In high Gere, with nowhere to go: Breathless

There’s this scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) where Jean Seberg holds up a reproduction of a Renoir for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s approval. “It’s not bad,” says Belmondo. “Renoir’s a really great painter,” says Seberg. Belmondo doesn’t budge: “I said it’s not bad.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a little like my feelings about Breathless itself. It formed the crest of the French New Wave. It’s a landmark on several fronts. Godard’s one of our true geniuses. But once you know more of Godard’s work and comprehend his debut’s historical significance, Breathless is finally, by the high standards set by Godard and his peers, not bad. In any case it’s no horrifying sacrilege to me that it was remade some years later, in Hollywood, with way more money, and Richard Gere. Worse things have happened to the movies. And Godard's Breathless is still there for us to see whenever we want.

The other Breathless (1983) was directed by Jim McBride, whose David Holzman’s Diary (1967), was not without its own postmodern ambitions. McBride co-wrote it with Holzman star Kit Carson, who wrote significant parts of Paris, Texas (1984). This Breathless reverses a number of Godard’s configurations: the girl’s a Parisian in America, rather than an American in Paris; the mise en scène’s characterized by flamboyant, art-directed artifice (rear projection, gels that swath entire scenes in one primary colour) rather than guerilla-style filmmaking (which yields its own sort of artifice); it attempts (rather laughably) to justify its characters’ actions, to psychologize them, rather than chalk their violence and betrayals up to genre dictates. Yet it shocked and sort of fascinated me just how faithful the other Breathless is to the story (if not the spirit) of the original, with Gere’s compulsive criminal, now very clearly a sociopath, killing a cop, living on the lam, and even resurrecting several of Belmondo’s gestures, such as his uses for newspapers. Instead of Bogart, he idolizes the Silver Surfer, which I like if for no other reason than every time he reads a Silver Surfer comic Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s magical, woozily beautiful Evening Star bubbles up on the soundtrack. These are for me the best moments in the movie.

But man, there’s something unnerving about Gere talking to himself (sometimes in funny voices, sometimes vaguely ethnic), or singing (Jerry Lee Lewis), or dancing, with such utter, blazing conviction. I mean it. You have to admire it. Gere's on fire here, and it can be tough to watch. You might say that something in his performance, along with aspects of the narrative itself, looks forward to Nicolas Cage and his Elvis-loving Sailor in Wild at Heart (1990), though the latter film is obviously far more focused and confident in its stylistics, even if its particular mania has proved equally divisive. It’s amazing how much of Breathless Gere manages to spend shirtless, the character’s narcissism dovetailing nicely with what would appear to be the actor’s. “I know I’m crazy,” he says. “I can’t help it.” Poor guy. But here's the sticky question: are we actually supposed to like him? It’s hard to tell, and it only gets harder as thing go on. And on, and on. There’s a bit where Gere and the girl get busy in a movie theatre while Gun Crazy (1950) plays behind them. I found myself wishing they’d get out of the way so I could just watch Gun Crazy. At one point we see a bus stop advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum. It’s very apt. McBride’s adoration of cinema’s past lacks the same level of critical inquiry or playfulness we find in Godard (that's a lot to live up to, I know), so his Breathless, however curious an artifact, however weirdly entertaining, feels only intermittently breathless and rather often lifeless.

Die, another Day

A famous American once said there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, but fear itself can be pretty goddamned scary. Apparently when Americans feels fear they instinctively resort to blowing shit up, no matter how unbelievably stupid such actions may be. In the new, longer, dumber and duller version of The Day the Earth Stood Still poor old Klaatu the alien gets pumped with lead before he can even get a word out. His people have studied long to understand our earthly ways, but I guess no one ever told them it was dangerous to be in Central Park at night.

Klaatu arrives in a big misty sphere to serve mankind its eviction notice. We’ve abused this planet long enough it seems, and interplanetary real estate’s at a premium, so out we go in a plague of metallic locusts that can chomp through baseball stadiums without stopping for a breather. Unless of course, like Ebenezer Scrooge, we can convince our executioner of our capacity for change.

After Klaatu busts out of his placenta suit and absconds, rather implausibly, from the military facility where he’s being prodded, he spends a little time on our company. Disguised as Keanu Reeves in a suit—is this really the most inconspicuous shape he could think to assume?—he liaisons with astrophysicist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly). She gives him a lift to some state park where more alien spheres lay waiting to get their Armageddon on. From there it’s off to the home of a Nobel-prize winning biologist (John Cleese) where Klaatu hears Bach. It’s beautiful, he says with genuine awe. Somebody take this guy to a record store! We could speed things along with some Procol Harum.

