REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and in the future, that I'm going to review classic movies that happen to cross my transom that would otherwise never make it to the blog.

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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (Andersson, 2014)

Just like that other Anderson from the United States, there's not point in denying that Roy Andersson tends to make films that resemble each other, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, his Leone d'Oro winner from the 2014 Venice Film Festival, does pretty much exactly the same things as 2000's Songs from the Second Floor and 2006's You, the Living, and it it does them in pretty much exactly the same way. Long takes of barely-moving scenes, sudden eruptions of po-faced absurdism, and the whole thing would be suicidally depressing if it the comic timing weren't flawless. Third verse, same as the first.

Or is it? Whether I'm just starting to feel diminishing returns, or whether Andersson is slowly running out of inspiration, the one clear difference between Pigeon and its two forerunners in his trilogy of modern life is that it's not as good as they are. Which is a very different thing than saying it's not good, period, and I laughed heartily, many times, throughout the film, and was then cut off cold, many times, by the mordant shifts in perspective and tone. It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone who responded to the other films not liking this one at all, or even liking this one a whole lot. But comparatively, it lacks the passionate fire they possessed in such quantity; there are many handfuls individual shots and gags I could recite in loving detail from the first two movies, but the scene from Pigeon that lives strongest in my memory does not do so because I admire it the most (though a repeating motif involving 18th Century King Karl XII of Sweden, played by Viktor Gyllenberg, imposing upon the confused patrons of a rundown portside bar in the 2010s does give me enormous pleasure as I roll it around in my head).

Still, if we free it from the tyranny of having to live up to the standards of two of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic comedies of the 2000s, Pigeon is a fine piece of work on its own merits. The crawling pace of the static long shots - which are frequently exteriors or otherwise not beholden to the "this is a shadowbox in a room" staging of the earlier films, and that gives things a nice sense of sprawl - is absolutely perfect in establishing the film's erratic humor, and telling us how to appreciate it: first you're confused, then you're repulsed, and eventually the stiff stillness becomes hilarious. Or it doesn't. This is, beyond doubt, the kind of material that appeals to a very particular audience, and I think Songs from the Second Floor is absolutely more immediately winning, but there's no doubt that this is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for folks as what like morbid humor based in the pasty-faced frigidity of both people and their actions.

8/10

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A Star Is Born (Pierson, 1976)

Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born - three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name - was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing the setting from the movie industry to pop music. That doesn't entirely work out in practice, owing to the differences in image management between classical Hollywood and the '70s music industry, and it's only the least of the problems that brings the movie down to its knees.

One can have heard rumors and mutterings for years, as I had, that the '76 Star Is Born is nothing but a colossal ego trip for star-producer Barbra Streisand (who won the film's only Oscar, for the gooey love ballad "Evergreen", co-written by Paul Williams), but it's impossible to be prepared for how all-encompassingly dreadful a movie it is. It's not simply that the screenplay, assembled by too many cooks who clearly didn't work in the same kitchen, sacrifices its dramatic integrity in favor of giving Streisand one moment after another to show off. Though it's not possible to have enough favorable feelings for the star nor her vehicle to excuse the grotesqueness of extending the sodden 139-minute film's ending by a good quarter of an hour beyond its natural stopping point just to facilitate a showstopping solo number at the end.

But really, everything about the movie, save perhaps for its nifty grit-soaked concert-doc cinematography (by Robert Surtees, Oscar-nominated), is just embarrassing hackwork. Kris Kristofferson, cast as the third wheel in the love story between Streisand and herself, ambles in like a guy who figures that you'll buy him a beer if he has a relaxing enough smile, while the rest of the cast shuffle around in the background; the luckier ones get to furrow their brows and look sad at the thought of Kristofferson's drinking. Occasionally, a pair of African-American backup singers materialise to give the film a jolt of incongruous lazy racism. As a work of craft, the film begins and ends with Surtees; the '70s fashions are charmingly dated, but still more campy than anything, and the less said about the raw editing in some of the singing scenes, the better.

No, the film lives and dies on Streisand's talent, which is of course considerable, but sabotaging the drama to get us there is hardly worthy of anybody's time or energy, hers least of all. I would at this point name some of the films to better show off her iconic vocal powers, her loopy screen presence and comic timing, or her gift for turning woundedness into lashing anger, but it would take too long: all of Streisand's films are better showcases than this, even the most overt vanity projects. And yes, I have seen The Mirror Has Two Faces.

3/10

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Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)

One of the last big sci-fi pictures before 2001: A Space Odyssey came along and fundamentally changed the possibilities of the genre, 1966's Fantastic Voyage is the platonic ideal of a movie that gets praised, sincerely, for its visual effects, by someone whose tone of voice and inability to maintain eye contact make it clear that they hope you don't ask about anything else. Because it feels bad to attack the movie: the visual effects are really good, even if they were supplanted and then lapped within a few years of its release. And how much nicer to have those kind of top-drawer visual effects in a movie about interesting concepts and adult characters, and not one that involves giant robots walloping the shit out of each other.

Still, you can't get too far into the film before you have to admit that for all its achievements, and the very real charm of mid-'60s sci-fi (notwithstanding the vast budget gap, the film more than slightly resembles TV's Star Trek, from the same year), Fantastic Voyage is a fucking slog. It shouldn't be: the hook is terrific. Both the U.S. and the USSR have developed miniaturisation technology, but only the Americans have a scientist who knows how to make the process last for more than an hour. And he's been almost fatally shot, and sent into a coma that can only be cured by shrinking down brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), and sub captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), and injecting them and their microscopic submarine right into the scientist's body, with government agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), along for manly protagonist duties, trying to catch Duval in the act of being a Commie spy.

That certainly ought to be a fantastic voyage, and if you've encountered the story in Isaac Asimov's novelisation, you even know that it kind of can be (Asimov demanded permission to re-work the story to make it less idiotic). But Henry Kleiner's screenplay and Richard Fleischer's direction show off all the seams and plot holes while pushing the plot along as slowly as a nominal adventure movie could possibly support. The sub voyage takes place in something longer than real time, during which the plot plonks along through a repetitive cycle of theoretically tense moments flattened by lifeless direction. Every actor who isn't Pleasance stands around being vastly too serious, and sometimes we are given blessed relief in the form of the production designers' florid, psychedelia-tinged vision of the inside of the human body.

It looks great - there will be those who carp about how dated it is (and, sure, it is), but really is quite a special visual experience. Tragically, behind those visuals, it's bloated B-movie nonsense built around false characters, expanded and perpetrated by people who didn't know how to capture the proper spunk and speed of a good piece of junk sci-fi.

5/10

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The End of the Tour (Ponsoldt, 2015)

Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature The End of the Tour, that they're wrong. There's something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and the way it treats its version of Wallace (Jason Segel) as a soul too gentle for this cynical, cold world - literally, the film is set in the Midwestern winter - while constantly foreshadowing his suicide 12 years later. There's a distinct, appalling thread of "come laugh at the homey wisdom of Your Literary Idol®, and then cry to remember that he's dead" that runs through the whole thing.

And yet I find myself not only not-hating the film, but even admiring bits and pieces of it, though probably not the bits that the filmmakers wanted. Frankly, I found Segel's Wallace to be all mimicry (good mimicry) with limited willingness to let us inside - and this is, to be fair, much more a function of Donald Margulies's script, which presents the author as an enigma and a concept in the first hour, than it's a sign of Segel's limits as an actor - with not nearly enough thought behind his eyes. The movie depicts Wallace, but it's terrified as hell at grappling with him.

Instead, the real protagonist and by far the deeper, more thoughtfully played character, is minor novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace near the end of the promotional tour for the author's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Eisenberg performance isn't as "revelatory" as Segel's, I guess - the doubt-ridden, antagonistic urban Jewish figure he plays here is securely in his wheelhouse - but it's far more expansive and tricky, full of threads that aren't quite in the script, allowing his version of Lipsky (whose story was never finished and ultimately turned into the 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Meeting Yourself, that this film is adapted from) to be sufficiently resentful under the starry-eyed nervousness and awe that the film's lurch towards an interpersonal conflict as it goes along feels like a natural outgrowth rather than an imposition. It ends being, Amadeus-style, better as the story of an average man admiring and fearing a genius, than as the story of that genius itself, and it's easily Eisenberg's best work since The Social Network.

