Gunnin' down a dream

Machine Gun Preacher attempts to tell the story of how real-life Pennsylvania hillbilly bad-ass Sam Childers got out of jail, became disgruntled by his former-stripper wife’s religious conversion—“bitch found Jesus,” as Sam puts it—and hit rick bottom. He bullied his family, hung out in bars where sleeves are frowned upon, robbed and assaulted some dealers, ingested buckets of drugs and alcohol, and stabbed a hitchhiker multiple times before tossing him out of his car. Then Sam himself finds Jesus, gets sober, turns suspiciously nice, gets into roofing, and builds his own church where folks listen to shitty music and Sam’s improvised sermons. Sam also goes to Uganda and Sudan, where he builds an orphanage in the middle of a war zone and occasionally takes up arms and wreaks bloody vengeance upon the Lord’s Resistance Army. He spends a fair amount of the film’s last third or so desperately trying to raise funds back home to buy a new truck for the orphanage, and I’m thinking, Dude, you could probably get some decent cash for a couple of those RPGs...

Not that that was the first such question I found myself asking while watching Machine Gun Preacher. The film, written by Jason Keller and directed by Marc Forster, who isn’t especially good with crafting spatially coherent action sequences—or, for that matter, spatially coherent garden parties—strains to impose a through-line on Childers’ larger-than-life endeavours but builds neither a strong narrative arc nor a persuasive study in unlikely redemption and radical altruism. Though presumably well-intentioned, the filmmakers—I refer not only to Keller and Forster but also executive producer/star Gerard Butler—seem stumped by the very questions that Childers’ thorny biography demands reckoned with, questions, for example, about the mightily messianic hubris involved in trying to clean up someone else’s civil war. Instead, the film offers a precariously sentimentalized depiction of child soldiers, a very thin portrait of what must be a near-impossible marriage, and eight varieties of bluster from Butler, including shaking, eye-bulging, and sweating. Childers is without a doubt one hell of a character. Probably too much of a character for this kind of plodding Hollywood treatment.

Of Gods and Men: the limits of brotherly love

We know that Xavier Beauvois’ Cannes Grand Prize-winner Of Gods and Men was drawn from the 1996 incident in which seven Tibhirine Trappist monks were kidnapped and eventually beheaded during the Algerian Civil War, the exact circumstances of their slaughter a matter of controversy and contention to this day. So we might expect something draped in dread to unfold here, a drama whose hopeless fluctuations amount to nothing more than a death march. But inevitability is a force one strives to come to terms with when one’s life is devoted to worship and public service. That things are bound to end poorly becomes a matter of secondary importance once Beauvois and his collaborators usher us into this realm of carefully nurtured quietude, where disparate, overwhelming inner struggles are conducted and resolve terribly hard-won, where fraternal bonds are largely strengthened as much through disagreement and prolonged panic as they are through a sense of harmony and shared ideals. This is indeed a meditative movie (how could it be otherwise?), yet also at times a joyous one, one that reminds us of several important things: that running away only brings new things to run from; that need, vocation, and genuine communion transcends the confines of dogma; and that god (or God), whether regarded as a concept or a true presence, is only alive when his followers engage fully with the world in all its disorder.

Written by Beauvois and Etienne Comar, and photographed with a loving (and necessary) bias toward natural light by Caroline Champetier, Of Gods and Men pulls us in by immersing us in the monks’ daily activities, especially those of the abbot Christian (Lambert Wilson), an Islamic scholar who has the magnificent nerve to quote the Koran to Muslim terrorists threatening his life, and Luc (Michael Lonsdale), a trained physician who administers humble remedies (not to mention shoes) to the local, largely impoverished Algerian population. As the threat of uprising prompts government officials to plead with that monks to flee and the townsfolk to plead for their steadfastness, each of the monks are forced to make their cases for staying or going, the disagreements causing considerable tension that seems only to abate when the group joins in song, their roster of Gregorian chants emerging as one of the film’s most fortifying refrains, the other being Beauvois’ dogged use of lingering close-ups to glean some sense of the monks’ individual inner turmoil, which emerges as diverse and resonant. Luc, who is not the eldest among the monks but whose health is poor, seems to be the only one who knows from the start what his choice is. “I’m not scared of death,” he says. “I’m a free man.”

