Never Let Me Go: The children are our future

When we talk about “unfilmable” novels we’re usually talking about those deficient in the essentials of classical narrative: a single protagonist, rising action, a satisfying climax, and so on. Yet there are filmmakers who have specialized in ushering such novels onto the big screen—David Cronenberg has performed this feat at least twice, with his highly personal realizations of William s. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and J.G. Ballard’s Crash, both of which reshape their source material to better align with the time-based dictates of movies while challenging conventional notions of how movies work. Perhaps we’re better off describing as unfilmable those novels that defy cinematic adaptation not on account of their unconventional narratives but rather for their resistance to coming alive in a cinematic context. If we consider literary adaptation thusly, I think Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go might just offer us a textbook example of the unfilmable novel.

Narrated by a young woman looking back on her childhood years at Hailsham, a rural English boarding school, the discreetly dystopian Never Let Me Go is like so many of Ishiguro’s stories steeped in nostalgia, in a longing for an innocence that can’t be recovered. It’s a heartbreaking novel, one remarkable for its ability to sustain the reader’s total engagement while maintaining an almost relentless melancholy. It has a story with a beginning, middle and end, and it has a vividly drawn protagonist, yet these ingredients aren’t enough to keep the film version of Never Let Me Go from feeling somewhat inert. The screenplay is by Alex Garland, himself a novelist, though he claims to feel greater affinity to films than literature. Garland wrote the screenplays for the Danny Boyle films 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and Never Let Me Go follows a route similar to its predecessors, constructing an intriguing set-up, only to arrive at a flat final act, one that appears to misinterpret what intrigued us in the first place.

When I reviewed Never Let Me Go upon its publication in 2005, I tried to assess the novel without giving away its central revelation. The film, perhaps determined to undermine the inevitable spoilers that often accompany film reviews, gets this revelation out of the way fairly early on. I still think I can talk about Never Let Me Go, both novel and film, without completely spilling the beans. Let’s say that Hailsham serves a very special and covertly sinister purpose, preparing its students for a life that’s almost completely predetermined and clouding all this in euphemism. Among the problems with the film version is that once the cat’s out of the bag, once we know what our characters are destined for, the story has virtually no place to go. There’s an attempt to generate suspense in the final act yet it’s almost laughably clear that this suspense is founded on a total sham—the “sham” in Hailsham, as it were—and the result is a deeply somber ending that, rather ironically, inadvertently mocks its own characters for actually believing they’re anything but doomed.

I’m focusing on what strikes me as a major flaw, but I still recommend seeing the film. Directed by Mark Romanek, whose previous credits include the film One Hour Photo and a certain Björk video that in an odd way feels like something of a dry run for Never Let Me Go, the visualization of Hailsham and “the cottages,” where our central characters live for a period following graduation, is rich. There are striking images pierced with loneliness: that dress dangling in the wind, those bits of plastic clinging to a fence. The cinematography, costumes, hair and production design are dominated by dusky light, earth tones, woolen jumpers, and childlike mullets—a pervading coziness undercuts the story’s darkness with a veneer of autumnal warmth. The performances, especially that of Carey Mulligan, our heroine, are most often emotionally complex and touching, though Andrew Garfield’s love interest is a bit too lingered upon in scenes that give him nothing more to do than flip out, something he does with such abandon he might just win an Oscar. If we were to isolate any one part of Never Let Me Go it would seem a perfectly engrossing, beautifully rendered film, and one whose sociopolitical significance is so obvious you can’t even call it subtext. The problem with Never Let Me Go is how the story builds over the course of its entirety. Or rather doesn’t build.

There’s a question prompted by Never Let Me Go that’s curious for never actually being addressed, even indirectly: if these characters know they’re doomed, why don’t they run? In the novel the answer to this is somehow implicit, yet I wonder how it would have worked if the film had used this question as a launch pad for a very different, action-oriented narrative, one less faithful to the source material yet potentially more dynamic. (Having said all this, I'd be curious to hear what someone who hasn't read the book thinks...)

