at Owl Creek".

On the other hand, if this film is so bad, why is it conjuring up echoes from literature I admire? In its favor, and I say this with halting speech punctuated by long, Pinter-y pauses, when I was six, this would have been my favorite movie. I'd have rolled with its audacious manipulation without resentment, revelled in the airbrushed beauty of the outback and the truly jaw-dropping glamor of its stars, fallen madly in love with that little boy, laughed, cried, and my poor, saintlike mother would have had to take me to see it over and over.

If you're over seven, though, give it a miss. Or anyway, take along your compost.

dollhouse: the runner stumbles

It's not that Joss Whedon has lost his talent, --we know that from last year's humble but effervescent Dr Horrible's Sing-along Blog, which was funny, strange, vibrant, and pretty much unlike anything else the world has seen. Filmed in six days on a budget of five bucks and a case of beer, its world felt cohesive, and its characters, although comic book figures, were fully engaging, with subtle asides, virtuous flaws and flawed virtues. Its twists were unexpected and its lines funny. Who could not love that baddest of all supervillains, Bad Horse, the Equestrian of Crime?

Dollhouse, on the other hand, that long-anticipated return of Joss to the slightly-bigger-but-still-small screen, has little or nothing to recommend it so far. The inner halls of the actual Dollhouse bear a vague and unimaginative resemblance to Angel's Wolfram & Hart Building, and the exterior scenes might be shot on the set of any of a hundred cop/forensics/whatever shows. These halls are filled with non-characters and vague half-characters, none of which had a funny or insightful line in the first ep. Some big breakout seems to be in the works for Amy Acker's Dr. Saunders, but it'd better hurry and break out or we'll be outta there before it manifests sufficiently to catch our interest.

One of Whedon's many supernatural talents has always been for taking very limited actors and playing to their strengths to the extent that his characters emerge full-force almost in spite of the performer. With some notable exceptions, much of the casts of Buffy and Angel fit this description, and those were both exceptionally good shows for most of their runs. Eliza Dushku, possibly one of the most beautiful women in the world, shone as the badassed tomboy supervixen psycho vampire-slayer Faith in Buffy because it played exactly to her strengths and gave her room to stretch. Echo, her Dollhouse non-character, does exactly the opposite. No chameleon is Eliza, who depends on a change of hairstyle and the addition of glasses and asthma to indicate an entire personality change in this shape-shifting world of highly-protected superdolls who get their minds wiped after every job and start each day with a new personality tailor-made for each new mission. She holds her own just enough that if she had brilliant lines to speak I'd have no complaints about her performance. Now is your cue, Joss, to bring on the brilliance, or at least some sign of life.

The wonder is why Whedon is working for Fox again, the evil supertyrant who mangled and cancelled the magnificent Firefly. Until further evidence is introduced, I'll assume that it's Fox who's wringing the life out of Dollhouse to conform the show to its renowned fascist agenda, or else I'll have to figure that Joss just isn't very interested in the whole venture. I'm sticking with the show for a month, and hoping to eat these words on a platter later on.

my cinematic a to zed: u - v

>SPOILER ALERT<

Unfaithful: (2002. dir: Adrian Lyne) Adrian Lyne is nothing if not controversial. Often accused of misogyny (in some cases, a cringe-inducingly difficult thing to deny), I prefer to think he is less interested in denigrating women than in digging around in that fascinating mulch of our darkest passions and watching the dreadful consequences that grow from the fertile grounds of our obsessions.

A friend of mine whose opinions I hold in high regard dismisses this film on the moral ground that it presents the guilt of a woman's infidelity as a crime equal to or greater than the murder committed by her husband. But if you think of it as a French film (which seems fair, since it's based on Claude Chabrol's 1969 La Femme Infidele), the question alters. Those crazy Francais have always said (on film, at least) that passion is passion, whether its manifestation is sex or murder. I'm not saying a concern with ethics has no place in film-making, but a very well-made film gets an out-of-jail-free card to examine human situations from a place transcending moral questions. This is one such well-made film, with an extraordinarily strong internal cohesion intrinsic in its story, and I'm willing to let Lyne go where he likes because his journey really does serve the telling of it.