It’s serendipitous that Of Gods and Men should arrive in theatres while Claire Denis’ White Material still lingers in the memories of many moviegoers (at least in the US; here in Canada the film has yet to enjoy a well-deserved release). Both concern the legacy of French colonialism as it effects those attempting to make a life for themselves in those countries afflicted, but the contrast is fascinating. Denis’ mise en scène is narcotic in its way, but also secular, dark, fierce and brutal, where Beauvois’ approach centers on the serene and a universal, non-denominational sense of religious feeling, even when the grotesque looms just outside the monastery gates. It’s a gift to have both these visions circulating through our collective consciousness, helping us to reflect on the complexity of global ruptures, and those ghosts from the past that continue to haunt us.

Ride With the Devil: "...how bad bad luck can be"

Ride With the Devil (1999) was dumped into the marketplace over a decade ago with only the most meager fanfare, a magisterial Civil War epic featuring several young rising stars that was somehow immediately rendered little more than a footnote of strictly cult interest in the careers of director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus. All this despite the fact that this celebrated collaborative team had previously enjoyed enormous acclaim with Sense and Sensibility (95) and The Ice Storm (97), and would soon enjoy massive commercial success with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (00). After hearing it praised every couple of years or so by the few people I knew who’d managed to see it, I finally experienced Ride With the Devil for myself last week, thanks to a fine new release from the Criterion Collection. The film’s neglect now seems even more astonishing to me, given that it is surely the equal of Lee and Schamus’ finest work. It is a rare Hollywood film that embraces both a broad canvas and rigorously iconoclastic approach to one of the great troubled subjects of US history. Photographed by Frederick Elmes, it’s beautiful in its bucolic visions yet largely eschews gloss and doesn’t linger unduly on the prettiness of its stars. Based on the novel Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell, it holds moments of tenderness of an endearingly awkward sort, yet most of its key scenes revolve around acts of rampant savagery that recall the most brutal evocations of Cormac McCarthy. It is, of course, a western of sorts.

It begins, shrewdly enough, with a wedding, the calm before the storm. It initially seemed to me burdened with too much overtly ominous and exposition-laden dialogue, but this passage is brief, and after we’re settled in our seats we’re quickly shaken out of them once the central characters’ lives are swept up in their nation’s apocalyptic crisis. We meet two friends, Missouri boys who unthinkingly side with the secessionists, Jake “Dutchy” Roedel (Tobey Maguire), the teenage son of a German immigrant, and Jack Bull Charles (Skeet Ulrich), who’s a little older and at times needs to look after the less experienced Jake. Their friendship is mirrored by that of the aristocratic George Clyde (Simon Baker) and former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), one of many black men who, for all kinds of reasons best not simplified, fought alongside those who were fighting to keep them enslaved. The story unfolds in such a way that it’s not obvious from the start who our real protagonists will be—Wright doesn’t even speak until 45 minutes in—a little narrative slight-of-hand that pays off brilliantly as we see the merciless vagaries of war wreak havoc on conventional heroic trajectories.

Residing far from the war’s hot points, these guys fight not as enlisted men but as guerillas, a point that serves to emphasize the chaos and meaningless violence that filled the margins of the Civil War’s official campaigns. The guerillas keep their hair long and wear broad-brimmed hats, looking like prototypes for Lynard Skynard. They fight only seasonally, hiding out over the winter, like animals, for fear that the tracks of their horses’ hooves will sabotage their strategies. They’re not organized like a regular army but are every bit as capable of atrocity, something made grotesquely clear in the films’ depeiction of the 1863 Lawrence Massacre, in which the guerillas, some of them already drunk, descend on the Kansas town at dawn, unannounced, to slaughter each and every man they find, sometimes while they lay wounded under the weeping figures of their wives. It’s the major turning point in Ride With the Devil, not in the sense that our central characters become suddenly politically enlightened, but that the infernal inhumanity they bear witness to finally reaches a breaking point. Most of the people being killed, Jake observes, “are just a bunch of ordinary folks finding out just how bad bad luck can be.”

