Best-made plans: Criterion does The Killing

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





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





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





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

The Town: Can I date a witness?

Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan, Ben Affleck’s sophomore directorial effort falls in that middle-ground between better than his detractors would presume and worse than his defenders would hope. Among the virtues common to most good heist movies is economy, sticking closely to the mechanics of the scheme while characters develop quietly in the margins. The Town is most problematic when it lingers too long in those margins, especially the fairly preposterous love story between Affleck’s career robber and the bank manager, played by Rebecca Hall, who he and his crew just kidnapped. The crew wore masks so Hall doesn’t realize that Affleck was her kidnapper—this could have been a way more interesting movie if she did and dated him anyway—and enters into a romance with him that consists almost entirely of Dunkin Donuts dates or hanging out at her place and exchanging over-rehearsed monologues about their personal baggage. His obviously, are heavily censored.

None of the central characters feel worth investing in even after they’re ostensibly fleshed out. Jeremy Renner plays Affleck’s partner-in-crime, your token loose cannon—he thinks he’s James Cagney in White Heat, where Affleck thinks he’s James Cagney in Angels Have Dirty Faces—always sniffing around for an excuse to snuff somebody, another adrenaline junky on the heels of Renner’s acclaimed performance in The Hurt Locker, and a character blatantly constructed as a plot device. I was very excited to see Mad Men’s Jon Hamm in a meaty big screen role, but his g-man never gets to do much besides reiterate his cold determination to nail the crooks terrorizing Boston.

Which is arguably the fifth central character in The Town, named after the Charlestown district which the opening title card describes as a Petrie dish for bank robbers, working men dutifully following in their father’s footsteps, contributing whatever small innovations are needed to maintain the family trade over changing times. That makes bank robbing sound somewhat similar to genre filmmaking, but The Town only partially feels like a solid genre exercise. Affleck’s pretty good with the action bits and his camera work shows genuine affection and sensitivity to his fellow actors, but there’s a significant miscalculation as to how many narrative clichés any one movie can carry without buckling over, including the absurd recklessness shown from both the cops and the robbers during the final shoot-out. So take this as a conditional recommendation: The Town is disappointing for its flawed and flabby script, but there’s enough energy generated in the hold-ups, stake-outs and chases to keep you from feeling completely robbed.

Inception: Leave the dreaming to us

They move through cities that fold in on themselves, that resemble immense cemeteries, that erode into seas; through zero-gravity hotel corridors, across bridges, between skyscrapers, over arctic tundra, and into hidden chambers. The protagonists in Christopher Nolan’s Inception are in many ways your archetypical assemblage of criminal experts convening for the perfect heist, speaking in action movie boilerplate, wearing nifty duds, yet here the crime unfolds not in some bustling metropolis but rather in the vast and intricate dream worlds of the mark… or is it the dream of the criminal? If everyone’s sharing the same dream, can the dream “belong” to only one of the dreamers? While we try to sort this all out we can marvel at the scenery. The worlds within worlds invoked here are overwhelmingly impressive in terms of scale. Nolan, a great craftsman, has been given the resources to dream, and he dreams very, very big. I’m not sure he dreams very deep.

Master infiltrator Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is normally hired to extract information from the dreams he burgles, but a vaguely sinister, unfathomably affluent new client (Ken Watanabe) wants Cobb instead to plant information in his target’s unconscious mind. The goal is to penetrate the dreams of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the son of a dying industrialist, and convince him to divvy up dad’s monopoly. Cobb has something ugly in his past—like all Nolan’s protagonists, he’s so ridden with guilt it’s turning toxic—and remuneration includes his hassle-free passage home to the US, where he’s a wanted man, so Cobb accepts, introducing the one-last-gig trope into Inception’s genre touchstones. Cobb gathers his cohorts: the supporting ensemble includes an unusually stuffy Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bronson’s charismatic and dexterous Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, giving by far the film’s most natural performance, and Dileep Rao, that annoying magical guy from Drag Me to Hell. Gradually the group’s adventure becomes less about messing with Fischer’s business sense than it does staving off Cobb’s inner demons. Cobb’s been rattled by dream-encounters with his hysterical wife (Marion Cotillard), or at least his memory of her, with increasing frequency. He’s apparently in danger of slipping into this permanent, gray matter-draining REM state forever. Or, you know, something really bad, anyway.

Much time is spent establishing the rules of psychic corporate espionage—the unspecified injections used to plunge participants deep enough into sleep, the mental tricks required to navigate one’s way through another’s dreams without getting lost, the necessity of a dream architect, a sort of production designer of the future—though much of how this business really fails or functions is nonetheless left pretty sketchy. Nolan seems more concerned with the idea of inner logic than he does in its actual exploration. Still, there are enough intriguing details—the reliance on personal totems to ground the dreamers, such as Cobb’s tiny metal top, being chief among them—to satisfy one’s sense of having entered a world with some reasonably consistent chains of cause and effect, and the final scene, a cliffhanger of sorts, works to the film’s overall strengths.

More distracting is the sheer aneurotic, humourless tidiness of Nolan’s dream worlds, which bear little resemblance to the amorphous, murky, slippery dreams most of us experience, places far more vividly and idiosyncratically realized by filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, or Andrei Tarkovsky, a key influence on Inception’s morbid love story. The realms Inception traverses feel closer to some science fiction novelist’s notion of virtual reality than they do to the places we visit in out sleep. But if these realms fail to resonate as a reflection of our dreams at least they provide terrain for an unusually fantastical crime thriller, one which revels in elegantly edited set pieces that each fit snugly into their respective slots in the writer-director’s intricate stratagem. Inception is an exhausting film—and I actually think it kind of needs to be—and is more problematic the more you think about it. It’s also easily the most stimulating spectacle movie you’ll find on the menu this summer.