The film has two disparate halves: the beginnings of the affair between the not-so-ironically-named Constance (Diane Lane) and the young bookseller Paul (Olivier Martinez), then the consequences of the meeting between Paul and Constance's husband, Edward (Richard Gere). The story is wonderfully told by way of close-ups and mirroring images (Constance frantically scrubbing away signs of her infidelity in one public lav and her husband later scrubbing frantically away signs of the murder in another; garbage blowing in the windstorm which may be seen as the initiator of the affair and garbage blowing later in the rubbish heap where Edward buries the body; an intimate close-up of the nape of a neck is mirrored in two very different contexts), and edited by Anne Coates (Lawrence of Arabia) who brings to it an absolutely perfect tempo, with room to breathe but steadily building tension, a tempo which implies from the first shots (the wind picking up, blowing a boat against a dock, knocking over a bicycle) a powerful suggestion of predestination taking a hand. Shakespeare often used a "wild place" -- a forest, an uncultivated moor, Petrucchio's house,-- as liminal ground where everyday laws soften and blur and, for a short while, a carnivalesque misrule of less reasonable gods reigns, breaking up the previous order so a new one will be established in its aftermath. Lyne uses his windstorm in this manner, as a transient fury which touches down for a moment and leaves whole lives disordered in it wake. The story rises relentlessly up from there into its last, whispered exchange, culminating in a truly great final image.

My generation as a whole has a collective soft spot for both Diane Lane and Jodi Foster because we grew up with them. That confessed, you'd have a hard time convincing me Lane didn't deserve an Oscar for this (which Nicole Kidman took home for putting on a fake nose. Behold Hollywood's wafer-thin values: a beautiful woman makes herself ugly, the Academy shudders with horror, thinking it's the bravest act ever, and would gladly give her a Nobel for it if it were able). She avoids all the cliches about the rich, suburban homemaker and remains grounded and likable; her affair, her repentance, and her decision to stand by her husband are clearly chosen and completely believable in context.

It's no secret that I love a director who can tell a story through pictures without drawing attention to himself, and this is a great example. The spoken words are the gorgeous block of marble from which a masterwork is carved. The train scene alone stands as a genius stroke of nonverbal communication: on her way home from her initial assignation, she recalls the encounter with palpable corporeality. The two scenes -- the lovemaking (without question, this movie has the best sex ever filmed) and the reminiscence -- are powerfully interwoven, and it's no surprise to learn that Anne Coates also edited Out of Sight, with its love scene so well-integrated into the continuing story.




and again: >SPOILER ALERT<

the Verdict: (1982. dir: Sidney Lumet) In this Mamet-penned courtroom drama, the halls of justice are ice-cold, gleaming, brilliant, austere, and the verdict goes to the party with the most expensive lawyer. Paul Newman is Frank Galvin, a man at lowest ebb, a broken, alcoholic ambulance-chaser grovelling at funerals for possible work. Given a chance to press a lawsuit on behalf of the family of a healthy woman who lapsed into coma after supposedly minor surgery, he finds his passion again and begins the gruelling and dangerous climb back into self-respect. James Mason plays his powerhouse opponent with easy command, and Charlotte Rampling is perfectly cast as the inscrutable beauty Galvin loves.

Newman's greatest strength lay in his unbreachable likability even when playing the most despicable roles, a quality which allowed him to barge all-out and gangbusters into the dark side without ever alienating an audience. It's a knack few have, and although I can think of actors who'd have been technically better as Galvin, in this very cold and harsh world it's Newman's unfailing warmth that's necessary to make this cringing failure of a man watchable. Galvin's task is Herculean, the suit impossible to win, which makes the unfolding arduous but the pay-off all the sweeter. Lumet and his crew (DP: Andrzej Bartkowiak, ed: Peter Frank) have an easy technical grace and the self-confidence to allow space, which in this context grants a possibility of thawing in this ice-cold world, a single moment in which springtime is conceivable before winter renews its grip. It's also got a marvellous early appearance by Mamet's then-wife Lindsay Crouse, maybe the best thing she ever put on film, husky-voiced and genuine, before she stopped showing us her feelings entirely, which seemed to be around the time of the Mamet-helmed House of Games in 1987.

my cinematic a to zed: r - t

The Race for the Double Helix: (1987. dir: Mick Jackson) For me, the BBC was always an argument in favor of socialism. What proud American network would ever fund a film whose climactic suspense depends on our interest in postwar boffins seeking the shape of DNA? And they pull it off, without all this "microscope-gazing-as-extreme-sport" absurdity-in-editing one finds now in the 1001 forensics shows one wades through every night en route to the soccer channel. Race is drawn from James Watson's memoir about his time in Cambridge, on his way to the Nobel Prize for uncovering the elusive helix. The first hour or so suffers for it, dragged down by a priapic and celebrity-hungry Watson who seems to have stumbled into science not due to any particular interest in it but because he hadn't got the looks to be a movie star or the social grace to be anything else. Jeff Goldblum brings his usual Jeff Goldblum to the role, working hard every moment to steal focus from anyone else onscreen, a performance that only works because it seems a fair delineation of the equally smart but self-obsessed Watson.

