Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

November 8 , 2003

Pull quotes, actually

The only thing more confusing than the logic of a bad, overly calculated Hollywood blockbuster is the sensation a reviewer gets get after reading a dozen movie reviews of something you've already written about. Or worse, the carefully selected quotations in the weekend newspaper ads.

Sometimes the question is less what the heck were they thinking than what the heck did they see? Looking over the advertisements in the Friday papers, I have to wonder, am I wrong not to write, not to see the world of movies, the way the reviewer for Boston Metro does, citing Love Actually as "brilliant. A classic.... It's not only one of the best film of this year, but one of the most romantic comedies ever made"?

I liked it, Richard Curtis' glossy and brassily ambitious attempt to cement the New Zealand native's stature, as all too many articles suspiciously suggest, as "the English Spielberg." Impossibly shiny and filled with funny swear words and playfully gratuitous nudity, Love Actually the Kill Bill of hopeful romanticism and shameless saccharine. But should I write, as the Australian narcissist Paul Fischer did, "the most exquisite romantic comedy seen in a decade"? (For those unfamiliar with that writer's oeuvre, keep in mind that Fischer was the only sentient being on the planet who could be coddled into providing a pull-quote to advertise the already-forgotten curdled catastrophe called The Sweetest Thing.) Or should I torture my prose differently and write, as, apparently, did Patrick Stoner, "The stars sparkle, the wit's winning, the script's seductive, and love intertwines it all. Actually, you will love it!"

Actually, there's one part of Stoner's review I might co-opt as a review: "!!!!!"

And what about this quote for Radio, the new Cuba Gooding, Jr. feel-icky movie, from Bonnie Laufer of something called Tribute TV? "A definite must for the entire family!"? There's an all-American sentiment.

Theory of revolution

I'm a sucker for formal beauty in movies, from the most costly and bogus of studio-machined contraptions to the most dolorously pretentious foreign-language films to the cheapest of grimy yet snazzy digital video experiments.

Lyricism? Poetry? Great cinema? That would be nice, but if you throw in some eyeball kicks, which was the name the goofballs at MAD Magazine in the 1950s called cool stuff being thrown up on the screen; or "whammies," as "Matrix" trilogy produced Joel Silver has dubbed them.

So, on to the end of the Matrix world as we know it, with the impact of the original Matrix and its discarded "rules" years behind us. (I'll leave the limning of the new rules to my colleague David Poland.)

What would Neo do? First, he'd hire his own God: John Gaeta, the special effects supervisor of the three "Matrix" movies, the deity-of-details who brings the Wachowski brothers' teeming, punishingly intent world to life. A little more than an hour into the glum, elegant yet ritualistic The Matrix Revolutions, the underground city of Zion is under attack. Does the battle take an hour or only seem like it?

There's more computer animation in this dark world than there are actors on screen. With the bombardment of deliriously imagined computer-generated imagery, the machines have in fact taken over in the representation of forces that want to take over humanity. As the first line of the script of The Matrix goes, we're watching a computer screen "so close it has no boundaries."

Secondary and sub-secondary figures man antiaircraft guns to battle earth-boring--and for the most part, boring as .. well, machines - that have penetrated the defenses of the last rebels against a machine takeover of the world. There are also unceasing swarms of Sentinels, like schools of silvery octopi crafted from molybdenum, undulant and relentless.

Where's Neo (Keanu Reeves), you start to wonder? Come back, little savior!

You'd have to shoehorn metaphors for the world we live in into The Matrix Revolutions. Academic and pseudo-academic analyses have proliferated about the philosophical background and literary borrowings of the Brothers Wachowski's two prior installments, and more are sure to flourish. Yet the neat idea and easily assimilated notion that we live in a mediasphere bombarded by images and advertisements and product places that bore into our dreams is left behind in the hurtling toward the final revelation of just precisely what sort of savior "The One" will turn out to be. (Spoiler: It's revealed that L. Ron Hubbard is God.)

While The Matrix Revolutions"has its own eccentric, hiccupy rhythm, there are substantial differences from the previous installment. There's almost none of the gaseous speechifying typified by the character of the Architect, whose explanations were more confusing than enlightening or instructive. "I do not resent my karma, I am grateful for it" is a typical "M3" line amid the crypticisms that substitute for witticisms. There's talk of the "vagaries of perception" and you have to wonder, because of the consistency: is the risible portentousness of virtually every spoken word purposeful rather than a hyper-stylized unnatural speech?

There's an unwelcome amount of attention paid to a ship's captain who seems to have wandered in from a World War II navy adventure, who inhales mightily, widens his eyes and exhales in a stream of PG-13-styled profanity and blasphemy. For a movie about a secular Jesus Christ, this episode has a thoughtless plenitude of "goddammit!"s.

The battles between Neo and Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving) bestow upon us the same acrobatic munificence as the other entries. In their climactic battle, several fists fly in slow-motion, between raindrops, cold solid, silvery stalactite vertical raindrops against green Matrix-code-like backdrops.

There's also much to admire in the Wachowskis' post-racial, pansexual world. There are more black faces in the trilogy than a year's worth of other action adventures.

