Sparring with the past

The extraordinary life of Mike Tyson as vividly described by Mike Tyson in James Toback’s Tyson constitutes a startling essay on American fame, race and sex. Never a well-behaved filmmaker, Toback seems too fascinated, perhaps even in love with his subject to soberly editorialize in the margins of this documentary portrait. Instead, he steers and shapes the film by way of carefully calibrated and provocative juxtapositions. Throughout Tyson the lisping, soft-spoken and now flamboyantly face-tattooed former boxer’s testimony is offered in overlapping images and soundtracks, sometimes featuring Tyson giving multiple divergent responses to the same questions. At first the technique seems like empty flash, but soon it reveals itself as an inspired method of portraiture, resulting in a Rashomon-like poem on human contradictions on a spectacular scale, moving from inspiration and thrills to horror and confusion to an evocation of the purgatorial existence of a man whose meteoric ascent and titanic career sank into the abyss around the age most of us are just getting properly started with our lives.

Great portraits typically dispel myths, yet the closer Toback gets to Tyson the more Tyson’s story feels like myth. Not myth as broad gloss but as dense tapestry of heightened experience that spans the breath of several ordinary lives. Tyson’s movement from an impoverished fatherless Brooklyn youth of raising pigeons, getting brutalized and living in fear; to the discovery of a rage so great as to knock men down and a proclivity for thuggery; to juvenile detention, self-actualization and the great fortune of finding a generous and encouraging father figure; to becoming an unbeatable human juggernaut, heavyweight champion of the world at 21, impossibly naïve about so much, yet with the world’s riches and women splayed at his feet; to rape conviction, prison, countless scenes of public humiliation, ear-biting and isolation: all of these phases are explored in a wholly first-person account illustrated through a wealth of archival footage, culminating in a story of a figure not so much larger than life as stranger than fiction.

Have you all seen Fingers? Because Toback’s 1978 startling directorial debut, which stars Harvey Keitel as a mafia collector with a deeply frustrated gift for music, holds the key to so much of what makes Toback’s work distinctive, vital and repulsive, the self-flagellating fantasy of an unabashed wigger. It also makes a dynamite double feature alongside Tyson. (Mind you, Raging Bull wouldn’t make too shabby a pairing either. Nor would The Wrestler.) What Toback offers us in these films and others—including 2000’s Black and White, which features Tyson in a scary, homophobic cameo as himself—is an excavation of male psyches stunted through punishment and empowerment, their empathy drained through brute force, plagued with an inability to reflect that leads to impotency, a sense of being involuntarily thrust into violence, a hunger to at once dominate and be dominated by women, and the inhabiting of some regressive ideal of blackness, regardless of the race of the subject in question. Films like Fingers and Tyson possess a rare transparency. Grotesque and shamelessly entertaining, they infuriate and intrigue. And of we had a few more movies like them we may just learn something of fundamental importance about how men become monsters. Or perhaps how some of us have to work against our instincts just to not become monsters.

Rough crossing: Sin Nombre

A revved-up hybrid of City of God and El Norte, nurtured and probably tamed by the Sundance Institute, US writer/director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s debut Sin Nombre, or Nameless, may not be as generic as its title suggests, what with its impressive landscapes, its novel and genuinely chilling brutality, and its surprisingly exquisite score (courtesy of Hollywoodland composer Marcelo Zarvos). But this infernal tour of Mexico’s decidedly unfriendly railway lines and its most grotesque nests of rural gang violence is nevertheless an obedient child of Hollywood convention. Amidst all the fighting, fleeing and filleting onscreen, another battle is being waged between a young filmmaker’s vigorous desire to invoke gritty, incendiary realism and increasingly frequent injections of sentimentalist deus ex machina. As we charge toward the climax there’s not much ambiguity surrounding which of these opposing forces will win out.

Willy, a.k.a. Casper (Edgar Flores), at first seems to represent just about the worst thing in his local Southern Chiapas branch of the horrifyingly vicious Mara Salvatrucha, founded decades ago in Los Angeles. He may not have erased his face with tribal tattoos like the gang’s ultra-scary alpha male leader—who provides us with the creepiest image of parenthood since Mike Tyson graced the Father’s Day issue of GQ—but as we meet him he’s ushering in a new member that still looks a couple of years shy of puberty. Sure, Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer) may have ended up in Mara Salvatrucha anyway, but if Willy didn’t recruit him at such a tender age the kid might have at least had a chance. Smiley’s initiated into their fold in the customary style: he’s ordered to kill an unarmed and terrified member of a rival gang held captive for just such a ritual. Smiley’s victim will soon be chopped up into dog food, just more grist for the mill, but the experience seals Smiley’s fate. Willy, whose tattooed tear is Fukunaga’s little giveaway that he’s really not such a bad egg, will steadily move toward redemption. Things for Smiley on the other hand will only get worse.

