Fortune and sons: High and Low

The English title given to Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 epic yet bracing kidnapping thriller and corporate critique is not accurate--he original translates as Heaven and Hell--but it’s better, or in any case appropriate on so many levels as to excuse its liberties. The film’s brilliantly rendered settings, from a shoe manufacturing executive’s deluxe, air-conditioned, ultra-Westernized mansion that looks down on Yokohama, to the industrial city’s dank, smoggy bed of low-lying refuse; from the cramped toilet of a bullet train speeding across a bridge to the anonymous grassy knoll far below to which briefcases of ransom money are tossed, High and Low shifts vertiginously between altitudes and class. Kurosawa himself was straddling “high” and “low” culture; he had previously adapted Shakespeare, Gorky and Dostoyevsky, was now working with considerably less elevated literary material: King’s Ransom, one of American author Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series of thrillers. And not one of the better ones.

Dramatic dichotomies abound in High and Low, right down to its stunning black and white (with one audacious exception) photography. Kurosawa was now three years into working with his own production company and was coming off a string of some of his finest and most enduringly popular middle-period films (Yojimbo among them); working hard to utilize the widescreen aspect ratio in as imaginative and fluent a manner possible, he had begun to forge what would become the signature camera style of the remainder of his career. He was at the top of his game, and could make such bold transitions with complete confidence. High and Low is one of his very best modern-dress films, and is now available on a gorgeous-looking, well-supplemented new blu-ray and DVD reissue from the Criterion Collection.

High and Low hits the ground running, with high tensions and thorny moral conundrums unfurling in its first scenes. Just as Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune, moustached, still terse and bullying, but with his characteristic bluster largely tucked into designer suits) is about to stake everything he owns--and he owns a lot--into clandestinely buying up shares so he can stage a take-over of the shoe company he works for, he gets a phone call that draws everything to a halt. His son has been kidnapped, and the ransom is very high. (Say goodbye to that corporate coup.) But soon his son enters the room--they kidnapped his chauffer’s kid by accident! Does Gondo still pay the enormous sum, even for a child that’s not his own? Is it worth throwing away his chance at advancement--perhaps throwing away everything? The immediate drama that unfolds, involving negotiations, elaborate arrangements and police involvement, is engrossing. And only about half of the movie. High and Low just keeps careening into different directions, and all the while it comments on Japan’s adoption of ruthless capitalism and peculiar ambivalence toward foreign influence.

Buried: it all happens below the surface

High-concept at a low budget, Buried promises to be the most claustrophobic mainstream movie in history. It’s hero, Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), is an American truck driver working in Iraq who’s been kidnapped, sealed in a pine box, and buried alive. His captors have left him with just enough devices to forestall complete resignation to slow death by asphyxiation: a mobile phone, a flashlight, a canteen, a lighter. But batteries die, gas burns up, and reception’s not so good underground, particularly when all your calls are to the other side of the planet. Paul needs to get help, but even if he can speak to an actual human instead of an inane voicemail service, his chances of being rescued are still despairingly slim since he doesn’t know where he is. He flips out more than once, but flipping out uses up an awful lot of air.

One actor, one very cramped location, limited light sources. (It's like Phone Booth, except you don't have to close down a New York City street! Or even a phone booth!) It’s a challenge—or, if you prefer, a gimmick—that might have appealed to the gambler—or, if you prefer, show-off—in Alfred Hitchcock—Rope squeezed into a casket, but with plenty of opportunities to cut—and the master of suspense is even given a subtle nod in the film’s opening credit sequence, which distinctly recalls the work of Hitchcock collaborator Saul Bass. Director Rodrigo Cortés and his cinematographer Eduard Grau, who’s recent work includes A Single Man, do an admirable job of finding an engaging variety of angles to hold our attention and continually reinforce the unnerving immediacy of Paul’s confines.

But Buried is a fundamentally dialogue-based story, so it’s up to screenwriter Chris Sparling to provide dynamics and stave off audience numbness through unrelenting hopelessness and terror. Reynolds isn’t an especially interesting actor to watch go through this twisty nightmare, and there’s not a lot of room for mystery or subtlety in any case, but he’s clearly committed. Black comedy and political commentary are ultimately the film’s most reliable tools, with Paul having to endure conversations with heartless employers and absurd bureaucratic hand-offs every time he tries to contact authorities. He gradually realizes that his is not the first such situation that American diplomats have had to deal with, which may or may not be a source of comfort.

Aside from its central metaphor—a means of imparting just how deeply embedded we are in Iraq—I’m not sure that anything in Buried will deepen our understanding of US misadventures abroad, but I don’t know that this was ever a real priority. The effect being sought here seems to be a delicate balance nearly unbearable discomfort and blood-curdling entertainment, and for whatever that’s worth to you, I’d argue that Buried delivers it in spades.

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.