Stylistically, it's wholly undistinguished American indie filmmaking of a sort that has been unchanged in all particulars since sometime in the 1990s; director James Ponsoldt is clearly more interested in presenting his characters than in doing anything to frame them cinematically. A literary approach certainly fits the material, but the lack of aesthetic challenge is exactly the problem: all the film wants to do is gawk at Wallace/Segel, not engage with him, and the result is often more trivial than penetrating.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LIVES OF RAPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Straight Outta Compton is a full-on biopic of N.W.A., the world's most dangerous group. Rather than visit one of history's other rap biopics - because they're pretty much all dreadful - let's take a peek at something of a freer, more impressionistic pseudobiopic of its subject and lead actor.

History is littered with movies in which popular music stars attempt to show off their acting chops, often playing a variation on themselves, and the results are disastrous. The list of films that are A) impressive as cinema, and B) demonstrate that their stars have anything resembling screen presence or acting talent is a brief one: 1964's A Hard Day's Night, with Richard Lester directing the Beatles to heights that defy the project's obvious "let's cash in on the teenybopper!" impulses.

That said, A Hard Day's Night is so fucking good that it has encouraged generations of filmmakers and pop stars to try again, almost always to no damn good effect at all. So this much credit must absolutely go to 2002's 8 Mile, starring Marshall "Eminem" Mathers as an impressionistic gloss on himself in the mid-'90s: it's a pretty strong movie. Director Curtis Hanson leads a terrific below-the-line team including the great cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editors Craig Kitson and Jay Rabinowitz, and costume designer Mark Bridges, in the creation of a striking vision of urban decrepitude embracing and nurturing its inhabitants. Meanwhile, the director fills out the margins with wonderful performances by Mekhi Phifer, Brittany Murphy, Michael Shannon, and Anthony Mackie in a virtually nonexistent role that still benefits enormously from his extraordinary ability to control the camera with his scowling face.

So that handles A), though this is not a Lester-esque explosion of inventive style (on the contrary, the film subscribes to a stock-issue "let's film urban poverty" aesthetic, it just happens to execute that aesthetic tremendously well). It does not, however, do well by B). Eminem doesn't embarrass himself in the way that Britney Spears did in the repellent Crossroads earlier in 2002, or Mariah Carey did in the insipid Glitter the year prior. He's perfectly unexceptional, with a fairly limited palette of facial expressions that leave the impression that his character doesn't feel feelings; he looks uncannily like Elijah Wood much of the time, and that's all it took me to long helplessly a re-casting in which Eminem could be taken out of the movie that only exists because he is in it (also, "how much better this would be with Elijah Wood in the lead role!" is a pretty awful place to be in).

Eminem's alter ego in the script written by Scott Silver is Jimmy Smith Jr, an automobile factory worker in Detroit whose life is in that singular state of perpetual collapse that only true poverty can create. As the film begins, he has just moved back in with his mother Stephanie (Kim Basinger), whom he resentfully tolerates, his kid sister Lily (Chloe Greenfield) who is unique among living human beings in having the ability to make him feel joy and love, and his mom's abusive wretch of a boyfriend, Greg (Shannon). When he's not slacking off at his job or skulking around his house with undisguised disgust, he pursues his great calling, freestyle rap; he has immense talent but no confidence at all, and at a rap battle emceed by his best friend Future (Phifer), performing as "B-Rabbit", he chokes completely, humiliating himself in front of virtually everyone whose opinion he cares about, and earning the disdain of Papa Doc (Mackie), who lambastes Jimmy as nothing but white trash trying ineffectually to muscle into the African-American territory of rap.

The film is not, in truth, very plot-heavy; there's a bit of back and forth involving Jimmy and Papa Doc's rap gang, the Leaders of the Free World (I'm looking for some kind of irony with Papa Doc's name, and I can't figure out if it's actually there), and the danger in which it puts Jimmy and his friends; there's a B-plot in which Jimmy's relationship to a young woman he meets accidentally one day, Alex (Murphy), helps to drive him to stop being such a resentful lump and take some ownership of his actions. But this is mostly a hang-out movie, of a particularly bleak stripe: the bulk of the film is scenes of Jimmy simply inhabiting his world and bumping against the people in it, with his character arc slowly coalescing as we observe the minute shifts in his behavior from moment to moment, rather than big dramatic shifts that come as the result of melodramatic incidents. The film doesn't even end melodramatically: the film eschews the rags-to-riches arc of Eminem's own life in favor of ending with the triumph of Jimmy being ready to seriously grapple with his life and nascent music career, rather than having actually become a success anywhere but in the tiny world he has always inhabited.

It's a refreshing way to build a story that is ghoulishly overfamiliar in nearly all its particulars, and it leaves 8 Mile feeling like it has earned its emotional claims on the audience, rather than just blindly insisting that we should be moved because of the poor. Parts of it are undernourished, beyond a doubt: the most troubling is the film's decision to steadfastly not think about race beyond Papa Doc's mockery of Jimmy for his whiteness (though it's not the most absurd "let's pretend that nobody is having conversations about Eminem's place in politics and culture" moment: that would be when he stops the film cold to explain why it's not okay to make fun of people for being gay), and while Murphy is utterly incandescent in the role of Alex, bringing a fire to the cold grey movie that emphasises better than anything else just what the absolute, burning desire to get the hell out of there looks like, there's no denying that the romantic subplot is the one that the film has by far the least desire to do anything with.

The biggest case of undernourishment, though, is Jimmy himself, owing mostly to Eminem's fine but basic performance, and the central relationship with his loved, hated mother, owing to Basinger's. The common complaint against her when the film was brand new was that she was too beautiful for the role of a broke drunk, and that's true; but it's also true of Murphy, and she didn't have a problem overcoming it. Basinger, though, simply retrenches to shticky performances of grinding poverty, with director Hanson failing to draw out the same once-in-a-lifetime brilliance that made her so shockingly potent in their previous collaboration, L.A. Confidential. "Shit. We're be-ing evicted. God damn it" she intones at one moment of crisis, and the effect is not "woman who is too far gone into the bottle to have human responses", which might have saved it; it's "didn't think through the right emotional tone for this most important scene". Her onscreen son, meanwhile, has a confrontation with his possibly-pregnant ex-girlfriend (Taryn Manning), and he stares and speaks at her like a Scandinavian tourist dropped into the heart of Detroit with only a tourist's dictionary to get by, so perhaps wildly unacceptable line readings are genetic within the film or something.

There's an absolute upper limit to how good the film can be when its two most important roles are filled by its two most disappointing actors, but 8 Mile comes remarkably close to that ceiling. Its depiction of urban squalor is right on-point without being so realistically hellish that it no longer makes sense to locate an unresolved Horatio Alger fable there; Prieto shoots it with moody, almost horror movie shafts of light and shadow that make it all look interesting without glamorising it, and the frequently impressionistic editing - which starts right from the bravura opening sequence, which muddies the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music as Jimmy practices his rapping, while the editors keep flashing from point to point around him - keeps our attention on the physical environment as an object and a force, not just the backdrop for the characters.

The film's depiction of urban Michigan is stellar, visually; it could, of course, be a bit more rigorous sociologically, but given what the film easily could have been, I am inclined to be excited for any little victories. Ultimately, the takeaway is that all this is a touch too easy and a touch shallow, which is far, far better than I'd have ever expected from it: a narcissistic autobiography of a non-actor is one of the most surefire no-win situations in cinema, and that Hanson, his crew, and most of his cast were able to haul this into something that's at least somwhat admirable is a huge triumph.

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ICONS OF CINEMA

A review requested by André Robichaud, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The apparent subject of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky's second feature, Andrei Rublev, is indicated right in the title: it's a story of the life of the most renowned painter of icons in medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn). Which is not, as film loglines go, a lie - but it is painfully reductive. At a minimum, the film also uses Andrei's life as a surrogate for examining the history of Russia in the first quarter of the 15th Century, during which time the Grand Duchy of Moscow began to wrest control from the Mongol Tatars, thus setting the stage for the country we now refer to as "Russia" to come into existence under one government. It is a story of how Orthodox Christianity was a driving engine of proto-Russian identity, and of the tense relationship between artists driven by their need to communicate spiritual truths, and totalitarian governments who saw no value - or were outright threatened - by those artists. And what do you think, but the Soviet government was leery of the movie, sending Tarkovsky to the editing room twice, shortening a 205-minute version of the film (the one universally available now) to 190 minutes, thence to 186 (the version Tarkovsky officially claimed to prefer), for its solitary screening in 1966; it was this version that was notoriously shown at 4:00 in the morning on the last day of the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

Taking the film as a historical argument about religion, art, and psychology that became yet another one of the many films in the second half of the 20th Century that ran afoul of Communist government censors isn't giving it enough credit either. In its gargantuan, three hour and 25-minute grandeur (whatever Tarkovsky might have said later, I couldn't imagine losing one frame of it), this is the one film, if ever there was such a film, that strikes me as truly being about the whole experience of life. Told in a prologue, eight parts, and a non-narrative epilogue, the film finds a setting to address virtually every facet of the human experience, using its radical narrative structure and mise en scène to express Deep Ideas about the relationship between God and the individual, the individual and society, society and history, history and God, and it does this elliptically, symbolically, and implicitly rather than at any point taking the viewer's hand to say "here's what I think about these very important subjects". It is one of the essential films ever made, and also, perhaps the apotheosis of the great tradition of Russian literature of ideas, using the medium of cinema to explore its profundities in a more glancing, complex manner than even the best prose of the 19th Century could muster.

