Best-made plans: Criterion does The Killing

The title of The Killing (1956) describes what, in one sense of the word, its characters hope to make, yet, in the more literal sense, it’s what they wind up unexpectedly doing a whole lot of once the machinery of their elegantly planned heist goes awry. This was Stanley Kubrick’s third feature, made when he was just 28. It should be seen as his proper arrival, the first film so charged with the particular brand of irony and almost singular rendering of architectural space that would come to define the director’s signature. Though hardly indicative of the towering and exacting displays of ambition to come—see Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001 (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), et al—The Killing is also nimble and fleet and yielding of cinematic pleasure in a way that Kubrick would never quite replicate. It features camerawork from the great Lucien Ballard and dialogue from hard-boiled author Jim Thompson—the source material is Lionel White’s Clean Break—and a dream cast of actors that read like a film noir rogue’s gallery: Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., Vince Edwards, Coleen Gray, and the unmistakable Timothy Carey. The Killing is now available on a great-looking DVD and blu-ray from Criterion.





Career criminal Johnny Clay (Hayden) has already done a five-year stretch, so he figures if he’s going to risk getting caught again it better be for a whopping payday. Two million, split between a small crew, about fits the bill, so Clay assembles a team consisting of a sniper (Carey), a betting window teller (Cook), a cop (Ted de Corsica), a bartender (Joe Sawyer) and—best of all—a wrestler (Kola Kwariani), who at one point actually has his shirt ripped off before he starts to kick ass, to rob a busy race track. Part of what’s meant to make the plan so effective is that no one player in the operation is able to fully see the whole, but this reduction of a larger machine to its individual parts is also part of what causes it to malfunction. The teller’s younger wife (Windsor) tells her boyfriend (Edwards) about the plan and the boyfriend figures to get in on the take; the sniper loses his patience with a parking lot attendant and fellow veteran (James Edwards), lets fire a racist slur, and is eventually fired at himself.





Moving back and forth chronologically—tellingly, the film was an inspiration for the young Quentin Tarantino—we see parts of the plan play out from different perspective; narrated by an anonymous voice who sounds a little too much like he’s narrating a trailer, it’s as though we’re medical students tracking the paths of a cancer. The cynical masterstroke in all this can be traced to the manner in which Kubrick manipulates the viewer’s emotional connections: by The Killing’s brilliantly staged finale, we’re confronted with the fact that we’re far more invested in the fate of a suitcase full of cash than we are in the lives of several characters. Everything, finally, is grist for the mill. As Clay memorably puts it, inadvertently foreshadowing the general shrugging attitude toward human endeavour in so much later Kurbick, “What’s the difference?”





The supplements on Criterion’s release are terrific, especially the interview with Robert Polito, author of the excellent Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, concerning Thompson’s relationship with Kubrick. (Among Polito’s most interesting insights are the connections he draws between Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and Nabokov’s Lolita, which Kubrick would soon adapt.) But the obvious supplementary highlight on The Killing is Kubrick’s preceding feature, Killer’s Kiss (1955), also a strong, moody noir about a not very good boxer and a girl in trouble, which memorably features scenes of casual voyeurism, lusty television viewing, underwear fondling, more bad voice-over, and a long, messy, dirty fight involving an axe, a spear, and about a hundred mannequins in various states of assembly. It was also shot by Kubrick, who had by then wound down his career as a photographer for Look, and his memorable, seemingly spontaneous street imagery conveys a curiosity about the world that would rarely resurface in his later work.

Closed marriage: Eyes Wide Shut

I hadn’t seen Eyes Wide Shut (1999) since it opened, though in the years since—the years that found me stumbling into criticism—countless friends and colleagues have urged me to revisit the film, Stanley Kubrick’s last and, on the surface, least obviously “Kubrickian.” Films have a way of changing on us while we’re off doing other things, and indeed, coming back to Eyes Wide Shut after 12 years—on the occasion of Warner’s new Stanley Kubrick: Limited Edition Collection blu-ray box—yielded a tremendous amount of interesting detail that I’d either not noticed the first time around or had forgotten. Yet my overall response was exactly the same: Eyes Wide Shut is a fascinating failure, more fun to think about or argue over than to actually sit through, though you’ve really got to sit through it to think or argue about it.