Jake might just be Maguire’s most interesting role, one that invites him to trust in the verity of his inherent, saucer-eyed innocence, rather than trying to comment on the part or ingratiate himself. Though he’s naturally good-humoured, Jake’s learning curve is tremendous and deeply pathetic. It’s a marvelous moment when toward the film’s end he had his haircut and is told by his impromptu barber (Tom Wilkinson) that he looks 21 again. Jake says, “I’m only 19.” His barber tells him, “You’ll never look 19.” There’s an amazing scene soon after that finds the virginal Jake about to make love to a beautiful woman. She repeatedly asks him if he’s ever had sex, but all he can answer, rather defensively, is that he’s killed 15 men. But the most affecting and elegantly wrought piece of acting in Ride With the Devil is easily that of Wright, who never overplays the colossal irony of his role, but uses a little characteristic sway of the head or suspicious glance here and there to make his presence more than felt. Wright’s Holt is a character of vast complexity that needs to be at least partly left to our imagination, though there is a nicely measured scene that makes the core of his journey explicit, one in which he realizes that the most devastating moment in his adult life is also precisely the moment in which he begins to truly feel like a free man. It’s a quiet scene in a film of grand spectacle, yet it constitutes the film’s unforgettable emotional climax.

Bearing witness to the inferno (by proxy): Senselessness

Horacio Castellanos Moya

An unnamed writer arrives in an unnamed Latin American country to copyedit 1,100 pages of testimony taken from the survivors of atrocities committed against indigenous communities by their own military forces. Overseen by the Catholic Church and a small legion of international human rights workers, the incendiary report awaits only this final polish from the foreign writer before being made public. The writer’s job, as he sees it, is to “make sure that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure…” The writer, recently slandered in his own country for politically correct misinterpretations of critiques he made of his country’s president in a national newspaper, has taken the work for essentially cynical reasons. He’s here for the remittance and to escape an unpleasant situation, and it behooves him to approach his work dispassionately.

Yet the writer immediately finds himself marveling at the primitive poeticisms of the Cakchiquel Indians who describe their trauma in curious phrases such as “I am not complete in the mind.” The writer jots down several such phrases in his personal notebook and even commits them to memory, repeating them to everyone he meets. He also however finds himself tormented by the sheer horror of what he’s charged with reading and revising, the steady, massive and dark waves of torture, rape and mutilation remembered by witnesses, one of whom even suggests that it is only with the forgetting the names of the victims that they will finally rest in peace.

The writer turns to drinking and cultivating sexual encounters to provide a balm to his agitated mind. His crudity and crassness with regards to the women he seeks to seduce makes a striking, blackly comic contrast to the ostensible solemnity of his task. Reading about violence perpetrated against human flesh only seems to make him crave more contact with human flesh, preferably when it covers a body roughly akin to that of Demi Moore. The contrast between the unimaginable suffering of many and the festering, petty, carnal obsessions of one might cause the reader to find kinship between Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (New Directions, $17.50) and numerous novels by Martin Amis. But Castellanos Moya’s prose in this, his first novel to be translated into English, by Katherine Silver, isn’t quite as merrily misanthropic as Amis, bless his black heart, can often seem. As the writer’s paranoia balloons to terrifying proportions over the course of his work; as he realizes that the memories he’s being exposed to can’t be shut out through fleeting and typically less than satisfying pleasures; as he begins to acknowledge the titular senselessness of the supposed identification that he, a well-fed writer, feels with the impoverished survivors of massacres, to the point of appropriating their words to express his own feelings, Castellanos Moya imbues his protagonist—who bears more than a few similarities with his creator—with a certain sympathy. Who among us is capable of fully digesting, of making any sense of, stories of abysmal slaughter?

