Heavy weather: Three Monkeys

The family lives in an apartment block so tall and emaciated as to look unfinished and precarious. Their dining room boasts a spectacular view of the Bosporus, yet its waters are choppy and forbidding, and between it and the building lie a freeway and railway, whose pedestrian underpass casts jagged shadows on its users. The story begins with an accident caused by a Turkish politician, and the politician persuading his driver Eyüp (Yavuz Bingol) to take the rap, a year’s stretch at most, with a substantial reward at the end of it. Such negotiations have a tendency to proliferate, so while Eyüp’s imprisoned his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan), concerned for their son Ismail (Rifat Sungar), who’s seemingly unable to find work or get into university, comes to the politician’s office asking for an advance. The politician names, or rather implies, his price, and perhaps Hacer was hoping for such a discreet agreement all along. But what will happen when Eyüp comes home?

Co-scripted with the director’s wife Ebru Bilge Ceylan and actor Ecran Kesal, who plays the politician, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys (Üç maymun) weds the contemporary image and atmosphere-rich European art film with the fundamentals of film noir. Unlike Christian Petzold’s Jerichow, rooted in James M. Cain, or Béla Tarr’s The Man From London, taken from Georges Simenon’s novel, Three Monkeys does not, so far as I can tell, have a single overt source, though there are intriguing echoes of The Reckless Moment and The Deep End, both adaptations of the same Elisabeth Sanxay Holding story. Unlike most films noir, Three Monkeys doesn’t evoke desperation through taut pacing, neurotic framing, or heated verbal exchange. In keeping with Ceylan’s distinctive style, the film above all broods luxuriously, in sumptuous digital images of looming storms and scenes sodden with unease and suspicion, imbued with an aquatic tinge that renders everyone victims of motion sickness.

Several sequences feel incidental while underway, yet everything counts at the end of Ceylan’s karmic equation, even Hacer’s comical ringtone. Much is destined to remain unresolved however, particularly once the stream of water imagery is completed by visits from the ghost of a drowned child. There are these two turning points for Hacer, wordless, nearly static moments in which a decision is made, one where she comes home, slumps in a chair, and flips off her shoe, another where she lies on her bed having been mauled by her angry husband, wearing lingerie that’s red and transparent, while a gust of wind balloons the curtain. It says a lot about Ceylan’s approach, and about the potency of Aslan’s screen presence, that both moments are pretty riveting. Ceylan, who is also a photographer, could be seen as bearing a kinship with the late Michelangelo Antonioni, in that landscape, weather and architecture play such a central role in his method of storytelling. Yet rather than exclude nuanced performance, this method depends utterly on actors who can deliver heaps of drama with a glance or a gesture. And despite a narrative that can at times teeter on a sort of bleak math, the cast of Three Monkeys delivers in spades.

Crime doesn't play: Public Enemies

The very public slaying of legendary bank robber John Dillinger outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre in 1934 is as much a moment in the history of film as American crime. The poetic unity of the event is the stuff of dreams. In typically flagrant disregard for his own infamy and imminent peril, Dillinger left a jam-packed screening of the gangster flick Manhattan Melodrama with two attractive women when the heat closed in. They were not there to make an arrest. The fatal bullet exited just below one of the eyes that had been watching the silvery likenesses of Clark Gable and Myrna Loy only moments ago. So the life of John Dillinger ended with the movies, and the movies would soon make a habit of resurrecting him.

Public Enemies is the most recent and surely most expensive retellings of Dillinger’s legacy, and most of its 133 minutes as perplexingly lifeless as Dillinger’s bullet-strewn body once the ambulance arrived. The material, derived from Bryan Burrough’s book of the same name, seems tailor-made for director Michael Mann, yet I’m not sure that any Mann film—and there are contenders—has ever seemed so prosaic, so mechanical and museum-like, so, well, dull. The showdown of masculine archetypes so boldly rendered in films like Heat is here a sort of Hollywood kabuki, stately and un-invested with tension, much less flamboyance.

Questionable choices were made at the executive level. The casting of beautiful and delicate Johnny Depp in a role previously—and marvelously—embodied by the likes of Lawrence Tierney, Ralph Meeker and Warren Oates does neither the often very fine actor nor the film any special favours. With Christian Bale playing the FBI’s top Dillinger hunter Melvin Purvis and, most especially, Billy Crudup playing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, there seems to be a conspiracy of prettified historical revisionism that even by Hollywood standards reads as laughable. While Bale gives an especially remote performance here that does very little to endow Purvis with texture, Crudup provide several of the film’s finest moments in his small role, using a bare minimum of facial and vocal mannerisms to convey a barely restrained and perverse rage for power. It almost makes you forget that this cutie is supposed to be playing a man that more closely resembled, let’s just say it, a troll. Marion Cotillard provides the film’s sole source of warmth as Dillinger’s devoted girlfriend Billie Frechette, yet what seems ostensibly her showcase scene, where she’s tortured by a sadistic and misogynistic cop, is saddled with dialogue that’s strictly boilerplate gangster’s moll.

