"Va-va-voom! 3-D pow!": Kiss Me Deadly

It’s been suggested that Kiss Me Deadly (1955) signals an end to the classic era of film noir, by conveying a retrospective/subversive knowingness of noir’s by-then familiar tropes (Dutch angles, shadows, fatales both femme and homme), by draining all pretense of romance from the private eye archetype, and by audaciously hybridizing genres, leading to a finale that literally blows its protagonist’s quest for “the great whatzit” to kingdom come. It makes sense that this ultra-modernist thriller made in the thick of the atomic age, fueled by Cold War paranoia, sexually liberated (okay, nymphomaniac) women, and rabid consumerism marks the end of something. At the halfway point in what is arguably Hollywood’s greatest decade, Kiss Me Deadly, now available from Criterion, and its new cognizance of postwar realities (packaged in a deliciously fantastical plot) draws a line in the sand that can’t be washed away—because everything behind it lies smoldering and in ruins. To quote the film’s most sympathetic character: “Va-va-voom! 3-D pow!”

It begins already in a state of agitation, with Christina (Cloris Leachman, here something of a precursor to Glenn Close), barefoot, in just a raincoat, running down a freeway at night, so desperate she plants herself in the middle of the road as our so-called hero’s Jaguar comes hurtling toward her. “You almost wrecked my car,” says Mike Hammer (the inimitable Ralph Meeker), assuming this woman’s he reluctantly picked up to be a date rape victim, though he gradually determines she’s “a fugitive from the laughing farm,” not that it makes any difference to him. Hammer’s descent into Kiss Me Deadly’s labyrinth of secrets and spies begins when the people looking for Christina catch up with her and torture her to death with Hammer lying semi-conscious nearby. Hammer only narrowly escapes Christina’s captors yet, utterly self-interested as he is, he can’t resist investigating what happened to Christina, which demands techniques beyond those normally employed by a detective who lives off divorce cases. Hammer’s investigation bridges the architectural, geographical, aesthetic and class dichotomies of 1950s Los Angeles, leading him away from the comforts of his sleek apartment with its futuristic devices (and his always horny secretary, Velma, whom he pimps out to seduce unwanted husbands) to busy boxing gyms, dilapidated Victorian houses in Bunker Hill (a neighbourhood memorialized so eloquently just a few years later in The Exiles), and jazz clubs with all-black clientele to find the answers that can’t bring back Christina, can’t save Hammer, and can’t prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that lay at the heart of this apocalyptic noir.

Boldly and beautifully directed by Robert Aldrich and scripted by A.I. Bezzarides, Kiss Me Deadly takes Mickey Spillaine’s über-macho, pro-vigilante source novel and simultaneously exploits its sordid thrills and critiques its meathead ethos, particularly through its parade of women who warn Hammer of his callowness even while seducing him. Meeker’s Hammer is a misanthropic, materialistic sadist. He childishly grins while crushing a mortician’s fingers in a desk drawer. While constantly eyeballing women (or “goodies”), it’s unclear whether or not he actually likes sex. The only person he cares about is his crazy Greek-American mechanic, Nick (Nick Dennis), though fair enough, since Nick is a loveable, only slightly annoying fireball of energy and perpetual generator of nonsequiturs, the finest being a chant about his moustache family tree. In a sense Nick’s the only character to represent both the old and brave new worlds of Kiss Me Deadly, who reminds us of American ethnic diversity and antiquated male bravado while embodying its new obsession with acceleration and technology. But Nick is just one of a gallery of wonderful supporting players (the cast includes character actors like Jack Elam, Strother Martin and Juano Hernández), each of whom play their part in luring Hammer closer to the Pandora’s box waiting to be opened in a locker room or on some moonlit beach, ushering in the dawn of a new age we’re still unable to contain.

The Prowler on DVD: Stop, look, and listen

The opening shot of The Prowler (1951) peers in out of the night through the luminous bedroom window of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes). We suppose we’re assuming the eponymous prowler’s point-of-view, but who exactly is the prowler? Officers Bud Crocker and Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) arrive to check for signs of trespassage, the latter condescendingly reassuring this nervous and attractive wife of a late-night disc jockey while admiring her affluence and formulating plans to seduce her. But it’s not at all clear that our heroine’s adversary (and soon-to-be lover) was the opening’s peeper, though Webb will briefly inhabit the very same perspective as that first shot while surveying the house’s exterior. The identity of the bearer of the eyes through which we first leer at Susan remains ambiguous. Audaciously so, considering the film’s titled after this creature-voyeur ostensibly nestled in the shrubs. Does he (or she) even exist? Are we the prowler?

Previously unavailable on DVD, The Prowler has finally appeared, released by VCI and gorgeously restored by the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Directed by Joseph Losey and secretly written by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, The Prowler is brooding yet taut as a timing belt, brimming with lust and petty ambitions yet complicated by a thicket of unarticulated, conflicting emotions. With its overt perversions and premarital sex, it’s one of the period’s most flamboyant violators of the production code. A broad abstract of its plot promises a retread of Double Indemnity (44), replacing femme fatale with homme, but there’s so much more going on here. Every new sequence renegotiates the story’s direction and tone. At times it’s a comedy of discomfort, at others commentary on class envy. While moving through Susan’s cavernous bungalow it carries the air of a horror picture: there’s that monster, and he wants inside. But as we move from Los Angeles suburb to Nevada highway to a desert ghost town, the film’s landscapes become increasingly oneiric, the couple’s motives increasingly bizarre—yet somehow it all makes an eerie kind of sense.

