Wednesday 30 April 2008

My Dark Places: A Review of 'Street Kings'


Nothing better to do on a Wednesday night. Go to the pictures. New movie. Street Kings. Script part-written by James Ellroy. Like him: crime writer. Hard-boiled. Sparse. Also written by Kurt Wimmer. Guy made Equilibrium. Suggests there wasn’t a lot of that in the writing process. Ellroy leaves treatment unguarded. Gets out the shower. Broken glass. Window shattered. Script gone. ‘Damn you Wimmer!’

Keanu wakes up. Keanu plays Tom. Tom’s a cop: LAPD. Tom’s violent. Tom’s a widower. Tom throws people in the trunk of his car. Tom’s like Jack Traven all growed up and gone to the drink. Or John Constantine, beating on ethnic minorities instead of demons. Either way: derivative.

Close-knit ‘special vice’ unit. Led by Forest Whitaker. Memories of The Shield. Who else in the cast? Jay Mohr. Okay. Cedric the Entertainer. Funny, not ha-ha. Hugh Laurie. Bizarre. John Corbett. John Corbett!?

Well-worn trajectory. Tom gets in trouble with IAD. Tom gets set-up. For a cop, Tom sure misses the obvious. Clearly never read an Ellroy book. Hooks up with a friendly detective outside his unit: Diskant. They investigate shit. They kill people. They have racially charged interactions with the Latino community. They bond. Homoerotic subplot weighs heavy.

The guys who did it aren’t the real bastards at all. The rot goes deep. The rot goes up. The rot goes all the way to city hall (implicitly). Oedipal issues. Violence solves everything. What did he just do with that spade? Baddies can’t just be corrupt: have to be rapists too. Women exist to be submitted to and/or saved. That guy is still in the trunk – have they forgotten?

Shot hand-held. Shot on 16mm. Should have cost less: the grit’s too polished. Conceptually shocking ending forced safe. Forced nice. Disturbing to watch if unironic.

Los Angeles is a character in this film. Not saying much. City gets hotter every year. Not cold enough for Ellroy. Room temperature drama. Chris Evans nails it as an honest cop. The others flounder. Redundant scenes alternate with incident-heavy nonsense. Needs to be forty-five minutes longer and a lifetime smarter.

That guy’s never getting out of the trunk.


Monday 21 April 2008

Living In Oblivion: A Review of 'Into the Wild'

An image of a handsome young man is seen displayed on a bedside table in the middle of the night. A disembodied voice on the soundtrack, then the startled gasp of a mother waking from a nightmare, wondering where her son is, whether he is safe, and what his motives were for severing all contact with the world he knew. The young man is Christopher McCandless, a high-scoring graduate who decided to live the life of a great American wanderer, beholden to no-one and no-thing, and while what follows celebrates such idealistic liberty, this opening scene of Sean Penn’s dramatisation of these true events in the early nineties suggest the keen awareness the film has of the collateral cost of self-ostracism.

This awareness seems to evade Chris himself, as he abandons his car one day and never returns to the life he knew, instead grabbing odd-jobs for a few weeks to earn enough money to pay for supplies and gear to keep him moving through Arizona, Mexico, and eventually Alaska. His abandoned sister states that the reason Chris has not sent her any letters is because he knew she trusted him enough and loved him enough not to need them. A romantic notion, but perhaps also a deluded one.

Chris is seen initially making camp in a deserted bus in the Alaskan wilderness, subsequent overlapping, dreamlike, and subjectively fractured sequences revealing his cutting-loose, his journeys, his encounters, and the growing realisation and pain brewing at his erstwhile family home. As the unpleasant domestic environment in the latter is sketched through Terrence Malick-esque voiceovers it becomes easier to see Chris’ quest as a simple attempt to escape the society that he sees represented by his abusive father and his brittle and cold mother. That he then spends much of his trip searching out surrogate father figures – all of whom live outside societal restrictions – is a bittersweet irony. It is not, however, highlighted in the film, but a motif left to drift unobtrusively through it, like a dust caught in afternoon sun.