Luckily, it's not a one-man show. Tim Piggott-Smith has a lovely, light touch as Watson's cheerful partner Francis Crick (I love Tim Piggott-Smith. Have you ever seen his Hotspur, or Jewel in the Crown?). Alan Howard is affecting as the bemused, gentle Maurice Wilkins, in whose "province" DNA research ostensibly lies at King's, and who just wants everyone to get along and work as a team. He ends up with a share in the prize but having been shut out of the joy of the discovery, first by the solitary Rosalind Franklin, then by the glory-hunting Watson and Crick. It is a young and baby-faced Juliet Stevenson who really steals the day as Franklin, the woman who did the painstaking physical research and photography on which Watson and Crick based their model. She was dead from cancer by the time they picked up their Nobel, and Stevenson gives us a frank, clearsighted character who is caught in a bleak old-boys'-club of not ill-intentioned men who have no experience dealing with an unconventional woman on equal footing and so tend to avoid her and mock her behind her back. Stevenson's Franklin is no victim, seeing her situation clearly ("They're making me hard... In the end you become the kind of person people expect you to be,") and finding solace in the process of exploration.

It all snaps into focus once the famous Linus Pauling has a go for the prize, and suddenly Watson and Crick are up against a deadline. After that, things move at a run and it's all about the science, which is when it's at its most engaging, even to a scientific illiterate like me. The moment when they find the proper base-pairings puts a chill up my spine, and I've never given a thought to base-pairings in my life.





Safe Men: (1998. dir: John Hamburg) This movie ought to have been awful, but it borders instead on the sublime. First, the actors: Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn are a brilliant comic team, backed up by a second brilliant comic team in the shape of Mark Ruffalo and Josh Pais. It took me a long time to trust Ruffalo, possibly because he emerged full-fledged into the zeitgeist on a wave of hype that roused my suspicious nature. This is the one that sold me, baby. His sad-sack, lovelorn safecracker is about as perfect as it can be, but that's par for the course in this film. Even cameo players exude easy brilliance. Early on there's a scene in a fast-food taco place with Michael Showalter as an overachieving micromanager. It's a tiny scene, maybe half a minute long, and if you picture the words written on a page, there's nothing there, no humor to speak of. He made it up from scratch, created a very funny bit and did it all with delivery. Then there's Paul Giamatti. There's a protracted scene, probably my favorite in the movie, in which he (as a gangster-in-training called Veal Chop) tries to talk Zahn and Rockwell (failed musicians Eddie and Sam, whom he's mistaken for a genius safecracking team) into breaking into a particular house. It's not just Giamatti's flawlessly funny delivery, not just the great reactions by Zahn and Rockwell... it's everything. It's the outrageous backlighting, and the smooth, ambling Al Green song tumbling easily beneath it, and it's the big space they have to work in, the space allowed them by the editors (Suzanne Pillsbury and M. Scott Smith). It's no easy task editing comedy. If you cut off the pause a half second early, it doesn't matter how funny the actors are; the joke's not going to play. I give as much credit to these guys as to director John Hamburg, who was in his twenties when he wrote and shot this with such a firm hand and strong personal style that he may be some kind of freaky comic genius.

The script veers wildly between the inspired and the halt and lame, hovering a lot of the time right over the abyss of near-suckage without falling entirely in. There are certain scenes I fast-forward through when I watch it, but only three or four, and there are others I rewind to watch repeatedly. The thing about Shelly Hack. The scene in the sundry goods store. When Christina Kirk (underplaying beautifully as the straight-man love interest Hannah) and Sam fall in love across the table at Rosh Hashannah, another scene that succeeds beyond its material because the editing is so good.

But I don't want to underemphasize the comic genius(es) of Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn. Rockwell has a bit when he's standing at Hannah's door, rehearsing what he'll say to her, that bears the subtle hallmarks of comic mastery (the pats on his own butt are the coup de grace), and a few of Zahn's many virtuoso moments that come first to mind are his explanation of the term "fence" (again, nothing much as written; it's all in the unique way he says it), and his inability to stop himself from questioning a fearsome gangster's use of metaphor.





The Twelve Chairs: (1970. dir: Mel Brooks) Mel Brooks is in it, and Dom Deluise, so you know the kind of movie it is, right? Neanderthally lowbrow humor, so awful sometimes you laugh at the sheer shamelessness of it. Only this time, somehow, Brooks has managed to create the most convincing snapshot of just-post-revolutionary Russia I've ever seen. Ron Moody is an ex-aristocrat chasing the family jewels, which got sewed into a chair before the government absconded with the furniture. Moody has a physical comedy like Peter Sellers', with a wonderfully expressive face. Frank Langella (as the trickster-beggar who helps him) flows through the movie like a long drink of water, the very personification of grace, beauty, and charisma, handling both the corniest jokes and truly poignant moments (yes! true poignancy in a Mel Brooks film!) with equal aplomb. He was just beginning his film career after a good, strong training onstage, and busted right out of the gate with this and, in the same year, Diary of a Mad Housewife, a darkly humorous classic which has inexplicably never seen the inside of a video store.