In order to get at this grand, sprawling content, Tarkovsky and his collaborators - co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky, cinematographer Vadim Yusov, production designer Evgeniy Chernyaev, costumers Maya Abar-Baranovskaya and Lidiya Novi, and the three-person editing team of Tatyana Egorycheva, Lyudmila Feyginova, and Olga Shevkunenko being among the key names to know - worked to the goal, not of fleshing out a narrative (talking about Andrei Rublev in terms of its plot is faintly impossible), but of building a complete, immersive world, which is then filled with symbolic objects rather than events. But they're also actually events. It's hard to describe the feeling of it. The film's opening, for example, is of a man played by Nikolai Glazkov prepping a hot air balloon and launching it just in front of a mob trying to tear him down. After a few moments, he crashes. And that, like, happens.We're not given any reason to doubt the literal truth of what's happening, particularly given its succulent physicality.

But at the same time, this isn't "about" a hot air balloon crashing - it is about the desire to rise above while being pulled down, and about human overreach ending in disaster, but also the way that life continues on despite individual failures. For it is followed by the first of the film's many horses, a symbol of the greatest importance in Andrei Rublev's universe: horses represent the animal instinct to survive, the life force if we want to be more upbeat about it. And the film, despite being 3.5 hours of suffering in medieval Russia, is perfectly willing to encourage our being upbeat: it is about surviving and finding joy as much as it is about being beaten and bloodied by the onslaught of history. In fact, its final, longest, and best sequence, in which a giant bell is cast over the course of a year is all but explicitly a tribute to the human ability to endure and triumph against all odds including self doubt. It sounds ludicrous, and when I first saw the movie it was as much out of a sense of baffled curiosity why the hell a movie would see fit to end with a lengthy sequence about medieval bell-casting techniques as because I expected for it to be even slightly interesting. But it is gripping: as human drama, while we watch young Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev) find himself suddenly thrust into a position of responsibility and authority that he's not prepared for, and finding the fortitude to survive it; and as cinema, for the film's overall aesthetic reaches its finest expression in this sequence.

That aesthetic deserves plenty of explication, because it is maybe the most important thing about Andrei Rublev. This is, more or less, the spring from which all of "slow cinema" emerges: long takes, frequently so wide that individual humans fall into a blur, with the camera set as restrained, unblinking observer. Watching the film, one starts to feel that each frame is inspired by painting, yet Tarkovsky and Yusov don't take the expected route of basing their style in Andrei's own icon painting - in fact, if there's any specific tradition of art that the film evokes, it's the pageant-like art of medieval France and England, emphasising and exploiting the width of the anamorphic widescreen frame. I'd say that the film is made out of tableaux, if that didn't suggest a certain posed, static quality that's nothing like the unconstrained movement onscreen.

What this all means, in any case, it that the film does greater work than anything else I can name of simultaneously: A) presenting medieval life in full detail, lingering steadily within sets to capture the full texture and rhythm of a centuries-dead world, while B) being so aware of the organic human component of that life that it feels like we've been dropped squarely in the center of a vibrant, tactile, living world. The only film that comes even close to matching this is Ingmar Bergman's earlier The Seventh Seal, which has a much smaller scope focused on a much less naturalistic scenario, and isn't as extraordinary in its reach - Bergman's interest in death and suffering starts and ends in Scandinavian Lutheranism, while Tarkovsky's study of belief in goodness and faith driving a man's life starts in Russian Orthodoxy, but moves beyond theism or any other specific belief system by the end, in its wide-ranging consideration of what gives meaning to human life and why.

The film is at once stately and lively, glacially paced over its 3.5 hours but so quick in its moments that it's preposterous how quickly it moves towards its meditative finale (a reel in full color, studying in wide and close shots the paintings that are Andrei's legacy). It evolves along the way: the first half of the film is full of greatness, but the second half is on an entirely different level, one unmatched by anything else in world cinema: the bell-casting passage, like a preceding sequence that finds the city of Vladimir sacked by Tatars, could be separated from the movie entirely and presented as a self-contained short, and either of those shorts would make a strong claim towards being one of the key texts of artistic cinema. The Tatar sequence, "The Raid", is a particularly extraordinary case study in everything that makes Andrei Rublev a masterpiece: its depiction, in the script, of the individual being affected by faceless collective history is perfectly complimented by the way that wide shots full of activity allow us to simultaneously appreciated specific character beats against the backdrop of crowded tumult and violence (this is also the scene that makes it impossible to issue an unhesitating blanket recommendation for the film: an actual cow is actually set on fire and tears off camera, where I hope it was doused. But still, the movie contains unsimulated bovine torture). The contrasts that the filmmakers are able to pack into individual shots are incredible and deeply moving: a shot of snow and ash falling onto a smoking church - into which, of course, a horse wanders - is one of the highest moments in any film from the 1960s, or ever.

It is entirely possible that one could eventually exhaust Andrei Rublev, but I don't know what that would take. There's simply so much in it, expressed in such dense visuals and under-stressed performances and elliptical thought. And hacking through all that density is among the most rewarding experiences I have ever had in my life of watching films. If cinephilia has a literal holy text, to be referred to and examined in times of joy and stress and sorrow, it is this.

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IT'S BEEN BUILDING UP INSIDE OF ME FOR OH, I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG

Biopics are bad enough, but biopics about genius artists tend to be the worst, and biopics of genius artists who are particular icons to the Baby Boomer generation? You might as well try to survive a nuclear strike. So the simple fact that Love & Mercy, the story of Beach Boys songwriter, producer, and artistic guide Brian Wilson, is pretty damn good - not great, but pretty damn good - is beyond miraculous. And I haven't even mentioned yet that it drags two remarkable-unto-sublime performances out of Paul Dano and John Cusack, a pair of actors whose recent career choices would leave me unwilling to trust them with doing voiceover work for a McDonald's ad, let alone bringing to life one of the defining artists of 20th Century pop music.

Aye, they both play Brian; that's sort of the gimmick, you see. Love & Mercy splits itself into two parts that interweave, each covering a short, important window in Wilson's life. There's the period in the 1960s (the Dano half) during which he conceived and created Pet Sounds, the "Good Vibrations" single, and the increasingly deranged recording sessions for the unrealised Smile, at which time he transformed from "guy who has auditory hallucinations that he funnels into his daringly unconventional production of rock & pop music" into "guy who has auditory hallucinations that leave him unable to function at the most basic human level". And then, there is the period in the 1980s (the Cusack half), which finds him overmedicated and easily manipulated by the overreaching Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), and befriended by Cadillac salesperson Melinda Ledbettr (Elizabeth Banks), who figures out reasonably quickly that he's being horribly mistreated, but has no idea what to do to help him.

The most critical thing that Love & Mercy gets right, and it's apparently all on director Bill Pohlad (who is, by habit, a producer) that it got that way, is that it's not a story of how Brian Wilson was a genius who used his emotional torments to feed his genius and thus created the genius works that have made all our lives better for a half-century. Now, I happen to believe that Pet Sounds is one of the handful of perfect musical objects of the last 70 years, and that "Good Vibrations" puts in an enormously strong case for being the finest pop single ever recorded. And because I believe that, there are some in-jokes and one-off references in Love & Mercy that I get to enjoy more than other people. But in virtually every way that it effects the story or the treatment of the characters, the film doesn't reward me for having good taste. It matters, within the film's frame of reference, that Pet Sounds is generally regarded as a masterpiece with songs on it that a random person, e.g. a Cadillac salesperson, would immediately recognise, and have automatic enthusiasm for meeting the man who wrote them. It does not, however, matter what we think.

