The singularity of Colin Firth

I missed A Single Man during the Toronto Film Festival and missed it again when it first opened theatrically. I was wary of it, noting review headlines that often insinuated the too-easy yet suspiciously accurate-sounding attacks on fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford’s excessively fussed-over, largely superficial direction. What made me keep wanting to see it was, of course, Colin Firth. Is there another leading actor so consistently pleasurable and moving to watch who makes so many mediocre movies? Would A Single Man be the one to showcase his tremendous blend of talent and pure screen presence? It has, in any event, won him an Oscar nomination.


Having finally caught up with A Single Man—the depiction of a day in the life of Firth’s Anglo-American English professor George, mourning the loss of his lover, set in November of 1962, and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood—I was surprised to find the movie to be actually less glossy or formally rigorous or provocative that I’d intuited. Or hoped. It is an oddly cool movie for one so steeped in grief. There are loudly announced stylistic choices to be sure, but many of them fall short of their intended impact. Ford’s jump-cuts are annoying, and his jarring switching of angles within a scene is superfluous, often disguising stasis. His cutty yet ceremonialized flashbacks to moments shared by George and his conspicuously younger boyfriend convey little in the way of emotional weight. His combination of slow-motion and the shifting of the image from dull tones to saturated colour is employed frequently, which does help us to trace the many moment’s in George’s day when he briefly recognizes hints of beauty in an otherwise drab, Cold War era and now largely loveless world, but it also renders the technique a gimmick whose meaning is very limited. Besides, if George can so often be reminded of life’s value, even a purely aesthetic one, does his depression not begin to feel too close to mere self-pity?


Firth, unsurprisingly, looks very compelling. In fact, as unlikely as this might seem, with his lovely haircut, large framed glasses, and elegant suits, he closely resembles Marcello Mastroianni from roughly the same period in which A Single Man is set. (Julianne Moore, who plays George’s one close friend, by contrast seems modeled after Dusty Springfield.) Firth has absorbed his costume fully, letting it alter his posture and expressions. Ford’s careful attention to George’s personal appearance and accoutrements is commendable. It only seems problematic when it begins to seem like a replacement for characterization.


“I am exactly what I appear to be. If only you look closely.” This is George’s most memorable line, and says an awful lot about Firth too, whose best moments may be the ones where George, as a way of making peace with the world before leaving it—he’s planning to kill himself before the day is through—makes a point of saying something nice to women. In one such beautifully played moment, while complimenting a secretary’s hair, he almost looks like he’s in a trance. Firth has always had great success with a less-is-more approach to his craft. His eyes especially are exceptionally expressive, and his awareness of this allows him to make bold choices with regards to how much he lets his visage colour a moment. But A Single Man simply lacks colour, even during those moments when the whole world seems to blush for George, and Firth’s careful modulation and discretion, while still the best approach given the circumstances, can’t flush out what simply isn’t there to be had. George has some sort of revelation before the movie is through, though it barely registers on screen.


I’m thrilled that Firth is getting more attention as an actor, though I hope audiences less familiar with his work don’t get the false impression that A Single Man is its apotheosis. How much more alive, dynamic, charming, and emotionally vivid Firth has been in movies more obviously awkward or even tacky than this one. In some cases, more risky too. I'm thinking of one of Bridget Jones' Diary, and one of the all-time great comic punch-ups. I’m thinking of recent movies like Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me, where Firth played a single dad who was wildly neurotic, tactless, exhausted, and totally irresistible, or When Did You Last See Your Father?, where he played a middle-aged man seething with childish anger toward his dying pup. Hell, even in fairly awful or silly movies like the new Dorian Gray or The Last Legion or Where the Truth Lies or Easy Virtue… I could go on. The point is he’s a wonderful actor, and should he win an Oscar for A Single Man (which isn’t very likely, I suppose) then so be it. Just don’t let the movie’s undigested gloom let you think this guy can’t do so much more.

Half man, half beast, half measures: The Wolfman

The family has already suffered the untimely demise of its beloved, beautiful matriarch and the institutionalization and exile of one of its boys for mental illness. As our story begins tragedy strikes once more with the gruesome slaughter of another Talbot son on the eve of his marriage. He’s cut down one night along the moonlit moors by something that seems both beast and man. When Laurence Talbot returns from years abroad to find out what happened to his fallen brother, he’s reunited with John, their father, still lurking in the gloom of the family’s decrepit rural mansion, who advises Laurence to forget the past. It is a “wilderness of horrors,” he says, and best left ignored. Of course we know Laurence will do no such thing, since gothic tales such as this feed on obsession with the echoing creaks of old traumas that never die.

