Half man, half beast, half measures: The Wolfman

The family has already suffered the untimely demise of its beloved, beautiful matriarch and the institutionalization and exile of one of its boys for mental illness. As our story begins tragedy strikes once more with the gruesome slaughter of another Talbot son on the eve of his marriage. He’s cut down one night along the moonlit moors by something that seems both beast and man. When Laurence Talbot returns from years abroad to find out what happened to his fallen brother, he’s reunited with John, their father, still lurking in the gloom of the family’s decrepit rural mansion, who advises Laurence to forget the past. It is a “wilderness of horrors,” he says, and best left ignored. Of course we know Laurence will do no such thing, since gothic tales such as this feed on obsession with the echoing creaks of old traumas that never die.

The Wolfman is itself an exercise in looking back, referencing a long tradition of lycanthrope flicks, mostly notably Universal’s own 1941 classic The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. This latest entry isn’t set in the present or even in 1941 but rather in 1891, setting it just a few years after the Jack the Ripper murders. It doesn't really set out to renovate any aspect of the werewolf legacy but rather subscribes devoutly to the established rules and tropes of the familiar myth. Yet it feels uncertain as to how fully it wants to surrender to the spell of old things. Victorian England is made to look artificially caked in soot, and while early scenes thrive on the anxiety of the unseen, such as one riveting sequence that plays out in the terrifyingly insufficient firelight of a fog soaked gypsy camp, the movie, helmed by Jumanji director Joe Jonston, gradually makes concessions to contemporary demand for souped-up gore, offering flamboyant decapitations and buckets of organ spillage. The Wolfman boasts make-up design by the legendary Rick Baker, yet its transformation scenes, heavily accentuated by smooth and slick CGI, have nothing on the ferocious tactility of Baker’s precedent-setting work on 1981’s An American Werewolf in London. (You just don’t squirm the same way watching this newfangled stuff, perhaps because the horror isn't located in the body or even some likeness of the body but rather in some hovering screen of synthetic imagery.)

So I’m going to have to go with what seems to be the critical consensus on The Wolfman as a movie that can’t quite make up its mind about what it wants to be, a moody and mysterious homage to the subtler chillers of old, or an iconoclastic, bracingly modern monster mash. It shifts uneasily from sinister to silly, from brooding to camp, especially once we’re thrown into one of these insane asylums where the torture treatments are administered by drooling, grinning maniacs. Yet for all that I was still pretty engaged with and entertained by The Wolfman. The perfectly cast Benicio Del Toro, who also produced, is arguably a bit wasted on Laurence for lack of rigorous character development, yet the character is just inherently interesting. Laurence is an actor, known for his Hamlet. He's perhaps psychologically unstable, and bears a confused but deeply-rooted Oedipal grudge against his father, played for kicks by Anthony Hopkins; he's drawn to his dead brother's fiancée, played fairly straight by Emily Blunt, who's made to resemble the brother's dead mother; and the hairy situation he finds himself in may be as much the product of repressed rage as a disease contracted from a particularly nasty animal bite. It just goes to show that certain monsters endure for a reason. No matter how often they’re overwhelmed by kitsch, no matter how often we recycle them, they still maintain the power to fascinate us by virtue of their primacy. You might chuckle at the conceit of a werewolf running loose in London, but it’s no great leap to buy into the metaphorical potency of the beast within.

Clandestine in Bolivia: Che Part Two

To enter Bolivia clandestinely, Ernesto “Che” Guevara disguises himself. Bald up top, with graying sides, dark-rimmed glasses and buckteeth. Castro tells him he looks like his father. The way this transformation plays in Che Part Two, which leaps across the eight years between Part One’s victory in Havana and the campaign that would end Guevara’s life, emphasizes how notoriety can thwart the real work of a revolutionary. (This doubtlessly resonates with actors like Benicio Del Toro, who endeavour to shape-shift so as to better embody that elusive autonomous character, or directors like Steven Soderbergh, who endeavour to make films so wildly diverse so as to sidestep expectation.) It also underlines the gulf between the careers of Guevara and Castro, still alive today, a robust anachronism in modern politics. In any case, long before the proliferation of T-shirts and mindless idolatry, Guevara was already in some sense attempting to foil fame as a means of following his vocation.

