Earwitness to an assassination: Blow Out

Jack (John Travolta) is a sound-effects technician, and thus a gifted listener, which might be another way of saying he’s a born aural voyeur, if you will. Blow Out (1981), Brian De Palma’s conspiracy thriller, continues a rich tradition, following Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), which was inspired by Cortázar’s story ‘Las babas del diablo’ (1959), and Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), in that it hinges on its protagonist’s special ability to perceive an incriminating detail hidden in a recording. The inciting incident: Jack’s perched on a bridge in a park at night in search of some good wind. Wearing headphones, handling a baton-like microphone, he captures not just wind in the trees, but also a whispering couple, an owl, and, fatefully, a car skidding off a road and plunging into the river. Jack rushes to help. He can’t save the driver but manages to rescue the driver’s lovely young companion (Nancy Allen). Later, in emergency, he’s told that the driver was a popular presidential candidate. He’s also told there was no lovely young companion, or rather, he’s told that the companion will simply be erased from the official record, just as Jack might excise a single track from a soundscape. Furthermore, Jack’s told that a certain noise he heard (and recorded) just a second before the accident never occurred, a noise that sounded like a gunshot.

Blow Out navigates the elusive bridge that divides authenticity and artifice: a bridge built on technology. This theme is cleverly integrated right into the film’s opening sequence, when a screening of an excerpt from Jacks’ current project, the exploitation slasher film-within-the-film, could initially be mistaken for the film itself. It’s interrupted only when one of the slasher’s naked nubile victims lets out a scream that doesn’t sound authentic enough and the producer calls the screening to a halt. (Amusingly, the producer tries to find a more authentic scream by bringing pairs of young women into the studio: one screams into a microphone while the other pulls her hair.) Jack knows the woman was in the car; he knows there were two sharp sounds: first the gunshot, then the blow out. But he has to get someone to believe him, to listen as he listens. We in the audience know there’s no ambiguity or paranoia here: we know Jack’s telling the truth because, unlike The Conversation, Blow Out doesn’t adhere exclusively to its protagonist’s subjective experience. De Palma breaks away from Jack on several occasions to follow John Lithgow’s misogynistic hired killer with a penchant for strangling his victims with wire. (A playful linguistic doubling: Travolta and Lithgow each possess their own kind of potentially lethal “wire.”)

Blow Out is the most compelling De Palma film I’ve seen. Its camerawork, courtesy of Vilmos Zsigmond, is relentlessly inventive; it’s heightened red-and-blue-all-over production design (perhaps substituting film noir’s black and white with a punchier sort of monochromatic palate) makes for weirdly fascinating eye candy; and its obsessive replaying of Jack’s recording of the assassination, along with its cluttered mechanical milieu of tape, reels and buttons, is engrossing. I have several reservations, yet thinking about them makes me want to watch Blow Out again (something that Criterion’s velvety-gorgeous new DVD and Blu-ray editions make that much more tempting). Travolta is young, beautiful, and gives a focused, nuanced performance, yet his character feels inadequately shaded, less implicated in the story’s darkness. Yes, Jack’s got a guilty conscience about an undercover police gig that went horribly wrong, yet this shadowy past doesn’t resonate in his presence. It feels oddly incidental. Meanwhile De Palma’s use of split screens, process shots, variable speeds and 360-degree pans become increasingly leaden, and Pino Donaggio’s cartoony score thwarts at least as many moments of intimacy or suspense as it enhances.

I know many have tremendous affection for De Palma, fellow critics especially (“Paulettes” most especially). Yet there’s something in his approach that consistently pushes me out. His work deserves scrutiny on a film-by-film basis, but I’ll offer one generalization. Whenever De Palma unfurls his more expensive, grandiose set pieces, whether in Blow Out or The Untouchables (1987) or The Black Dahlia (2006), when everything slows to a crawl and every frame is so conspicuously composed, I inevitably feel as though I’ve been asked to sit through an over-rehearsed audition. There’s a strange thinness to these sequences (not unlike the thinness that plagues certain De Palma characters). De Palma’s frequently taken to task for cynicism or irony, but the way he crafts such sequences strikes me as nakedly earnest. He suddenly wants genuine opera, and it feels awkward. Yet in the case of Blow Out the big set pieces hardly spoil things overall, and the quieter bits (that inciting incident especially) are eloquent and highly memorable. So if you happen to share some of my frustrations with De Palma, do see this one. It’s looking an awful lot like his masterpiece.