The Wolfman is itself an exercise in looking back, referencing a long tradition of lycanthrope flicks, mostly notably Universal’s own 1941 classic The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. This latest entry isn’t set in the present or even in 1941 but rather in 1891, setting it just a few years after the Jack the Ripper murders. It doesn't really set out to renovate any aspect of the werewolf legacy but rather subscribes devoutly to the established rules and tropes of the familiar myth. Yet it feels uncertain as to how fully it wants to surrender to the spell of old things. Victorian England is made to look artificially caked in soot, and while early scenes thrive on the anxiety of the unseen, such as one riveting sequence that plays out in the terrifyingly insufficient firelight of a fog soaked gypsy camp, the movie, helmed by Jumanji director Joe Jonston, gradually makes concessions to contemporary demand for souped-up gore, offering flamboyant decapitations and buckets of organ spillage. The Wolfman boasts make-up design by the legendary Rick Baker, yet its transformation scenes, heavily accentuated by smooth and slick CGI, have nothing on the ferocious tactility of Baker’s precedent-setting work on 1981’s An American Werewolf in London. (You just don’t squirm the same way watching this newfangled stuff, perhaps because the horror isn't located in the body or even some likeness of the body but rather in some hovering screen of synthetic imagery.)

So I’m going to have to go with what seems to be the critical consensus on The Wolfman as a movie that can’t quite make up its mind about what it wants to be, a moody and mysterious homage to the subtler chillers of old, or an iconoclastic, bracingly modern monster mash. It shifts uneasily from sinister to silly, from brooding to camp, especially once we’re thrown into one of these insane asylums where the torture treatments are administered by drooling, grinning maniacs. Yet for all that I was still pretty engaged with and entertained by The Wolfman. The perfectly cast Benicio Del Toro, who also produced, is arguably a bit wasted on Laurence for lack of rigorous character development, yet the character is just inherently interesting. Laurence is an actor, known for his Hamlet. He's perhaps psychologically unstable, and bears a confused but deeply-rooted Oedipal grudge against his father, played for kicks by Anthony Hopkins; he's drawn to his dead brother's fiancée, played fairly straight by Emily Blunt, who's made to resemble the brother's dead mother; and the hairy situation he finds himself in may be as much the product of repressed rage as a disease contracted from a particularly nasty animal bite. It just goes to show that certain monsters endure for a reason. No matter how often they’re overwhelmed by kitsch, no matter how often we recycle them, they still maintain the power to fascinate us by virtue of their primacy. You might chuckle at the conceit of a werewolf running loose in London, but it’s no great leap to buy into the metaphorical potency of the beast within.

Unwanted body hair, unwanted parents, unwanted metal massacre: three from the 1980s

The 1980s were strange years for horror—strange and deliriously productive. The production code was a distant memory, boundaries of taste had already been pushed past their breaking point, the home video market exploded. The inevitable result was the transformation of carnage into camp. Horror always lent itself to humour, its premises so often silly in the cold light of day. Hysterical fear collapses easily into hysterical laughter. The dismal side of this was that audiences were frequently encouraged to take distance from rather than become absorbed by the stories, to stay on the surface. Don’t shudder to consider the terror onscreen when you can smugly look down on the terrorized—the victims are so dumb!—and admire the nifty special effects. But with the remake industry now gobbling up rights to ’80s titles, reconsideration is facilitated through fresh releases of the originals on DVD.

The new comedy-horror equation was apparently still in its infancy when An American Werewolf in London (1981) debuted. Critics felt the film couldn’t make up its mind. This seems more of a slight to writer/director John Landis than a genuine assessment—following Animal House (78) and The Blues Brothers (80) doubts about Landis’ earnestness with regards to the genre may have been in doubt. Yet the film feels lovingly invested in werewolf mythology and the gravity of its protagonist’s dilemma. The humour emerges naturally out of the situation, even if the use of every popular song with “moon” in the title feels awkward and ham-fisted in its irony.


It’s a story about friendship. Two horny, likable, ordinary young guys in puffy coats backpacking through Northern England stray too far from the road and onto the foggy moors. They fall victim to the local lycanthrope. One dies, one lives. The survivor is taken to London, is taken home by a hot nurse, and encounters some unnerving side effects once the full moon rises. The dead friend, lacerated flesh now growing putrid, pays regular visits. He’s stuck wandering the earth until the final trace of his werewolf-killer has been extinguished, so he asks his best pal to suicide, and get it over with. There are captivating dream sequences. Griffin Dunne is terrific as the dead friend with deadpan humour. “Ever talked to a corpse?” he asks. “It’s boring!” And the legendary transformation scene is hideous and completely fixating, you can't take your eyes off of it, a testament to the allure of well-made (by Rick Baker), tactile rubbery effects over blandly smooth CGI.

He always says grace, makes birdhouses in the basement, and gets choked-up while giving a speech at a neighbourhood barbecue. He’s also prepared to butcher his whole family if they can’t realize his demented Republican fantasy of the perfectly wholesome household. But we know that from the beginning, when we see Jerry Blake alter his appearance and close shop at one such failed residence. Inspired by the real case of murderer John List and scripted by crime fiction maestro Donald Westlake—whose own father, like List, once lost his job and didn’t tell his family—The Stepfather (87), directed by Joseph Ruben, is a model of taut low-budget crispness, marred only by the laughably illustrative score from Yes synth-man Patrick Moraz.