Oblivious to his own douche-bag menace, Webb is Heflin at his finest: those round, Wellesian eyes that keep glancing backward as he swaggers away from Susan’s door, the way he abuses his authority to make himself at home, worming his way in, asking for milk, thumbing the records in search of some Guy Lombardo. Webb and Susan discover they share roots in rural Indiana—they attended the same football dances—and with this tenuous connection Webb commandeers their affair, delighting in toying with Susan’s feelings. He tells her he wants to buy a motor court in Nevada. Every time he’s in Vegas he drives out just to see if it’s still there. At first Susan says she married her older, wealthy husband to get away from guys like Webb, but she still falls for him. Is Susan lonely or mentally ill? Is she genuinely drawn to this creep? The elegance of Keyes’ performance lies in its sustained uncertainty. It’s often impossible to discern what she’s thinking, though it’s clear she’s thinking something. And it’s probably a bad idea.

Susan’s husband is heard on the radio during their trysts. (I love that the voice is supplied by Trumbo.) That voice assures the adulterers of the husband’s absence, yet it also makes him perpetually present, a bodiless chaperone, announcing song titles that read like chapters in the novel of his wife’s affair. When Webb kisses Susan the camera swings over toward the radio as if seeking a reaction shot. Susan never describes her husband physically, and that first fleeting moment in which we finally see him is also the last. In this way Losey’s film becomes a delicious, rigorous study in what it means to see and to hear in the movies. Everything out senses are given is precise and provocative. “I’ll be seeing you, Susan,” the husband says each night as he signs off, and we’ll be seeing her too: The Prowler is a noir masterpiece, and deserves to be revisited again and again.

Battle: Los Angeles: What's alien for Oorah!?

The disasterama alien invasion opera Battle: Los Angeles can’t have been the easiest project to provide production design for: despite the film’s inane if commanding title, much of the action is set in Santa Monica, nearly every square inch of which gets blown to kingdom come. Yet early in our story, as marines troll the corpse-strewn resort town for survivors, a clever and conspicuously placed SUPPORT OUT TROOPS sign looms. It’s a straightforward plea and a sort of moral summary of what follows, which teeters on the cusp of bald armed forces propaganda. Battle: Los Angeles is more war movie than science fiction, and within its genre more Pearl Harbor than Thin Red Line. In a pivotal third-act scene, the most heroic of the movie’s uniformly heroic marines attempts to comfort a small child who just lost his civilian father and is several hours into a pants-kaking apocalypse by declaring that “Marines never quit!” Am I the only one who found this an inappropriate opportunity for recruitment?

The three-alarm meteor shower that kicks things off reveals itself to be a full-on hostile extraterrestrial colonization attempt just when guilt-ridden Staff Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart, well-cast, oddly enough) was supposed to be retiring from service following a tragic “tough call” which cost the lives of several members of his company in a curiously unspecified foreign conflict. Massive destruction is thus occasionally interrupted by portentous gossipy grumbling about Nantz’s lethally neglectful leadership, leading up to the token grossly overwritten bathetic monologue in which Nantz explains his actions and regains the confidence of his fellows. The attempt to generate some character development is noble enough, but what screenwriter Christopher Bertolini contrives is so generic that it mostly feels like draggy distraction from questions like why has no one mentioned nuclear bombs yet, or where’s our ubiquitous snarling explosion movie go-to girl Michelle Rodriguez… Oh wait, there she is!

Reunited with cinematographer Lukas Ettlin, the pair having teamed up previously for Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, director Jonathan Liebesman evokes the chaos of battle through jittery camerawork and aimless fidgeting with the zoom. The gunplay and scurrying is at least fairly coherent, and there’s a pretty nifty bit where Nantz fools a flying alien drone by having it follow a bunk radio signal. There’s also a memorable sequence involving some sloppy, syrupy alien surgery, preceded by what’s easily Bertolini’s finest piece of dialogue, given to an attractive civilian (Bridget Moynahan) and potential love interest for Nantz in the inevitable sequel: “Maybe I can help. I’m a veterinarian.” The aliens of course never utter a word, not even in alien, so you’re waiting in vain if you hold out for their leader to mount the Griffith Observatory and announce that they’ve come to liberate us.

Open House: The Kids Are All Right

For having been together for the better part of two decades, the ever-searching-for-organic-harmony aspiring garden designer Jules (Julianne Moore) and her no-nonsense Dr Nic (Annette Bening) are faring well. We meet them during what seems like a spell of marital routine fatigue, yet there’s a sense that neither is willing to go too long without attending to the other’s needs, whether that manifest through Nic giving Jules space to work through her spiritual issues or Jules performing cunnilingus on Nic while she watches hunky guy-on-guy porn, a quirk that makes for what’s surely the movies’ funniest lesbian love scene.

Their teenage kids, meanwhile, are more than all right. Sure, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) hasn’t yet found his calling and is into homoerotic wrestling with a homophobic moron, while seemingly straight-laced Joni (Mia Wasikowska), readying herself for college, goes behind the moms’ backs to track down the siblings’ biological dad, but such minor transgressions reveal a perfectly healthy curiosity and robust sense of good will. So the stakes in The Kids Are All Right arise not through perilous character flaws or insurmountable familial feuds, but rather through the accumulation of smaller tensions as its story builds, specifically from the introduction of mystery sperm donor Paul (Mark Ruffalo) into the family dynamic. A sexy, scruffy restaurateur with a habit of avoiding interpersonal commitments, Paul’s intrigued by his new friends, by the unexpected possibility of being a genuine dad, and, just maybe, by the even stranger possibility of luring Jules away.