Penn, directing for the fourth time, again chooses a story about individuals who cannot be understood, and whose own stated motives are merely proxy to a wealth of inner turmoil and yearning which cannot be expressed in words or narrative. Marrying the visual elegiasm of Badlands with an attraction to the obsessive, self-deceptive, and pining characters of Werner Herzog, Penn makes films which are above all a celebration of the existence of life and spirit in the face of overwhelming scepticism and random unpleasantness. Into The Wild only touches on the anguished mania that is seen in The Pledge and The Crossing Guard, but this state-of-nervousness remains a necessary corollary of any attempt to influence a world which, thanks to its absurdity, can only ever be mapped on the level of the subconscious. The growing confusion and loss of William Hurt’s paterfamilias certainly belongs in the same warped AA meeting as Jack Nicholson’s distant loners.

While one would never expect the film to be rushed, at two-and-a-half hours the story begins to weary, as McCandless continues to (eventually) reject potentially corrective adult role models, and slowly makes his way to an environment which has no trucks to hitch rides on, or helpful hippies to cook him dinner. Alaska might be seen by some as the nadir of McCandless’ intent, but it seems to show an extreme to which even he should not quite be willing to go. It is telling that he chooses to camp in the only indication of humanity for miles around. His subsequent difficulties are the most compelling of moments of the film, and for all the implicit and explicit support and vindication of Chris’ actions throughout, the dangers begin to seep in.

Incredibly well made, the film draws typically genuine and quintessentially American performances from its high-calibre cast, Emile Hirsh not only resembling McCandless but capturing his peculiarly charismatic vacancy. The music, while frequently beautiful, unfortunately serves occasionally to undermine the drama and the quietly breathtaking landscape cinematography – one sequence of Chris climbing a snow-drift, the sound of his shoes crunching on the earth and the clean air rustling through the trees achieves in a few seconds what a dozen specially-written songs attempt throughout.

In Friedrich Dürenmatt’s original novel of The Pledge the motivations of the detective in befriending the single mother and her pretty daughter are never in question: he is to use them as bait to catch a killer, and we hate him for it. Just as Penn muddied these simple waters in his earlier film, here he keeps the exact reasons for Chris’ movements indefinite, forcing us to consider his actions, and those of his parents, as motivated by the immense and invisible forces of environment and psychology, rather than a writer’s need for structure, consequence, and moral arithmetic.

Sunday 6 April 2008

Public Speaking: A Review of 'Michael Clayton'

In Michael Clayton the eponymous ‘fixer’ at a prestigious law firm based in New York begins to see his world crumble, an old friend having slipped off into the deep end thanks either to the crushing weight of his sins of silence or having gone off his meds.   Clayton, played by George Clooney, is having a hard enough time as it is, debts up to his eyeballs and a family circle that veers between judgemental and drug-addled. His attempts to hold his own life together form the core of what we observe on screen, but the film keeps pulling away, visualising moments of bizarre pathological hysteria, seen as the consequence of an unpleasant corporate world that surrounds and bleeds into everything.

At no point do we see any of the victims of the deadly toxins to be found in the fertiliser pedalled by bulletproof corporation U/north. The story takes place in boardrooms, restaurants, hotel rooms, and other people’s living rooms. While evoking Erin Brockovich in plot, Clayton keeps away from the collateral damage caused by his law firm and their clients – fellow attorney Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) has connected with the poor souls, and the result is more than moral realignment: it is a total psychotic break.  Wilkinson’s performance in this role is both grandstanding and convincing, his opening monologue – set to images of an empty law office – is an incredible piece of cinema, quietly compelling in its compulsive mania.

Yet writer-director Tony Gilroy does not preach like a man possessed; rather, he films like a methodical, enormously capable, brittle first-timer – like the character of Karen Crowder, a legal professional within U/north who is completely out of her depth.  Moments where we see her carefully arrange her clothes for a business meeting, or obsessively rehearse answers to a forthcoming Q&A session make far more of an impact than Clayton’s debt-problems or broken family.   His afflictions are temporary, and will either get solved or be his downfall by film’s end; Crowder’s quest for a permanent suitability is a far deeper, more horrifying suffering that cannot be admitted, let alone corrected in two easy hours.  When her character is forced to decide whether to end a life for the sake of her job, Michael Clayton finds the sting in its tale: this is not a story about the ethical lapse of doing nothing while evil is in your midst, its about the temptation to choose evil because it is what is expected of you.