There’s no fatuous attempts to explain Blake’s psychosis, while the best subtextual elements—the parallels between Blake and his teenage stepdaughter, the vaguely unseemly romantic vibes emanating from the stepdaughter’s fatherly psychiatrist—remain always just present enough to read without being too winky. There are references, especially to Hitchcock—the newspaper scene, Norman Rockwell setting, and central relationship recall Shadow of a Doubt (42), while the clean-up scene, the shower and the big knife echo Psycho (60)—but these enrich rather than detract from the film’s distinctive mood. The film made a cult star of Terry O’Quinn, whose performance is so committed, so nuanced, so inside the character of Jerry Blake it’s positively chilling.

Trick or Treat (86), by contrast, probably wouldn’t frighten a small child, unless that child is terrified by big hair. But it uses the genre to generate something so sensitive to teenage experience, so merrily immersed in a subculture, it hardly matters. A much-bullied high school head banger who calls himself Ragman—played by Marc Price, aka Skippy from Family Ties, a masterstroke of casting—starts to dabble in the occult after his favoured metal god dies in a house fire. To the first of many pitch-perfect tracks from Fastway, the opening montage is a tour of Ragman’s tormented adolescent mind, the bedroom lined with handcuffs, action figures, studded collars, a Priest calendar, candles, and a poster of his beloved Sammi Curr—who most closely resembles Dead or Alive’s Pete Burns—gazing down at him from high above. “I can’t believe they cancelled your Halloween concert,” Ragman writes in his fan letter to Sammi, choking back tears. “It’s like you say: Rock’s chosen warriors will rule the apocalypse… I’ve got thoughts in my head that only you would understand…” Identification is total.

“Do you even care who’s running for student council?” a big-haired teen inquires, assuring us that the gulf that separates Ragman from his schoolmates is unbreachable. The question is posed just before the menacing Aryan jocks throw Ragman into a public pool, yet another scene of humiliation from which our hero stamps away, his sneakers squishing loudly with water, as he sputters “Bunch of fucking assholes!” in front of the one popular girl who’s on his side. This attention to detail is characteristic of Trick or Treat. Its narrative’s beyond ridiculous, and the last act, devoted mostly to killing the ultra-queer, ballet-trained metal beast unleashed from Pandora’s box—actually a slab of vinyl which offers advice on revenge plots and conjures the dead if played backwards—gets a little tiring, but the writers and director Charles Martin Smith (the guy from Never Cry Wolf) never let a moment go by without some sharp shard of wit intervening, while There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit surveys the suburban scenery in dusky tones.

Unlike the aforementioned films there is no new, or even good DVD of Trick or Treat. I first saw it as a kid on Super Channel. I taped it and watched it until it suffered from video-rot. The crappy pan-and-scan version I bought for ten bucks off the internet sports no special features, and the cover makes it seem like Ozzy Osbourne—who plays a televangelist—and Gene Simmons—who plays Ragman's DJ/father figure, modeled after Simmons' childhood hero Wolfman Jack—are the stars of the movie when the two of them together make up about three—brilliant!—minutes of screen time total. I write this in the hope that this sorry state of affairs will one day change. I'll do the audio commentary track for a case of beer!

Soul Power: the other rumble in the jungle

The concert was held in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo) back in 1974. It was intended to coincide with the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” that eventually found its way onto the big screen in Leon Gast’s superb 1996 documentary When We Were Kings. Foreman was injured and the fight was delayed, but the concert went ahead anyway. If you share something of my personal musical inclinations—shit, if you share an interest in great popular music at all—you were probably watching Kings and thinking to yourself how all this Ali and Foreman footage and all this commentary from Norman Mailer and Spike Lee is totally awesome and everything, but where the hell is James Brown, y’all? Jeffrey Levy-Hinte must have been thinking the same thing. He found the footage of that concert and the build-up to it and assembled some dazzling fragments into a parade of musical bliss called Soul Power.

B.B. King

Miriam Makeba

The line-up was conceived, as a celebration of both African and African-American music—and it should be stressed that when we say African-American we’re referring to the Americas, not just to our immediate neighbours to the south. So Miriam Makeba works the same stage as Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars. Manu Dibango sweats it out before the same ecstatic crowd as B.B. King and Bill Withers. And did I mention James Brown? Sure, the integrity of the event’s mandate toward unity within the African diaspora may be somewhat tainted by its having been financed under the auspices of Liberian investors and Zaire’s totalitarian, kleptocratic dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, or by the less-than-honourable interests of money-gobbling fight promoter Don King, but the integrity of the music itself is beyond question. Its overwhelming energy, combined with not uncomplicated messages of personal and political empowerment, its genre-dissolving funk soup and soulful primacy that transcends the disparate lifestyles of those in both the affluent and third world, collude to form a resounding statement about the state of global culture in the mid-70s, which remains a watershed moment in popular music and black power. Compressed as it necessarily is, Soul Power has a few issues to nitpick over, but none of them have to do with the excitement generated by the musical performances.