Director/co-writer Lisa Cholodenko chronicled women shedding off stolid conventional lifestyles to explore the cultural fringe in High Art and Laurel Canyon. With The Kids Are All Right she now seems interested in seeing what happens when seemingly unconventional lifestyles have become entirely domesticated. Make no mistake, this is a movie about family values that actually values family. Beautifully captured through sinuous, sun-soaked, hand-held photography that seems always alert to the nuances of its superb ensemble, this film’s group portrait is warm, fun, and complicated, its politics left entirely implicit so that these characters can behave like real people instead of mouthpieces—if the film can do anything to persuade its opponents that gay marriage represents any sort of scourge to society, it’s by letting this particular gay marriage simply exist up there on screen, warts and all.

Moore and Bening are so good together that they can be bad to each other without our feeling as though their conflicts are dramaturgical conceits. When called upon to explain the kick they get from guy-on-guy porn, Moore mumbles something about the inauthenticy of most ostensible lesbian porn being an unsexy distraction, but there’s no such distractions to be found in the employment of these two famous actresses, both of them married to men, playing a lesbian couple. Like Hutcherson and Wasikowska, they graciously fail to comment on their sexuality. They focus rather on enriching the storytelling by giving the fullest possible life to these characters, whose dialogue, it must be said, isn’t always very good, and occasionally slips into cliché. It’s no slight to say that Cholodenko’s casting often trumps her writing since this story’s eloquence is in the unspoken aspects of its interactions.

Ruffalo is wonderfully passive-aggressive as the interloper, soft-spoken, entirely sympathetic, yet often on the defense. “I’m a doer,” he says in response to his lack of education. “I’m funny that way, I guess.” It’s unfortunate that Paul gets sort of abandoned in the final act, because in the first two-thirds he’s treated as an equal within the film’s ensemble, developing, making discoveries, and having scenes all his own, entirely outside of those pertaining directly to the family. Moving as gracefully as it does from one busy, diverting and thorny sequence to another, The Kids Are All Right only starts to reveal its shortcomings in this last section, when it starts to abruptly, somewhat forcedly shut all those doors it previously left wide-open as it searches for resolutions that aren’t entirely needed. So we should see this film not to anticipate closure but to bask in its transitory pleasures, which are plentiful. Kids grow up and leave home, bachelors get middle-aged and anxious, marriages get knocked around and need time to regain their senses. Sometimes you just have to enjoy the fleeting chaos before it all passes you by.

Absence makes the art go yonder: The Missing Person on DVD

John Rosow (Michael Shannon) used to be NYPD, now he’s a Chicago PI and a strong candidate for a DUI. He’s woken from some state close to comatose by the proverbial ringing phone, requesting his services to tail someone all the way down to LA. Initially the gig seems conspicuously easy, with the subject hiding in plain sight, taking the train, not bothering to disguise the fact that he’s a middle-aged white guy traveling with a handsome Mexican boy. Things gradually become more arduous. The technologically impaired Rosow has to buy a phone that takes pictures from a gentleman named Boo Boo (Mark Ventimiglia), pay a Serpico-obsessed cabbie named Hero (John Ventimiglia) $500 to let him hitch a ride in his trunk, and ward off the amorous attentions of an altogether fetching cougar named Lana (Margaret Colin) who sleep-talks to her mother about blueberry pancakes. But nobody told Rosow switching professions in your mid-30s would be easy.

Writer/director Noah Buschel’s The Missing Person is loaded with pronounced eccentricities, but its also loaded with amiable, detailed performances, thanks to an impressive cast of film, television and theatre veterans who unanimously seem to jive with Buschel’s kooky, decidedly unhurried neo-noir. Genre tropes are dusted off and tickled back to life, with Rosow regularly knocked unconscious, dreaming of some lost lover, or trading banter with good-cop/bad-cop feds who mysteriously turn up in the motel parking lot. At times it’s a little cute, a little cartoonish, all the coffee and jazz and smokes and booze and abundant anachronisms. Personally, I like coffee and jazz and booze, but besides it’s all leading somewhere, all in the service of a thoughtful narrative arc that exchanges noir’s foundations in postwar despair for a post-9/11 dispersion. This is a story about going missing, staying missing, and liking it, about being missing as a state of grace, and helping others to disappear for their own good.

None of which screams box office gold, I suppose, and thus, in this country anyway, The Missing Person makes its debut at your local video store rather than your local cinema. It plays well on TV, even if Ryan Samul’s HD imagery is a little annoyingly heavy on ostentatious filters. It also plays to the strengths of Shannon, an actor whose very particular peculiarities won him an Oscar nod for Revolutionary Road, not to mention plum nut-job and/or jerk-off parts in films by William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, and Werner Herzog. He’s really quite ideal for the strange, haunted, lumbering hero of The Missing Person, so withdrawn he could initially be mistaken for the title character. Shannon shuffles and groans through most of the film. I had to laugh at certain shots that play out with the sole item on the soundtrack being Shannon’s amplified wheeze. But it’s a wheeze with a soul, from a face like yesterday’s unrefrigerated lunch. Despite intermittent voice-over, we learn only fragments of Rosow’s past, but we finally know everything we need to know just by spending time with Shannon’s sardonic grin, bleary confusion, and seemingly outsized figure. They speak of a primal wound, one we can trace back to Philip Marlowe, to Jeff Bailey, or to Al Roberts. It’s a feeling that transcends time and genre, even when the setting is as winky as this.