In the odd but oddly satisfying ending, the Wachowskis make a ringing endorsement of free will. But you knew I would say that.

My own private Columbine

A respected American director I know debuted a third feature at Sundance 2003. Ebert liked it, a few other critics did, too. Most people who saw it there? Withering disdain or outright contempt. One reason? The movie didn't provide cues as to how the filmmakers felt about their eccentric characters.

After the Toronto International Film Festival press and industry screening of the elusive, haunting, mostly magnificent Elephant, two middle-aged men with studio-type voices are at the urinals. Their reaction to Gus Van Sant's gliding, melancholy contemplation of the transient nature of everyday experience and the choking power of inchoate rage is similar to that to my friend's movie. One pisser turns to the other and says, "Gus Van Sant was here right now? I'd fucking punch him. What an irresponsible piece of shit!"

Elephant, compulsively retracing the hours before violence erupts on morning in a fictional suburban Portland, Oregon high school, is one of a fistful of current American releases about school shootings. But Van Sant is a more idiosyncratic filmmaker than polemicist Michael Moore, who incorporated surveillance footage from the most notorious of school slaughters in Bowling for Columbine.

Elephant is about inexplicable beauty and the fragility of each breath as it is taken. It's autumn. Leaves are falling. Green lawns are strewn with autumn's rustling bursts of color: leaves turn most brilliant just as they are dying. We follow almost a dozen students at a suburban high school, through classrooms, the library, cafeteria, the grassy quad, locker rooms. Faces become landscape. Seemingly inconsequential actions are repeated from multiple points of view. The frame is boxy, shot in the 4:3 ratio of a television screen or videogames; the 16mm box of Frederick Wiseman's black-and-white documentary classic, High School or, as Van Sant has pointed out, the format of every badly-made, fear-inducing instructional film shown to students into the 1980s.

Elephant, lovingly, gorgeously shot by director of photography Harris Savides (Gerry), is composed mostly of long takes of young people walking from one place to another: sweet, feckless, unaware. "I'm so ready to go to college," one says. ""I just want to live to get my license," says another, a tossed-off yet violent figure of speech, "It's not like they're going to kill you." Like the aging industryites in the Toronto toilet, they're unaware of the violence of metaphors and turns of speech embedded in the culture.

Elephant is like Kubrick's The Killing - a film mimicked in different fashion by Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs - -making the movie's present tense unstable in disconcerting yet lyrical fashion. You have three, four hindered people in one place, think of all the potential perspectives, all the subjectivities.

Elephant's acknowledged borrowings from the 1970s stylized color of the brilliant, deadpan photographs of Southern seer William Eggleston and the tracking, gliding, lengthy takes of Hungarian maxi-minimalist Bela Tarr are not Van Sant's only calculations. Some may be puzzled by the intersection of pretty youth unaware of what their day will bring and the wistful drift of Tarr's tracking shots: "Satantango 90210," anyone?

Beauty dies. Van Sant shoots ghosting white contrails against improbable blue skies. Clouds rush over an Eggleston-style shot of power lines. A dog jumps up in the air just as the shooters cross the lawn toward the school, it's a scene repeated from several perspectives, and in one, the dog's twirl, leaping into mid-air, magically slows then returns to normal speed. And the kids are uniformly arresting. Van Sant told Amy Taubin in Film Comment, "If you're making a film about high school kids, they are pretty much all alluring and interesting looking and beautiful, because of their age. Even [the girl mocked by the others in the locker room], is very beautiful. If you were her age, you might not classify her as beautiful, but to me she is. If you're going to stare at the kids for a long time and they're going to be doing basically smile things, you try to find really beautiful kids so that you won't lose interest." But to me she is." This seems the essence of Van Sant's gift in his smaller work, from Mala Noche and My Own Private Idaho to Gerry and Elephant: this is beauty.

Amoral formalism? Pshaw. Movies are not stagecraft. Film is not a soapbox. Elephant, an important movie in many elusive yet specific ways, is greater for its mostly ambiguous form. It is a film about portent, about mystery, that answers the one who says, "I want to know more than what I want to know."

Those who want answers, psychological reduction, have fixed on a few too-literal instants in Elephant, which, to some have suggested the shooters may be gay neo-Nazis. Fewer have commented on Timothy Bottoms' drunken dad failing to drive his son to school in the opening scene: as in the Comedy Central series, "That's My Bush," he's a dead ringer for George W. Bush. But, as Van Sant has repeatedly said, "If you don't want problems, we could make a Seabiscuit documentary instead."

Elephant is not a cynical film, but a fearful one. It says: It happens. It does not say: This is why. I look at the rest of this terse, eighty-one minute, made-for-HBO movie, of its dreaming of a nightmare, of sudden violence sundering the adolescent illusion of immortality, one cocked trigger from right outside my door-Thursday, midnight, gang members--or just inside your workplace,

Elephant's heavy baggage is already in the culture. Dread and sorrow suffuse our days. While I write this, a fragment of Wilco's all-American "Heavy Metal Drummer" plays on the jukebox and I'm stung. "I miss the innocence I've known," Jeff Tweedy singsongs. So does Van Sant. Me, too. Unambiguously.

Email Ray Pride