Ali, Bill Withers, Don King

Celia Cruz shakes on a plane

Some fascinating early scenes convey a sense of just how difficult it is to organize an event of this magnitude in a developing country, yet the party starts before the musicians even arrive. A terrific sequence finds a bunch of them jamming on the plane during the flight over, with Cruz making a groove just by knocking a plastic cup on the upper luggage rack. Another sequence showcases the excellent local bands setting up their equipment on Kinshasa downtown corners for the best street performances you’ve never seen. Ali turns up a lot, of course, hugging Brown on the tarmac, dumping buckets of sugar into his coffee, and riffing gloriously and vainly on notions of homecoming, cultural repression and personal freedom for the cameras, while Don King makes a grand appearance wearing his electro-shocked ’fro and one ugly motherfucking jacket. There’s a lot of talk about the meaning of the event and the importance of development and financial reform by numerous spokesmen, though it finally Brown cuts to the chase with wry comments like “You can’t get liberated broke.”

Cruz with Fania All Stars band leader Johnny Pacheco

Brown and the JBs

Brown’s climatic performance, so athletic and frenetic, with that big-ass fuzzy moustache and jumpsuit with an acronym for Godfather of Soul etched across the sexiest male potbelly in showbiz history, with an electrifying JBs—featuring ace saxophonist Maceo Parker—backing him up, is magnificent, and ‘Cold Sweat’ a major highlight of the film. Yet the acts leading up to his appearance are often just as sublime. Bill Withers’ supplies a moving, stripped-down rendition of ‘Hope She’ll Be Happier.’ Makeba, sporting a weirdly elegant fauxhawk, performs ‘The Click Song.’ And there’s something positively cruel about our only song from Cruz being a knockout ‘Quimbara’ (as though Cruz knew any other way to do it). To really give a more penetrating sense of just how diverse and dynamic those three days of music really were, Soul Power simply needs a lot more soul music, more than its 93 minute running time can handle. So I’m crossing my fingers in the hopes that Mongrel will cough up a DVD with lots and lots of extra performances. (Hint, hint.) In the meantime, you don’t want to miss any chance you might have at enjoying Soul Power on the big screen, however truncated its musical bits may be.

Giant Steps

The titles or authors I can’t recall, the content only barely, but the photos in my elementary school’s surprisingly bountiful selection of Bigfoot books spring back into memory as though only days, rather than decades, have passed. The thing lived on the peripheries of the visible, so naturally it was the images that really mattered. The elusiveness of the creature could not have seemed more carefully designed. The iconic, infinitely reproduced stills from the 1967 Roger Patterson film, sensuously grainy, as though the creature’s fur were mottled with blur, and that pose, looking back over its shoulder like a wounded lover bidding a dramatic farewell, fascinated me like it did millions of other kids, and, I guess, almost as many adults. Bigfoot was already so perfect, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to alter its allure by trying to prove its existence, or by, most appallingly, trying to hunt it down and kill it. Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, to use the more noble-sounding and proudly Canadian term—would only ever be Bigfoot so long as it remained in the shadows, off the grid, never quite seen by prying eyes.

Author Joshua Blu Buhs

Much to the chagrin of those determined to usher the creature into the annals of legitimate science, Bigfoot lends himself quite nicely to being placed within the universal myth of the wild man, a potent symbol of our primal conscience. If he does exist, would Bigfoot be the product of nature, or would be some manifestation of the collective unconscious, a shared desire to believe that something almost human could persevere uncorrupted by the domesticating and soul-deadening effects of civilization, a Frankenstein’s monster built not of disparate body parts but of fragments from our vast cultural swamp? Such questions, however ridiculous the subject matter might seem to some, can yield complex and revealing answers, and I can’t imagine anyone providing better ones that Joshua Blu Buhs does in his engrossing read Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (The University of Chicago Press, $34.95). The book is a biography of a figure whose existence is extremely dubious at best—and Buhs, while remaining respectful of true believers, makes clear from the outset that he’s not among them—and is thus in essence a biography of the conditions under which this figure was cultivated and came to thrive. Buhs tells a great story by weaving together a multitude of interrelated stories taking place over two continents and the better part of a century. There are countless terrific anecdotes: the man who shot Bigfoot and listened to him tell his life story as he lay dying; a guy being abducted by a Bigfoot and held captive in a cave with an entire Bigfoot family, the implication being that he was destined to become the boyfriend of Bigfoot’s daughter; Jimmy Stewart agreeing to smuggle a Yeti paw from Nepal to England. Bigfoot spawned a lot of things, among them great stories, heated arguments, and a hugely profitable industry. But along the way he also spawned a community of misfits, some passionate and articulate, some cynical, some cracked. The story of their formation is one of the book’s highlights.