After the divergent results of the two campaigns they dramatize, the most striking difference between Che Part One and Two is their level of immersion into the business of developing an armed uprising. Part Two gets us into Bolivia relatively quickly and from there seldom maneuvers away from Guevara’s arduous trajectory, to which the camera doggedly sticks. There are far too many idiosyncratic flourishes and too much historical selection to call Soderbergh’s approach faux documentary, but there is the sense of the documentarian’s commitment to watching a process unfold. It can be grueling to watch, and sometimes confusing. Like The Thin Red Line, the films of Hungarian director Miklós Janscó, and perhaps Apocalypse Now, it joins the tiny league of war movies you could call hypnotic. And this tells you the strange—and I think utterly fascinating—place where Che lives. It feeds you waves of historical data, builds incredible tension, and puts you in a trance all at once.

There’s a fireside discussion where Mario Monje, leader of Bolivia’s Communist Party, suggests that Guevara will fail because Bolivians don’t want a foreigner for a savior. Someone counters with the fact that Bolivia isn’t even named after a Bolivian—Simón Bolívar was Venezuelan. But the disconnect between such sly arguments and the reality of popular sentiment looms large over Guevara’s Bolivian campaign. It’s simplistic, but maybe there’s something to the notion that Cuba was simply desperate enough, and the Bolivians not quite, or if so, perhaps their hunger was of a more particular nature. While carefully placing such discussions at the forefront, neither Soderbergh’s direction nor Del Toro’s largely stoic performance overtly support any one reading, but their evocation of the star-crossed atmosphere and litany of struggles surrounding the fiasco is haunting.

It’s been 50 years since the Cuban Revolution, yet its legacy, like that of its protagonists, remains no less fraught, no easier to assess. The final images of Che Part Two return us to where Part One began, with Guevara, clean-shaven, with triumph still far ahead, leaning on the rail of that leaky little boat with its 82 men. Guevara says nothing in this sequence, but glances over toward Castro, who stands confidently near the bow. There is a quality about Guevara’s stare that’s hard to guess at, a flicker of something. It could be suspicion.

Sólo con tu Guevara: Che Part One

In November 1956 he left Mexico for Cuba in a leaky boat with 82 men, only 12 of whom would live to see victory. The sequence depicting this traversal toward the island and struggle that would define Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s destiny is stark, quiet, fleeting, yet, tellingly, it offers one of the film’s rare close-ups of its protagonist. It lingers in your mind long after you’ve watched Che in its entirety, not simply because this moment is returned to so eloquently in its coda, but because by the time you’ve made it through all this you can’t help but look back on it as one of those truly indelible turning points, punctured with immediacy, anticipation, history, ambiguity. It’s the threshold upon which one of the 20th century’s most controversial and ideologically complex lives begins to truly bloom.

I saw Che first over two nights during the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, and a second time several months later over the course of one sitting with a lunch break between the two parts. These two parts were originally entitled The Argentine and Guerilla but have since been marketed by the rather less inspired Part One and Part Two. Part One will open in Edmonton first as a single feature, and there are perfectly good reasons for Edmontonians, or anyone for that matter, to see it separately with plenty of digestion time before the more daunting Part Two arrives in the coming weeks, even if the films possess a certain extra potency when viewing them in succession as a diptych, as two chronicles of armed uprisings, one successful and legendary, the other disastrous and sad. No matter how they’re packaged, I urge you to see them both in the theatre, without interruptions, to submit to this audacious beast of an epic. This decade-in-development labour of love from producer Laura Bickford, actor Benicio del Toro and director Steven Soderbergh is a most particular kind of masterwork, demanding special attention and, I believe, rewarding it in kind.