Vivre sa vie on DVD: Godard year zero – Karina's visage – trouble with words – A double game

In an interview for Sight & Sound, conducted by Tom Milne in October of 1962, Jean-Luc Godard was asked if he felt his most recent work, Vivre sa vie (62), was a departure from its predecessors. Godard replied that, on the contrary, he felt it was an arrival. The previous work had been the product of a cinephile, one whose knowledge of life had accumulated exclusively within the spectral darkness of the cinema, where as this, his fourth movie, a somewhat somber chronicle of an aspiring actress’ slippage into prostitution, was the first to be constructed in the open air, so to speak, to attempt to absorb and reflect upon the realities of the world beyond, not to mention upon art forms other than the movies. It may read as sacrilege, particularly on this, the 50th anniversary of Breathless (60), his iconoclastic debut, the movie that more than any other encapsulates the French New Wave, but Vivre sa vie does feel in some sense like Godard Year Zero, like the full emergence, both politicized and poeticized, of the auteur who dominated the 1960s and changed his medium forever. It certainly had far greater impact on me, someone discovering these movies decades later. Breathless excited me. Vivre sa vie arrested me, and continues to do so. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray, with characteristically superb supplements, from the Criterion Collection.

A “film in twelve tableaux,” each preceded by a title card listing telegraphic synopses of their contents—ie: THE BOULEVARDS – THE FIRST MAN – THE ROOM—Vivre sa vie, though compact and economical, unfolds with the rhythm and structural intricacy of a novel, perhaps a character study from Zola, from whom Godard borrowed his heroine’s name. Yet Nana (Anna Karina), first seen during the credits in a trio of close-ups, resembling mug-shots, is also an anagram for the name of the actress portraying her. This is but one of multiple allusions to the nature of this movie’s double game: it is at once a work of fiction and a kind of documentary, about prostitution, of which we will learn a fair amount, particularly in the montage of transactions set to a series of frequently asked questions; about Paris’ suburbs and the lives passing through them; and about Karina, Godard’s wife and valiant collaborator, who like her character came from elsewhere to make it in the movies. Karina’s performance is repeatedly startling. At times she looks directly at the camera, with those immense, worried eyes, as though checking in, or wondering if this is how things were meant to go. She seems always to be utterly immersed in the most immediate sources of stimulus for her character—writing a letter, dancing, conversing with a philosopher, “hooking” a client, or, most famously, being moved to tears by The Passion of Joan of Arc (28)—while also somehow aware of being the subject of a movie. While positively radiating innocence, Karina, then all of 21, had already sufficiently developed as an artist to follow her husband/director onto the high wire, the result being this movie that, in a new age of understanding and sophistication with regards to what movies can be, draws attention to its artifice, though camera work and through its eerie use of truncated fragments of Michel Legrand’s score, while never spoiling its fictive illusions.

Prostitution is a primal theme in Godard’s work, and the problematic role of actresses in the movies, as the subject of the (predominantly) male gaze, is never far from the surface. Fortunately Godard isn’t interested in victimization—the excerpt he selects from Joan of Arc emphasizes the heroine’s participation in her own martyrdom—but rather in the social dynamics that allow one such as Nana to be gradually swallowed up by misfortune. There is in Vivre sa vie a constant mistrust of interpretation, or even of the meaning of words themselves, not an insignificant statement coming from a former critic. Nana expresses her discomfort with words in the first scene, where she breaks up with a boyfriend in a café, trying out certain token phrases as though trying for the best line reading, while Godard, perversely, shoots their conversation from behind, so that their faces are unseen and all we have to go on are their words themselves. Godard places obstacles between Karina’s face and the camera almost as often as he allows her face to consume its frame in an act of pure portraiture, yet the images in Vivre sa vie, though occasionally awkward, aren’t obtuse but rather fixating and beautiful, and there seems to be a sly joke in the fact that the first name of Nana’s pimp is the same as that of the movie’s cinematographer, Raoul Coutard. From start to finish Vivre sa vie continually reminds us that Godard’s greatest work is never, as the cliché suggests, a cold, intellectual exercise. This is a work of rapture, curiosity, rigorous play, and, indeed, genuine compassion, so that even if its abrupt finale feels perhaps like the intrusion of one type of movie onto another, we’re left with the devastating feeling that at any moment those who slip through the cracks, whether in art or in life, are that much more likely to be caught in the crossfire.

The Ghost Writer: how to write yourself in, and out, of history

He has no name, and offers very little with regards to his past. He’s supposed to be a ghost: anonymous, invisible, not really here. But this ghost, brought to an island oppressively cloaked in wintry clouds to infuse some flavour into the insipid memoirs of a former British PM, will be punched, pressed, provoked and prompted to delve deeper into his subject’s past than professional etiquette would have it. Just as the ghost arrives his subject is hurled into a maelstrom of disgrace, accused of handing over terror suspects to the CIA for torture and subpoenaed by the international tribunal in the Hague.