Inner-life during wartime: The Thin Red Line

It opens with visions of swimming in glaucous waters, rowing out to sea, familial bathing, running a wheel barrel race with the child inhabitants of this mercifully ignored Pacific paradise. But the voice-over narration wonders on the essential duality of man and nature that perpetuates conflict, and soon we’re gearing up for a long and arduous battle. Based on James Jones’ 1962 novel about the taking of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line (1998) is a group portrait of men at war, underpinned by, or more aptly, given an undercurrent of daydream speculation regarding mankind as a single, multifaceted soul. The collective anxiety of these men, most of them young and relatively inexperienced, as they board the carriers that will usher so many of them to their deaths is almost palpable. Time is invested in establishing rank, but when grown men whimper and cry their hierarchies dissolve. We see men shudder with panic, men sick with fear. There are plenty of great war films, but The Thin Red Line, newly available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion, might be the only one I, who’s never been close to a war, relate to so fully. It’s because of its painstaking emphasis on brotherhood, and it’s because of the fear.

This was the first film from the reclusive maverick director Terrence Malick in 20 years, after having made only two films during the decade of the New Hollywood, Badlands (73) and Days of Heaven (78). Only two, yet the both of them immensely memorable and immensely individual. Malick’s return to the movies would be a far bigger production than both of its predecessors combined, yet his signature would remain unmistakable: there would be a lot of voice-over, some of it playing dissonance with the images; there would be earnest philosophical questions, often posed by decidedly credulous characters; sooner or later, something would be set on fire. But the ambitions that separated The Thin Red Line from Malick’s earlier work wouldn’t be confined to questions of scale—this new, older Malick sought to locate his poeticism in collectivity. Butterflies, birds and bats oversee the carnage and ripping of earth. The film sweeps across landscapes to light down upon varied characters and their interior voices, swooping into their consciousness in search of some unuttered emotional truth, so that each of them becomes our protagonist for a time. Yet the film’s protagonist is also some presence beyond the brutal drama unfolding on-screen, some hand guiding the camera, especially when mounted on a crane, soaring through tall grass and the smoke of freshly detonated ordinance, gliding past soldiers running, screaming, being torn to shreds, propelled upward by blasts or standing in stunned silence. The camera itself becomes our narrator, the ghostly observer that brings some supra-natural coherence to so much chaos.

To realize such a sprawling narrative required an enormous and diverse cast; to finance it required stars. So Malick chose to assemble a cast split evenly between knowns and unknowns, with the latter most often playing the larger roles. (It’s astonishing to watch the audition tapes featured on Criterion’s disc and see just how many great actors didn’t make it into the film.) If you were to make a shortlist of your favourite American actors of the last fifteen years or so there’s a good chance you’ll find a couple of them lingering somewhere in the populous canvas of The Thin Red Line. There’s Elias Koteas as the god-fearing, soft-spoken Greek captain. There’s Sean Penn, beginning by this point to look older, calmer. There’s Adrian Brody, his eyes looking wider than his narrow face. There’s John Travolta, with a ridiculous moustache. There’s John Cusack and John Savage. There’s Nick Stahl, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Ben Chaplin. Nick Nolte looms large over the central sequence concerning the taking of a hill that incurs heavy casualties. Nolte quotes Homer though it’s really just to show off. All worked up and phlegmy, his lipless mouth a frightening maw, he narrates the slaughter like a peppy football coach. But we also hear his inner thoughts: “Shut up in a tomb. Can’t lift the lid.” He’s trying to stage manage the whole thing, sculpt the most compelling narrative, the one that’ll ensure his belated promotion.