Part One is, by contrast at least, the more conventional biopic of the two, shifting mainly between two trajectories. One follows Guevara’s pivotal role in the Cuban Revolution from 1956-59, which closes on a perfect note—he’s just about to roll into Havana and heady glory but stops on the way to chew out some colleagues for appropriating a gorgeous convertible—that stops just shy of what a flabbier movie would consider the proper climax. The other is his visit to New York and the United Nations in 1964, when he was at his height of international celebrity and is interviewed by journalist Lisa Howard (Julia Ormond) for ABC. “Maybe a little powder,” Guevara (Del Toro, so good with stillness that he can absorb a multitude of possible intentions at once) quietly suggests after initially declining any make-up for the cameras. It’s one of a number of moments of levity and conveys something of Guevara’s learned sense of showmanship, a striking counterpoint to the preceding years of spartan jungle existence, the strategizing, the combat, the asthma attacks, and the submission to the vision of Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir), already rehearsing his beard-stroking and cigar waving.

This is in part a movie about merely extraordinary men becoming global icons, told through the accumulation and refinement of facial hair and the symbolic value of battle fatigues. It isn’t, I think, a polemical movie in any clear-cut sense. Despite the propagandistic poster art, Soderbergh hasn’t calibrated Che to render Guevara a more humanized hero or, as is often the case with biopics, clumsily reduce his persona or accomplishments. Yet one of Che’s most distinguishing characteristics is surely the ways in which its mise en scène corroborates with Guevara’s ethos. For a film ostensibly about one man, the integrity of the collective is repeatedly emphasized, not only in the scenes of Guevara’s training, camaraderie, lecturing or disciplining of his comrades-in-arms—among whom Santiago Cabrera’s Camilo Cienfuegos really deserves to be singled out for his charismatic presence—but in Soderbergh’s camerawork, guerilla-like production model and the process-oriented narrative itself, which updates and renovates the dormant aesthetic of the docudrama. You could even say that Che is in a sense a dramatized instruction manual, perhaps the only war movie from which a layman can actually grasp a coherent sense of how an uprising is staged.

Of course to really see the extent to which Che commits to evoking the most grueling aspects of jungle warfare one needs to wait for Part Two, where Soderbergh’s commitment to this fusion of form and content becomes more singly focused and severe. But we’ll come back to that when Part Two receives its Edmonton release, which is hopefully very soon.

Would you give this man an Oscar?

It would feel like a dream, or at least an elaborate joke. Indeed, if I were to suggest a candidate for the single strangest possible moment that could transpire during next Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast, it would have to be the vision of Werner Herzog, preferably in a tux, receiving an Oscar. Of course, Herzog’s Antarctica essay Encounters at the End of World couldn’t be more deserving. It wasn’t merely among the best documentaries of last year but one of the best movies, period. But I still can’t quite wrap my head around the sheer weirdness of the notion of Herzog’s presence amidst the glitz, the tears and thanks-to-god, the microphone-wielding babbling ninnies. Herzog, director of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Strozek and Grizzly Man, is a living legend—but he’s an outsider’s outsider, a deeply eccentric, autodidact maverick. Since when do such people win Oscars? But then it begs the question, what is Oscar?

The official line is that Oscar rewards cinematic excellence, but everybody knows that’s far from the truth. The dismissive cynic tells us it’s all politics, advertising and self-congratulation, but this too seems a bit of an over-simplification, and hardly accounts for the fact that, in the acting categories especially, the Academy actually does single out superlative work as often as it does sentimentalist blubbery. So the Oscars are a nebulous, persistent beast, and a lot of us still watch despite it all. They satisfy a desire for summation, catharsis and unabashed glamour. And maybe it’s that last part that catches us up when we try to hold it to a certain standard.