“What accounts for Bigfoot’s popularity?” Buhs asks. Perhaps it is that the possibility of its existence “was evidence that the world was not yet fully explored, that there was still room for man to test his mettle, to touch the really real behind the false front of consumer goods and scientific arrogance.” This angle, of modern man—and we are talking mostly about males here—alienated by an intellectualized, feminized, materialistic or reductive culture lies at the heart of Buhs’ thesis. The men who made Bigfoot what he is were mostly white, working-class and rural, loggers, hunters, small town reporters, disgruntled scientists and more than a few outright con men, Patterson, as most reports attest, being one of them. Following the emergence of sensational Yeti reports in the Himalayas, sightings of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and of Sasquatch in British Columbia, as well as reports of traces of the creature, such as hair, feces and, most famously, footprints, began to accumulate in the 1950s, leading to an explosion of Bigfoot related material in the 60s, the overwhelming majority of it turning up in magazines devoted to a blend of traditional masculine interests and the paranormal. As Buhs traces the development of Bigfoot iconography a compelling case is built around the creature fulfilling a deep need, becoming a figure of authenticity in a world where so much of what constitutes daily life is composed of the overtly phony, and mass produced.

Yet from almost the very beginning Bigfoot seemed ready to be co-opted. The creature represented a tireless resistance against consumerism within the very culture in which consumerism was born, yet this same creature was all too adaptable not only to the dictates of literature and movies, but to New Age ideologues and people trying to sell more Canadian Club and Kokanee—like a good many backwoodsmen, Bigfoot, it seems, is a heavy drinker. He would with time become safe, cuddly, a best friend to the Hendersons. He would be the poster monster for environmentalists, and a sort of prototype for the teachings of Iron John and Women Who Run With the Wolves. The creature has never been captured, but he has been stuffed with fire-repellant materials and can be frequently found enjoying a wild ride at Disneyland. By taking a closer look at the cultural history, Buhs suggests that with the demise of the primitive Bigfoot and the ascendance of the new, hip, fully tamed one, we can trace some sort of gradual surrender to the unstoppable juggernaut of modern artificiality. The stalwarts, meanwhile, have not given up their vigil. The creature may still be out there, immune to polluted streams and deforestation, smacking his feet into some soft earth as a way to say “I was here,” and laughing at us as he returns to his cave to watch free cable.

Glimpsing Christ on the mean streets of Abel Ferrara's New York: Bad Lieutenant returns

There are films—we sometimes call them character studies—we’re best advised to watch and re-watch without concern for continuity or sweep, suspense or forward-motion. We marvel at, or are at least compelled by, the individual moments that hover somewhere in the haze of the whole, suspended like some fleeting exhibit. I hadn’t seen Abel Ferrara’s cult film Bad Lieutenant (1992) in at least a decade, and I returned to it with one wave of fascinated, slightly nauseated familiarity after another. It concerns a haggard, brazenly corrupt middle aged cop (Harvey Keitel) and his tentative, confused emergence from what seems a very long tour—going back as far, perhaps, as Taxi Driver (76)—through the special internal inferno that awaits god’s lonely men when dwelling in the crowded, sordid Petri dish that is, or was, New York City. To my surprise the film resonated more with me now that when I was younger and inclined to feel impressed by anything affecting a post-Scorsese, gritty, skuzzy, rock and roll verisimilitude. Bad Lieutenant is audacious, somewhat pretentious, perhaps excessive. It’s also harrowing, genuinely crazy in its construction, slyer than it at first seems, and facilitates one of the great raw, only partially comprehensible, out-on-a-limb star performances.

Some of those moments: Keitel’s unnamed Lieutenant stumbling, stoned out of his mind, listening to Johnny Ace croon ‘Pledging My Love’ in some strange woman’s apartment, eyes shut, his bulldog torso naked, his arms extended in some Christ-like pose or perhaps an attempt to fly, emitting this weird whimpering sound like my dog used to make when he wanted something and knew he wouldn’t get it if he barked; Keitel hunched over the driver’s side window of a car, two big haired sisters from Jersey in the front seat, a misty rain rendering the three of them seemingly isolated in the night, while he gets one of them to expose her ass and the other to perform a pantomime fellatio; Keitel, already buzzing with the possibility of his own redemption, getting high with two already severely incapacitated crackhead rapists on a crack house couch. Save the last of these, you might have to work to remember where such scenes fall in the course of the narrative. But you’re unlikely to forget the scenes themselves. They stain your brain, like those traces of certain drugs that we’re told never really go away.