The prose style of Senselessness is actually most in keeping with that of Thomas Bernhard, especially its long, fluid sentences, which read not as leisurely digressions or opportunities for pedantry but rather as anxiety-riddled bursts of compulsive extrapolations from a guy on the verge of totally losing his shit. Written in the warts-and-all first person, Senselessness’ rambling sentences give a vivid sense of a protagonist utterly overwhelmed, tense as a wire designed to asphyxiate, with every period punching into the page like a drowning man coming up for air. The evocation of burgeoning madness can probably be most accurately aligned to Gogol or Kafka—whom we can also trace in the novel’s dichotomy of bureaucratic abstraction and looming threat of genuine violence. The short, sharp finale has the effect of reminding us that terror cannot be confined to the frontiers of the third world.

In a sly bit of self-referral, there’s a moment in Senselessness when the writer, already beginning to feel les than complete in the mind, declares his new goal of “not wallowing in any of the testimonies that I would never turn into a novel, because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples…” Well, so much for that idea. But Castellanos Moya’s contribution this genre, if we can call it that, is hardly a work of unbridled bathos and hand wringing. It doesn’t pretend to contain in any neat fashion the atrocities the writer reads about (which are presumably modeled after similar crimes committed in Guatemala). In fact Senselessness is about our inability to do precisely this, no matter what our proximity is to the events in question.

Castellanos Moya circa 1980

Castellanos Moya’s own proximity to atrocity has fluxuated vertiginously. Born in Honduras in 1957 but raised in El Salvador, he has been a citizen of Guatemala, Canada, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, and Mexico, where he spent 12 years as a journalist and political analyst. He now lives in Pittsburgh, living in exile as part of the City of Asylum Project. In a recent interview he stated his intense distaste with being identified as a political novelist, though he admits that his earliest memory is of a bombing that destroyed the porch of his grandparents’ house back when his grandfather was the president of a nationalist party and conspiring the oust a liberal government, so perhaps politics is something he would be incapable of excising from his work if he wanted to. In any case his is another vagabond and unsentimental voice from Latin American literature that the rest of us would do well to listen to. As we stand back and try to comprehend the chaos that continues to unfold in the rest of the Americas Castellanos Moya can help us to decipher not only the experiences of those who live there, but of us too, in our watching.

The wild frontier: El Norte on DVD

Near the beginning of El Norte (1983), a rural Guatemalan family sits around a table over which Josefina (Stella Quan) extols her practiced impressions of American life. “Even the poorest people have toilets,” she explains. “You flush it, and everything disappears.” As Guatemala is consumed by civil war, this vision of a utopia, a modern, ordered world where no one ever need look at their own shit, a world evoked most beguilingly in the images of vast antiseptic kitchens pictured in a well-thumbed Latin American edition of Good Housekeeping, plants within Josefina’s godchildren Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez) and Enrique (David Villapando) the seed of a promised land, a place so longed for it blinds its pilgrims to the enormity of its shadow side.

These early scenes establish the peculiar tone of this extraordinary movie, which so flamboyantly rejected the then-dominant docudrama formula. Bookended with stark images of work, punctuated with moments that more closely resemble a horror movie, told entirely from the perspective of Rosa and Enrique, with no buffering middle-class outsider protagonist, El Norte is an epic chronicle of migration conveyed in three parts aligned to the three very different nations traversed, a tale with one foot in myth and the other in a still all-too-recognizable sociopolitical morass. Enrique bids his father farewell amidst a spectral thicket of maize. Rosa is courted by a local boy through the window of her parents’ home. Everything indoors warms in the glow of candles and kerosene, yet when Enrique, woken by spasms of gunfire, rushes from his bed into the darkness of a ruined hacienda, the eerie day-for-night photography cloaks all in ashen blues. Taking cues from both the Popul Vuh and the magical realist canon, a number of nature-derived symbols imbue the proceedings with enigmatic pathos. The uncanny resides alongside the real without pronounced differentiation or unneeded fuss. As the setting moves northward however, the real will gradually crowd out the uncanny, until the mystification, suffering and harsh electric light of the real is nearly all that remains.