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy won the Toronto Film Critic’s Association Award and was nominated for an Independent Spirit, but it has yet to open in most markets in Canada at least, and its complete shut-out among the Oscar nods won’t help it circulate any faster or bigger. It stars Michelle Williams—note: a previous nominee—in the best work she’s yet done. But it is in every sense of the word a small movie, concerning America’s socio-economic fringe. Is this why Wendy and Lucy is ignored? Do recessions naturally turn people away from stories of economic hardship? At least Williams is in good company as one of the year’s most notable snubs. Sally Hawkins, the widely celebrated star of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, also failed to receive the Best Actress nod, though Happy-Go-Lucky at least managed to snag an Original Screenplay nomination, the art-house ghetto/unofficial consolation prize for any movie that fails to garner its due kudos in the ostensibly major categories.

To give credit, the Academy did acknowledge Anne Hathaway for her sublime work in Rachel Getting Married and Melissa Leo’s heart-rending turn in Frozen River. But how do we explain Angelina Jolie for Changeling, a movie that wasn’t especially embraced by audiences or critics and gave Jolie nothing especially interesting to do? Perhaps politics—ie: being insanely famous and becoming an international symbol for maternal altruism—shouldn’t be underestimated any more than glamour. Jolie’s got both on her side. And her even more famous other half also got nominated this year, but I can’t argue with that so much. I’ve never been a great admirer of Brad Pitt’s, but I submit that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gave him the role of his life, playing a man condemned to get everything backwards, doomed to live his life as a permanent alien, watching, never fully participating. Pitt’s performance may be necessarily adorned in multiple layers of make-up and CGI, but is there any moment in its trajectory more astonishing, more strangely moving, than the one where Button finally arrives at the point in his life where he simply becomes Brad Pitt? In this sense, an actor’s beauty is as essential to performance as the tricks used to disguise it. And in the movies, folks, a well-harnessed beauty is a force to be reckoned with.

Still, Pitt has noting on Mickey Rourke, who also found the role of a lifetime in The Wrestler, and likewise elegantly exploited his distinctive physicality to embody it. Come to think of it, Richard Jenkins, whose nomination for The Visitor was among this year’s most pleasant surprises, also gave a superb performance that was heavily dependent on the actor’s appearance, that long, pock-marked face that conveys disappointment and inwardness so immediately that a simple smile emerging from it feels like some sort of miracle. To be sure, I can think of only one performance that was the equal of these guys yet excluded from their company. Benicio Del Toro’s portrayal of Ernesto Guevara falls into two of Oscar’s pet categories—the famous actor portraying the famous historical figure; the repeat nominee—but that wasn’t enough. Che, like Wendy and Lucy, is about people normally invisible in American movies. And it’s long. And it’s tough. It’s also extraordinary, iconoclastic, educational, in its way, truly revolutionary. It should have gotten Best Actor, Best Director, Best Picture and Best Cinematography.

Cinematography however is one of those categories whose nominee list most consistently lacks imagination or even sense. How could they neglect the inspired imagery of Paranoid Park? (Let's not even get into directing, where we would have to discuss the phenomena of Ron Howard.) It’s not unlike editing, an award that should most often be preceded by the word ‘Most’ rather than ‘Best.’ How else could the Academy manage to nominate Laurent Cantet’s The Class for Best Foreign Film and not notice that its lively classroom scenes, filled with comments and bits of behaviour coming from so many of its actors, are partially the result of some of the finest possible cutting? We’re talking about an editor—Robin Campillo is his name—whose contribution was so integral to the movie that he was given his own writing credit.

And what of that other remarkable Foreign Film nominee Waltz for Bashir, an ideal candidate for Best Animated Feature—not to mention Best Documentary—if there ever was one? Was it really not on par with Bolt? Need every Animated nominee be for kids, be rife with superfluous spectacle? Is this why neither of Richard Linklater’s wondrous animated movies Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly went without nominations in their respective years? Such are the mysteries of Oscar, I suppose. We mull them over, we get pissed off, we get happy and occasionally satisfied when we see work we believe in get rewarded and perhaps even reach a larger audience. In any case, we keep watching. Okay, I keep watching. Do you?