Given the crushing volume of biopics, and musical biopics especially, whose solitary hook is "because this person achieved great things and you love him/her for it, come bask in hero worship for two hours", the existence of a movie that takes an unbelievably famous man and prefers to place him in a character study that feels the need to make the case in reference to itself that he deserves to be studied is great enough. But then Love & Mercy goes even farther in the direction of the angels by focusing, rigidly, on just one aspect of its subject's personality and building its narrative around relatively concise stretches of his life that directly relate to that one aspect. This merciless focus serves the movie well as cinema, far better indeed than the macroscopic "childhood to the grave look of virtually every other biopic of recent vintage. Praise be to Pohlad for having the good sense to make those choices, and praise be to screenwriter Oren Moverman (who also co-wrote one of the only other mainstream biopics of the 21st Century that's worth keeping, the experimental Bob Dylan fantasia I'm Not There) for executing it so successfully. Even without recourse to its terrific cast and its occasional unconventional technique, the structure and narrowed scope would be enough by themselves to put in a play for this as the most original and insightful film biography in many, many years.

In the form of Dano and Cusack, it boasts two absolutely vital performances that are not any kind of mimicry - Cusack does not physically resemble Wilson at any stage of his life - and aren't interested in digging into the creative process. They are performing a man with a profound mental imbalance, in both cases putting more emphasis on his personhood than his disease. And, forbidden by Pohlad from meeting to build the character together, the actors approach that goal with sufficiently different strategies that the break in personality is shocking and even scary, hammering home the idea that the years between Smile and Lebdetter's arrival represented a profound, irrecoverable rupture in Wilson's life more eloquently than any piece of writing could. It's career-redefining work for both men; Cusack hasn't played so hard against his stock tricks and refrained from indulging in his standard persona in years and years, and it's the most daunting, accomplished performance that Dano has ever given in a movie.

And even given that, I'm not sure if I'd hand either of those men Best in Show honors over Banks, who emerges as the actual protagonist of the 1980s scenes, in a role that demands different things of her than I can recall having ever seen. There's little to no comedy in the movie, which hamstrings her from using her best-honed tools; but the quick-witted reaction times and disappearance into the needs of the individual moment that mark good improvisation translates remarkably well to the needs of a sober character drama.

Stylistically, Love & Mercy is a bit subtler; Pohlad and cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman aren't hellbent on putting together particularly striking images, and while the movie is unmistakably well-shot, it's in a very humble manner that only goes for broke in a couple sequences that try to mimic '60s film stock. Otherwise, it's all so many California afternoons with thinnish yellow and blue skies, well-used but hardly imaginative. Where Love & Mercy casually sidles into genius is in its sound design, led by Eugene Gearty, as befits a movie about a man driven towards crafting innovative overlays and harmonies in pop songs because it captured the world as he knew it, with its shifting, non-real sounds. The movie calls attention to audio first and foremost: it's opening is a black screen on top of which a formless sound montage rolls around over our heads and behind our ears and back and forth through our skulls. And this continues, if frequently in less aggressive forms, throughout the movie, sometimes for better (young Brian's fit in a swimming in a pool), sometimes not quite as much (a busy, noisy dinner that feels a little bit too "yes, we get the point, thank you"). It shades invisibly into Atticus Ross's astounding, perfect score, a sound collage using fragments of Beach Boys hits and incomplete session tracks that have been reassembled and tweaked so much as to sound like the movie having an auditory hallucination of its very own, one from which snatches of music can be pulled out only if we're paying attention constantly. It's a marriage of form and content of an unexpected sort, but it works perfectly to match our perception to the distressed leads'.

The question that at last presents itself: does all this add up to an actually great piece of cinema? Or am I simply bowled over by a semi-biopic that breaks every last one of the conventions that makes that my least favorite genre, and find myself anxious to overrate it? For all that I'm thoroughly impressed by Love & Mercy and have had it rolling around in my head much more stickily than I'd have ever assumed might happen, I can't quite bring myself to actually recommend it. Still, it's better than it has any right to be in virtually every capacity, and far be it from me to undersell that kind of achievement.

7+/10

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SHE DIDN'T SAY MUCH, BUT SHE SAID IT LOUD

A review requested by K. Wild, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The 1996 feature film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical Evita is, generally speaking, just fine. It's biggest limitation, frankly, is that it's an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical Evita, but that show and preceding concept album was neither man's worst hour, at least. There are alternate universes where they got a much better film Evita, though: one directed by stylistic madman Ken Russell in the late '70s, or even the same exact one we got in our universe, directed by Alan Parker, only it stars Michelle Pfeiffer. And I must confess that I am jealous of the musical lovers in those universes. Because our Evita is just fine... it's just fine.

That being said, adapting Evita into a movie was always going to be a hideous amount of work, and it was perhaps never going to turn out right. The source material isn't a dramatic play with passages of dialogue set to music to demonstrate intensified emotion or particularly important scenes; it's really more of a staged song cycle, much like Webber and Rice's earlier collaboration Jesus Christ Superstar. Compared to the utter dog of a film which that show was turned into in 1973, Evita looks like an uncompromising triumph. But it still leaves the movie with a structure that won't construct, and while Russell made a song cycle into the crazyfucker masterpiece Tommy, as Parker himself did with Pink Floyd: The Wall, both of those movies got to cheat. They both had concepts that not only permitted, but outright demanded a psychedelic treatment, and so both of those films get to turn into florid visual trips hung along the spine provided by an arty rock group's concept album. Now, I'm not saying that there could not be a psychedelic Evita, and if there was, nothing in this world would have kept me from it. But it's no surprise at all that Evita isn't psychedelic in the least.

The thing that it has as a story surrogate relates, broadly and with dubious accuracy, the life of Eva Perón née Duarte (Madonna), born illegitimately in 1919 in rural Argentina. It tracks her laser-like focus on sleeping her way into modest radio stardom, which put her in position to meet Colonel Juan Perón (Jonathan Pryce, who looks about as much like a "Juan" as I do like an "Ichiro") at a charity gala in 1944. They married, and she threw herself into a fiery populist campaign to get him elected president in 1946. Together they (mostly she) were extravagantly beloved by the people of Argentina, until her stunningly premature death from cancer in 1952 rocketed her to the position that she still occupies of secular saint.

Fleshing that sketch out is where things get a bit rocky because, well, the film really doesn't (I'll plead ignorance as to whether the show does: I've never seen Evita staged, and I'm familiar only with the 1976 concept album that would be considerably re-worked for its 1978 theatrical debut). Parker does what he can with that favorite trick of silent filmmakers, the Zooming Newspaper Headline, but the almost totally sung-through story offers very little room for context or historical depth, and while that might play in the concert-like surroundings of live theater, the trappings of prestige cinema are too concrete, and Parker's directing too drably normal to survive such an abstract storytelling register. Evita doesn't end up feeling like a movie, but a series of music videos stitched together by montages. And, frequently interrupted by montages: one of the small number of brash stylistic tricks that Parker trots out, and probably shouldn't have, is to use impressionistic flashbacks and flashforwards to pep up what would otherwise be static moments of characters just standing there singing for a few minutes, and while I admire the effort, it doesn't land. We came for "Don't Cry for Me Argentina". We did not come to see "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" turned into a repository of footage we just watched, like, 40 minutes ago.

The music videos have the merit of being inordinately handsome, at least; with production design by Brian Morris and cinematography by Darius Khondji (who received his solitary Oscar nomination to date for this film), Evita looks lush and costly, but not at the cost of being stuffy and lifeless. It's a film of much grandeur, with no subtlety about it whatsoever, but it feels Big and Epic and Important in a way that very little Oscarbait actually manages to do. And within that framework, Parker's staging of individual moments - when he and editor Gerry Hambling can be bothered to let the action play out in chronological order, at least - certainly manages to be sure-footed and impeccably dramatic: the quick flow of the story through the flippant "Good Night and Thank You", or the jagged visual rhythm in "And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out)" even manage to make a virtue of the ragged holes in the story's chronology.