Closest to embodying a single central character is Jim Caviezel’s Witt, the boyishly handsome, blue-eyed private thrown back into action after going AWOL. A Melanesian woman tells him he “looks army,” but to me he looks like a dreamer. Where the other men remember beautiful women and inviting houses on the other side of the world, Witt’s flashbacks are to the island idyll he was taken from only days earlier. His voice-over speaks about the mystery—or lack there of—of death, and throughout the film Witt personally oversees many deaths, peering into the eyes of his comrades as they meet their demise, driven crazy with terror. He doesn’t seem the macho type, nor dies he seem suicidal. Perhaps he just thinks he’s lucky, because he keeps volunteering for the deadliest tasks. “If something bad happens” he says, “I want to be there.” Maybe he’s Malick’s avatar, which for better or for worse will make him the embodiment of a somewhat glorified naïveté.

“Who are you that lives in all these many forms?” “We. We together. One being.” “Love. Where does it come from?” These shards of reverie that emerge from the chorus of voice-overs—sometimes it’s hard to know who is who—can seem profound or pretentious depending on your mood. Yet by the time you’ve gotten say, half an hour into The Thin Red Line’s 170 minutes, it’s hard to imagine not surrendering to it utterly. It’s a genuine war epic, elegantly staged and chillingly violent, as well as a Tarkovsky-like meditation on nature, and one of the most penetrating and immersive mega-budget movie experiences I can think of. The new sound mix on Criterion’s new edition—at least on the Blu-ray I was able to sample—is particularly enveloping, dynamic in its depth and at times bracing. The overall effect of The Thin Red Line is to leave us by its end feeling as though we’ve been pushed through something, bore witness to something grandiose that only the cinema can offer. We feel closer to a particular vision, at once infernal and beatific, at once helmed by a single and singular artist and the portrayal of a difficult to fathom experience shared by hundreds. There’s almost nothing like it.

Blood on the dancefloor: Tony Manero on DVD

We can interrogate and, to some degree, illuminate the most tenebrous horrors of the past through making up stories, but what sort of stories should we devise? Which are best equipped to stir us out of despondency and actively engage us? The greater the horror, the more urgently and rigorously this question needs to be addressed. When the young filmmaker Pablo Larraín interviewed his fellow Chileans about living through the institutionalized terror of the Pinochet years, he found most of their memories to be foggy and imprecise. “What I got from this research was not any particular idea of what happened in terms of facts, but a tone, an atmosphere,” Larraín explains, “a combination of fear, sadness, and strangeness, because they didn’t know what was going to happen the next day.” Larraín’s response to these interviews was not to somberly chronicle the plight of victims of the Pinochet years, but rather to scour the era’s atmosphere and dread in search of a unique sort of character, one that might cloud the conventional frontiers diving victim from oppressor. His response was Tony Manero.

It’s Santiago, 1978, and 52-year-old Raúl is devoting all his energies to preparing for a local televised celebrity impersonation contest. It seems Raúl wants not simply to evoke but to literally transform himself into Tony Manero, John Travolta’s ambitious, disco dancing sensation from Bay Ridge, the hero of John Badham’s 1977 hit movie Saturday Night Fever. We see Raúl in a rundown cinema watching the film, studying Travolta’s moves and parroting his dialogue—but does Raúl ever stay to the end? Does Raúl even realize that Tony Manero never actually becomes a big star? Or is Raúl hoping to correct Saturday Night Fever’s downbeat ending by miraculously transcending his own marginalized existence of despair, poverty, confinement, communal living, dysfunctional sex, and routine applications of jet black hair dye to cover up the accumulating grey? Raúl will do anything to fulfill his dream of usurping reality with his distorted reading of an imported fantasy. His desire initially seems akin to that of so many go-for-it movie protagonists. You wonder at first if Tony Manero will be a comedy of self-discovery and triumph over adversity, its protagonist yet another addition to the movies’ ongoing collection of lovably obsessive, nerdy, underdog dreamers. But any such suspicions are dashed once we see Raúl help an old lady home after being mugged, only to get her alone in her little apartment and calmly bash her head in so as to steal her colour TV. Colour TVs were apparently tough to come by in Pinochet’s Chile.