Parental misguidance: Mother and Child

Now in her early 50s, Karen (Annette Bening) still lives with her mom, a reticent woman with vacant eyes, housebound and it seems not long for this world. Karen works as a physical therapist for the elderly. We know Karen had a child at 14 whom she gave her up for adoption. We hear the maudlin unsent letters Karen still writes to this daughter she never knew, and we sense that there’s something terribly sad about this woman who forfeited her opportunity to care for a child so that she could spend her life caring for the aged. Karen is socially impaired, lonely, angry, and wears dumpy clothing. She’s unkind to her housekeeper. Still, she’s weirdly sympathetic. You wish her the best.

Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) by contrast has turned her own difficult, controlling nature into something of a social asset. She’s a reputable lawyer, fiercely independent, without any familial ties, very self-assured, beguilingly attractive, sensual without sentiment. She’s seduces her not-easily-seduced new boss (Samuel L. Jackson) in a heartbeat, and nabs her dopey married neighbour as a side dish. It’s no mystery that Elizabeth is Karen’s daughter, and the fact that they both inhabit Los Angeles, that they both inhabit this movie, conspicuously titled Mother and Child, prompts us to speculate how they’ll eventually reunite. That such expectations are never fulfilled in any sort of obvious or predictable way is a testament of sorts to the storytelling skills of writer/director Rodrigo García.

But García’s feats of plot-twisting slight of hand also constitute all that’s finally most frustrating and annoying in Mother and Child. Much like the work of its executive producer, Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu, the movie betrays it’s finer qualities in an over-extended final act riddled with blasts of dramatic irony that feel as contrived as so many earlier scenes feel honest, thoughtful, and highly attuned to the peculiar and unnerving ways we negotiate our relationships. There’s a third storyline here, involving Lucy (Kerry Washington) and her attempts to adopt a child, and the presence of this seemingly unrelated thread should, I suppose, be a major tip-off to the sort of Paul Haggisy, too-neatly tied-up ending we’re slowly moving toward.

The restraint exhibited in certain exchanges between characters, exchanges that often resemble interrogations, is striking. The bits of dialogue whittled down to the bone, sometimes down to simple declarations, are intriguing. Editor Steven Weisberg has an immaculate sense of when to exit a scene, which is to say he always leaves as early as possible, yet never too soon. The performances are uniformly inviting while never being ingratiating. Bening and the exceptionally perfectly cast Watts are never more watchable than when seemingly trying to push others away. Jackson, in bow-tie and glasses, with graying beard, and Jimmy Smits, who plays a cuddly, baffled love interest for Bening, are effortlessly endearing in their inability to resist these pushy, off-putting women, the sort of flawed but resilient mother figures who form the core of García’s world view. There’s so many appealing aspects to Mother and Child, so many items to lure us in, that the over-calculated series of last act revelations, all timed to go off in rapid, numbing succession, to ostensibly give the audience its big emotional release, become a major let down even if you see them coming a mile away. I just lauded Weisberg for his judicious trimming, but there’s one additional cut he could have made that might have saved the whole movie, one that would have occurred right at the end of that scene were Watts drops off a letter at the adoption agency, the scene that assures us that everything is changing, when there still remained a balance of ambiguity and conclusiveness in keeping with all that’s most eloquent and memorable in Mother and Child.

Roaming the wilderness of cities, time, and the vagaries of the film industry: The Exiles on DVD

Homer (Homer Nish) leans against the storefront window, his large head with its meticulously greased-back pompadour literally haloed by liquor. He’s just received a letter from back home, which he opens to read. While the film is heavily reliant on voice-over, repeatedly juxtaposing the disparate internal and external lives of its characters, it’s among the film’s masterstrokes that no voice-over is used here, in the very moment we most expect it. Yet Homer’s letter is, in a purely cinematic sense, read to us. As he unfolds the pages we’re taken from this neon-lit strip in Bunker Hill to a sun-beaten pastoral scene in Valentine, Arizona, where Homer’s family gathers beneath a tree near the shack we presume to be their home. There’s singing and dialogue, but no subtitles. We’re momentarily immersed in the distant world Homer mentally revisits during a pit-stop along yet another night on the town, getting drunk, gambling, maybe looking for a fight. There’s nostalgia in Homer’s voice-over for a time when Native Americans were nomadic and lived off the land, and implicit in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) is the notion that this tradition continues in some bastardized form, where wandering is limited to the confines of a neighbourhood literally on the verge of being condemned, and the land being lived off is comprised of the disposable consumer fruits of modern mass production. Like the climactic scene in which Homer and his friends drive up to Hill X—today’s Dodger Stadium—to play drums, get wild, and keep drinking, the bar-hopping reads as a distorted updating of once revered traditions.