Based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, Eyes Wide Shut—its title evoking both the wilful blindness of marital complacency and the dream state—is a story of re-marriage in which the apparently harmonious coexistence of Bill and Alice, a handsome upper class couple (real-life handsome upper class couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), is disrupted by Alice’s confession of erotic fantasies involving a naval officer. Just as Alice completes her confession, Doctor Bill, now thoroughly tormented, gets called away to attend to the death of an elderly patient. While paying his respects, Bill becomes audience to a second, equally disorienting confession, this one coming from the deceased’s daughter, who explains that she’s always been in love with Bill. Bill flees, eventually finding himself at a jazz club where an old friend plays piano. The friend accidentally lets slip that he’s playing another gig that same night for some clandestine masquerade/sex party and, having learned the password needed to gain entry (Fidelio, or “fidelity”), Bill rents a costume from some pervert who whores out his teenage daughter and attends the event, which seems to be organized by a wealthy cult—the same cult from The 7th Victim (1943)?—and proves more dangerous than he’d anticipated.

Brimming with blemish-free, perfectly groomed, fresh-from-the-gym naked bodies and a parade of women who inexplicably can’t keep their hands off Cruise, Eyes Wide Shut, at times like David Lynch without the flights of imagination, at others like Roman Polanski without the genuine perversity, is not a very sexy movie. It cautions us to the potentially mortal dangers of sexual adventure, dangers that Bill evades partly through the seemingly clairvoyant protective powers of Alice, who, for example, calls Bill on his mobile just as he’s about to engage a prostitute, prompting him to abort the arrangement. The next day Bill finds out that the prostitute is HIV positive; moments later he buys a newspaper bearing the headline LUCKY TO BE ALIVE. Similarly, while Bill’s at the sex party Alice has a dream that nearly parallels his experience, something which, along with the film’s curiously artificial-looking Manhattan, its cryptic coincidences and pervasive use of blue gels and Christmas lights, alludes to the source material’s dreamlike quality without quite ever fully surrendering to it.

There’s something uncertain about the tone of Eyes Wide Shut, and this, along with a preposterously flabby script by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael—a script that finds nearly every question followed by someone repeating the question back to the questioner—and the pause-laden, alternately stiff, strained, or distracted performances from Cruise and, far more surprisingly, Kidman, renders the film turgid and tiring and over two-and-a-half hours long. Not even his champions would characterize Kubrick as a director especially sensitive to eros or love, and one suspects he may have hoped that having a real couple, a celebrity couple, together onscreen would carry its own special charge. But Cruise and Kidman, who divorced in 2001, seem strangely awkward, comfortable with each other’s bodies but not with each other’s presence, and reveal nothing of the particular nature of their relationship—other than, perhaps, this rigid unease—through Bill and Alice. Whatever brought them together or tore them apart, they kept it to themselves.

Death trip: Enter the Void

Central to Enter the Void is not so much a character as a point of view. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American living, loafing and dealing various drugs in Tokyo, is observed relatively little (though for a while we get a rather thorough study of the back of his head) yet is, in the loosest sense, present in every scene. Gaspar Noé uses Oscar’s consciousness as a cinematic vessel: we see and hear what he sees and hears, a device familiar from its fleeting employment in slasher films but, documentaries aside, is rarely used in extended duration, some memorable exceptions being Russian Ark, The Lady in the Lake, and the first part of Dark Passage, whose title could easily be substituted for the one Noé settled on for this, his follow-up to Irreversible and third feature as writer/director/editor/cinematographer/provocateur/

etc.