The film is structured around a series of displays of intent, beginning with Eden’s frenzied explanation of his motives, a speech in which Clayton is addressed and examined, but not seen – when the story finds him a few minutes later he is revealed like just another cog in the machine: how could he possibly deserve the honour of Eden’s confession? We perhaps expect the film to show us how he becomes worthy, but in a sly joke the opening scenes are a flash-forward, the Clayton sitting at the poker table already having heard the rousing call to arms of Eden; and yet, there he sits.   The finale, too, plays games with the preparation and delivery of vital information and audiences in and out of sight.

Gilroy’s direction is crisp and exciting, occasionally unfolding events and motivations in wordless passages of surprising weight and tension.       His script is intelligent and polished, but for me contained one too many leftovers from his work on the Bourne series, assassinations shown that, for all their effectiveness, should have been concealed.  The best writing comes in the true-to-life moments like a father insisting to his son that he is better than both his father and the people his father hangs around with, or the frustration felt between friends when one betrays another.  A shame, then, that the tale is so well-worn, resembling Soderbergh’s aforementioned work, as well as Clooney’s recent Syriana, and any number of seventies thrillers starting with The Days of the Condor.

A surprisingly strong showing in 2008’s Oscar nominations will hopefully bring the film to a wide audience, which Swindon’s performance particularly deserves.  The whole work will, I suspect, reward further study, and indicates the proper introduction of a mature and disciplined presence behind the camera.

Thursday 3 April 2008

Reigning It In, Letting It Loose: A Review of 'Shine a Light'

'What do you mean, you're not going to play 'Gimme Shelter'?'

Back in the day, there were Beatles people, and there were Stones people. Sure, the former were more politically active and maybe presented a higher echelon of hippie-consciousness, but barring some kind of Lazarus-like resurrection (of both people and careers), you’re not likely to get them playing an 18-song set at the Beacon Theatre in New York – even when they were all still alive, they had moved on. The Rolling Stones will never move on. Until Mick Jagger collapses on stage like an oversexed Moliẻre they’ll continue to delight in the adrenaline of the live show.

To capture this stubborn commitment, Martin Scorcese has furnished himself with ten cameras, a team of Oscar-winning cinematographers (like Cameron Crowe collaborator John Toll), and a triple-decker stress-sandwich in order to make superlative part-documentary mostly-concert film Shine a Light. The film hints at being both a larger historical project (which it was once planned to be), and a behind-the-scenes examination in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil, but ultimately sets himself the more difficult task of capturing just what it is like to watch the band play live.

On an IMAX screen this is accomplished with aplomb. We see Jagger’s fillings and Keith Richards’ dishevelled veins in all their (in)glorious detail. The little details surprise and engross: Richards leaning on the shoulder of bassist Ronnie Wood during a lull, drummer Charlie Watts sighing in exhaustion after a solo, pretty blondes in the front row desperately trying to get a picture of Jagger on their mobiles.

Having opened the Berlin film festival, Shine has garnered mixed reviews. True, the set itself is not a barnstormer, designed as it is to highlight lesser-known tracks rather than recycle wall-to-wall hits (which come as the encore), some of the riskier lyrics have been excised thanks to the presence of a Presidential dynasty, and the performance – to a much smaller crowd than the band are used to – occasionally lacks a certain something, most notably in the opener, ‘Jumping Jack Flash.’

Those who are not that familiar with the band may not be able to get past these quibbles, while even hard-core fans may be unimpressed due to them. Either way, the work behind the camera is exceptional, Scorcese and his team turning fresh what could so easily be stale, the editing and cinematography crisper and more rewarding than in most concert films. The opening may resemble Spinal Tap without the irony, but it successfully sets a tone of frenzied anticipation and fin-de-siecle grandiosity.

This is a film to either stick on in the background on a Sunday afternoon in your open-plan flat while people come and go, or to be overwhelmed by in the immersive environment of Waterloo’s IMAX, an experience made all the stranger by the necessary passivity of the audience in the face of such an energising performance.