Kent Mackenzie in production on The Exiles

Nearly 50 years on, The Exiles, which never received theatrical release until last year, still feels singular, ahead of its time and ours, and not only because of its bold blurring of documentary and fiction, its use of non-professional actors to tell their own stories in staged—and gorgeously photographed—scenes. As Native American filmmaker Sherman Alexie emphasizes in the informative and hugely entertaining audio commentary, “I guarantee this was the first time in a motion picture you saw Indians in khakis, getting gas!” (Alexie also draws attention to such timeless items as the sense of mischief particular to Native American culture and the inexplicable persistence of “weak Indian moustaches.”) Fully integrated yet unmistakably Other, wearing the clothes and driving the cars and listening to the music of white Americans yet existing in a defiantly separate realm, the characters who inhabit The Exiles emerge from behind the veil of social invisibility and genre film stereotype, not for the purposes of liberal hand-wringing but to tell their own stories, or rather provide a complex and resolutely unresolved portrait of a problematic community. Thanks the Milestone’s superlative new two-disc package of The Exiles, which contains several additional works from Mackenzie, who died in the midst of a frustrated career in 1980, we can begin, however belatedly, to appreciate the themes that reside at the core of Mackenzie’s compressed oeuvre. His was a cinema of community. Above all, he seemed to cultivate a sense of place. And a sense of place is not complete until you convey a sense of how that place is shaped and made relevant by the people in it.

The Exiles follows three characters, each of them Native Americans relocated to Los Angeles after being raised on reserves, over a 12-hour period. Two of them—the men—go out for a night of revelry, the third—the beautiful, quiet and very pregnant Yvonne (Yvonne Williams)—out for a movie and, later, the company of a girlfriend. We glean something of their personal philosophies through the voice-over track that glides between them, but their portraits are only completed by Mackenzie’s ongoing movement between close-ups and wide shots of the city that looms over them. The evocation of Bunker Hill Mackenzie provided was sufficiently striking to be included in Thom Andersen’s monumental documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (03), excerpted on the Exiles set, in which Andersen paid tribute to Mackenzie conveyance of how “different social realities coexist without touching each other.” Mackenzie’s early short, the elegant and touching ‘Bunker Hill 1956’ (56), also included here, laid the groundwork for such urban commentary by collecting the testimonies of three residents of this once affluent enclave which gradually became a haven for the pensioners and visible minorities. By then Bunker Hill was already slated for demolition and Mackenzie’s short functioned as a form of protest, a demand for affordable housing instead of throwing residents into further exile and destroying a vast expanse of architectural history. In ‘A Skill for Molina’ (64), Mackenzie by contrast applauds a federally-funded skill development program that allowed this documentary’s titular WWII vet and father of nine to gain a trade as a welder. Yet here too Mackenzie’s deftness with ambiguous understatement can be found in a montage sequence that shows Molina cutting each of his children’s hair—he had earlier took courses in hairdressing, but had to stop when he ran out of money.

Other highlights in Milestone’s set include an episode of ‘Leonard Lopate’ featuring the Exiles’ official “presenters” Alexie and director Charles Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep (77), while not directly influenced by The Exiles, was also successfully re-released by Milestone two years ago and now feels very much like a continuation of Mackenzie’s project. It begs the question: who’s continuing this work today?

Tripping over clues, while dreams go up in smoke: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Speaking of the end of the sixties (see preceding film review)... When we catch up with the Southern California counterculture at the start of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (Penguin, $35) the rust has already started to eat away at the carburetor. It must be early 1970 from the sound of things. Manson’s going to trail. Cambodia’s getting pummeled. Drugs are getting uglier. Funkier Los Angeles is well on route to becoming a grid of massive real estate developments. Permanently groovy Gordita Beach private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello, meanwhile, is getting a visit from his past that will prove more tumultuous than a mere flashback, however extended. His ex-girlfriend Shasta appears at his door one night with something like a job, something about a billionaire named Mickey Wolfmann who she appears to be in love with, who takes a lion’s share of the responsibility for the aforementioned real estate development binge, and who might just be about to get kidnapped. The whole thing makes Doc instantly nervous despite his wealth of first-hand experience with danger. “Doc had outrun souped-up Rolles full of indignant smack dealers on the Pasadena Freeway, doing a hundred in the fog and trying to steer through all those crudely engineered curves, he’s walked up back alleys east of the L.A. River with nothing but a borrowed ’fro pick in his baggies for protection, been in and out of the Hall of Justice while holding a small fortune in Vietnamese weed…” But still. If hippy telepathy counts for anything he’d better steel himself for some unusually not-so-good vibrations, a process which, like every other process in Doc’s daily doings, generally involves getting high. Perhaps a horoscope will be consulted.

Two related movies. In director Robert Altman and screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s iconoclastic and satirical adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s greatest novel, The Long Goodbye (1973), private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself transplanted from the 1950s to the 1970s, where his once unshakable code of ethics dissolves in a post-hippy haze. In the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (98), a wildly imaginative pastiche that leans heavily on Chandler’s legacy, a pothead bowling fanatic and relic of the 1970s who actually calls himself the Dude finds he’s roped into playing private detective after the theft of his favourite rug during the 1990s. Pynchon’s Doc exists in a curious realm somewhere between these two film-based-on-literary protagonists. He lives in nearly the same the milieu of the former while guiding his actions by what feels like virtually the same philosophy as the latter. Unlike either he’s not an anachronism but is rather perfectly in keeping with the spirit of his age, and that spirit and its sticky residue are to a considerable extent the real subject of Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s first and, to say the very least, irreverent attempt at the mystery genre. From what I could keep track of in my reading the mystery plot does basically hold together, but it’s gleefully obscured by a tangled web of cultural observation and critique manifesting in near constant digressions. It’s pleasantly meandering, obsessively detailed, probably over-written, at times poetic, and quite often extremely funny. Funny in that zany, busy, baffling, conspiracy-laden, pop culture-crazed Thomas Pynchon kind of way. (If you’ve read him—greatest hits include V. and Gravity’s Rainbow—you know what I mean.)