If the aliens really do come and threaten to kill us all it would certainly not be advisable to show them this movie. Klaatu can resuscitate the dead, make helicopters smash into each other, create ear-piercing noises and get tuna sandwiches out of the vending machines for free—he’s not going to be impressed by these lame special effects, the pointless artificial camera swoops around cars and poorly matched green-screening. He might have a soft spot for kids, granted, but Helen’s stepson is so relentlessly annoying that such a gambit seems doomed to backfire. Helen herself is a total fox, but Klaatu’s libido has apparently been Zenned into submission. So yeah, it’s pretty much hopeless.

The new Day is just as didactic as the old one while lacking all of its fun. Yet director Scott Derrickson seems uninterested in fun anyway. His apocalypse is boring, the overwhelming loss flatly abstract, the menace bland, the story needlessly padded. The original film’s spectral spookiness has been traded in for murky imagery and boilerplate design. Reeves doesn’t help much either. The single thing he needs to do here is change his mind, yet he can’t quite manage it. If they needed a supernaturally handsome, seemingly enlightened but nonetheless otherly-looking famous person to play Klaatu couldn’t they have got Richard Gere? How about David Byrne? Better yet, why not Al Gore? Give him a little software, set him up in Times Square and Bob’s your uncle.

I'm Not There: A mosaic of persona, with each of us in the mix

Save the imminently memorable closing image fade-out, Bob Dylan, or any direct representation of Bob Dylan, is, strictly speaking, nowhere to be found, nor ever mentioned, in Todd Haynes’ new movie, a biopic –or is it perhaps an anti-biopic– about Bob Dylan. Rather, we get a slyly assembled sextet of Dylanesques and Dylanguises: Dylan as a riddle-smith Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), Dylan as Woody Guthrie as a black little kid (Marcus Carl Franklin), Dylan as one Jack Rollins, the remote avatar of troubled social conscience who later finds God and polyester suits (Christian Bale), Dylan as an actor playing Jack Rollins in a mid-60s biopic (Heath Ledger), Dylan as a drug-addled, gender-blending provocateur on tour in England (Cate Blanchett, in the role closest to a recognizable Dylan, circa Don’t Look Back), Dylan as Billy the Kid in hiding after faking his death (Richard Gere). Among the countless conceptual marvels on display here is the forming of a mosaic of personas that collectively embody our collective Dylan, with not a single one of them staking any claims on any sort of definitive biographical portrait. I’m Not There, indeed.

It sounds like a radical exercise in semiotics. It is. (Godard looms over the film as much as Dylan.) It’s about the paradox of a popular artist’s obligation to speak only for himself while also speaking for all of us, and the accompanying schisms this incites between his private and public life. Crucially, it’s about the unavoidability of politics playing into personal expression. But can I please ensure you that it’s also wild and vibrant, often giddily entertaining and funny, and, at it’s very best, absolutely heartbreaking and unexpectedly cathartic. It is also, like anything hoisted up with such vision and audacity, flawed –some parts just work better than others– yet to remove any of its individual parts would render it far more flawed. All this is to say I’m Not There ain’t no Ray or Walk the Line. This isn’t your Auntie Linda’s biopic. But for god’s sake see it already. And take your Auntie Linda along with you. After all, it’s about the 1960s.

Did I mention the tremendous music? I’m Not There is of course not only bursting with it but guided by it. Dylan’s songs, many of his very best, supply the soundtrack just as they inform the shape and tone and playfully baffling hairpin turns of the story. Just like Chronicles Volume One, Dylan’s recent memoir, the film flows along with the restless, associational, merrily anachronistic funk of Dylan’s verse. Thus each of Haynes’ Dylans appear and reappear throughout, prompting one and other, conspiring toward a strangely coherent narrative thread that’s not at all apparent while we’re in the thick of it.

Early on, Franklin’s Woody, at once a reincarnation and a throwback, is taken to task for singing folk songs tinged with nostalgia for the Depression instead of facing up to the problems of the day. Much later, Gere’s Billy will see flashes of Vietnam in the rolling wooded hills he inhabits like some horseback Unabomber. In between, Blanchett assaults audiences with machine gun rock and fends off journalists with razor sharp witticisms, while, in what for me is the film’s most compelling, beguiling and deeply moving section, Ledger copes with romance, marriage (to a marvelous Charlotte Gainsbourg) and family life while trying to maintain a role in the outside world that may just be coming to define himself. Along the way there are concerts, commentaries (by Julianne Moore as Joan Baez!), cocktail parties, and more than one ominous scene of fumbling with motorcycles.