Wilson: 71 fragments of a morphology of chance

The eponymous protagonist of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel Wilson (Drawn & Quarterly, $23.95) may or may not be a sociopath. He typically greets complete strangers with flamboyantly presumptuous terms of endearment like “brother” or “sister.” In several of the 71 single-page, six-paneled episodes chronicling several years of his troubled if largely banal life we see him make what appears to be genuine attempts at meaningful contact with a fellow human—only to be inevitably disappointed with the response his random act of conditional kindness incites and thence counter-respond with a venomous outburst of pent-up rage. In one episode he waits seated at the post office for no apparent reason other than to convince a stranger to hold onto a large box he’s filled to the brim with dog shit. Wilson does love his dog.

Wilson, like Clowes, was born in the 1960s, hails from Chicago, and currently resides, for reasons he can’t muster, in Oakland, California. Wilson’s baffled by the modern world. He sees a man take a nocturnal dump on a sidewalk. He notes with horror the inexplicable proliferation of nail salons in his community. He struggles with despair: “Not only will I leave no trace of my existence behind, there won’t even be anything from my entire generation lift in another fifty years…” His wife Pippi left him 16 years ago while pregnant. Wilson fantasizes Pippi fell into a life of drug-addled prostitution. They eventually reunite. They seek out their long-lost and now teenaged daughter, who they take on a road trip, though some may call it kidnapping. Wilson’s life accumulates in drama, yet fails to yield the desired sense of order and inner peace, not to mention gainful employment. The final episode, however, may suggest some soul-fortifying autumnal revelation. If this is the case, Wilson, who can usually be relied upon to think out loud, decides not express it. This sudden reticence might sound perverse, but I take it as evidence that certain deeper sensations are simply ineffable.

The way Clowes draws a motel swimming pool makes it hard to tell if it’s full or empty. There’s a deliberately elusiveness to the visuals in Wilson, most notably in its ongoing alternating of jarringly different drawing styles, which render Wilson consistently recognizable yet in an ongoing state of flux. Here he seems younger. Here he has a lazy eye. Here he’s a good 40 lbs overweight. Here his body looks like an orb on sticks. If Clowes were primarily a filmmaker we could say that he shows two main tendencies, one toward the twisted surrealism and narrative density of David Lynch, the other toward the cerebral formalism and uneasy balance of misanthropy and affection of Todd Solondz. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is very much in the Lynch mode. Wilson is more Solondz. But it’s good Solondz. Initially Wilson threatens to amount to nothing more than one depressing punch-line after another, but something’s quietly building in Clowes' hapless character. He nears the precipice of accepting the world. Maybe. In any case his willingness to try to make peace, to communicate, maybe even to gather something like a family around him, is hilariously, almost touchingly relentless. His persistence allows him to take risks the best of us mightn’t ever venture.

Go ask Alice: Gemma Arterton on disappearing into Alice Creed

There’s not a word uttered in the first I don’t know how many minutes. The men just get down to business, boarding up windows in the sad, anonymous flat, going to the hardware store, soundproofing—the menace begins with their silence. The silence ends with the muffled screams of the woman they snatch off the street, whisk away in their van, and hastily sequester. They gag her, cuff her to a bed, scissor off her clothes, prepare the bedpan, show her the loaded gun. From this claustrophobic set-up things only gradually loosen, or rather unravel. The Disappearance of Alice Creed, J. Blakeson’s feature debut, is taut, bracing, immensely resourceful, and twisty as all hell, sometimes too much so for its own good.

Best then to say as little as possible about the narrative, but it should spoil very little to discuss the acting. The always marvelous Eddie Marsan as the elder of the kidnapping duo is riveting, a control freak prone to losing control, a barking attack dog who just wants to have his belly rubbed, his goatee rendering his face rat-like every time he blows his top and the crinkles round his nose bunch up as though about to crack. As the junior, cutie-pie criminal, Martin Compston, the young actor who made an auspicious debut in Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen, has a tougher time in a perhaps unfairly demanding part as the centre of more than one game of trust. But I'm guessing it’s Gemma Arterton as Alice that you’re probably most curious about.

Arterton drew attention for her brief but memorable role in Quantum of Solace—mostly the sort of attention that’s accompanied by involuntary salivating—before appearing in such straightjacketing and spectacularly lame mega-movies as The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the new Clash of the Titans. Her name has of late most often been preceded by the term “Bond Girl,” which seems condescending when weighed against her RADA training, her eponymous role in BBC’s Tess d’Urbervilles, her already impressive body of stage work, and her upcoming starring roles in Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe and Burden of Desire, in which she’ll play a Haligonian. None of which, I freely confess, was I even aware of before preparing to interview her. But I suspect Arterton’s profile is about to change.

I met with Arterton in the lobby of a Toronto hotel. She was genuinely lovely, very friendly, thoughtful and chatty, twisting her dark locks while working through her responses. She seemed happy just to be discussing work that didn’t involve her wearing copper bikinis or enunciating hambone lines about time and destiny.

JB: What drew you to this project? It promised to put you into some nasty situations and couldn’t have seemed like the most appetizing shoot.