There are so many beautifully selected details in Bad Lieutenant: the Jesus blanket and plastic cover on the sofa of the polite Puerto Rican dealer’s apartment; the door that always gets stuck in the tiny, wallpapered apartment of Keitel’s pretty, intermittently articulate junky pal Zoë (played the film’s co-writer, the late Zoë Lund); the gum that Keitel asks the Jersey girl to spit into his hand. Yet the choice of ‘Pledging My Love’ is especially inspired. Johnny Ace killed himself back in ’54 playing Russian roulette, and such recklessness is perfectly aligned to what’s presented as the status quo for the Keitel character. Within the first 15 minutes we’ve seen him drinking, snorting, screwing, stealing, harassing and gambling himself into oblivion. Another actor might have tried to make the character ingratiating or, even worse, confused his self-destruction with diabolical glee. But Keitel makes everything he does seem more pathetic than fiendishly cruel. He somehow lets us know that this creature possesses a soul. He pours his heart into it, without judgment, and his abandon can result in bizarre black humour, which works too—take the moment where he gets so upset listening to a baseball game while driving his car that he shoots his radio. Ferrara says he originally conceived the film as a comedy anyway—lots of movies have protagonists with one vice, why not make one where the he has every vice?

I emphasize the fragmentary nature of Bad Lieutenant, but it does actually have a sort of rudimentary story, which was based on a real 1981 incident. A young, pretty nun is viciously raped by two young thugs, and the investigation is thwarted by the nun’s refusal to give police any information about her assailants. Yet Ferrara—who always was half exploitation filmmaker, half would-be Pasolini—is barely interested in the investigation’s dramatic potential. What matters to him is the nun’s Christ-like feat of forgiveness, which Keitel has such a hard time believing yet is clearly inspired by—if such utter scum can be forgiven, there may still be hope for him. This leads to some wincingly cheesy Jesus apparitions, but what’s more memorable are the actions it prompts in Keitel, ramping up to a brilliantly stark, poetic finale.

Abel Ferrara

Lion’s Gate’s new special edition of Bad Lieutenant features a rambling but frequently informative commentary track by Ferrara and cinematographer Ken Kelsch. It also features a superb half-hour documentary about the making of the film, which is something in itself: the guerilla tactics of the shooting sound truly insane; Christopher Walken, who’d just starred in Ferrara’s King of New York (90), was originally slated to play the lead, but dropped out because he didn’t think he could deliver; fellow actor Victor Argo had to convince Keitel to do the role, and Keitel was apparently going through some severe personal turmoil that fed his performance. Yet for all the chaos in both its content and genesis Bad Lieutenant survives as something sharp, focused and brutal, direct and rigorous. It deserves to be seen again, and not just by the faithful.

Startling intimacies, drifting narratives: Garrel x 2

An actress accosts her filmmaker husband for casting another actress in a role clearly modeled after her. A woman sits perched on a toilet in a pocket washroom while her boyfriend crouches just outside the door, kissing her, which prompts the release of her urine heard tinkling merrily on the porcelain. A couple discuss whether or not one is able to paint the portrait of the other, their very proximity being an obstruction to their ability to truly see one another. A smiling elderly woman explains to a young mother that she’ll always be welcomed here while both clutch a child’s denim jacket, the confused child standing just a few feet away, staring at a man who timidly alludes to his new role as surrogate father. A woman waits on a subway platform while she watches another woman, who we by now see as a sort of double for her, enter a train from the other side and be carried away in the opposite direction from where the woman is heading.

These images, which I’ve plucked more or less randomly from my recent crash course in the cinema of the prolific but under-seen French filmmaker Philippe Garrel, appear onscreen with a minimum of context, if not downright cryptically. Each hovers in its own space, pieces of a mosaic. You get the impression, even after watching only two Garrel movies, that maybe every scene in every Garrel movie hovers in a similar way, the mosaic to which they belong being not any single picture but the whole body of work which, peculiar, at times unabashedly courting pretentiousness, strikes me as genuinely singular.

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (J’entends plus la guitare, 1991) and Emergency Kisses (Les Baisers de secours, 89), the movies collected in Zeitgeist’s new Philippe Garrel X 2 two-disc set, generate an atmosphere I can honestly say I’ve never seen in movies before, or at least not pursued with such rigour and for such sustained durations. Garrel has a way of placing the camera before one or two figures—usually gorgeous, forthright women and unassuming, often far weaker, sometimes homely men—and letting them build a vivid hum of intimacy that defies filmic artifice. There’s something of Ingmar Bergman in this, and Robert Bresson too, but Garrel’s lyrical naturalism has none of the carefully honed dramaturgy or overt urge toward transcendence of either. (Garrel cited Jean-Luc Godard as his cinematic idol way back in the 1960s, but it seems to me the Godard movies which feel closest to Garrel’s are the lesser-known, playfully self-referential ones, like 1980’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), which come long after the canonical 60s works.) Garrel’s stories have no beginning and no end. The relationship between these characters and the people playing or directing them often seems flamboyantly blurred. If they had dramatic arcs these stories would resemble Woody Allen movies or Chekhov plays, all these sophisticated couples negotiating their love affairs and philosophizing about the wayward nature of their lives, frequently stupefied by the presence of their offspring.