“You never know how the past will turn out,” is one more gem of a line one of these Dylans tosses off, yet it’s at the heart of Haynes’ stratagems. The caveat in the title of Pennebaker’s classic Dylan doc implies a consequence: if you look back, what lies behind you will change, and the path you’re following will change along with it. I’m Not There looks to and reconfigures the past as a way of discovering ecstatic truths about the culture we share as emblemized by this tremendous individual who means something different to everyone. It’s one hell of a hall of mirrors, and one in which you just might find yourself gazing back.

Transitions, transfiguration, splendour: Days of Heaven

When writing about the films of Terrence Malick, it’s difficult not to get caught up in reverie, not only because his films possess such a cherished place in the culture—one continually made the subject of heated critical debate—but because reverie itself holds such an axial position in Malick’s films. They are films that, despite their grandeur, evocation of period and high production values, generally shy away from the narrative pay-offs typical of big movies, instead immersing the viewer in an extremely rare experience of sensual immediacy.

Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), his second Oscar-winning feature as writer/director, at once cemented his unusual approach to filmmaking and, for a time at least, became his unexpected swan song. (He wouldn’t make a third film until 1998’s The Thin Red Line). Following a trio of migrant farm labourers—the on-the-lam Bill (Richard Gere), his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams), who poses as his sister, and his real sister Linda (the extraordinary Linda Manz)—the story settles on an enormous spread of wheat fields overseen by a sickly, shy young farmer (Sam Shepard). The trio works the harvest and finally stays the winter when the farmer confesses his affection for Abby. All this constitutes story, yet what Days of Heaven really deals in is moments, passages, transitions, transfiguration, splendour and the vulnerability of human beings when set against boundless country.

The title’s Biblical allusion is reinforced in numerous compelling ways: Linda’s remarkable, endearingly awkward, heavily accented voice-over, in which she speaks about the Biblical apocalypse while images of smiling travellers under blue skies unfurl; the eventual scenes of fires spreading out of control; the plague of locusts that consume the farmer’s property and are sometimes revealed in close-up with the same attention and awe that Malick bestows upon the characters and objects. Edited to accentuate the film’s poetic sensibility, images shift continually between small details outlining the characters’ emotional stakes and the world with which they’re forced to negotiate.

Though set during the second decade of the 20th century, Days of Heaven carries with it something of the ghost of the 19th, particularly in its undercurrents of philosophy gleaned from Emerson and Thoreau, and in its evocation of man’s uneasy status in a still-new age of machinery, enterprise and expansion. A love triangle gives the film its narrative centre, but another triangle is just as prominent in its thematic core, one drawn between man, nature and industry. The heavenly days are fleeting indeed, their vestiges cradled in the embrace of Malick’s sumptuous camerawork, as fleeting as the harvest season’s magic hour that sweeps across the prairies in so many of the film’s most achingly beautiful scenes.

It’s not only because of it’s key creative talents—Malick, cinematographers Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler, composer Ennio Morricone and the lead actors—that Days of Heaven is such a special film. Shot in the seemingly endless, roadless, Hutterite lands of Southern Alberta with a luxurious shooting schedule, an exceedingly loose observance of union restrictions and granted considerable freedom under the auspices of Paramount, it’s a film that could probably only have been made in that particular window of history, before the demise of director-driven projects, the exploitation of the land and the micromanaged system of filmmaking took hold.

The singularity of the elements feeding into Days of Heaven is something made clear time and again on Criterion’s new DVD, which in my book is probably the single-best single-disc package of the year. The ever-reclusive Malick is unsurprisingly not a collaborator in the film’s extras, but this in no way detracts from their appeal and information. In fact, there are times when great directors make the weakest commentators, as they’re unable to articulate their feelings about work that’s emerged from such a slippery, instinctive part of the creative consciousness. This might go some way to explaining why the audio commentary on Days is so good. Performed by the film’s editor, casting director, production designer and costume designer, the commentary is so rich with anecdote and laid-back analysis precisely because these comparatively peripheral collaborators were simultaneously heavily involved in multiple aspects of the film and able to stand back and see it from a distance. And they reveal countless fascinating tidbits of production history, like how John Travolta and Tommy Lee Jones were originally considered for the roles of Bill and the farmer, how Manz was found living in a laundromat in Manhattan, how Hutterite kids built the row houses for $5 an hour or how the clouds of locusts were created by dropping seeds from the sky and shooting them in reverse.

Of equal interest is a long, thoughtful interview with camera operator (and later cinematographer) John Bailey and a shorter, less articulate, but still fun interview with Wexler. There are also great interviews with Gere and Shepard that deal with their complex interpretations of Malick’s vision and his elusive and sometimes frustrating method of working with actors, not to mention with their own off-camera crushes on Adams. Last but not least there’s a wonderful extract from Almendros’s autobiography that talks in largely layman’s terms about the daring experiments with natural light that endowed the film with its haunting imagery, and an excellent essay by Adrian Martin.