Inasmuch as Evita was going to be primarily naturalistic, then, Parker's treatment of it is as good as it was likely to be. That's still limited by the story structure, and by the songs: though the rock music he relies on is a weird and sometimes unpleasant fit for a story of '1940s Argentina, Webber hadn't yet hit the wall of insipid mediocrity by the time of Evita, but Rice in the '70s was outright deranged, and the lyrics in Evita are baffling as often as not. Nothing matches the swirling vortex of madness found in the loopiest passages in Jesus Christ Superstar - the man who perpetrated "Like a jaded, jaded, faded, jaded, jaded mandarin" set that bar far too high to jump over it again - but there's plenty of choice "what the fuck were you thinking" moments, in places like "I came from the people, they need to adore me / So Christian Dior me..." in the aptly named "Rainbow High" or "Although she's dressed up to the nines / At sixes and sevens with you" from the iconic "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" itself. The film's solitary new song, "You Must Love Me" - specially designed for the purposes of being a hit Madonna single - doesn't quite come out unscathed (the word "must" connotes "are commanded to" too strongly for the line's primary meaning of "I guess you love me, huh" to naturally flow out), but the Rice of '96 is sufficiently calmed down that Evita manages the rare - maybe unprecedented - feat among stage-to-film musical adaptations of having its original, awards-courting composition be the standout number.

All that was baked in, though, and would have been a problem with any adaptation. But this particular Evita could still have done better with a better cast, and with no other changes been a considerably stronger film. Pryce's crisp British aura was a poor fit for Juan Perón, and he's not believable as a dictator, but the role isn't all that big. The male lead is actually Antonio Banderas as Ché "Not Guevara, Alan Parker Didn't Like That", the mysterious figure who drifts in and out of Evita's life as a host of different characters, always probing her conscience and snottily passing asides to the camera that clarify that for all her goodwill and charm, Eva had some massive limitations as a human being. What with the benevolent dictatorship and all. Though Evita is petrified to death of actually engaging with specific politics, so any attempts to actually analyse the Peróns' effect on Argentina is doomed to die in infancy. But anyway, Banderas is excellent in a role that lacks any interiority and specifically forbids an actor from faking it. It's all attitude and rolling the lines around as he sings them, and he's got that down cold.

But then there is the matter of the superstar albatross around the film's neck. It's easy to see why Madonna identified with the role and wanted it; it's easy to see why the studio wanted her. But she's just not good. The demands of the role tax her range considerably, and the dramatic flourishes all tend to flatten out (her "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" is a particular flat spot, in exactly the place that movie needs to put all its chips on a big showstopping rouser); she hits the notes, but frequently it audibly costs her to do that. That's bad enough, but she is a terrible actress, analysing the words in her songs like a pop singer and not the lead in a work of musical theater, and so her emphases are close but rarely exactly right. Her body language, meanwhile, is utterly helpless; she uses her arms to vaguely indicated and stress thoughts, like a malfunctioning audio-animatronic version of Mussolini. The only time she seems to understand what emotions should be foregrounded on her face is during Eva's sickness, when she adopts a saggy, weary look that almost manages to sell the pathos of the sequence, but without a strong foundation preceding it, it's hard to care.

Evita is so single-mindedly focused on Eva herself that no production, no matter how great all the constituent elements were, could survive the kind of stiff, wholly artificial and forced performance that Madonna gives. And of course, many of the constituent elements here are not great. There are enough individually good parts that I really wish I could fake it and give it a pass - Khondji was in excellent form when he shot this, which counts for an awful lot - but nope. Evita minus Evita is a washed-out slog, and all the lovely settings and handsome staging in the world can't compensate for that.

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THE LOVE OF GOD

A review requested by Bryan L, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

To begin with, it's a biopic - and does any genre so reliably connote "this is a well-polished and achingly handsome lump of Serious Art that's not terribly artistic and even less entertaining" than the biopic? And not just any biopic - it's part of maybe the most diabolically prestigious and inert subgenre, the biopic of an important classical musician, which has produced such ever-forgettable lead weights as The Great Waltz (Johann Strauss) and A Song to Remember (Frédéric Chopin), and has stretched all the way into the 21st Century with the likes of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Besides, it's a powerfully murky biopic: the incredibly famous title character isn't actually the subject or the protagonist, but in deference to his fame, the movie keeps ceding huge chunks of attention to him that leave it damned confusing what the actual story is that the filmmakers aimed to tell.

And yet, Amadeus is one of the best American films of the 1980s. So it just goes to show, never prejudge.

The 1984 film is based on the 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, who did a rather thorough job of re-imagining the material for its journey into cinemas, but either way, the core is the same: the relationship of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), between Mozart's 1781 arrival in Vienna, where Salieri served as artistic director for the Italian operas of the Hapsburg court, and the former's death in that city in 1791, at the age of 35. It is an enormously fictionalised version of that story, though it should be pointed out that the single biggest lie that Amadeus has popularised - that a jealous Salieri murdered Mozart with poison - is one that the film very specifically and as a key element of its plot doesn't depict (it also doesn't, technically, indicate that Salieri was a mediocre hack, only that he perceived himself as such relative to Mozart. And so these two unfair characterisations of Salieri - the talentless murderer - are the film's great popular legacies through no fault of its own).

So disinterested is Shaffer in actual sober history, in fact, that to call Amadeus a biography, in either medium, is something of an inaccuracy. It's more of a psychological fable told using real historical figures to give it an imposing weight; that, and to celebrate in front of the widest available audience the peerless sophistication and beauty of Mozart's music, lengthy passages of which are played all throughout the rather long movie as Shaffer hands enormous blocks of dialogue to Abraham to elucidate using only somewhat dumbed-down musicology exactly what it is about Mozart that should cause all of us to regard him as one of the half-dozen greatest composers of music in the history of European culture.

And that's a great and worthy goal, one that Amadeus only slightly muffs by handing off all of its music cues to the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, as conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, who generally leans on an annoying tendency to rush through the music like he's terrified of losing his dinner reservation. But ultimately, "provide a showcase for Mozart's Greatest Hits" isn't remotely the reason that Amadeus is great drama and great cinema (many a tepid workaday biopic has also been a splendid Greatest Hits showcase).

For that, we turn instead to the excellent performances and cutting characterisations in the script, as well as the vivid and fleshy production overseen by director Miloš Forman, in what I will happily identify as his best work in English. The film is not the first nor the last, but among the most successful of all attempts to revivify a culture dead for 200 years using sharp contemporary style; the vast majority of costume dramas have a marked tendency to look poised, stuffed, and mounted, but in the hands of Forman, who came of age in the raw, direct naturalism of the Czech New Wave, 18th Century Vienna is full of sarcasm and ass-kissing and bitterness and flustered movement just like the contemporary world. It's a period film that was shot as though it took place in modern-day Los Angeles; Forman and cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček (who'd worked with the director, on and off, from the beginning of both their careers) don't both with painterly lighting or compositions, in some desperate attempt to ape Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (which perfected that style and has never been remotely equaled); they dive right in and capture the color, line, and texture of the dressed-up Prague locations, and of Theodor Pištěk's costumes (rather more fanciful than accurate) with the same intention to find the blunt reality of things that served them as young Czechs attempting to tear holes in the fabric of Communism.

This unsentimental way of film interiors and exteriors alike with a kind of blank-faced present-ness is perfectly matched by the two most important performances, Abraham's and Hulce's - the cast as a whole is wildly inconsistent, ranging from Jeffrey Jones's marvelously and perfectly unfocused Emperor Joseph II, to Elizabeth Berridge's whingey, breathy take on Mozart's wife, but it's essentially a two-hander with a lot of people standing on the sidelines cheering. It's not always subtle acting that's going on: theater actor Hulce's only meaningfully visible film role to that point was in the low-brow comedy Animal House, and he brings a lot of that exact energy to his manic, filthy Mozart, with an unavoidably irritating laugh. Abraham is a bit more nuanced, mostly because the character he's playing is a facile liar, who does his level best to seem pleasant when he is scheming and wrathful. What matters about both of them, mostly, is their resolute modernism: the very conscious layering of psychology and the small physical gestures (Abraham's performance as an old man recounting the story to an increasingly horrified priest is full of some absurdly wonderful facial expressions and gestures - his inward-looking smugness on "Everybody liked me. I liked myself" is my favorite beat in the entire film) that speak to fussy stage-trained acting, and that fills this very old-fashioned mise en scène with very hard contemporary attitude that goes beyond such things as the evocation of punk rockers in Hulce's wigs. It is a study of 20th Century attitudes towards jealousy and faith that places 20th Century men, incongruously but effectively, into 1780s Vienna and does not comment on it.