The ways in which The Ghost Writer mirrors real life are numerous. Though the PM is dubbed Alan Lang, this is clearly the next-best thing to an explicit indictment of Tony Blair by Robert Harris, former BBC journalist and author of the source novel. Lang’s disillusioned Foreign Secretary Richard Rycart seems loosely based on the late Robin Cook. There’s a US Secretary of State that so carefully resembles Condoleezza Rice as to almost be camp. And yes, the scenario eerily evokes the ongoing house arrest of director and co-scenarist Roman Polanski. But however tempted one might be to read The Ghost Writer as allegory, the movie demands to be appreciated as exactly what it is, an engrossing, somewhat artificial thriller, realized by Polanski with inspired classical economy. He imbues the whole with characteristic wit, cynicism, and a billowing dread that somehow remains playful.

Look at how Polanski opens the movie: Cars are ushered off the Woods Hole ferry that connects Martha’s Vineyard, where Lang holes up, to mainland Massachusetts. But one car seems to have been abandoned. Night falls, and the car is towed away. As gray dawn exhales upon a local beach a body washes up on the shore. The sequence is a shrewd, disarmingly detached vestibule to the main action. No central characters are introduced. Well, not exactly. That body belonged to one Mike McAra, Lang’s former press aide and his first ghost writer. McAra’s ghost will haunt all that proceeds, his nameless replacement retracing his footsteps, recovering his research, even sleeping in his bed. The protagonist lured into assuming the role of someone perished under mysterious circumstances is a theme familiar from some of Polanski’s finest work, most notably The Tenant. It’s a condition to which Polanski displays a unmistakable affinity, one that interrogates the hazy region where free will dissolves into the caprices of merciless destiny. Crucially, the protagonist is neither innocent nor fully cognizant of what sort of trap he’s slipping into. No one’s ever innocent in Polanski, but that doesn’t mean knowledge will save you.

As Lang, Pierce Brosnan is a perfect blend of exhausted diplomacy and draining charm. Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall play Lang’s spouse and secretary, and both, sexy, smart, and a little scary, exude far greater control over Lang’s affairs than Lang himself. As the ghost, Ewan McGregor makes up for the protagonist’s dearth of conventional character development by playing each and every moment as potentially decisive, his actions at once motivated by a fatal curiosity driven by frustrations over a sub-mediocre literary career and the intoxication of letting oneself be dragged under by an overpowering wave. There are pleasingly portentous cameos from Eli Wallach as an old hermit and Tom Wilkinson as a reticent Harvard professor, absently patting the arms of his chair.

Polanski, working mostly on a German soundstage, handles everything with supreme confidence, unconcerned with the scattered holes in Harris’ labyrinthine plot and staging minor key set-pieces with bold efficacy, including a clever use of GPS that Hitchcock would surely have appreciated and a final, brilliantly staged single shot so chilling that Hitchcock would never have been allowed to end a movie thus in his Hollywood heyday.

Pros and cons: The Brothers Bloom

Wayfaring grifters, the brothers Stephen Bloom and just plain old Bloom—the latter presumably having lost his given name in a Polynesian poker game, or perhaps while convalescing from ennui in some Alpine hospice—have toured the world in search of ever-more risk-courting and inventive cons, but the lifestyle’s no good anymore for Little Bloom and hasn’t been for some time. He wants out, but is persuaded into the proverbial one-last-big-score by his tireless elder. Their ultimate mark is a lonesome and preposterously wealthy heiress with a fantastical, perhaps autistic penchant for collecting and perfecting hobbies, making her something like all of the Tenenbaum children rolled into one. Over the course of our story she’ll inevitably move from being a surprisingly formidable victim to a brilliant accomplice.

That reference to The Royal Tenenbaums just sort of slipped out, but it’s tough not to let such references accumulate when trying to describe Brick writer/director Rian Johnson’s second feature, which has been crafted top to bottom with the sort of cutesy comic pageantry and fraternal drama which Wes Anderson has made his domain for well over a decade now and with considerable success. The Brothers Bloom has been craftily titled so that it ends with both a surname and a verb, though, despite the avalanche of plot and the truly magnificent efforts of its actors, it’s hard to say if anyone or anything truly blooms here since the movie itself is often so stiflingly manicured as to preempt anything so spontaneous as discovery. Right from the prologue, which finds the Blooms as children already working elaborate ruses and dressing themselves as Amish undertakers, which ends with a prematurely cathartic slow-motion climax, replete with exultant Rod Stewart bursting through the speakers and an explosive announcement of the film’s title spelled out in lights, we’re meant to feel really excited about what we’re seeing –even before its even properly begun!