The elusive Mister Pynchon, circa a hell of a long time ago

Doc covers a lot of ground, not only in Los Angeles but Las Vegas, too. He visits a massage parlour called Chick Planet, where queries about certain sought after figures are responded to with counter-questions such as “Far out. Does he eat pussy?” He patronizes several disparate restaurants where the servers seem always to be warning their customers against eating the food. He visits his cousin Scott Oof, drummer in a band called Beer, and a friend who’s on the verge of discovering the internet in its nascent form. He visits a luxury home with lighting design by James Wong Howe. He gets into a car driven by an insane young woman named Japonica he was once paid to find and is pulled over by cops belonging to a special squad called Cultwatch. He enjoys a rare sighting of the Golden Fang, a schooner that miraculously survived the Halifax Explosion, was later purchased by a blacklisted Hollywood movie star, was later still used for anti-communist activities in the Third World. All the while there is this ongoing tension with regards to Doc’s autonomy—is he picking up clues or simply being led along a path designed by unseen agencies? Of course Doc’s paranoid, but often with reason. He’s a private dick—not a gumshoe but, as one character suggests, a “gumsandal”—and thus a natural outsider, and maybe a pawn of the LAPD, who’ve taken to farming out their dirty work. In any case, Doc’s being perpetually adrift in fogs both literal and figurative is the running joke of Inherent Vice, but it’s also the meat of it. As Endless Summer turns into endless bummer Doc slowly emerges as a lonesome, damaged emblem for a generation whose dreams of fun, freedom, tolerance and respect for privacy, however wishful or misguided they may be, are exploited and finally dashed altogether by the rise of corporate power and ubiquity. Pynchon has a great old time poking fun at Doc’s lifestyle and philosophy, but under all the farce lies a genuine melancholy nostalgia for a time when such dreams could even by conceived.

By the end of Inherent Vice, even mellow old Doc might be getting hardened to the way the tide is turning. “I should trust only good people?” he asks his pal Denis (pronounced, incidentally, to rhyme with penis). “Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.” But Pynchon at least mercilessly leaves Doc in a state of meditative suspension, of unknowingness that’s relatively comfortable, driving in yet another fog, singing along to ‘God Only Knows’ on the radio, with more than a half a tank of gas and an almost full pack of Kools, feeling ready enough for whatever might happen.

Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro's variations on a theme always amabile, rarely animato

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s most widely admired novels, such as The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans or his most recent, Never Let Me Go, memory’s vice grips conspire with some essential inward tendencies within his narrators to gradually reveal intricate discrepancies between the personal story being relayed and the larger story of the world surrounding. Unreliable narrators constitute a well-mined trope in fiction, but Ishiguro has raised it to a highly particular, melancholy art though crisp, concise language, inventive narratives, a sly manipulation of genres as varied as science-fiction and mystery, and, most especially, an unusual willingness to immerse himself so fully into the minds of his protagonists. I’ve pretty much adored everything he’s written, and greatly admired its daring variation, so I guess I’ve set the bar pretty high.

Still, with Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Knopf, $29.95), Ishiguro’s first story cycle, I began to wonder if the one literary boundary Ishiguro’s genius can’t quite traverse is the one that separates the needs of long-from from the short. The stories in Nocturnes are each perfectly absorbing and worth the relatively brief investment required, but taken either as separate components or as a whole—which is presumably the author’s intention—they never quite ascend to Ishiguro’s established heights of emotional complexity. As with all Ishiguro’s work, these stories—of vagabond third wheels trying to interpret the cryptic tensions that exist between couples; of musicians who never quite make it as big as they’d hoped; of lives in stasis contrasted with lives in upheaval—observe the precariousness of nostalgia and the pitfalls of poor communication with knowingness. The problem might simply be that few of these characters truly come to life so as to make that knowingness resonate deeply.

In ‘Crooner,’ Jan, a cheerful young Polish guitarist living in Venice, plays for tourists on the piazza circuit, one of whom being Tony Gardner, a 60ish, once-famous American vocalist. He asks Jan to play backup during a moonlight serenade for Garnder’s wife Lindy. They discuss strategies for injecting specificity of feeling into one’s performances, cultivating those unuttered mental images that imbue one’s playing with texture. What Jan has in his mind—memories of his mother taking consolation in Gardner’s records during bleak days in Communist Poland—differs greatly with what Gardner has in mind—memories of a marriage that for his wife has essentially been a career move. Jan says of his playing: “I tried to make it sound like America, sad roadside bars, big long highways, and I guess I was thinking of my mother, the way I’d come into the room and see her on the sofa gazing at her record sleeve…” Each is lost in private, disparate reveries, but if Jan’s reverie is slightly clichéd, I can’t say I ever bought into Gardner’s story at all. Like a number of the larger-than-life Americans found in Nocturnes, he feels like a conceit.

Lindy Garder however is more developed, particularly since she’s able to return later in ‘Nocturne,’ the fourth story, which—get this—finds Steve, a struggling Los Angeles saxophonist, agreeing to allow the rich man who stole his wife from him to pay for Steve’s plastic surgery, a dubious effort to help forward the unhandsome session player’s lagging career. Steve winds up spending his post-surgery rest period in the posh hotel where he meets the slightly older, rather convincingly batty Lindy, who’s just gone under the knife for the third or fourth time. There are several moments in Nocturnes where Ishiguro, who mastered a Kafkaesque comic vernacular in his underrated The Unconsoled, strains for laughs. But once Steve and Lindy meet, the both of them traipsing around the hotel in the middle of the night with their heads wrapped in bandages, at one point trying to retrieve a stolen trophy from the bowels of a roast turkey, I have to hand it to Ish: this stuff is pretty hilarious. And it cries out for a younger Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, say, to do the movie version.