But in that very lack of commentary, Amadeus comes alive. It's not the kind costume drama that brings a long-dead place back to life; while the film's Vienna is persuasive, and Twyla Tharp's staging of several Mozart operas winningly looks back the poshest stagecraft of a long-dead era, and the film-long obsession with food of the Viennese upper classes (which serves more as a character detail for Salieri than a piece of world-building) is lavish, if not always totally appetizing, it would be difficult to argue for Amadeus the merit of scrupulous historical accuracy. The dialogue doesn't support that; the general indifference to verifiable facts in the matter of its subjects' lives certainly doesn't support that. The film triumphs above all things as a character study, played by two remarkably fine actors in peak form, providing a chance for its very modern audience to reflect on very recognisable feelings of envy towards people we know damn good and well to be more capable than ourselves, "fairness" be damned; the period trappings are, as much as they are anything, a way of heightening those feelings by making them seem weird and fresh.

Or even more simply: the thing Amadeus primarily depicts, biopically-speaking, is the writing of operas - a dramatic form in which strong emotions are presented in a heavily artificial matrix of absurd plot and florid singing. And because of that artifice, the emotions are more immediately accessible. And that's basically the exact same thing Amadeus is doing: the mechanism of the artifice is different, but the intensity, lack of subtlety, and thus the accessibility, they're all the same. It's a prose opera. Form and content meet and seamlessly blend. Terrific stuff.

N.B. I: To prove that I can be at least a little bit critical, take a gander at that tagline. "The man... The music... The madness... The murder... The motion picture". Is that not literally the worst copy in the history of film advertising?

N.B. II: There exists a director's cut; it is far easier to see the film in that format now than its original theatrical version. I prefer the older, shorter cut; the extended version overexplains things that were perfectly clear without being laboriously spelled out, and it badly affects the flow of a 160-minute film that starts to feel puffy at three hours. One might say, of the theatrical cut, "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall".

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YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD

With what I can only call the most admirable clarity, the monumental biopic Patton, Best Picture Oscar winner of 1970, opens with a kind of thesis statement that lays out everything the rest of the film is to contain. I don’t refer to the main body of its legendary opening scene, in which famed World War II hero Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. (George C. Scott) stands in front of an enormous U.S. flag to deliver a rousing message to the unseen troops about the inherent nobility and bravery of the American fighting forces. It’s less a patriotic harangue than a revival meeting centered around the religion of blood and killing. That is a great scene, and it does perfectly set the stage for all that comes after, but it’s not what I’m referring to.

I refer to the short beat that precedes his speech. We see Patton emerge in a long shot, a tiny black blip against the field of red and white, followed by a series of cuts that swiftly bring the camera in closer, after which several seconds are spent cutting metronomically from one visual element of this man’s heavily polished exterior to the next: his ivory-handled pistol, his medals, the insignia on his helmet, his rigid salute, his pristine boots. In this moment, director Franklin J. Schaffner and editor Hugh S. Fowler (both Oscar winners for this film) aren’t merely communicating that these are the elements that go into making this man; they’re arguing that these elements are this man, that he is defined entirely as individual components of perfect military bearing. That matters more, to him and to the viewer, than anything to do with his internal humanity. And only once we’ve quickly absorbed all of that does the film move into its legendary opening monologue, where he clarifies that first impression with his impassioned hymn to being the biggest, toughest sonofabitch you can be. Not, in any sense, to being the finest human being.

Scott, according to at least one story, was nervous about this opening, concerned that it was so potent that it would overwhelm the rest of his performance. That at, least, doesn’t happen, but he was almost right; the opening does tend to overwhelm Patton the movie, which has the somewhat unfortunate characteristic of having told us, in its opening and strongest scene, exactly what it’s going to be about for the rest of the film. And at 172 minutes total, the rest of the film is quite long to feel like it’s only ever providing variations on a single theme that’s never clearer than when we start off. There’s a kind of weirdly academic texture to the screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola (who would have much better success directing a three-hour Best Picture winner just two years down the road) and Edmund H. North, which plainly yearns to be a complete and thorough study of an all-time fascinating real-life human, using war less as its plot than as the prism through which its central character is refracted. And it even manages to be that, but Coppola and North are so successful at quickly sketching an outline, and then filling it in with smartly implied and gracefully stated exposition, that we have learned virtually all we will ever learn about Patton before the film is even a third of the way through.

I find much about the film - its expansive length, its focus on psychology during wartime, the central position of a title character who wants above all else to be thought of as a warrior, not a man - to evoke Lawrence of Arabia, then eight years old. That film carefully danced around its protagonist, peeling him like an onion, so that we kept learning new things about him all the way till the end; Patton ends up having to repeat itself, constantly, to hoist itself up to a running time that seems preposterously out-of-place. There is no fact about Patton that we only learn one time. There’s even an entire subthread of scenes taking place in the offices of the Nazi army command dedicated solely to demonstrating that the Germans realise the same things about Patton that the viewers already know. If there had been no other change to Patton but to surgically excise all the scenes involving Germans, it would be infinitely more focused and tight. For not only do the Nazi command scenes serve no meaningful function, they also don’t fit a movie that’s intently concerned on the way that American military men perceive the world.

That all being said, and no matter how reliably Patton leaves me feeling exhausted and, if I must be honest, quite a bit bored, the fact remains that the character it studies is a genuinely fascinating, remarkable figure, one of the most interesting subjects in the history of the biopic. Partially, this is because Patton himself was such a profoundly strange man, colorful and brazen and full of messy self-contradictions. A devout Christian who believed in reincarnation and worshiped the great military minds of the pre-Christian world, a martinet and bully who almost scuttled his entire career for abusing a shell-shocked soldier, an orator who carefully laced blunt profanity into his speeches as a way of making himself seem more erratic and giving his words more memorable tang, and a demented war-hungry genius whose refusal to slow down or play by the rules proved decisive in helping the Allies win the war in Europe. The writers, in pinning this man down on paper, prove to have an immensely ambivalent and confused attitude towards him, which ends up being one of the film’s best strengths - uncertain whether to condemn his bloodlust and my-way-or-the-highway braggadocio, or to cheer for his rebellious instincts, mystified by his adoration of classicism, anxious to praise him as a hero, but alarmed at supporting unchecked American militarism while Vietnam was still burning, Coppola and North never decide on a single approach to the character, which frees Patton from having the simple “you should think this” moralising that tends to make so many biopics so bland and harmless. No doubt, the fact that they were working mostly with the accounts of Gen. Omar Bradley, a bitter rival of Patton’s and eventually his commanding officer, led to this split between hero worship and anti-hero condemnation (it also likely explains why Bradley - played with level warmth by Karl Malden - comes off as so damn humane and reasonable throughout the film, in a way that strikes me as a bit intellectually and ethically questionable).

Its overall ambivalence crops up in many ways: Schaffner’s direction, which keeps the war itself at enough of a remove, and always privileges people talking about strategy rather than executing it, and thus silently reminding us that Patton, great warrior man, was still a general and thus still kept himself back from the heart of fighting; Jerry Goldsmith’s score - one of the few Oscar nominations the film lost, and one of the few it unambiguously deserved to win - which presents rousing military marches that feel like more fully-orchestrated fife and drum tunes from the Revolutionary War, punctuating them with a repeated motif of echoing horn triplets that feel entirely out-of-place and mournful. Though the film was seen as the moderate, middlebrow champion in the year that MASH was a more robustly anti-war Oscar nominee, and Richard Nixon adored it, Patton feels more of a piece with the New Hollywood than its bloat and aesthetic conservatism imply - it has the same lack of clear moral authority and obsession with the ways that men express themselves within a culture where they don’t fit that are typical of more showily radical American films of the same time.

And, like many of those films, it demands a lot of its main actor and relies on him to provide complexity and richness that an only be indicated by the script. So it works out well that George C. Scott came along and gave such an absurdly strong performance. Really, take out the actor, and Patton is much less insightful, and its bloat becomes unforgivable; but put him in, and suddenly even the most logy moments hum with dramatic tension. Scott is a marvel, vanishing completely into the role, and building a rock-solid foundation for Patton’s endless self-confidence and violent certitude that leaves his every action feeling like the inevitable extension of that mind into the wrong time and place, where he is nevertheless able to thrive. Never a small man, Scott towers over everyone and everything in the film, physically and emotionally; he has no little moments, but finds a way to make even quiet reflection the burly explosion of a volatile personality (the famed "2000 years ago... I was here" scene, in particular, is at once spiritual, self-consciously mythic, and presented with an aggressive "fuck you, I dare you to tell me I'm being weird" bullishness). And in his big moments, he exudes crushing, giant emotions with terrifying splendor, as in his wrathful verbal assault against that shell-shocked soldier that Scott turns into Lear-like scream of defiance against a world where things exist that Patton does not approve of.