It’s unclear whether Mann and company are interested in the brutal facts—some of which are present, others ignored, none of which convey new insights—or glamorous myth—the fedoras are so uniformly crisp, the coats splay just so, the cars so clean. There’s so little glamour or fun of even the most vulgar variety in Public Enemies. Though he does have a handful of wonderfully delivered one-liners, Depp mostly seems to be enjoying himself relatively little. Dante Spinotti’s handheld HD cinematography, with its emphatic fleetingness and the weird oiliness of the imagery when brightly-lit and in motion, is deeply exciting in how it furthers the frontiers of this new technology’s visual vocabulary, yet the way it, in collaboration with the costumes and production design, drains all colour from the Great Depression—a potentially timely sociological factor barely registered by the script, incidentally—feels like an empty cliché, making the whole film seem like it was reflected on the surface of an ice-cold razor. The action scenes feature impressive sprays of Tommy gunfire, especially during the nocturnal raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge, yet there’s little spatial coherence, and the piling up of identically dressed and bloodied bodies—some of them famous actors in non-cameos—is easy not to care all that much about.

I can imagine how the overriding aesthetic of Public Enemies could be regarded as admirable, as lean and cold and maybe kind of Jean-Pierre Melville, if you wanted to go that far. But such a take doesn’t account for all the other things the film seems to want to do, like tell an oft-told tale with some new imperative, give us a thrill, or speak to our need for outlaws.

The case file as art: Zodiac on DVD

Watching Zodiac in its director’s cut nearly a year after the original version’s theatrical release, it feels that much more remarkable, that much more singular, this film so haunted by the unknowable, so unapologetically embracing of tracing the intricacies of laboring toward uncertainty. While seeing the film in the theatre with a captive audience unsure as to what to expect was for me at least an exhilarating happening, Warner/Paramount’s new two-disc special edition somehow completes the Zodiac experience: presenting a movie driven by obsession in a package so brimming with commentary, supplementary data and contradictory opinions, invites the viewer to obsess right along with Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the cartoonist-turned one-man investigatory team whose exhaustive books on the unsolved Zodiac murders provide the story’s foundation.

The material added by director David Fincher only fortifies the film’s slow building of character, period and engagingly banal procedural detail –not to mention humour. The scene in which Captain Lee (Dermot Mulroney) and Inspectors Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) lay out their grounds for a search warrant not to a living person but a tiny speakerphone simultaneously mounts anticipation of a new break in the case and feels vaguely like borrowed shtick from Charlie’s Angels.

Yet it’s the same details you saw the first time around that really deepen the chilling evocation of these otherwise disparate events linked only by shared trauma: the brief exchanges, alluding to complicated, intimate relationship histories, and even an unexplained sense of imminent danger, between the Zodiac’s victims at Blue Rock Springs and Lake Barryessa; the frequency with which we see Toschi eat, this man who’s life becomes consumed by Zodiac in turn seeking to comfort himself through consumption; the hysterical woman who claims to have been abducted by Zodiac (Ione Skye), hiding her baby in some bushes off the side of the highway at night; the sheer amount of time that passes while memories fade and research accumulates and gets filed away, sucked into multi-jurisdictional limbo. Just as no single member of the tremendous ensemble cast passes through Zodiac without making some distinct impression, everything in the film becomes equally absorbing, boggling the mind with the promise of some grand interconnectedness that may not truly exist.

Fincher’s commentary track is illuminating both technically (he seems, perhaps to a fault, a perfectionist of the first order) and with regards to the director’s own emotional involvement with the film, tied to his growing up in San Francisco during the Zodiac’s heyday. It’s fascinating how a project that mightn’t seem all that personal can finally become a filmmaker’s richest, finest, most idiosyncratic and humane work, and it’s revealing to hear how Fincher himself made a concentrated effort to avoid any kind of formal flourish that would detract from the clearest possible observance of character and action. This lack of flash becomes a vision in itself, and renders everything else in Fincher’s oeuvre, from the genuinely creepy if over-adorned Seven to the rather tedious Panic Room, a mere warm-up for the more serious filmmaking displayed here.

A second commentary track trades off between a laid-back Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., who are consistently amusing if not especially insightful (and Gyllenhaal kind of embarrasses himself by going on this long spiel about Raymond Carver when I’m pretty sure he means Raymond Chandler), and the power team of screenwriter James Vanderbilt, producer Brad Fischer and, most welcome of all, novelist James Ellroy. In sly deadpan, Ellroy boldly introduces himself as “James Ellroy, King of American crime fiction… acknowledging that this film is one of the half-dozen greatest American crime films.” Now that’s how you kick-off a commentary! (Makes you wonder what the other five films are.) Vanderbilt and Fischer speak eloquently about all the varied choices that sprung from their resolve not to show anything that didn’t have a surviving eyewitness. They also discuss the sheer weirdness of the possibility that Zodiac murdered cabbie Paul Stine, then stole his glasses, put them on his face and walked away from the crime as though disguised as his victim. Ellroy meanwhile interjects with articulate reverie over the film and some terrific non-sequiturs, such as his bizarre anecdote that illustrates why he hates Donovan or what he considers to be the moral of Moby Dick.

The second disc features a nicely put-together making-of featurette that provides a sense of the strange balance between fact-based minutia and pure creativity that went into every aspect of the production. There’s also an extended documentary on each of the murders and all the particulars surrounding them, and, maybe best of all, a shorter doc solely about Arthur Leigh Allen, the deeply enigmatic prime suspect who died just before he was to meet with police one last time back in 1992. New interviews with the pivotal Don Cheney and several others who knew Allen alternate between strengthening the case against him and poking still more holes in it. Criminology experts make a convincing plea for a practice of fitting the evidence to a suspect instead of trying to fit a suspect to the evidence, yet even if certain aspects don’t fit the profile for Zodiac, Allen remains a compelling scapegoat even in death. His long, ovular face stares at us from a handful of obscure photographs, giving away precious little, ready to have whatever foul notions projected upon it, still the centre of a mystery that’s been arduously compacted into what is finally one of the great films of our age.