Enter the Void follows, or rather inhabits, Oscar as he gets profoundly stoned, walks to a nightclub, gets killed, and thence drifts in spirit-form through a narrow network of past and present. His life seems to have consisted mainly of one major source of trauma (his parents’ death in a car accident when Oscar was a child, an event he was present for) and one of comfort (his sister, with whom he’s made a pact to always be together, even after death). It is in any case these items that doggedly haunt Oscar’s afterlife and Noé’s project. Over and over we witness the accident from the backseat, the lifeless bodies, the sister wailing. The memory repeats until it no longer shocks us nor deeply troubles Oscar, the implication being, I suppose, that he’s letting go of earthly woes. Over and over we visit Oscar’s sister (Paz de la Huerta, frequently naked and, less appealingly, screaming), usually while she’s getting laid or dancing in a g-string. Oscar’s protective impulse and incestuous desire for his sister merge into a single focused longing for reunion that finally manifests in a sequence that ushers Oscar toward reincarnation via one particular anatomical dark passage that, it’s probably safe to say, the movies have never taken us through before.

Equal parts mind-blowing and incredibly boring, I can no more deny the tedium of Enter the Void than I can its ingenuity. Maybe that’s just it: displays of ingenuity are tedious, at least when undertaken by artists who seem drawn to nothing so much as their own sublime gimmickry. (To be fair, the tedium is surely more oppressive in the 160-minute version I’ve seen than in the 137-minute version that’s screened in some theatres.) The first half-hour or so, where Oscar trips out to visions of branching galactic veins of pulsating, morphing beauty, where paranoia burgeons and fades, where his buddy Alex (Cyril Roy, oddly charismatic, and giving the closest thing to a two-dimensional performance) comes by to explain the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Noé’s source material), is easily the most engaging and witty section. Noé’s evocation of Oscar’s reeling response to his narcotic cocktail, which includes DMT, is uncanny: anyone who takes drugs for extra-medicinal purposes will recognize the sensations carefully conjured here. But once Oscar goes astral, momentum and insight is largely discarded. Yes, the soaring-over-Tokyo camerawork is wondrous, a milestone even. But Oscar’s a bland cipher, his afterlife hardly the sort anyone truly invested in spiritual questions would choose for such extensive cinematic examination. His posthumous wandering might have worked better as an installation or visionary video game, which it resembles in many respects. Stanley Kubrick and 2001 especially are touchstones, though Noé has yet to muster up even Kubrick’s negligible level of interest in characters. Enter the Void is one hell of a trip, but you may find you’ve come down long before its final fade to black.

Haunted by these images: The Film That Changed My Life

Something happens to us when we try to come to terms with formative experience. Some of us can articulate what constitutes the turning point in our lives. Some slip into reverie. Some are forced to acknowledge that there’s nothing more ineffable than the things that set fire to our imagination. Can something that blows your mind be analyzed? Does the fact that it blows your mind not preclude the inability to do just that? These questions haunt The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark (Chicago Review Press, $18.95). They give you some idea of what works and what doesn’t in this book of transcribed interviews conducted and edited by Robert K. Elder.

Alex Gibney

Some of the selections in The Film That Changed My Life are genuinely surprising, such as Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce on The Godfather, or, most interestingly, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney on Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Gibney tells a nice story about his brief correspondence with Buñuel, and goes some distance toward explaining how he was influenced by Buñuel’s cryptic surrealist techniques while commenting on the intermediary walking scenes in Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: “It’s like finding some random shot as a documentarian, and throwing it in there because it has some kind of power you can’t quite identify.” Elsewhere, The Last Seduction director John Dahl recalls seeing A Clockwork Orange at a drive-in in Billings, Montana. “It was the first time I paid attention to the sets,” he says, which probably tells us something about the cinema of Stanley Kubrick.