Scott makes for such an unstoppably watchable Patton that, even though the script offers him little chance in the middle hour to do anything he didn't already do in the first, and only lets him start to project introspection towards the end, he makes every single onscreen moment feels like the most vital thing you have ever seen in a movie. Patton, on the whole is handsome prestige cinema that's executed well enough, looks swell - Fred J. Koenekamp's cinematography, the second and last film shot in the Dimension 150 format, lends a faded beauty that speaks to the subject's mythic stature and his behind-the-times attitudes alike - and has plenty of smart writing (just too damn much of it), but when Scott is added to the equation, it suddenly turns into a genuinely great character study. Not "Best Picture of 1970 or any other year" great, but far better and more involving than it easily might have been.

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BDSM WEEK: SEXUAL POLITICS

To the best of my knowledge, at the time of this writing, 1976's In the Realm of the Senses has never been shown uncensored in its home country of Japan. The easy gag is to go for the "ye gods, it's too explicit for the country that invented tentacle porn?" angle, except that glosses over the social complexity that explains not merely why ITROTS - oh, we're going to have to work on finding a better abbreviation, aren't we - was so unprecedentedly controversial when it was made, but also why it was made to begin with. It is not merely a sexual film; it is a critique and deconstruction of Japanese sexual mores constructed into a film-shaped object.

To be a bit more specific, Realm of the Senses is that great theoretical ideal that all of the filmmaking intelligentsia of the 1970s kept driving itself: it is the great example of Artistic Porno. There have been attempts, as long as the film has existed, to somehow reclaim it from the category of pornography, often with the assumption that "art" and "porn" are mutually exclusive categories. But trying to redeem Realm of the Senses from the shameful genre of porn is, I think, to completely misunderstand what it is, what it's doing, and why writer-director Oshima Nagisa made it. The film shows, almost to the exclusion of any anything else, unsimulated sex scenes; the mechanics and fluids involved in sexual intercourse are depicted with unabashed physicality in close-ups and wide shots; and the really important part is that, unlike virtually every other artistically nuanced film containing explicit sex that I can think of, Realm of the Senses has no obvious interest in circumventing our proclivity to finding its sex scenes pleasurable and arousing. It's not prurient, and the grimly transactional feeling that characterises what most of us probably think of as "pornographic" is absent. But it is erotic, and even given the brutal place it winds up, it never feels for a nanosecond that sexual ecstasy is something for which its character or its audience deserve to be punished. That's far, far rarer in cinema throughout the world than explicit onscreen sex itself.

If I understand things correctly, the idealised Japanese audience that has never been able to see the film in the form Oshima wanted would have known exactly where things were going from the start, so allow me to give away the ending: Realm of the Senses is based on the true story of Abe Sada (Matsuda Eiko), who in 1936 killed her lover Ishida "Kichi" Kichizo (Fuji Tatsuya) by strangling him during sex, and cutting of his genitals to take with her as a memento. Oshima's movie trades, heavily, on our knowledge that things are heading in that direction (there's at least one moment of explicit foreshadowing that is, honestly, a bit more corny and leering than a film of such sensitivity and subtlety deserves), but only for purposes of strictly sex-positive humanism. In fact, that In the Realm of the Senses never seems to struggle with balancing self-positivity and a narrative it knows in advance ends with death and dismemberment is, in and of itself, one of the most impressive things about a movie that's basically 102 straight minutes of immaculately controlled filmmaking.

The film's narrative focus is conscribed to the point that it feels like fine lace, defined more by the holes it leaves than what's present. Starting right around the time that former prostitute and current maid Sada meets Kichi while cleaning his home, and the rest of the film consists of virtually nothing other than scenes of them having sex, or the time immediately before and after. Whatever domestic narrative passes between these events is alluded to but never shown; the tense political situation in Japan (the film takes place in the shadow of a failed coup d'etat by certain military leaders, less than three months before Ishida's death; war with China was just a year in the future) at the time is occasionally visible in the background, but it's never the focus. We have, in effect, just enough of a sense of everything that's not Sada and Kichi's increasingly intense sexual assignations to be particularly aware of how much the film isn't paying attention to that everything.

In the context of a culture with as defensive and repressive a relationship to sexuality as Japan - Oshima not only couldn't screen the film there, he couldn't even make it, legally, meaning that the negative had to be brought to France to be developed and edited - this focus on sex as a mutually satisfying and empowering act that requires no kind of narrative or social grounding was itself a bold social statement. Oshima being a reliably, perhaps even exclusively political filmmaker (I've seen only a small handful of his films, but that's the clear connective tissue between them all), it's unsurprising that for him, depicting explicit sex would be a primarily political consideration, and particularly considering its production and distribution woes, In the Realm of the Senses proves to be a uniquely powerful swipe against the culture it depicts. As Sada and Kichi's relationship grows increasingly isolated, it too grows less ashamed and mannered, finding more extreme limits of ecstatic violence and what would be called "aberrant" behavior, if it weren't for the fact that the sex itself is, in a sense, considered "aberrant" in context.

The film isn't exclusively driven by social concerns, though that is its primary focus. It's equally driven by character; and if there's any way in which this explicit, erotic film made almost solely out of sex scenes can rightfully be described as non-pornographic, or even anti-pornographic, it's in the way that it uses sex as a means of building character. Considering how little we actually see them do, we get a strong sense of the two leads, Sada especially (and how much more still can be said about the way that this taboo-busting indictment of Japanese sexual morality fixes specifically on an empowered woman in full ownership of her own desire, contrary to the norms of an especially male-dominated culture?). Part of what the film achieves for itself with all of that nudity and unfaked intercourse is a degree of relaxation and closeness with the characters. When Sada playfully bats at Kichi's penis, we're seeing two people who are totally comfortable with each other enjoying a quiet moment as much as we're seeing sex play (and, for that matter, Matsuda and Fuji have to have been fairly at ease with each other and the crew to be so guilelessly naked for such long stretches). Oshima and cinematographer Ito Hideo's strategy of close-ups and acute angles means that our focus is as much on whole bodies as on genitalia, and we're encouraged to think of the two characters relating to each other as people in love and lust, not just as thrusting, penetrating body parts interacting.

The visual scheme of the film is, overall, quite particular and intentional. It subscribes fully to a very Japanese-specific geometric language with its costumes and sets deliberately suggesting a more archaic time period than the one in which the story takes place; though I am sure it wasn't Oshima's intention (regardless of the film's subsequent history, it's hard to imagine his hope was ever for this to be renowned internationally and unseen in his native country), the overall effect to Western eyes, trained to anticipate a certain kind of Japanese cinema, is that it looks very characteristic of that nation's most important cinematic imports. There's a squared off "room as frame" technique used fairly often that immediately recalls the work of Ozu Yasujiro; the more emphatic cut-ins and sharp angles tend to accentuate the same and depth of cubed spaces, rather than work against them. Take any given frame, and it reads as "Japanese"; except that most of those frames have copious nudity. There's no inoculation against the intellectual disjunction that causes, no matter how much cinematic nudity one has seen. The visual language it subscribes to is almost exclusively used (especially in Ozu, but in plenty of other filmmakers of that generation), to insist on a kind of formalism and mediated approach to drama; In the Realm of the Senses explodes that formalism by virtue of what it depicts.

There is, essentially no distinction between form and content here. The way it depicts the actions it shows and the thoughts it has about what those actions mean are indivisible. It is all about the frank appreciation of sexual behavior in all its extremes, and the firm belief that what brings mutual pleasure to the participants cannot possibly be obscene or licentious or unworthy of visual depiction. The way it moves through its story is so minimalistic that it's almost easier to think of it as an experimental film than as a narrative; but a tremendously successful experiment it is, staged with beauty and complexity and psychological thoughtfulness that I have, personally, seen in no other film on anything resembling the same subject.

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IT'S A HELL OF A THING, KILLING A MAN

It seems irresponsible to review American Sniper without doing so through the lens of the enormous cultural conversation surrounding it, but having actually seen the damn movie, it strikes me as rather bizarre that so many tens of thousands of words have already been spent discussing it without most of them being, y'know, accurate. Given the parameters of The Dialogue around the movie being so divorced from what seems to me to be its reality, I don't even know how to engage with that dialogue. So sadly, I'm just going to have to treat this like a movie that happened to come out, that I happened to see, and we'll all have to pretend that it hasn't already been buried under a mountain of essays from all corners of the political spectrum.