The casting is ideal. Maybe too ideal. Adrien Brody brings the same melancholic amiability, uncertainty and romantic longing to Bloom as he did to Peter Whitman in… Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. His scarecrow physique seems custom-built for heroes who wilt like a frail weed when they suffer but are just as easily swept up in the winds of an exuberant game plan. As Stephen, Mark Ruffalo is all charm, and I mean all. He’s so charming it seems he could con himself right out of existence. (He’s also one of my favourite screen actors to watch eat.) Rachel Weisz as Penelope, the mark, is so damn good that she frequently makes what should be an annoying artifice of a character into a gas, walking with the gait of a 12-year-old who hasn’t yet figured out she has the body of a rather fetching and shapely thirtysomething woman. Robby Coltrane arrives on the scene to ham it up with absolute mastery. Sadly, Rinko Kikuchi, who didn’t get to talk in her Oscar-nominated performance as a deaf teen in Babel, still doesn’t get to talk while playing Stephen’s sidekick, a demolitions nut rendered as a tired stereotype of mute Japanese cool.

So we’ve got terrific actors, a dazzling and diverse array of locations, and a little Asian girl who wears kooky costumes and lives to blow shit up. We’re having fun! Or so we’re often reminded. With it’s deluge of sight gags—Penelope’s casual smashing of her car into a brick wall is admittedly a real winner—and shower of winky literary nods, there’s an eagerness to impress on display throughout The Brothers Bloom that most of us can’t help but feel kindly to, the way we might indulge some precocious kid who just can’t wait to show you her entire collection of rare stamps or, more fittingly, magic tricks. Narrated by magician Ricky Jay, The Brothers Bloom is finally an ode to the pleasures of getting fooled, of slight of hand and fast fingers. But the hand guiding this tale is too slight by half, giving us a good enough time when its all just a lark, but fumbling things up when he expects us to invest more deeply in the emotional journeys. I’d have been content with mere showmanship.

Eight speakers in search of an author

Early in Examined Life writer/director Astra Taylor appears onscreen to address the problem of approaching philosophy in a movie as opposed to a book. With a book we’re able to set our own pace, to comb over the material at will. Ideas receive more exhaustive treatment than can be granted in a movie, especially one in which eight subjects receive only ten minutes each to speak. Taylor’s wise to confess from the outset her awareness of her project’s limitations, that she can perhaps strive to, above all, as Samuel Beckett would have had it, fail better. Yet even within the constraints imposed upon Examined Life, one can’t help but consider how much more dynamically this movie could have failed.

As with Taylor’s Zizek!, what makes Examined Life a sympathetic and engaging yet finally frustrating experience is a sensibility that feels star-struck and easily sated. The problem with Taylor’s subjects—which include of course the flamboyant Slavoj Zizek—isn’t so much that they’re only given ten minutes as they’re too often speaking so generally as to provide only superficial impressions of their individual philosophical proposals. Avital Ronell for example, charged with kicking things off, gives us a good taste of her personality—she makes a cheeky comment about the injustice of her not being allowed more screen-time that her colleagues—but conveys almost nothing of the particularity of her insights or arguments. Likewise, Cornel West, a self-described “bluesman of the life of the mind,” is a rant-master flash whose championing of dissatisfaction and contagious enthusiasm for music, art and literature is hugely entertaining. But he leaves us with little more than a blur of references, and really, what the hell is a “Chekhovian Christian”?

Peter Singer by contrast turns his ten minutes into a concise mini-lecture, yet the way he addresses applied ethics, questioning consumer choices while strolling along New York’s Fifth Avenue, feels facile, using pretty flimsy analogies aimed at stimulating our guilt rather than our critical faculties while working under the assumption that what constitutes the common good is unambiguous. Zizek’s segment works much better, partly because of his knack for provocative one-liners—“We should become more artificial!” he declares, sweating furiously before a backdrop of towering trash—yet he still has a hard time approaching something like full coherence.

Examined Life is handicapped by its paucity of dialogue. Everyone’s given their podium but, with one exception, no one to interact with. Taylor appears fleetingly but, opening statement aside, is literally just smiling and nodding. For this reason, the segment featuring Judith Butler and activist Sunaura Taylor is in many regards the most successful. They wander through San Francisco, discussing body difference and interdependency, at one point entering a thrift store to buy a sweater for Sunaura—the very act of doing so going some distance to elucidating their subject. Sunaura, the director’s sister, is a high-functioning disabled person, confronted daily with the discomforts and limitations of her community.