Danny Boyle

Many choices however, especially those from directors with a large and familiar body of work, are more predictable—and why wouldn’t they be? And who can blame Peter Bogdanovich if he doesn’t have anything especially fresh to say about Citizen Kane? 8 1/2 changed Henry Jaglom’s vocation from actor to director. Richard Kelly believes that “We get closer to Brazil with each passing week.” Danny Boyle declares Apocalypse Now “a celebration of the destruction as well as a condemnation of its subject matter.” Boyle laments the loss of the sort of quixotic ambitions that could drive a film during Francis Ford Coppola’s salad days. He also claims cinema is fundamentally a medium designed for young men, which I probably tells us something about the cinema of Danny Boyle.

I wondered soemtimes if The Film That Changed My Life mightn’t have been better as a series of magazine pieces. Some of Elder’s choices of interviewees might have seemed less puzzling in that context. (Bill Condon? Brian Hertzlinger?) It also might have forced him to be a more judicious editor. There are numerous repetitions that sound fine in conversation but in print read as mere redundancy. There’s also a lack of spontaneity in some pieces that I can only assume arises from Elder’s insistence on using same questions every time out, whether or not they go anywhere. The best interviews in here are the ones that seem to indulge tangents—that’s when Elder’s subjects, as well as Elder himself, really engage and come to life.

Guy Maddin

I’m happy to report that two of the very best interviews are with Canadians, and I take comfort in knowing that both directors in question discovered the movie that changed their life while channel-surfing late at night for glimpses of accidentally uncensored nudity (something I myself have experienced—is this a Canadian thing?). Had he never seen L’âge d’or, Guy Maddin, a man not adverse to hyperbole, claims that he would have never picked up a camera. “It’s just a love story,” Maddin says, “every bit as surreal as a love story deserves to be.” Atom Egoyan meanwhile is extremely sharp about Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, describing its sculptural qualities, how it emphasized the friction in language and the role of the listener. He also says one thing in particular that nearly sums up the entire book: “We are never more alive, I think, as when we are trying to ascertain our relationship to something which is completely mysterious to us.”

Sins of the father: Harlan on DVD

In the years following the Second World War, Veit Harlan, darling of the Third Reich and director and co-writer of the notorious propaganda film Jew Süss (1940), was twice tried for crimes against humanity and twice acquitted. Felix Moeller’s documentary Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss (2009), now available on DVD from Zeitgeist, is thus less concerned with re-opening the case, so to speak, than enriching our understanding of its consequences by attempting to take measure of that titular shadow, which loomed not only over Harlan’s life, which came to a quiet end in Italy in 1964, but which still looms over the lives of his many descendents. Moeller’s film is less polemic than family portrait, less investigative report than biographical essay. For the most part its value lies in its narrative density, which only accumulates as it goes.

Christiane Kubrick

The Harlan clan forms a diverse and conflicted chorus. On one end of the spectrum we find Harlan’s daughter Maria Körber, who says dad had plenty of Jewish friends so surely he had no anti-Semitic feelings of his own, and who claims that she was forced against her will to cast off her infamous surname when she began her own career in movies—a claim which Moeller situates so as to sound a subtle echo of Harlan’s claim that he was coerced into making Jew Süss, a project “commissioned” by Joseph Goebbels. On the other end we find Harlan’s son Thomas Harlan, who seems to have bore the sins of his father most heavily, who became involved in researching Nazi war crimes and in helping to mount socialist revolutions in Chile and elsewhere. Thomas is probably Moeller’s single-most fascinating subject, his life seemingly one extended, rather flamboyant reaction against his father’s legacy. It’s interesting that chief among Thomas’ grievances is the fact that Veit Harlan returned to filmmaking after his acquittals rather than assume some other profession, as though resigning from filmmaking could have served as a kind of meaningful penance. Of Harlan’s extended family the most notable and articulate testimony comes from his niece Christiane Kubrick, who married the director Stanley Kubrick, who happened to be Jewish, and who, sadly, never managed to fulfill his dream of making a film about Harlan and the German film industry under National Socialism.