El Norte is unusual in that its precarious earnestness is compellingly offset by its unannounced bursts of brutality, its mischievous, very Mexican humour, its subtle incestuous overtones, its almost pathological insistence on authenticity with regards to location, language and personae, and its unwillingness to redundantly polemicize on the injustices meted upon Rosa and Enrique as they abandon their devastated village to journey through Mexico and into the US to seek safety and work. As nurtured by director Gregory Nava, his co-scenarist Anne Thomas, and his astonishingly inventive cinematographer James Glennon; as embodied by the Mexican and American landscapes, the valiant cast and the experiences imprinted on their gallery of atypically cinematic faces; as contained and shaped by the limited budget and ideological rigour; El Norte assumes an oneiric, organic, striking and at times pleasingly oddball form.

Several scenes, some laughable in their melodrama, feel as modeled after telenovelas as the literary sources to which Nava pays homage. Yet the sincerity of Gutiérrez and Villapando, both very young and unseasoned at the time of filming, is disarming and rife with a flurry of emotions. Villapando’s silent film star saucer eyes convey such a distinctive naïveté, even when he learns to lie in English or, hilariously, talks a blue streak in Spanish in an attempt to sound like a Mexican. Rosa and Enrique are not so much incorruptible as they are perpetually stupefied, and their determination to move northwards—even when crawling through narrow, corroded drainpipes infested with rats—is fed by a pure, youthful faith in destiny.

‘In the Service of Shadows,’ the hour-long documentary on Criterion’s two-disc standard and blu-ray editions of El Norte, tells the story of the movie’s creation, which proves to be nearly as fraught with danger and buoyed by relentless resourcefulness as the movie itself. The indigenous extras who didn’t know what a movie was and subsequently were offended that they should wear costumes; the hostile Chapanecos driving the skeleton crew out of town; the Mexican military who held exposed film reels for ransom, eventually paid by Nava’s father, who smuggled $30,000 into the country in his cowboy boots—the fascinating stories connected to El Norte’s production are too numerous to recount here.

Another standout supplement is Nava’s student film ‘The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva’ (72), which dramatizes the final days of a poet displaced in the midst of civil war. It is graced by Nava’s attention to architectural detail and the likely influence of photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. It’s an essentially meditative film, low on drama, rich with locale and haunting imagery and strange moments such the one where Rodriguez Silva comes upon his first corpse, circling it before carefully placing his hand upon its back as though to sense how much life might still linger within. From the little about Nava’s career I could glean, it seems like, despite a long-time affiliation with J-Lo, the guy was never able to fulfill the promise of these early works. Perhaps the conditions of American independent filmmaking at the time, however difficult, brought out the best in him. Or perhaps it was the simple fact that, like the dazzlingly talented Charles Burnett, Nava’s special interest in America’s marginalized failed to attract opportunities.

American history X: Ronald Wright and Paul Auster review the story in progress

A nation is a living thing, and as a living thing—not to mention a thing of tremendous potential for both prosperity and peril—it requires ongoing examination. Definitions of nations are useful, yet they are not fixed, and as the US rapidly builds toward a new opportunity to re-define itself following a tumultuous period simultaneously characterized by unprecedented power and influence and unprecedented international disdain, it’s as good a time as ever to take the long view.