But in ‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’ similar hi-jinx are thwarted by an uncertain tone or too much repetition. Middle-aged university pals reunite. They’re so comfortable with each other that they can insult each other and, despite protests to the contrary, insist they know what the other is thinking to increasingly absurd degrees. Basically, they don’t listen to each other. This not listening goes on for a while. Again, Ishiguro holds things together. He never betrays the basic traits with which he’s endowed his protagonist—though he does, rather improbably, have him imitate a dog. But what he has endowed his protagonist and his narrative with here is pretty limited, even for a short story. The more serious ‘Malvern Hills’ is similarly founded in a solid premise—young English guitarist meets long-married Swiss tourists so oblivious to each other they don’t seem to exist on the same planet—that doesn’t arrive at a very satisfying resolution.

Which leaves us with ‘Cellists,’ the collection’s final and in some ways strongest tale, partially because while being written in Ishiguro’s customary first-person, the narrator is telling the stories of other people who remain sufficiently enigmatic as to make us wonder about what really transpired between them and where their paths led them in the shadow years after the story finishes. It concerns Tibor, another talented young musician from another Eastern European country—Ishiguro’s quite sensitive to the distinctive experiences of Eastern Europeans who fall under the spell of Western music—whose taken under the wing of Eloise, another American musical celebrity—or at least that what Eloise advertises herself as. Eloise is a fascinating question mark, existing on this strange frontier where it’s hard to distinguish between what passes as lived-in wisdom and as pure fantasy. Her true nature is fundamentally unknown to us, yet what we do know about her are details so carefully arranged that we leave the story wanting to know more without feeling we’ve been ripped off.

A troubled, nearly transcendent duet: The Soloist

The based-on-true-story premise reads as pretty pedestrian. LA Times staffer crashes his bike, bashes his head, runs into a homeless head case and secretly virtuosic cellist, and hits upon a knockout idea for his column. Good copy leads to friendship, which leads to second chances, increased public awareness of homelessness, and so on. But The Soloist plumbs deeper into interdependence and responsibility than such cynical synopsizing lets on. It does indeed deliver the (feel-)goods, but what it lets us feel good about is failure, fleeting victories, and unnerving ambiguities.

Nathaniel Ayers wears some crazy duds, including a jacket with a patch on it that reads VISITOR. This seems apt as Nathaniel’s P-Funk-hits-the-skids outfits and erratic, verbose behaviour can render him otherworldly to amused passersby. Yet VISITOR can also be construed as ironic, given that Nathaniel’s one of 90,000 homeless people in Greater Los Angeles, a population that may not have an address but is hardly just passing through. Jamie Foxx’s performance as Nathaniel is immersive and specific. He grants Nathaniel his rightful charisma without being needlessly ingratiating. We come to care about Nathaniel terribly, but, despite the misguided efforts of director Joe Wright—more on that in a moment—we're never fooled into thinking we can fully comprehend his wildly fraught interior world. And anyway, it’s not his story.

Steve Lopez is the journalist, a workaholic in an imploding industry, and our protagonist. As their association thickens, Steve seems to believe he can save Nathaniel from drowning in marginality and madness, and this is where The Soloist, scripted by Susannah Grant from Lopez’s memoir, bucks against formula. Robert Downey Jr. invests Steve with layers of guilt and uncertainty that no amount of energy, column inches or phone calls can ease. With nuances that play out with wonderful clarity across his wearied face, Downey’s is a grounding presence. His desperation never makes a spectacle of itself, but rather burrows into his engaging surface cocksureness and flurry of conflicting desires.

Making a spectacle however seems to be Wright’s overriding raison d’être. I appreciate Wright’s willingness to infuse unabashed emotionalism into his camerawork, but there are scenes in The Soloist that, recalling Wright’s cripplingly show-offy work and penchant for bathos in Atonement, suffer from a lack of trust in the material. Wright tries too hard to externalize Nathaniel’s subjective confusion and bliss, which at its worst apes the third-act psychedelic freak-out of 2001. At times Wright verges on rendering homelessness as tastefully aestheticized and numbingly maudlin. On the other hand, the film’s rhythms are immaculate. The Soloist is partly about the transcendence of music, and, in harmony with this, Paul Tothill’s taut, melodic editing feels utterly inspired.

Take this job and shovel: The Bastards

They wait maybe a dozen together, in ball caps and blue jeans, on a corner near a freeway in some vast, anonymous, mind-numbingly landscaped patch of American sprawl. Employers pull up in hatchbacks and trucks quickly filled with the huddled day-labourers leaping at the chance to dig ditches or collect trash. Negotiations occur in exchanges of broken English and Spanish so minimal as to be comical, never more so than when one boss improbably addresses his impromptu crew of underpaid workhorses as “amigos.” Mexican director Amat Escalante’s The Bastards drops us into the circuit of illegal migrant work, ensuring it’s deeply tedious and, most importantly, that no matter how much these rich gringos and desperate Mexicans interact there can finally be no genuine communication. Exploitation cannot engender friendships. Not on Escalante’s clock.