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar begins with two couples on holiday, no longer young—or at least no longer innocent—bohemians who seem set on a course of perpetual ambivalence. The movie is dedicated to Nico, the statuesque German-born model and deep-voiced chanteuse most famous for her collaboration with the Velvet Underground on their eponymous debut. Nico lived with Garrel for several years and appeared in a number of his films. Marianne (Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege) is clearly based on Nico, heroin habit included. Marianne and Gerard (Benoît Régent), Garrel’s stand-in, drift together and apart, at times compelled toward stability, at times finding it unbearable and thwarting it however they can, usually through the accumulation of other lovers, their undulating trajectories moving in time to Faton Cahen’s eloquent score.

It was while going into production on Emergency Kisses that Garrel learned of Nico’s death and decided to make a film about their relationship. Yet Emergency Kisses is in fact a far more overwhelmingly self-reflexive work, with Garrel himself playing Mathieu, the filmmaker husband of the disgruntled actress Jeanne, played by Brigitte Sy, who was Garrel’s wife at the time. Garrel and Sy’s son, the now well-known actor Louis Garrel, plays Mathieu and Jeanne’s son. Garrel’s father Maurice plays Mathieu’s father. Garrel’s ex-girlfriend Anémone plays Minouchette, the actress Mathieu chooses to play Jeanne… You get the (meta-)picture, which of course reads like a wildly elaborate form of group therapy but does indeed cohere into something that reaches marvelous heights of emotional richness—though there’s something presumably unintentionally comical about Garrel’s onscreen presence, his enormous mushroom-mound of frizzy graying hair and his little voice. Mathieu and Jeanne, like Marianne and Gerard, do their dance of partnership and paternity, of uncertainty, self-interest, self-loathing and love, and love, as is explicitly stated by the characters, is what makes the stories of their lives. And these stories make for surprisingly absorbing and sensitive filmmaking, culminating in a bravura finale that, after so much talk, engulfs the last moments with a poetry that’s wordless, visually inspired, metaphorically pointed and quite moving.

Angels, ages, outliers (and beards): Gopnik and Gladwell seek the hidden histories in the lives of great and famous men

It was just over 200 years ago, on February 12, 1809 to be exact, that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born to very different families on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, there are more differences between these two men than there are similarities—though the similarities are striking. It is above all mere history that has aligned them, through the essential randomness of a birth date, and through the synchronized peaks of their influence. Today, with questions of racial destiny and religious tensions reigning so prominently in public discourse, it’s not difficult to make a case for Darwin and Lincoln as the most influential and enduringly controversial figures in the West.

With Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (Knopf, $27.95), Adam Gopnik has produced a captivating and concise volume that sifts through the myths, biographies and historical powers of both men to flush out the ways in which they speak most directly to the present. The book’s purpose is in one sense pragmatic; given the proliferation of writing on both men, Gopnik successfully offers overwhelmed readers an engaging and informative starting point. But if the book possesses a particular thesis of its own, one that illuminates these disparate lives through a single prism, it is “that literary eloquence is essential to a liberal civilization.” There were others who could’ve unleashed big ideas similar to Darwin’s and Lincoln’s upon the world, but, as Gopnik argues, it’s highly unlikely that anyone could have delivered these ideas in such a persuasive and meaningful way.

“A love of the grease and a feel for the gist, the habit of compromise even at the cost of absolute clarity…” such were the attributes of Lincoln’s famously monosyllabic oratory style. Darwin, meanwhile, “was one of the great natural English prose stylists… a man who had learned to cast his thesis in a succession of incidents so that action and argument became one.” Gopnik stresses the importance of Lincoln’s law practice and Darwin’s observational skills. He writes of their tender and yet challenging relationships with their wives, debunking some myths about 19th century sex life while he’s at it, and considers the grief over the loss of a favoured 11-year-old child each of them suffered. (And I love the fact that Gopnik compares Darwin to Colombo.) He draws parallels, addresses some lingering mysteries, and yet avoids over-working history for superfluous sweeping overstatement. “The past is so often unknowable,” Gopnik writes, “not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.”  

If I quote Gopnik a lot in my attempts to convey something of his readings of these two men, it’s only to give you some hint as to how Gopnik himself, a staff writer for The New Yorker, utilizes a special talent for articulating something as difficult to characterize as literary or oratory style, as well as providing a sense of how this style accumulates in complexity and resonates across the ages. And he makes you crave more. If Angels and Ages acquires a large readership, it will surely expand the readership of The Origin of the Species in kind.

“Coincidence,” Gopnik observes, “is the vernacular of history, the slang of memory.” It’s a statement that could slip easily into the foreplay of one of the many intellectual sucker-punches Malcolm Gladwell doles out in Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown, $30.99). Gladwell, author of the best-selling pop provocations The Tipping Point and Blink, has set out to discredit the myth of the self-made man, the heroic figure who conquers adversity through sheer will power, vision and a dazzling array of innate gifts. Circumstances—class, era, race, cultural demeanor, opportunity—matter too, Gladwell reminds us, and if that sounds like common sense, it’s Gladwell’s willingness to actually prove it through one case study after another that forces the reader to reconsider their assumptions. At least for as long as it takes to read Outliers, which is not long at all. The book’s lively, diverse and colourful in subject matter, and so inclusive and methodical in tone you’ll feel like you’re taking a beginner’s business seminar: “Just as we did, then, with Bill Joy and Chris Langan, let’s start over with Joseph Flom, this time putting to use everything we’ve learned from the first four chapters of this book.” Ready, kids?