Veit Harlan

Chance plays such a haunting role in all this. It suggests that there are two kinds of evil, the kind so potent that it will find an outlet no matter the circumstance and the kind that might never manifest without just the right set of opportunities to prompt it. Harlan’s collaboration could be regarded as an evil of the latter category, which makes the fall-out, for all involved, that much more arduous to draw conclusions from. When rigorously following the threads of the Harlans’ life stories, Moeller’s film is totally captivating. Moeller only runs into trouble when he seems unable to distinguish which threads are most vital to the core of his project—he spends too much time with some of Harlan’s youngest grandchildren, who mostly have little to say, and refers too frequently to scenes from Jew Süss, which, when pried loose from their context can seem misleading. So Harlan is finally a bit overlong and at certain points under-focused, but what’s best in it more than justifies the time invested.

The Man Between: the Cinematheque Ontario celebrates 20 years with the films of James Mason

I’m thinking about that scene in Lolita (1962), the one where Clare Quilty meets Humbert Humbert on the veranda of the hotel where a police convention just happens to be underway. “You have a most interesting face,” Quilty tells Humbert in parting. Yet only minutes earlier he’d told him, “You have the most normal face I’ve ever seen.” That’s James Mason.

5 Fingers (1952)

The Cinematheque Ontario, recently—and, it must be said, lamentably—re-dubbed TIFF Cinematheque, turns 20 this year, and it strikes me at least as serendipitous that among the numerous exciting programmes being unveiled in their newly launched anniversary season, which include retrospectives of legendary directors such as Eric Rohmer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Akira Kurosawa, they’ve made room for a 14-film retrospective of James Mason, the extraordinary actor whose larger body of work I only became exposed to, and only began to fully appreciate, after becoming a Cinematheque member five years ago when I first moved to Toronto.

Julius Caesar (53)

Laura and I arrived in June of 2005, right in the middle of a heat wave and right in the middle of the Cinematheque’s Ingmar Bergman retrospective. We’d just traveled across the country with our aging Mexican poodle, had been through car trouble and illnesses along the way, and had nearly exhausted our finances completely. Nonetheless, a Cinematheque double membership was the first thing we bought with our last bit of cash. It was one of the best investments we ever made. If you’re going to be broke for a summer in Toronto, you might as well spend it watching elegantly projected masterpieces with an enthusiastic and attentive crowd.

Bigger Than Life (56)

It was at the Cinematheque that I first saw Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment (49) and Caught (49). In the former Mason plays a blackmailer, in the latter a kindly pediatrician. It was at the Cinematheque where I first saw Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (77), in which Mason plays a Nazi. And it was at the Cinematheque where I finally saw Bigger Than Life (56), Nicholas Ray’s melodrama about a middle-American schoolteacher and patriarch who’s saved from a death sentence by a wonder drug only to have it drive him off the rails. The material is fascinating and provocative, the mise en scène exacting and so tense as to make you grit your teeth, but its Mason who makes the film so enduringly troubling. With his mid-Atlantic accent, his slightly overwrought cheerfulness and contained superiority, Mason’s Ed Avery is that much more reflective a mirror of postwar American values by so obviously being an outsider, one quietly desperate to fit in, and when he’s gradually transformed from an amiable, humble, hard-working family man into a potentially murderous, ultra-conservative megalomaniac, you never quite buy that it was just the drugs that did it. It was something already there, inside the character and permeating his environment. I believe this sort of transformation, this rigorous persistence of ambiguity, even while working within the confines of the Hollywood studio system, is evidence of Mason’s genius.

North by Northwest (58)

The Cinematheque will be screening all of the above pictures minus the Peckinpah, as well as some well-known favourites such as North by Northwest (58), where we get to see Mason survey Cary Grant’s well-tailored wrong man like he’s sniffing leftovers and stroke Eva Marie Saint’s neck like he’s fitting it for a noose. And of course we get Lolita, which took Mason even farther out on a limb than Bigger Than Life. Mason’s Humbert is rather different from that of Vladimir Nabokov’s source novel, as are so many things, but Nabokov’s own adaptation, realized by Stanley Kubrick, manages to offer a slightly more palatable, if still inky-blackly comic variation on the novel’s pedophile’s confession. (As I get older and begin to re-asses Kubrick, Lolita is starting to look more or more like his best work.)