With What is America?: A Short History of the New World Order (Knopf, $29.95), essayist Ronald Wright, author of Time Among the Maya, Stolen Continents and A Short History of Progress, does just that, surveying the trends in defining American life from the arrival of the first Europeans and the gradual crushing of the old Americans by the new. The national character as described in this new book’s pages—one that is forever “losing its innocence” thanks to an unusually strong penchant for historical amnesia—is not very much flattered to say the least, but Wright’s aim is not to pat anyone on the back but rather to flush out the essential, long-circulating venom that plagues the heart of what, like it or not, is our world’s best hope. (Okay, them and, maybe, the European Union, but that would surely call for another book.)

What is America? is, as Wright admits, an eccentric book. As concise in volume as it is expansive in chronology, it spends precious little ink reiterating certain historical events, however enormous in implication, that have been exhaustively dealt with elsewhere. Thus slavery and the Civil War, to name two sweeping examples, are duly accounted for in the book’s thesis but left largely undiscussed in favour of more iconoclastic takes on other, still more unruly histories, such as that of the centuries-in-the-making extermination of Native Americans. Wright emphasizes the fact that it was not simply that white settlers usurped their territory and decimated their rank but that this territory was already being occupied by organized, sophisticated, agrarian peoples—not ranging savages standing in the path of civilization. He does this to make clear just how much the New World was founded upon not just the raw terrain but the time-tested developments of the Old: “The Pilgrims thanked their God for saving them in a ‘wilderness,’ but the feast speaks for itself: turkey, corn, beans, pumpkin, cranberries, potatoes and the rest came from thousands of New World civilization. It was the heathen, not the Lord, who saved them.”

Wright aligns the spin doctoring and self-deceit that facilitated the extermination of the Indians with like contemporary practices, aligning the rhetoric of Andrew Jackson with Ronald Reagan, or that of William McKinley, who needed to consult directly with God in order to allow him to justify invading the Philippines, with George W. Bush. Wright also gives a gracious nod to the work that fellow contemporary writers for laying the groundwork for some of his thesis, such as Jon Krakauer, who’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of violence in Mormonism, is cited in Wright’s exploration of the continuous role of fundamentalist religious thinking, not to mention paranoia, in the development of America’s march toward self-realization.

Yet while its list of dishonorable patriots is impressive, part of What is America? is also given over to paying tribute to the countless voices of intelligent dissent that are equally intrinsic to American identity. Besides Krakauer, Wright also draws upon the barbed lamentations of such luminaries as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Gore Vidal, Davy Crockett, Henry David Thoreau and Alexis de Tocqueville. And were he to take a gander at some of the other titles sharing the new releases section with What is America?, perhaps Wright would go on to include Paul Auster in his list, since Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $26), Auster’s latest novel, is also in a sense a work of American historical revisionism and Auster’s most clearly politically charged work since 1992’s Leviathan.

“I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.” These are the first words of Man in the Dark, which reads as the testimony of a 72-year-old retired book critic named August Brill. The wilderness he writes about is figurative, a vast landscape of relentless shadows, while the literal space he inhabits for the whole of the novel is but the single darkened room where he lies, his leg shattered by an accident, his mind roiling with persistent ghosts, those of his wife, deceased, his son-in-law, separated from his daughter, and his grandson-in-law, killed horrifically on foreign soil. Brill makes up stories to ward off misery, and the one he’s working on as Man in the Dark begins concerns an America embroiled in a new Civil War, one ignited by the corrupt presidential election of 2000.

Stories within stories are the gleaming mulch of Auster’s garden of ideas that deliberately slip away when sifted for singular meanings, but one of the things that I think ennobles Man in the Dark in particular is how boldly it exudes a faith in the redemptive power of storytelling, and how it locates the storytelling capacity in not just writers but in every one of us. The novel lights upon a dizzying catalogue of hot-button issues, from the war in Iraq to the erosion of civil liberties, yet it is the confluence of Brill’s imaginings with the stories he’ll later share with his grieving granddaughter about their family’s past that provides Auster with the meatier political statement, one founded in this crazy notion that a democracy really is meant to empower the individual, and that the access to individual dreams, to the inner lives of others, is the gift that novels give to readers to sustain them through troubled times.