The movie that Examined Life reminded me of most wasn’t another documentary but rather Richard Linklater’s animated feature Waking Life, and I have to say that Waking Life is in some ways more philosophically engaging for inviting not only monologues and dialogues about ideas, but also fantasy sequences that embody and dramatize these ideas. Let me say that I really love how Taylor had her subjects walking as they spoke—except for West, who does his thing in the backseat of Taylor’s car, and Michael Hardt, who rows a little boat in Central Park—evoking the timeless relationship between walking and thought. But walking also implies movement and exploration, and, for all the critical heavyweights onscreen, by the time Examined Life is over we’re left feeling like we should have gotten a little farther.

Sanguine properties: The Last Mistress

It says a lot about the almost singular subversion of The Last Mistress, not to mention the progress of Catherine Breillat as a filmmaker honing very particular themes, that for no less than half of the movie’s duration, we have the young, delicately handsome Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) divulging the breadth of his impressive sexual biography to the Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute), an elderly woman and protective grandmother of Hermangarde (Roxanne Mesquida), the virginal and rather unhappy looking young beauty who’s to be Ryno’s bride. Alternating between Ryno’s measured recount and flashbacks to his tempestuous ten-year affair with La Vellini (Asia Argento), a sort of verbal seduction unfolds in precisely the context that would seem to forbid it most. But the Marquise assures us that she is still a woman of the 18th century, which is to say, a woman of the Age of Reason, now biding the end of her life in the Age of Romance. She’s worldly, and she’s game. She listens exquisitely. The year is 1835, the city Paris.

This also says something about how much the movies can still learn from the novel. Based on Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly’s 1851 novel Une vieille maîtresse, or The Old Mistress—the English-language title being a dopey compromise that deletes the dreaded term “old” from the promotional materials—Breillat’s eleventh and by far most expensive and glamorous feature possesses an unusual, bisecting structural elegance that compliments the intricacy of its narrative, one rife with erotic struggle, surrender and self-realization. It begins with Ryno entering Vellini’s boudoir for one last premarital fuck, which of course will not be the last by far. As we’re ushered back into the development of their affair, we see how deeply it’s rooted in the ecstasy of antagonism, with Ryno only winning the venomous Vellini’s affections after he’s been shot by her elderly husband in a duel. Once the bullet is extracted from his chest, Vellini rushes to his weakened figure to suckle the fresh blood. She feeds upon Ryno, as he, in his way, will upon her in turn. Her erupted lust is, you know, kinda repulsive. And totally hot.

The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish matador and an Italian princess, la Vellini is a social outlaw, undeterred by the local consensus that a 36-year-old, ostensibly homely woman leading a life of sexual abandon is deeply unseemly. As mapped out by Breillat and Argento, arguably the two most notorious bad girls of contemporary European cinema, Vellini’s trajectory is marked by aggression and orgasms—and, let me tell you, Argento makes the movie orgasm into some sort of new art form here. Vellini, with her defiant, devastatingly hard stares—the way she licks an ice cream cone makes the promise of fellatio at once enticing and scary—is the devouring one and thus, in a sense, the masculine half of the pairing, while Ryno, with his full lips and pale features, pursues more gently, playing the feminine. The overturning of traditional gender roles is itself a part of what makes their collision dynamic, and, as the Romantics would have it, destined for misadventure and courting peril.

Breillat’s shrewdest tactic comes in her balancing of formalities with recklessness, containment with the carnal. The production design is immaculate and softly hued, the costumes artful but largely understated, with the few flourishes counting for a lot in terms of character, and the camerawork, courtesy of Giorgios Arvanitis, who also photographed Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and her masterful Fat Girl, is painterly—the painter, mind you, would have to be Goya—and presentational, with speakers frequently gazing squarely toward us as though posing for a portrait—which, of course, they are. The brazen qualities, the rawness of the movie, is kept largely within the confines of the narrative itself, while the directorial style is largely clean and only coolly confrontational. It’s a marriage made in the heaven preserved for shameless provocateurs, some sublimely seedy place where Breillat and Argento can recline with their feet on the table, while the rest of us watch, in shock, here and there, but in this case, more often in awe. The Last Mistress is pretty delicious.