Lolita (62)

I cannot imagine another actor in this role, not even Jeremy Irons, who played Humbert in the later Adrian Lyne version (97), which corrected certain things while completely screwing up others. It’s the odd sincerity in Mason’s expression and vulnerability in his voice when he urges Quilty to understand he’s about to be killed. It’s his deliciously ridiculous attempt to cha cha cha with the very horny Charlotte Haze. It’s the hoity-toity way he enunciates words like “issue” and “toenails.” Mason’s Humbert, though afflicted with a perverse, crippling nostalgia, is indeed, as Mason’s characters usually are, urbane. He’s also bumbling. He’s nefariously manipulative, yet he’s also somehow innocent, even in the depths of his moral bankruptcy.

Odd Man Out (47)

Mason was born in 1909 in Yorkshire. He studied architecture. He co-authored a book about cats. He led several lives, it seems, before his death in 1984. He was self-effacing, yet his career, which thrived both in the UK and the US, was clearly driven by a tremendous ambition and belief in his particular talent. The Cinematheque’s programme gives a superb assessment of his singular career, and is not to be missed.

Building mood: Hiroshi Teshigahara's tour of the architecture of Antonio Gaudí is a sublime study in strangeness

With its broad, undulating surfaces and proto-Cubist mosaics of broken tile, its membranous mugwump spires and smooth spinal railings, its leaf storm motifs and, most of all, its ubiquity of knotty tree imagery, the work of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí (1852-1926) seems designed to forever inspire pause in passersby, to de-stabilize our sense of passively moving through discreet, utilitarian physical boundaries. When he first laid eyes on Gaudí’s work in the spring of 1959, Hiroshi Teshigahara felt a surge of creative empowerment, later crediting the work with endowing him with an understanding that, like those between shelter and open spaces, the boundaries between artistic disciplines were meant to be questioned. It was a pivotal realization in the development of this most distinctive Japanese filmmaker—and a debt eventually paid in filmic homage.

Antonio Gaudí (1984) is an endlessly striking, audaciously hypnotic, deeply contemplative documentary study of Gaudí’s legacy, which is spread throughout Barcelona and the surrounding countryside: the Santa Teresa School, with its lithe, ovular arches; the Park Güell, with its oceanic outlines, sprawling gardens and serpentine benches; the Casa Batlló, with its skeletal formations that are said to represent the story of St. George and the Dragon; the Church of Colònia Güell, with its cavernous crypt resembling the interior of some massive sea creature; and the great, unfinished Sagrada Família, which has got to be the most tremendously bizarre, subversively sensuous place of Christian worship ever erected. Teshigahara’s cameras explore each of these places, the austerity of the filmmaker’s aesthetic beautifully complimenting the irregular and fantastically intricate aesthetic of the architect.

The film’s comprised almost exclusively of imagery and music, with little in the way of commentary or even titles to interrupt the reverie of looking, scouting, tracing. Context is not developed through biographical, historical or political facts—which can be easily found elsewhere—but rather through revealing how Gaudí’s ostentatious structures interact with the places they inhabit and the people who inhabit them. Among the film’s most inspired depictions of human activity are the images of crowds performing sardana, the ancient circle dance. Curiously, they are depicted without their accompanying music, rendering their motions primordial, trance-like, quite funny.

Above all, with Antonio Gaudí Teshigahara honours his undying awe for his favourite architect through the careful cultivation of a profound sense of utter strangeness, juxtaposing what we see and hear in such a way that it builds up a sort of roiling disquiet. Some of the glacial traveling shots arguably recall the technique of Stanley Kubrick, but more specifically they align themselves with like sequences in Teshigahara’s earlier films, such as those that focus on the weirdly sinister, ever-collapsing sands in Woman in the Dunes (64). There is finally no attempt here to place Gaudí’s work into settings that would make it easily digestible. Teshigahara’s tour of these places is happily resigned to seeing their forms as alien things—and for this reason, Antonio Gaudi makes a terrific double bill with Metro Cinema’s other feature of the week Fantastic Planet (73).