Gemma Arterton: It was appetizing to me because I’d just finished a film that I felt like I hadn’t acted in at all, or if I had it must have been terrible. So I wanted to make sure I could still act! [Laughs] I wanted to choose something really terrifying, something difficult. I also just liked the script. I was mostly getting things just like the things I’d already done and they mostly seemed really boring. I knew if I kept playing those roles my shelf life would expire quickly. This script came along because the casting director was a believer in me. I read it and thought it was brilliant. It was a glamourless role, very raw, visceral, so I went to meet J. He later confessed that before we met he just assumed I wouldn’t be able to do it. His preconceptions were absolutely fair. People don’t know what you can do until you do it.

JB: I guess he hadn’t seen your stage work? Or Tess?

GA: No, he hadn’t seen the stage work, and Tess isn’t really his type of TV. But I finally went in to read for it and he gave me the part on the spot.

JB: Were you at all nervous about placing yourself in such a vulnerable position with someone who hadn’t made a feature before?

GA: You know, I probably should have been. I guess I’m just a very trusting person. But the script made me think he must have a very good mind for psychology, and his short film showed tremendous potential. Everybody has to start somewhere. Someone gave me a role once that they probably had doubts about. Sometimes you just have to have faith. It was actually kind of great that he was a first-time director because he kept discovering what the film was really about along with the rest of us, and that’s how it should always be on a film set. It felt like a genuinely collaborative effort, very free and creative, which was such a contrast for me having previously made these very controlled movies.

JB: You spend so much time bound and gagged. Were there moments when things became too claustrophobic?

GA: I’m not the type of actor that likes to get too carried away. I always go for it in a scene, but as much as I can I then try to snap out of it right afterwards, you know, tell a joke, take a brake. But there were scenes where it got to be too much. There was one particular scene where I got so wound up. I asked them please to take me out of the handcuffs, and I ran into the toilet—which was actually the toilet you see in the film—locked myself in and just… [loudly gasps for air]. I just needed to get it out, but then I went back and we got on with it. When you’re crying all day it takes its toll. That’s only natural, that it emotionally wears you down. By the end I was just exhausted.


JB: Did you ever feel like you were playing multiple roles? You have these layers of acting going on, one being you, Gemma, trying to inhabit Alice, another being Alice trying to play the willing participant in, well, let’s just call it a scheme within the scheme.

GA: It’s true. Some of the most satisfying scenes to play are the ones where Alice is lying. One of my favourite screen acting moments ever is where Ben Kingsley’s lying about smoking on the plane in Sexy Beast. It’s brilliant because he’s making it up as he goes along. The audience knows that—you can see him calculating it in his head and yet it’s so subtle. Anyway, for me, as soon as I plan something it just becomes terrible. But if you’re very alert and working closely with your fellow actor it usually comes together. Eddie and Martin are fantastic. Even when the camera was just on me they would give it their best. Sometimes you’d hear them say, “Jesus, I just gave my best performance when the camera wasn’t even on me!” [Laughs]

JB: But of course their performance, albeit indirectly, does wind up on screen, because if things are working in the way you’re describing then what they’re delivering is reflected in what you’re doing, right?

GA: Absolutely. To me it’s so frustrating when actors don’t stick around when they’re not on camera. My first-ever job I had to do a scene—it was a Stephen Poliakoff film—and the actress I was working against wasn’t there. My first-ever acting job and for my whole scene I was doing it to a cross with a prompt reading the lines. What does Stanislavski say? Acting is reacting. If you give, they give. That’s how you get the best work. I have to say I was genuinely petrified at times with Alice because Eddie was so scary. Sometimes I didn’t know if he was going to punch me. Of course he was completely in control.

JB: He’s also scarier with the beard.

GA: I know! He’s actually got this cuddly, kind face.

JB: Sort of gnome-like.

GA: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s right. He’s the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet, always all, “Darling, are you all right?” Then as soon as he puts the balaclava on and starts shouting it’s terrifying. He snaps right in and out of it. That’s proper acting.


JB: Though it’s extremely selective with what it reveals, the film seems to demand that you imply a great deal of back-story for Alice.

GA: I did create a lot of back-story. I made all these little films of myself—I had quite a bit of free time out there on the Isle of Man. It was really helpful to get a sense of who Alice was. But when it came to performing all that work seemed really irrelevant because Alice’s situation is so extreme. If there were a film about Alice Creed before being kidnapped you’d see a completely different person than the Alice in our film. Over its course she transforms, becomes much more brutal, ruthless and manipulative. It’s her method of survival.

JB: In a way, your character remains the most mysterious, doesn’t she? We actually learn far more about her captors.

GA: I love that, because we’re usually so spoon-fed in cinema nowadays. I get frustrated with that. It’s nice not knowing every detail.

JB: Does playing a character like Alice, being at the centre of such a traumatic story, teach you something about others or yourself you weren’t aware of before?

GA: I learned a lot about thinking on the spot, the fight or flight thing. Your brain goes to this other place where you lose sense of time and space. And I learned a lot about myself actually, and about my work. One of the reasons I was making this movie was because I doubted myself quite a lot. I wasn’t sure if I could access those things needed for the role. What I learned was that if you’re focused on working intensely with the other person you can achieve almost anything. You’ve got the director to support you. You’ve got the other actors. You’re not doing it on your own.