Ways of not seeing

The original Portuguese title of Blindness, the 1995 novel that prompted José Saramago’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira, or Essay About Blindness. I think it’s worth mentioning here because those unfamiliar with Saramago’s work might glean from this specification some sense of this extraordinary novel’s tone, which, characteristically, is digressive, allegorical, and basically unconcerned with character development or the well-measured escalation of drama—the sorts of elements that conventionally make for engaging movies. It’s equally worth mentioning that Blindness the movie, as adapted by Don McKellar and directed by Fernando Meirelles, is clearly uninterested in being a conventional sort of movie. Yet in its attempts to carve out its own identity while making select concessions to the basic form and structure of a dramatic feature, the film seems to lose out in both gambits. Blindness is a deeply intriguing movie that can’t fulfill its promises, a strangely flat apocalyptic drama that rarely shows signs of knowing what it’s about.

It begins, boldly, and not unlike a horror movie, with the first victim of the mysterious disease of “white blindness” becoming afflicted while waiting behind the wheel of his car at a traffic light in the middle of an unnamed large city, the attack thus accompanied by a thunderous chorus of car horns and hollering, intensifying the sense of some terrible pestilence raining down on the masses from an angry god. The disease goes airborne, and we follow a chain of others who catch it: the thief who steals the first blind man’s car (played a little too obviously mercenary by McKellar), the doctor who treats the first blind man (Mark Ruffalo), the patients who shared the doctor’s waiting room with the first blind man (Alicia Braga’s tough, dignified prostitute, Danny Glover’s one-eyed wise man), and so on. Following the measures decided upon by a panicked government (helmed by Sandra Oh), the blind are quarantined, and much of what follows plays out in the characters’ increasingly decrepit confinement.

Saramago’s formally rigorous prose style, with its extensive, multi-page paragraphs with scant punctuation, serves Blindness more perfectly than any of his other novels because, with so few signifiers to help break up dialogue, you actually feel sort of blind while reading it, trying to keep track of who’s talking, depending largely on the nuances of their individual printed voices. Since McKellar’s script resigns itself to simply dramatizing the novel’s action and does little to evoke its refrain of philosophizing and consideration of motives, Meirelles, perhaps as a countermeasure, seems to be trying to build up a like sense of blindness in the viewer through the repeated use of rack focus, white-outs, and the blurring of the frame’s edges. Yet the white-outs look uninterestingly synthetic—imagine if that “milky whiteness” were evoked by using actual milk!—and the strategy feels like an affectation, partly because it makes no sense as a way of creating a subjective point of view: the characters are either blind or not blind, never anything in between. At the same time, the entire visual world of Blindness is so cold and steely, filtered so as to suck all warmth out, that there’s no sense of the richness of the visual world that’s been stolen from the victims, no nostalgia either suggested or displayed that might pierce the emotions.

Over the course of Blindness the quarantined exhibit both the most base and vile of human tendencies—Saramago’s Marxist leanings can be detected here in the pathetic trading of food for utterly material goods—and the most ennobling and moral. The hero of the story is the doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore), the sole character to retain her sight, a fact she wisely holds secret. In a journey not unlike those of other characters that Moore has played over the years, she seems initially to be fairly vacuous and only through crisis reveals herself as resourceful, maternal, valiant and wily—though this transformation feels a matter of course, rarely becoming something we’re able to identify with. So on one hand, Meirelles is trying, unsuccessfully, to put us in his characters’ shoes, while on the other hand the characters, each of them as anonymous as the world they inhabit, fail to assume the specificities and interior lives that might draw us to them. Where literature, which only need supply the data it desires and nothing more, can function quite well in a world without specifics, it is a tremendous challenge to create a movie, particularly one shot on location, that exists in an everyworld full of everymen.

I can’t help but wonder if the movie might have worked better if Meirelles simply opted to maintain a detached, clinical approach, a la Michael Haneke in the similarly inexplicable apocalypse wrought in his underseen Time of the Wolf, allowing us to gradually develop our own empathies through a distinctive, vivid, stark visual world in which trauma and negotiation play out fully. Indeed, how oddly appropriate it might have been if the perspective through which we watched Blindness unfold was strictly observational.

We will not call upon the author to explain: Bart Beaty's history of A History of Violence heeds each of the film's brilliant disguises

Would you trust this man to explain his movies to you?

