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Crickets

Peter Bart’s column is seldom more than lame: it’s even lamer when every well-paid metro daily writer who has to fill column inches weighs in on the heavy meta of an already too-meta-for-words “controversy.” Which made a quote in the February 10 New Yorker particularly appealing, in Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Unknown,” a piece about what’s known by U.S. intelligence of Al Qaeda and Iraq: “If you take thirty movie reviewers and show them the same movie, they will understand its meaning in thirty different ways, and they will even understand the plot in different ways, and I’m not talking about watching Rashomon.” It’s attributed to Douglas Feith, described as “Under-Secretary of defense for policy, who is considered to be an Iraq hawk.” On the other hand, William Goldman‘s savaging of the Oscar tub-thumping for the still-rotten Gangs of New York has a sweet savagery that too few crickets chirping in the dark ever avail themselves of.

Guided by Voices

On Thursday night, a friend of mine was angry: she’d rushed to see the final showing of Russian Ark at a local arthouse and had inadvertently missed seeing the epic documentary dismantling of Michael Jackson on ABC. She even more angry because she’d seen Russian Ark. I wrote very briefly describing it as “More stunt than vision.” Other critics, however, particularly Jonathan Rosenbaum, had led her to believe she’d get some old-fashioned transcendence out of it. While she’s a rock publicist, she’s also a terrific enthusiastic moviegoer, and it was pleasant to suddenly find ourselves comparing Andre Bazin’s theories on the sustained take versus Sergei Eisenstein’s practice of montage over $2 pints of Leinenkugel beer.

Which makes me concerned about how I’ll write about David Cronenberg‘s Spider, a terse, imposing study of schizophrenia that finds Ralph Fiennes trembling through an almost entirely physical performance, under a Samuel Beckett haircut and a carapace of layered, crusty shirts. Amy Taubin of the Village Voice has weighed in on the Sony Pictures Classics release as being one of the best films ever made. Wow. There’s a responsibility to live up to.

I think Spider is one of the most troubling, most aesthetically magisterial things I’ve seen in ages, yet I’m always concerned about enthusing so vivaciously over something that is so rarefied. What can a reader do with gush that doesn’t offer sufficient context to demonstrate why a tough or dark movie is worth the effort. (Roger Ebert’s review of the sadomasochistic Korean The Isle deals well with this subject.)

For me, Spider is genuinely great, filled with manifestations of the indelible sense memory of the gifted or the mad or the artistic. (In a way, Spider is a portrait of both madness and writing as an unavoidable, inescapable state. There’s a theater piece that’s played in several cities, most recently Brooklyn, that provides a parallel to Cronenberg’s quietly, persistently chilling study. Ridge Theater’s Jennie Richee, an inspired phantasm of the life and intricate, demented work of naive artist Henry Darger never provides release: your head can barely contain the groan of the staticky madness of the protagonist in either case. It works both aurally and visually in Spider: listen to the pursed, small quack sound as Fiennes sucks at a hand-rolled, or the scrawwwww of fork tines that slip and shriek against china. The look of the film is filed with textures of carpet and jigsaw and earth, a heightened plein air that tends to bone and sand-colored light. But more importantly, Spider collates his thoughts in a small notebook in a secret language comprised of Cy Twombly hieroglyphs, as profound as wallpaper. Then we’re shown the wallpaper behind his head, which also crawls, a cryptic crossword patterning of feathery strokes. In all, Spider is like a highly distilled version of the Freudian pageantry of Eraserhead, but rife with Cronenberg’s serene neo-classisicm. Will that be enough to tell my friend whether it’s her cup of artiness or not? I’ll write more after a conversation with Cronenberg next week.

Gerrymandered

Gus van Sant’s Gerry is a second attempt to appropriate the vocabulary of another filmmaker, and it’s more successful than his earlier retake of Psycho, despite Chris Doyle’s gleaming layers of sculpted, multicolored light in that project. Matt Damon and Casey Affleck wander a seemingly limitless desert (shot in California and Argentina). “Hey, Gerry, the path,” is the sort of post-Beckett absurdism, meaningfully meaningless, these two pretty lads have improvised along with van Sant. While the horizon is always important in van Sant’s work, the sometimes-golden, sometimes bone-ash-gray line of the desert is relentlessly flattened here, Antonioni deprived of architecture, James Benning with bewildered figures, Claire Denis’ great Beau Travail without a persistent critique of masculinity. The film is comprised mostly of sustained takes, tracking or Steadicam-ing with the two lost boys. The Hungarian director Bela Tarr is rightfully thanked at film’s end: without movies like his seven-hour epic Satantango --van Sant shepherded its limited U.S. release--Gerry wouldn’t exist. Bela Tarr with lustrous color instead of black-and-white and stars and improvised dialogue.

Does this count as a rupture or a potential alternate presence in twenty-first century moviemaking? I don’t know, but there is a wry knowingness to this shaggy-star story, including having Affleck wearing a t-shirt with a big yellow five-pointed star on his chest: stare at the star, it seems to say, that’s all you get, face and figure and gesture. Love the star. Admire the star. Forget about story. Put two stars in the desert without a script. Without an industrial process behind them. Then, Van Sant suggests, this lovely yet arid object is what you get. As well as shots, like one about an hour in, where the boys scrabble out a map in the dust, while the director’s attention circles low behind them, camera caressing their their khakied buttocks.

Do the Right Thing

The Quiet American will be on 35 screens this week in anticipation of Oscar nominations on Tuesday. If it doesn’t get any, I wonder how many people will get to see Philip Noyce’s quiet, un-American (for its serene storytelling proficiency) picture.

Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine), an anti-colonialist Brit, is a veteran Times of London correspondent who’s grown indolent in Indochina in the early 1950s while the French are still battling the Vietminh. His young mistress, a former taxi dancer named Phuong (Do Hai Yen) whom he loves for her beauty and way with an opium pipe, is only part of what’s brought on his world-weary stagnation. The arrival of a substantially younger American named Pyle (Brendan Fraser), avowedly a medical researcher, as well as a threat from his editors back in London to bring him “home,” leads to romantic and professional conflict. Screenwriters Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan have produced the sort of compelling and intelligent literary adaptation (which won’t satisfy the purists among Graham Greene aficionados) that used to be Hollywood’s mainstay, yet it is done with a maturity and grace possible only in contemporary movies. Noyce, working with profligately talented cinematographer Christopher Doyle, create a dustily exotic Saigon neverland, and the work is never mere chinoiserie, nor as extravagant as Doyle’s style in Hong Kong-made pictures like his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai (Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love). Working with spare classicism, they find a visual grammar of spent grandeur to mesh with Greene’s splendid, plaintive prose, never overpopulating the alleyways of rue in which the romantic triangle (and unfolding of America’s first involvement in the Vietnam War) steep.

“I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam,” Fowler’s narration begins. “The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London.” At first, it’s a scary thing: voice-over in a Miramax project is often a sign of last-minute fiddling. Yet throughout, Caine’s voice, intermittently lovely, direct lines that draw from or approximate Greene’s prose, adds a gratifying extra layer to the narrative, as opposed to something like the Ed Wood-style voice-over affixed to the corpse of Gangs of New York.

And Caine is very, very good. You want to keep your eyes on him, to admire acting as habitation, as breath. Caine demonstrates a marvelous, complex stoicism while playing a man who’s sorrowful, ragged, a burned-out case. Fraser’s physicalized performance as a man who moves by manners and good intentions is both solid and amusing; a turn of a hand, a shift of his stance, is often all that he requires to illustrate the shifts in Pyle’s many agendas. In Greene’s words, Pyle “gave a lost gesture, like a boy put up to speak at some school function who cannot find the grown-up words.” This boyish rectitude offers a pleasurable contrast to Caine’s Fowler, a man doing the right thing for improper, even corrupt reasons; asking questions, becoming a genuinely virtuous and daring reporter to sustain his lifestyle, his love.

Phuong is a dangerous character for any story, the unfolding flower who symbolizes the fragrant and exotic motherland. Noyce stirs this lightly. His assurance, as in his early Australian pictures like Newsfront, as opposed to well-remunerated American misfires like Sliver and The Saint, is evident throughout. Mirage Enterprises, headed by Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella and William Horberg is the sort of script-and-performance-intent production company that encourages this kind of craft.

Doyle, as always, demonstrates a great eye, particularly for Saigon’s blue and blur past dusk, used to similar brooding effect in his later work for Noyce in Rabbit-Proof Fence. There’s also a milky haze of midmorning light that suggests the disabling parch and sear of tropical daylight.

Greene’s ambiguities are troubling enough to frighten a film’s financiers, partly for its skeptical look at the earnestness of early U.S. advisors to the war; a scene showing the terrible aftermath of a terrorist detonation is cold and blunt, with blood measured by the heartbeat. “Sooner or later, Mr. Fowler,” Fowler’s closest Vietnamese source insists, “one has to take sides if one is remain human.” Co-writer Hampton made an attempt at deciphering the roots of terrorism in his acrid Robin Williams-starring adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s The Secret Agent, but The Quiet American is much more precise. (Note the shot after the attack in the square, where Pyle demurely dabs blood from his cuffed trousers with his hankie.)

The battle between the older man and younger man for a young woman and the nineteenth century representatives of empire with the twentieth century’s is blunt but never reductive. It’s worthy of Greene’s line he wrote for Fowler (not in the movie), which goes, “Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young, we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.”

Shelved

Criterion’s just re-issued their edition of Jean Cocteau‘s great The Beauty and the Beast, with more extras, including Philip Glass’ recent opera, synced to the picture. It’s playing in the background right now: paired with the images, it’s almost as peculiar as seeing the version of Dracula that he and the Kronos Quartet tour with. Cocteau’s command of the everyday was always shaky, but at his best moments there's a magic, a sureness of fantasy unmatched by any other filmmaker. The elegant, icy look was provided by designer Christian Bernard (such as the Beast's sumptuous castle) and recently passed master cinematographer Henri Alekan (who shot Wings of Desire, among many other movies).

Home Vision’s newest releases include Barbet Schroeder‘s trippy and goofy 1972 New Guinea-set story of sexual experimentation, The Valley (Obscured by Clouds), beautifully shot by Nestor Almendros and with an original score by Pink Floyd.

Docurama’s put out an extended version of the Independent Film Channel’s BaadAsssss Cinema, director Isaac Julien’s compelling, compulsively entertaining history of 1970s blaxploitation films.

For topicality, the History Channel’s Inside Islam is a good two-hour overview of a few thousand years of history most of us aren’t aware of; Docurama’s release of Edet Belzberg‘s Children Underground, one of the most shattering, unflinching documentaries I know, and a 2001 Best Documentary Feature Academy Award nominee, observes the daily lives of five homeless children in Bucharest, Romania, whose lives are simply horrifying even as their will to survive impresses. In times of war everyone suffers, even the innocent, particularly children.

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