The Bastards was written by Escalante and his brother Martín, who previously collaborated on their debut feature Sangre (2005). Escalante was assistant director on Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven (05), and an aesthetic kinship is clearly evident here in the lengthy shot duration, often-static camerawork, deadpan humour and dearth of events in any one scene. This is definitely not a bouncy movie, but Escalante utilizes what might feel like Latino art-house tropes with craftsmanship and purpose. When so little happens in any one sequence everything counts: gestures, fragments of dialogue or a handful of actions bloom portentously, and sometimes quite funnily. We’re given just the right amount of digestion time to consider what things might mean before the narrative moves along. And where this narrative moves may surprise you. And then after it surprises you, it suddenly doesn’t surprise you at all.

The polemical core of The Bastards is in one sense simplistic. Policies that perpetuate exploitation, crime, economic disparity, suffering and death are bad. Guns, too, are bad, perhaps especially when in the hands of the young. The final scenes ram these perfectly sympathetic sentiments home with a grand wallop. But the bluntness of the film’s thesis is tempered by the sophistication and wit brought to the shaping of the story and skeletal character development. (And here’s where you stop reading if you want to avoid potential spoilers.)

The Bastards takes the animosity toward these so-called wetbacks invading US soil and toil and compresses it down into a single case of home invasion. Jesús (Jesús Moises Rodriguez) and Fausto (Rubén Sosa), who we first see on the corner with the other guys, with nightfall break into the cozy bungalow of Karen (Nina Zavarin), the single, apparently depressed mother of an uncommunicative teen. Karen’s got a penchant for crack—itself a metaphor for unconscious bourgeois desires to “slum” it—and, alone for the night, is already slumped on the couch and lost in a foggy dream when the boys break in with a sawed-off. Rather than load up on saleables and scoot, Jesús and Fausto ask for dinner and are served by Karen in a scene that almost perfectly mirrors an earlier scene involving Karen and her son. Karen asks if they were hired by John, her presumably monstrous ex, and Jesús blankly replies, “Si. John.” It’s unclear whether or not this is in fact true, as Jesús’ response reads to me as automatic and disinterested and quite possibly a very Mexican bit of mischief. But either way it struck me as revealing, Karen’s assumption that any difficult task performed by a swarthy Mexican must surely have been financed and organized by a rich white gringo.

Jesús and Fausto continue to linger around Karen’s house, and the promise of connection between them and Karen emerges again and again in a series of increasingly intriguing situations. There is even the suggestion that while this woman is obviously terrified, she may also feel that she’s been hurled into the darkest of transgressive fantasies in which the soul-draining effects of her lifestyle are obliterated through the erotic charge of violent class confrontation. The film’s neatly wrapped resolution is unable to process all these provocative thematic threads, but still, as far as heavily politicized home invasion dramas go, this is more imaginative and slippery than Funny Games (97/07).

Over the border and into the bathos

Crossing Over features a cross-section of characters figuratively situated on either side of the US border, people who either want in, want to stay, or want to determine who makes the cut. You’ve got your Mexican mom illegally cranking out textiles for a few bucks to fund a better life for her little boy. You’ve got your affluent Iranian family with its soon-to-be naturalized patriarch and daughter turned black sheep on account of assimilating too fully into the Western model of feminine independence. You’ve got your Chinese family, the parents humbly coveting citizenship while their punk kid scoffs at such a legit entrée into an American dream he’s figured is available only to the Tony Montanas of the world. You’ve got your naïve Islamic teen apologist for the 9/11 hijackers persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech. You’ve got just about everything you could think to throw into a movie about the overwhelming morass surrounding US immigration. Everything except a rounded character, a single plausible scene or even a coherent polemic.

Hopping around Los Angeles to follow several characters as they cross paths and slide into detours, Crossing Over is earnest as all hell, ostensibly muckraking, dramaturgically strangled, and deeply mawkish. In other words, it’s the new Crash—there’s even an actual car crash that brings together, wouldn’t you know it, someone trying to get a green card with someone who approves green cards! So lovely young would-be Aussie starlet Alice Eve winds up screwing shameless old bureaucrat Ray Liotta in a motel room, but at least she cries in the shower afterwards. Meanwhile senior migra Harrison Ford goes on a private crusade to protect an abandoned child and immigration lawyer Ashley Judd has to deal with aggressively moronic feds who go ballistic over militant Islamic chat rooms found on annoyingly self-righteous Summer Bishil’s computer. The pervading dumbness reaches its spectacular nadir in a convenience store robbery gone wrong where, after splattering three kids brains all over the walls, Cliff Curtis, in a scene he’s surely praying future-employers will soon forget, delivers a monologue about how becoming an American constituted the greatest moment of his life to a crybaby twit pressing a loaded gun into a terrified innocent’s woman’s skull. It’s so unintentionally funny it’s not even funny.

Writer/director Wayne Kramer (The Cooler), a South African who doubtlessly has some first-hand knowledge of the issue at hand, apparently wants to tell a story about the masks we wear and compromises we make to get by. Perhaps the fundamental problem with Crossing Over is that for so much of the film masks are about all we see. Despite the efforts of a few of the better actors, these characters are crude types, overwrought mouthpieces for a grossly over-calculated scheme. Nothing feels natural, so nothing resonates. Images of crying kids are milked to death. Bizarrely, given the context, the sex and violence feels gratuitous. Bishil’s one victimized facial expression grates. Good intentions only make the whole thing more frustrating to sit through. I’ll say this for Kramer: at least his ambitions are to provoke viewers to reconsider what it means to be a patriotic American. Still, you should see The Visitor instead.