Gladwell exposes how hockey stardom is fixed from the time children try to get on teams; how Bill Gates lucked out by getting thousands of free hours on a computer back when they filled garages and were difficult to access; how the Beatles honed their craft thanks to landing that early and arduous Hamburg gig; how Robert Oppenheimer clawed his way to science superstardom even after attempting to murder his tutor; how plane crashes proliferate under air crews who come from countries where people typically speak in deference to superiors; how the Chinese rock at math because the way they verbalize numbers just makes more sense. These are all great stories—I was especially intrigued when Gladwell compares Oppenheimer’s career to that of Chris Langan, some freakin’ genius who lives in obscurity because, it would seem, he lacks good communication skills—and in a basic, anecdotal way, every one of them rings true.

The problem arises when Gladwell uses these stories as avatars. So many questions arise when we start to apply these generalizations to all cases. Why do some people fail when they actually have every single one of Gladwell’s ingredients for success? What exactly is success anyway, especially in, for example, the popular arts? Awards are a most dubious measure. Plenty of world famous and enduringly appealing rock bands never had their Hamburg—some of them, strictly speaking, didn’t even know how to play their instruments. And if Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” of practice is true, how do we apply it to, say, filmmakers? What exactly should they practice doing for 10,000 hours to become masters?

Make no mistake, Outliers is a terrific read. It feels like a carefully edited transcript of a really smart guy effortlessly holding court at a dinner party. It’ll teach you things, and make you think twice. Just be wary of accepting Gladwell’s over-confident conclusions. The promise of universality draws us in, but the success of a good story often lies in part on its singularity.

Mr Universe Goes to Hollywood: on playing robots and barbarians, pumping iron, and the strange case of the movies' most fantastic actor

Is there a case to be made for Arnold Schwarzenegger being heralded a great—or should we say “fantastic”—actor? The hulking, hyperconfident, business-savvy Austrian bodybuilder who so dazzled Hollywood during his ascension into the realm of Californian politics is so resolutely larger than life, bordering on extraterrestrial, so ill-fitting in the role of a mere mortal, only a fool could take up the enterprise of claiming the man could embody all that broad a range of human experience. But there came a time when the movies genuinely needed him, and he answered their call, filling a niche that’s absolutely singular.

Bob Raffelson surely felt he’d struck gold when Schwarzenegger was brilliantly cast in Stay Hungry (1976), but the fledging actor was to take an altogether different, more ostentatious path into stardom, with his prominent role in Pumping Iron (77) making a more definitive debut, even while showing him to be obnoxious. Who else could possibly become the Nietzschean brute in Conan the Barbarian (82)? There’s not a single action hero from whatever athletic or aesthetic discipline, neither a Jean-Claude nor a Dolph, who exudes the same outsized will, the same steely focus, the same base satisfaction and irony-free, near-palpable, unabashed narcissism. In his spooky, unwaveringly Republican appraisal of what is good in life (“to crush your enemies, to see them kneeling before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women”), in his supple swinging of heavy weaponry, in his decidedly arrogant prayers to Crom, Schwarzenegger’s is that treasured thing, a performance of total conviction, crude heroism manifested through sheer, improbably body mass and a 1000-mile stare.

I’d argue Conan remains his career peak, but you could just as easily argue that Schwarzenegger was never more at home in any role as he was playing the killer robot from the future, a role fully utilizing Schwarzenegger’s unusual talent for physical concision and control. The Terminator (84) and The Terminator 2: Judgment Day (91) showcase one of the strangest movie icons to come around since Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster, a model no doubt for Schwarzenegger’s “good” terminator of the second film, a psychologically primitive techno-beast of man’s creation capable of becoming more human through the untainted intentions of an admiring child wonderfully played by Edward Furlong.

This second terminator was by far the more complex character, through T2 was ultimately so wearyingly excessive in every respect—especially duration—that it’s the original film that, for all its technically less advanced effects and pageant of big hair, has aged better and holds more charm. It’s a fiercer, leaner, more impactful story still imbued with writer/director James Cameron’s contagious sense of child-like awe over the time-slipping, apocalyptic scope of his one killer sci-fi idea. Still, even in that first time out there was still too much of at least two things: dull flash-forwards to the dreary future better imagined by the audience, and the even duller performance from Michael Biehn, whose heavy emoting feels all the more ham-fisted next to Schwarzenegger’s terrifying placidity. 

Acting for the movies can be as much about presence as it is about chops, and even if he never makes another movie half as thrilling as those he made in his salad days, Schwarzenegger has struck film history with a presence truly like no other. For better or for worse, he will no doubt do the same for US politics.