Would Raúl have been a sociopath had he not lived under a murderous dictatorship? Are there certain kinds of monsters that are only awakened by the right circumstances, prompted by social conditions that seem to offer tacit permission to act out otherwise repressed atrocities? It’s a question that lingers in some of the novels of the posthumously celebrated Chilean-born author Roberto Bolaño, and Larraín, in his documentary-like follow-up to the very different, far more baroque, and not very successful debut Fuga, implies this question too, without offering any answers that might oversimplify his bizarre, grotesque and utterly absorbing story. Larraín instead focuses on imbuing Tony Manero with numerous details that heighten the film’s sense of place, its tension, and its black humour. Raúl’s incestuous housemates rehearse in their ramshackle performance space and perform their almost endearingly lame song and dance show for paltry audiences of locals happy for whatever sort of diversion to fill their hours before curfew arrives. Some of these housemates meet with secret insurgent groups, though Raúl himself isn’t to be distracted from his mastery of Manero embodiment, getting the right number of buttons on his white pants or the right high-density glass cubes to build an illuminated dance floor, just like that of Saturday Night Fever’s 2001 Odyssey nightclub, and replace the crappy wooden plank floor he memorably rips up in a wild fit when something in one of the group’s disco routines goes wrong. The success of that scene, like so many others, including an especially messy one you’ve just got to see to believe, rests firmly on the interpretative talents of lead actor Alfredo Castro, who plays Raúl with such complete, deadpan immersion it’s positively chilling. Castro’s work alone is reason to see this film.

Kino’s disc of Tony Manero is pretty much devoid of extras, and while that’s regrettable given that some minimal historical context at the very least might help certain viewers to appreciate its layers of critique and genuine audacity, it is finally a work that can stand alone and leave you reeling. Tony Manero barely screened in North American cinemas, but everyone with whom I watched it during its appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival, including a few Chilean friends, still haven’t forgotten the experience. Here’s hoping it continues to intrigue and appall viewers on DVD.

Off the rails: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Based on the 1973 novel by Morton Freedgood (writing as John Godfrey), this thriller, filmed previously in 1974 and 1998, finds an NYC subway car hijacked by thugs threatening to kill a passenger a minute if they don’t get $10,000,000 in an hour. Brian Helgeland’s new, gizmo-heavy script has alpha thug Ryder (John Travolta, with conspicuously dyed hair, brows and handlebar) striking up a strangely chatty repartee with Garber (Denzel Washington, paunchy, bespectacled, stubbornly handsome), the MTA employee who first takes Ryder’s demands and thereafter becomes the only negotiator Ryder’s willing to deal with. Discovering that Garber stands accused of accepting a bribe, Ryder apparently identifies with what he views as Garber’s victimization at the hands of an unjust corporate and/or social hierarchy. At one point Ryder gets especially vulnerable and shares a traumatic memory of getting shit on by an Icelandic sled dog while on a date with an ass model. Their interplay and its macho—at times homoerotic—sense of connection are, needless to say, deeply silly.

But Tony Scott is, to say the very least, a deeply silly filmmaker. “I never get excited by coincidence,” Garber says in an early scene, but Scott clearly get excited by absolutely everything, regardless of how inane or pointless it might be. His spastic editing and love of blaring soundtracks, his inability to settle upon anything for more than half a second or keep his camera from aimlessly circling his subjects: all these habits combine to make a monstrously glossy cocktail that in its way something to behold. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is as undeniably diverting as it is stupid, though it gets less diverting and more stupid as it goes—see the superfluous faux-suspense sequence where a subway car hurtles toward a destruction we've already been told isn't going to occur, or the nonsensical showdown/show-off/suicidal finale.

However, Pelham 1 2 3 also holds a certain interest simply as a broad portrait of contemporary Manhattan, strikingly contrasting the dinginess of the 74 version with its high-tech transit management, its police force as virtual standby army, and its surprisingly complex characterization of its municipal leaders, with James Gandolfini giving a fun performance as Hizzonor. Garber seems the avatar of this whole vision of a city that’s equally culturally diverse, overwhelming in terms of busyness and bureaucracy, and somehow cozy. The final image of Garber cheerfully bringing a full gallon of milk home to his apparently lactose-starved wife (Aunjanue Ellis, lovely and totally game in a goofy bit part) rather audaciously leaves his guilt in the bribery scandal totally ambiguous. And there’s something oddly charming, if absurd, about the sense that for all the extra drama, this was all just another day at the office for this hard-working New Yorker.