Love and theft: Poison turns 20 on DVD

A boy flies away from his Long Island home after killing his father; a scientist isolates the human sex drive in liquid form, accidentally ingests some and thereby transforms himself into a leper sex killer; a thief is sent to prison and its isolated world of erotic hierarchies: each of the disparate threads of Poison (1991), titled ‘Hero’, ‘Horror’ and ‘Homo,’ are delivered in radically different, easily distinguishable forms (the investigative report-style documentary, the low-budget drive-in 1950s sci-fi melodrama, and the lyrical memoir, respectively), yet are intimately linked by themes of ostracization and longing and interwoven in such a way that each thread reappears with cyclical regularity, loping and looping, creating a kind of narrative vertigo symbolized in ‘Horror’s flashing spiral motif. Todd Haynes’ resourceful and inventive feature debut was derived in part from the novels of Jean Genet and became a landmark for the New Queer Cinema, taking a top prize at Sundance and sparking an unusual career, one that’s allowed Haynes to bring his seemingly anti-populist sensibility to a number of surprisingly commercial, studio-backed products, such as the Douglas Sirk-homage/critique Far From Heaven (2002), the Bob Dylan biographical essay-drama I’m Not There (2007), and HBO’s mini-series adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (2011).

Now available from Zeitgeist in a handsome 20th Anniversary Edition DVD, Poison already conveys much of what would come to mark Haynes’ approach, such as a fascination with ornate structural devices as vehicles for multi-tiered storytelling and the postmodern incorporation of popular cultural iconography (a characteristic that some might argue justifies footnotes). I’ve heard Haynes referred to as an academic or cerebral filmmaker, which strikes me as unfair, though his affection for mannered or even kitschy performances and his brazenly imitative stylistics no doubt encourages such derision. What such comments fail to account for are the spikes of genuine emotional engagement that make key scenes in his movies transcend their self-reflexive strategies: the heartbreaking end of Far From Heaven, the Heath Ledger sections of I’m Not There, the sleepy hand-job or sexy scar display scenes in Poison (displays of outright homoeroticism that many admirers no doubt wish Haynes would return to). Haynes films can feel calculated, but I don’t think they’re cold. Poison reminds us of how far Haynes has come, and just how deliciously unlikely his journey has been.

Tender mercy killings: murderous intentions clog perky postwar spousal calm in Ira Sachs' Married Life, now on DVD

1949, the Pacific Northwest. Buttoned-down Harry (Chris Cooper) is in love with Kay (Rachel McAdams), a war widow apparently one-third his age wearing in her first appearance a conspicuously vertiginous bun in her supernaturally Hitchcock blonde hair. Harry's in love, so Harry needs to leave his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson). But Harry fears the shock will kill poor Pat, and thus Harry figures he’d best beat the grim reaper to the punch and just quietly, mercifully poison her to death. Watching all this from the sidelines and itching for a chance to get in the game is Richard (Pierce Brosnan), Harry’s dapper, dashing old buddy with the sly eyes who wears his hat just so. He offers his cabin in the woods for Harry and Kay to tryst the night away but all the while has his eyes on the prize.

Based on John Bingham’s 1953 novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, which also goes by the decidedly less cagey title of The Tender Poisoner, Married Life ostensibly excavates post-war repression but really works best as a multiple character study and mood piece that bows devoutly in the direction of the filmmakers whose work drew upon the shadow side of that period’s optimistic façade: Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls (or at least The Reckless Moment, that marvelously coded domestic noir) and the aforementioned master of suspense. There’s even a scene in which a fateful decision is made while watching a James Mason movie. Directed by Ira Sachs, this movie, a cocktail of equal parts neo-noir and black comedy, is nicely paced and quite engaging, if rather over-calculated and over-reliant on conventional attitudes toward the era’s conformist principals. But maybe its themes seemed just so 1949, or at least 2002, the year of Todd Haynes’ sublime Sirk homage Far From Heaven—Married Life didn’t have much of a life at the box office. It’s now looking for a new one on DVD.

Married Life's distance from its 60-year-old story becomes critical rather than just temporal by way of pairing its characters’ outwardly dominant traits with their polar opposites. Harry is the picture of the gentle company man and supportive spouse, but he’s fucking homicidal; Pat seems the ever-adoring, erotically undemanding homemaker about to get ditched for a younger sexpot, but truth is she’s a minx who thinks people get married first and foremost to get laid on a regular basis; Richard is the poster boy for elegantly aging sexual nomadism but deep down is getting all choked up about settling down and picking out the curtains with Kay. In every case these potentially too-cute character reversals are given breath and texture by the superb cast, Clarkson especially. Only McAdams feels a bit flat here. Totally hot, but flat. (Just like, to twist an expression, Georgia asphalt.) After seeing her shine in The Lucky Ones, it strikes me as kinda funny that she’s more at home playing a soldier than a soldier’s wife.

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.