For my money, there are precious few filmmakers working in the popular genres these days whose movies reward repeat viewing with the same sort of intellectual/imaginative force as David Cronenberg’s. Even among those Cronenberg movies that initially strike the viewer as his weakest—perhaps especially those ones—there always lurks the promise of some rich, implied proposition, some biological, ontological, biographical or psychological notion coded to varying degrees in the many fleshy layers of filmic tissue. Crucially, these layers rarely trumpet their own significance in Cronenberg’s films but are left to be gleaned by us in our individual ways. His characters, like Cronenberg himself, are frequently articulate, yet they don’t have any privileged understanding of the full consequence of the story they’re traversing—as protagonists in good genre fare should be, they’re too busy dealing with what’s immediately at hand to give speeches explaining the movie’s themes to us.

By the same token, it is arguably precarious to invest too much authority in Cronenberg’s own statements about his work, which can be found in countless, imminently readable, often fascinating interviews—see Chris Rodley’s superb career-spanning book of conversations Cronenberg on Cronenberg for a full feast of them—and, more recently, audio commentaries. Martin Scorsese, Cronenberg’s nearly exact contemporary and an unabashed, vocal admirer, once said something to the effect of Cronenberg not knowing what his movies are about, and I think he has a good point. Cronenberg’s comments on his movies are always smart, often insightful, sometimes very witty—he’s memorably dubbed The Brood his version of Kramer vs. Kramer—but he himself is insistent on the intuitive nature of his creative work, stating that “understanding” his movies is for him a process that begins exclusively in the wake of a project’s completion. He’s an unusual artist in that he at once resists analysis and is so very compelling an analyst.

For this reason, the real lynchpin in the thesis of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (University of Toronto Press, $16.95), Bart Beaty’s captivating new monograph on the eponymous, widely acclaimed 2005 film, is Beaty’s overt skepticism regarding Cronenberg’s public statements about his work. This questioning is an elegant extension of Beaty’s thoughts on A History of Violence as a whole, a movie of proliferate disguises in which Cronenberg’s directorial role can be seen as yet one more form of clever misdirection. As Beaty states in the book’s introduction:

“The very foundation of A History of Violence is a network of lies… Nothing here is what it seems, and all evidence points to the fact that the filmmakers are playing games when they talk about the movie. The concept of masquerade, of pretending to be something that one is not, has a long and close affinity with filmmaking, precisely because actors put on roles. Yet in A History of Violence, I would suggest, it is also Cronenberg who is playing a role: the Hollywood filmmaker.”

Indeed, the “Hollywoodness” of Cronenberg’s recent return to commercial cred after 20 years in the art house ghetto is embedded into its every intuitive/reflexive brushstroke, making it easily the most cinematically referential work in the director’s oeuvre, a movie which consistently dances between embracing and subverting filmgoers’ expectations, generating power through its always ambiguous relationship to tradition, genre and spectacle.

When I spoke with Cronenberg for Vue Weekly upon the release of Spider back in 2002, we mainly discussed his literary influences—his beloved Nabokov, and of course William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, novelists whose work he’s adapted—while he made virtually no mention of cinematic ones. Even when he mentioned Luis Buñuel, it was to cite the great Surrealist director’s memoir, not his movies. How interesting then to see in A History of Violence a movie so soaked in the history of cinema, and not art cinema, but the classical genres.

Beaty, following a great deal of critical groundwork, emphasizes throughout his book that A History of Violence is very much a genre hybrid, assuming the guise of the western, the thriller, the bully movie or serial killer movie, for as long as it serves a purpose before discarding it, usually in a dynamic, engaging, even shocking manner. I think his point is astute, yet the way Beaty arrives at his conclusion requires the reader to generalize genres to sometimes problematic degrees, like when Beaty defines the western as “the most triumphalist of genres” equating “technical proficiency with a weapon with moral superiority, justice, and righteousness.” Speaking of the western in such simplistic terms only holds water if we ignore the last 60 years or so of movies—more than half the medium’s lifespan. Westerns have been “revisionist” or dismissive of its own myths at least as far back as The Gunfighter (1950).

Likewise Beaty lists several reasons why A History of Violence isn’t a film noir, the lack of urban setting, femme fatale, expressionistic lighting and such, but besides the fact that many of the most iconic noirs also lack these same ingredients—Border Incident (49), with its rural setting, Born to Kill (47), with its homme fatale—I don’t think anyone has ever made a convincing case for noir as a genre in the first place. Crime dramas and thrillers are genres, whereas noir is alternately best labeled a style or cycle. And Cronenberg’s film, in all its ambiguity, subversion and self-consciousness, is perhaps quintessentially noir, or more precisely neo-noir.