Despite the high drama surrounding all that unfolds around Willy, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) will emerge as our real protagonist. Her trajectory will take her from her Honduran village, hopping freight trains northward in the hope of making it all the way to New Jersey, where some family and a presumably better life awaits. Where the movies have more commonly explored the hazards of clawing one’s way onto US soil, the illegal migrants in Sin Nombre are clearly lucky if they even make it that far. Willy and Sayra will cross paths, and once he’s made a violent break with Mara Salvatrucha, Willy will become Sayra’s designated protector, even though she may be in more danger what with Willy’s ex-comrades on his tail. There could even be a love interest here, but you have to give credit to Fukunaga for steering clear of cursory romance in the midst of a story to desperate and blood-soaked to really make room for it. It’s one of the few deviations from cliché Fukunaga manages to hold onto.

With its images of migrants clinging to nocturnal trains like flies on a wounded animal, Sin Nombre leaves a deep impression, a sense of the trail of fear and ambition that branches off into the distance far beyond the relative serenity of the US/Mexico border. Above all, we’re given here a striking portrait of a world still on the move against all odds, of the Americas as a largely lawless wilderness where shelter is either absent or shrouded in bureaucracy and the worst kind of opportunism is able to flourish. In a way it’s almost a better documentary than it is a drama. It makes you wonder how Fukunaga will distinguish himself from here on out. Outsiders have often made great storytellers, but this gringo brought just a little too much luggage with him on his travels south.

Hot Docs 2009: strange weather, slow death, violent crime, and private confessions

To say there was something electric in the air this year as North America’s largest documentary film festival commenced eleven days ago would be more than a mere platitude. Springtime is typically fraught with electrical storms in Southern Ontario, but the charge felt during the first night of Hot Docs 2009 was generated most prominently by the new film from Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, whose Manufactured Landscapes made such a deep impression both at home and internationally after premiering at Toronto’s other major festival back in 2006.

Act of God uses stories of being struck by lightning as a foundation for meditations on our urge to invest meaning in the most seemingly random events. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that the film feels a little random or rootless itself, but while frustrating desires for a more unified thesis and deliberately ignoring any exploration of the science, it delivers some enlightening profiles and, best of all, a duet of sorts between novelist Paul Auster, who eloquently recalls his experience of witnessing another child’s death by lightning during summer camp, and guitarist Fred Frith, who improvises a magnificent performance meant to invoke the primal drama of a tempest billowing over the landscape.

The equation of death and nature was also central to Swiss filmmaker Peter Liechti’s The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy, where heavily associational images accompany the story of a man who ventured into the wilderness to commit suicide by starvation. The voice-over reading of the man’s journal—the English version comes courtesy of Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler—alternately chronicles bodily collapse in increasingly disturbing detail, offers hints of the life he left behind, and muses on the bizarre choice of method, fasting in solitude ostensibly being the best way to witness the process of one’s own death. Based on a novel inspired by the real event, yet visually realized through a bank of images that feature no actors or recreations, The Sound of Insects playfully haunts the frontiers of documentary and fiction. It’s chilling, funny, hypnotic, and totally draining.

Private confessions are similarly the driving force behind Canadian filmmaker Alison Rose’s Love at the Twilight Motel, which features interviews with various clients of a pay-by-the-hour Miami love nest, many of whom are disarmingly lucid and affecting. The repellent yet admirably frank adulterer and closet junky who wants to protect his wife’s innocence; the Cuban massage therapist who feels it’s his duty to service sexually dissatisfied married women; the prostitute and exotic dancer desperate to reclaim custody of her children: each of Rose’s subjects is able to testify at length and with dignity intact in one of the Twilight’s anonymous rooms. Yet the film leaves you with questions regarding Rose’s intentions. What was she after? Who did she think she was going to fool by only showing portions of her subject’s faces as a method of disguise?

Love at the Twilight Motel is compelling, but a vaguely similar tack is used more rigorously and satisfyingly in Canadian filmmaker Alan Zweig’s A Hard Name, which features Zweig’s more transparently interactive interviews with several middle-aged ex-convicts, many of them with violent pasts. While talking to a former crackhead, a guy who grew up sleeping in abandoned buildings in Detroit, a guy who extended his prison sentence by 20 years just for the sake of stabbing Clifford Olsen 21 times with a pair of scissors, Zweig stays off-screen but remains very present, prompting the more tight-lipped, cracking jokes to ease tension, gathering advice on prison life, and gradually revealing that every last one of his subjects suffered sexual abuse as children. A guy named Art tells a particularly harrowing confession about feeling less capable of dealing with life outside than in. My heart went out to him. Before the screening I attended Zweig declared his hope that after this film his subjects would simply “be welcomed back into the family of man and just disappear into the crowd.” Of course, this didn’t keep Zweig from bringing a number of them up on stage afterwards. Sadly, Art was not among them.

The most sensational tale of going from brutal youth to violent adulthood and prison however would easily be that of Tyson, James Toback’s gripping profile of the eponymous former heavyweight champion. Even if you remember each of its key events (ear biting, et al.) as they unfolded, when you put it all together like this Mike Tyson’s biography is truly incredible, alternately inspiring and disgusting, a living essay on some deeply precarious notions of American race and sex. And Tyson ultimately emerges as a sort of poem about human contradictions, with constantly overlapping interviews in which Tyson gives glaringly incompatible testimonies on things like his rape conviction. Toback never interjects and seems totally uninterested in guiding us toward any conclusion. This movie is too ablaze with fascination for its subject and desire to provoke its audience to settle for anything as simple as closure.