War Inc.: sentimental satire that doesn't take the gloves off... does feature funny poo jokes

I suppose it’s to the film’s credit that War Inc. dispenses with any doubts about its self-identification as broad satire very early in the proceedings. To the strains of a supremely winky spaghetti western strum, corporate hitman Brand Hauser (John Cusack) is seen taking out three Germans in a bar in Nunavut, taking his regular hits of ultra-intestine corroding chili sauce, and taking instructions from a former US vice president and CEO of Tamerlane, a wildly successful weapons manufacturer, over the web-phone while said CEO is seen taking a giant steaming dump. Hauser’s new gig is in war-torn Turaqistan, which is of course a stand-in for Iraq. The ex-VP is of course a stand-in for Dick Cheney, Tamerlane of course a stand-in for Halliburton, and Hauser, with his deep cynicism, digestive problems, shaky hands and increasing weariness, stands in, rather uneasily, for the repressed conscience of the American public, tacit participants in a monstrously ill-fated post-post-colonial experiment, chugging down whatever over-the-counter medication to erase their guilt.

Hauser is charged with the assassination of one Omar Sharif (no, not that Omar Sharif), a romantic, rotund Middle Eastern oil minister whose plans to lay a pipeline through Turaqistan threatens Tamerlane’s monopoly on the ravaged nation’s resources. Hauser’s to enter the country under the guise of overseer of a Tamerlane trade show, an extravaganza replete with chorus girls sporting the corporation’s generously donated artificial limbs and a performance from Central Asia’s biggest pop sensation, the nubile and talentless Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff). The occupation of Turaqistan is the first such military operation to be completely outsourced to private corporations and its time to celebrate.

Sound like a smugly self-satisfying (for Liberals, at least) laugh riot yet? Just wait! Hauser’s operation is soon compromised by the entrance of funny-named Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), a courageous—and foxy—journalist writing for a magazine nobody who lives between New York and Los Angeles actually reads. Hauser’s heart is swollen and his political apathy broken by Natalie’s feisty assertiveness, and though she plays hard to get, her being kidnapped by insurgents who really just want to make arty snuff videos will soon ensure that Hauser will have to save her life and make sacrifices that throw his whole killing-machine lifestyle upside-down. And there’s still the flashbacks that explain why Hauser’s so haunted, because as all moviegoers know, hitmen are really just hardened men in need of a hug.

The notion that War Inc., directed by Joshua Seftel, could function as a bitingly comic, enlightening or enraging commentary on some relevant political topic is so misguided its not even funny. At best it might have been Blood Diamond—the comedy! But really it’s no more politically astute than Grosse Point Blank, the first appearance of Cusack’s endearing hitman character, which, like War Inc., found Cusack contributing as co-scripter and co-producer and, like War Inc., featured a fun sidekick role for his sister. War Inc.’s obvious model is Dr. Strangelove, yet its story, and most especially its hero, are way too mushy-hearted to properly align itself with Stanley Kubrick’s ruthless send-up of Cold War insanity. There are to be sure talented performers at work here, and a few gags are certainly successful (okay, so I laughed at Dan Ackroyd taking a dump on the horn), but the whole is severely side-tracked by its own lack of focus, its excess of cheap potshots, and its ultimate succumbing to the very Hollywood conventions that it should be rallying against.

There’s also the niggling factor of War Inc.’s reliance on a white male American antihero to redeem an otherwise ghastly situation, not to mention the occupied country’s one-dimensional depiction as a grubby wasteland of violent, greedy lunatics. When viewed in this light, War Inc. is in its way exhibits exactly the sort of message the filmmakers are ostensibly rallying against. Ironically, those of us who share the political views of the filmmakers are likely going to be more annoyed by the film than anybody else. Those who don’t share such views probably won’t care.