Anyway, my nitpicking is if anything a testament to just how solid Beaty’s book is. Not once in its entirety does he survey any single established idea about what A History of Violence is really all about—especially where its thorny political subtexts are concerned—and simply accept it at face value. His a restlessly inquisitive critical mind, driven by some real passion for the possibilities of movies. Light on jargon, heavy on analysis and—especially considering that this is the product of an academic press—shot through with a real sense of voice, Beaty’s provocative take on our country’s most provocative mainstream director is pretty much exactly the sort of writing on movies we can always use more of.

Starting Out in the Evening: the literary movie, its splendour, and its limits

There’s no mistaking Starting Out in the Evening for anything but a very literary-minded film. There is, rather refreshingly, no sense of apology whatsoever for this from its director Andrew Wagner. The film opens and closes with its protagonist, septuagenarian novelist Leonard Schiller (the marvelous Frank Langella), seated with stony concentration before a typewriter, one thick hand closed around the other, patiently waiting for the conditions, at once familiar and mysterious, to arrange themselves in his mind and body, for that crisp moment that allows him to start his daily work. It is a moment recognizable to any writer, but it also plays with surprising clarity on the screen to a general audience. In these visual bookends is the implication that it is only with Leonard’s intake of breath and the pounding of text onto paper that this particular film can begin and end.

Based on the novel by Brian Morton, and adapted by Wagner and his co-scripter Fred Parnes, Starting Out in the Evening is elegiac, frequently elegant, and, by its very literariness, perhaps a bit cloistered in a world apart from most movies. It is a film in which two of the three central characters, all of them New Yorkers, all of them very comfortable, live their lives passionately for books. Indeed, they converse about everything, even their most conflicted feelings, with a certain formality, a declaratory, almost didactic bookishness. You might say they speak like characters in a Woody Allen movie, except they’re not very funny. For all that, they do feel real. They’re feelings feel real. Their stories are very adult. And, despite a few stumbles here and there, the whole thing is not only intellectually stimulating but also quite moving. Yet, sadly, is it any wonder such a film barely made the rounds in today’s climate of movie distribution? Hopefully, Starting Out in the Evening will find a new life on DVD.

Leonard is visited by one Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a young, gifted female student looking for his participation in the development of her doctoral thesis on his work. She petite but strikingly sexy. She has a mane of red hair that frames a round face and large eyes that fix on Leonard like he’s the only person in whatever room. She’s clearly in love of a sort, but also very tough and uncompromising in her attack on his small oeuvre—his first novel changed her life, while the subsequent ones she finds increasingly soft.

Leonard, a long-time widower living in a large but fragile body, is a man whose spent decades carefully nurturing a lifestyle that courts no surprises and is devoted to work. Heather seems set to revive something in him long forgotten, something perhaps connected to some missing vitality in his work. But don’t let the set-up fool you. Both characters go far beyond facile April-December archetypes, things do not wrap up so neatly, there is no wish fulfillment waiting to be enacted, lives are stirred and shifted to be sure, but sweeping changes do not come easy to these people, while betrayal and adoration prove to be close neighbours. Most importantly, Starting Out in the Evening defies the tired notion that art can be reduced by the values of a single age group, a single critical perspective, or of a single era.

There is another woman in Leonard’s life to help thicken the plot. Ariel (Lili Taylor) is Leonard’s daughter, not a literary type but a yoga instructor and once a dancer. She’s pushing 40, wants a baby something fierce, but has serious problems with long-term relationships. After failing at tricking a current boyfriend into unknowing paternity, she goes back to a precarious lover from her past, one disapproved of by Leonard. As terrific and utterly unique an actor as Taylor is, Ariel’s subplot does expose some of the more blatantly artificial mechanics at work in the film, her emotional ups and downs and healing process with her ex are approached rather preciously by Wagner, and they often seem to weigh down Leonard’s story unnecessarily, which is itself more than rich enough for one movie. In short, the breadth of Ariel’s presence in the film does in fact feel like a device more in keeping with a novel than a film.

Starting Out in the Evening works best when most immediate, when words are merely implied or are simply insufficient for even these articulate characters to express themselves, when talking ceases and body language takes over: a brush of fingers on lips, a little wave across a crowded room, a hovering hand over a prone, fully clothed body. In such scenes Langella exhibits a titanic presence, embodying so much while doing so little. Thus it is finally the moments of silent or near-silent connection, as well of those where connections suddenly snap harshly, are the ones that make this film worth watching. They also make Wagner a filmmaker to watch, and make you wonder if Langella, in the “evening” of his acting career, might not just be reaching his heights of grace.