So, American Sniper: Clint Eastwood's most thought-through, well-mounted, and thematically snug movie since Letters from Iwo Jima, centered on what is far and away the most subtle, insightful, and nuanced performance that Bradley Cooper has ever given. Indeed, I can't think of an Eastwood film since The Bridges of Madison County which so successfully foregrounds an actor and banks everything else on that actor's performance doing work that would be impossible if the film tried to approach it any other way. For American Sniper is, first and above all, about a man who wants to turn himself into a machine; a man born into a value system in a nation at a time where his sense of right demands that he give up a certain measure of his humanity for The Greater Good, and it resides entirely upon Cooper's performance to communicate what that entails. That, and one scene where Jason Hall's screenplay drops a broad-ass line to the effect of "aren't you even human any more?" into the mouth of the main character's wife, but by Eastwood movie standards, that's almost inscrutably subtle.

The film is adapted from the memoirs of Chris Kyle, self-aggrandising "most lethal sniper in U.S. military history", though the filmmakers are content to reconfigure him as necessary to make the movie they want to. It's impossible to fathom Cooper's version of Kyle bragging in print about slugging Jesse Ventura, or whatever the hell it was; when he's praised as "the Legend", or reminded of his career kill count, he adopts a pleasant but blank expression that communicates "that's so nice of you and can we maybe talk about anything else?" with the silent pleading of a man who's much better at avoiding talking about things than acknowledging them. It's the cousin to the expression he wears when his Stateside wife, Taya (Sienna Miller) talks about how much she and their kids just love it when he's home; the facial vocabulary of a man who doesn't like feeling emotions and thinking about himself, and found that transforming himself into a military killing machine facilitated that non-feeling. The real-life Kyle has, in other words, been retrofitted into a perfect Eastwood protagonist, the clearest of all descendants from Will Munny in the director's 1992 Western Unforgiven. He even delivers the Munny-esque line "It's a heckuva thing to stop a beating heart" when taking his son out deer hunting, late in the film, delivered without Munny's world-weary fatigue. For that would require introspection, and introspection is something Kyle is thoroughly incapable of performing.

American Sniper illustrates Kyle's mind by fully settling into his warrior POV (which doesn't require or imply that it adopts his opinions as its own, but I've resigned myself to waiting until 2025 or so to start that fight), which to begin with, results in a pretty ingenious structure for a pretty conventional biopic. The opening 20 or 25 minutes start with the future deadliest of all possible snipers about to pull the trigger on his first human victim and then flashing back to race through a potted history of his life prior to the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, glancing at the Big Obvious Signpost moments like it can't wait to get back to Fallujah, Iraq. It then spends time meandering through his four separate tours in-country, with Eastwood's characteristic bleached-out cinematography, courtesy of his regular DP Tom Stern, serving as it customarily does to strip all of the sentiment out of a scenario that barely had any to begin with. When Kyle goes home, he spends just enough time with his wife for her to just barely make an impression on us (I have never, ever had much use for Miller before, but the particular impact she makes is so profound with so little screentime that I'm not likely to doubt her again in the near future), and he's always back for another tour without a scene depicting his decision or his attempt to sell Taya on its merits. In short, the story won't engage with interpersonal conflict, it blasts through all of the explanatory history that might give us some insight into the protagonist, and it ignores everything in its haste to get back to war. And that is what I mean by settling into Kyle's POV.

The filmmaking reinforces this: the excellent sound mix especially, with its layers upon layers of explosions and gunshots at multiple distances from multiple directions. But the editing by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach (also Eastwood regulars) is equally on-point, charging ahead during the overt action scenes and giving the more languid chatting non-combat scenes an erratic vigor, a constant sense that even if we're relaxed now, we're still in the middle of a fucking war zone. And then there's the more direct matter of how the film frankly depicts the messy suddenness of human death by bullets, small geysers of crimson that pop out of human bodies, Iraqi and American alike, with unromantic proficiency, leaving nothing to the imagination. It does not, by any measure I'm able to recognise, suggest that being in war is exciting - unlike the very similar The Hurt Locker, nothing in American Sniper suggests that Kyle is an adrenaline junkie or flirts with a death wish - and the increasingly washed-out expressions on Cooper's face, coupled with the unyielding desaturation of the images, clearly indicate that it's taking a lot out of Kyle to be in that environment.

The question the movie focuses on, then, is why he's there, and why he keeps going back; why, after having killed a child right off the bat, he'd keep placing himself in a position where his only task is to keep killing and killing. The best scene in the film shows Kyle training his scope on a little boy wandering around an RPG launcher, quietly begging him not to pick up the weapon: not wanting to shoot another child, feeling visibly sick at the thought of killing another child, and yet it plainly does not occur to him as an option not to kill the child if it comes down to it. Why does Kyle do this, the film silently asks, and then it even more silently answers: because he doesn't have the imagination to conceive of anything outside of the moral code he has always lived by, even when it causes him anguish, even when his wife - importantly, the only other human in the film given even the vaguest semblance of an inner life - tells him straight to his face that his beliefs are wrong and causing pain, even when his great "I shall be a hero and slay the dragon" moment is reckless and ends up putting the exact same American soldiers he was "heroically" saving into more active danger than if he'd just sat there and done nothing at all. He wanted to turn himself into a machine, and he succeeded in doing so, and the movie stares at him without judgment or praise as he goes about that process. And when his refusal to look inside himself means that he can neither acknowledge privately nor even consider as a possibility the reality that the actions he has committed and the actions he has witnessed have caused him to suffer from PTSD, the movie stars non-judgmentally at that, too. But the longer it goes on, the more it trusts us to see that disorder peering out from behind Cooper's increasingly flat eyes, and understand that his desire to avoid human feeling is increasingly a desire to avoid naming his own suffering and thus his own perceived weakness.

All of which makes it epically frustrating when the movie ends by descending into a maudlin, arch-biopic sequence of leading up to Kyle's death while back home in Texas, playing as a straightfaced version of the same "life is happening!" montage that's used to such mercilessly ironic effect in the film's opening, and ending on the corniest "he's off to meet his death!" scene since the penultimate scene in 2012's Lincoln. And having thus pointlessly fucked his own movie, Eastwood doubles-down with a travesty of a montage of images from the real-life Kyle's funeral and memorial services, a sequence that's exploitative to begin with, and also moonily plays up the notion that this was an unambiguously wonderful man whose passing is much to be mourned, which is found nowhere else in the movie, and indeed is almost exactly contradicted by its persuasive argument that this was a prickly man whose refusal to look inside himself caused only suffering in himself and others. It's a different, vastly worse movie - the movie, in fact, that American Sniper has been accused of being (by liberals) and praised for being (by conservatives), but that it emphatically isn't for some 127 of its 132 minutes. But oh me, oh my, how shittily pandering those five minutes are.

Meanwhile, is it racist? Not really, but it doesn't do a very good job of inoculating itself against that charge - there's one scene in particular, involving a made-up insurgent assassin with a penchant for drills, that doesn't do serve any meaningful narrative purpose and provides almost the entire basis for the argument that the film as a whole presents the Iraqi people as bloodthirsty brutes; and even that isn't quite a slam dunk 1+1=2 piece of evidence, given context. Mostly, though, American Sniper simply doesn't care very much one way or another about the people of Iraq; an apparently damning statement, until we mention as well that it doesn't care one way or another about any American, citizen or soldier, whose surname isn't "Kyle". This is a character study, not a political statement, and the only real sin it commits is presenting that study in a framework that is entirely impossible to strip of politics, and could only be perceived otherwise by somebody with a reflextive America-centric worldview. A sin that somehow didn't taint the equally apolitical Hurt Locker, despite that film actually coming out when the Iraq War was still officially ongoing.

That being said, it's a marvelous, marvelous character study, driven by a superb central performance and unpolished, spare filmmaking and writing that allow that performance to be the motive force of everything else the film does and is. Some of what it is, is ambivalent to the point of being problematic; a tiny bit of what it is, is acutely vile; and most of what it is, is a smart, complex portrait of a largely fictional man who desperately wanted not to be complex at all. What the film's reception reveals about American culture is uniformly discouraging and depressing, but as a two-and-a-quarter-hour piece of cinema made by an inconsistently great director who got his mojo back in a huge way after too many years of burnished mediocrity, I come about thiiiis close to loving American Sniper, and even with its ugly-ass flaws, I wouldn't trade it away for anything.

8/10

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