Fight Club: We got the beats

Our unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) holds a position that could only have emerged in the late 20th century: he’s something called a recall coordinator, which basically means he negotiates the degree to which products have to annoy, maim or kill buyers before the manufacturer actually has to do something about it. It’s a brilliant occupation for the protagonist of a film that’s aged so well that its time is still coming into being. The first rule of Fight Club (1999) is, however macho/obnoxious/show-offy it may seem, don’t underestimate Fight Club.

Off the top, our young Narrator’s already reached an advanced state of yuppie zombification; his insomnia renders everything “a copy of a copy of a copy,” debilitating sleeplessness being an apt response to a world conspiring to keep one simultaneously lulled from disruptive critical thinking and excited by the possibility of perpetual shopping. Then Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a salesman of soap—"the yardstick of civilization"—and projectionist of family films into which he slips big dicks. He has silly spiky hair, dresses like a trailer park pimp, and waxes anti-establishment philosophy; he’s also handsome and sculpted and wants to get physical with Narrator, prompting what we might deem an ultra-masculine friendship, gay romance, or a solipsism so overpowering as to induce prolonged hallucinations. These guys start their titular club in basements and backstreets and it grows or catches until all over America men are denouncing their identities, pounding the shit out of each other, and waiting for cues to launch spectacular acts of terrorism.

So Fight Club’s trajectory is itself novel: boy meets girl; boy meets boy; boys fight (for fun/self-betterment); second boy steals girl; first boy finds himself; everything goes bananas. The film didn’t initially “perform,” but it established director David Fincher as a masterful, if over-eager, manipulator of industrial light and magic: the walk-in IKEA catalogue, the camera’s vertiginous swoops, the fantasy air collision all feel a little overbearing and Roger Rabbity. But who else could have told this unruly, audacious story with such vigour? In its perverse depiction of mental illness, leading up to its big twist, this adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s eponymous novel is actually an outstanding adaptation of Philip K. Dick, the oft-adapted, rarely apprehended author whose schizophrenia imbued so much of his science fiction. Fight Club suggests that schizophrenia might be the natural result of prolonged exposure to late capitalism. And I almost believe it.

The Mechanic: Trying to make a decent contract killer out of a punk-ass loose canon

The Mechanic distinguishes itself almost instantly from your run-of-the-mill contemporary hitman-as-antihero actioner by way of its relative efficiency, dearth of annoying cutting frenzies and absence of ostentatious computer-enhanced tomfoolery. Most pleasingly, it also sports a far more interesting soundtrack than is the norm for a Jason Statham vehicle. Statham’s stoic killer, one Arthur Bishop, digs Schubert and high-end hi-fi, lives in quiet seclusion in the everglades, and is considering purchasing a nice little yacht.

After he’s paid to bump off Harry, his aged mentor—a pleasing cameo from Donald Sutherland in a wheelchair—he attempts penance via playing surrogate big brother and all-round Mister Miyagi to Steve, Sutherland’s ne’er-do-well brute of a son, played with remarkable nuance by Ben Foster, who exercised somewhat similar neuroses as the troubled Iraq vet in last year’s intelligent war-at-home drama The Messenger. But Steve’s something of a sadomasochist. He gets his kicks from dirty fights and punk-ass recklessness, the antithesis of Bishop’s “Make it clean” mantra. So when Bishop starts subcontracting jobs to the kid of course everything rapidly goes to hell. Meanwhile Steve, ignorant as to who killed dad, starts to wonder why Bishop’s being so nice to him all of a sudden.

Statham’s so rarely used to full effect. It’s refreshing to see him in a picture devoid of splatter, misogyny, sexual assault, inane video game aping, and bad comedy. But this remake of the 1972 film of the same name, which starred Charles Bronson, whose career certainly had its limits but could still serve as an instructive model for the Statham, rarely rises above being a classyish regurgitation of well-worn macho clichés, replete with a gold-hearted hooker who serves virtually no purpose. All of which is fine, of course, which is to say easy enough watch flicker across a screen for 92 minutes. The mostly straightforward direction comes from Simon West, who incidentally hasn’t helmed a feature since Tomb Raider. His handling of a sequence in which a romantic evening out with two tough guys turns into a monster truck rally for humans is bracing enough. The script was co-written by Lewis John Carlino, who wrote the original, but it feels less updated than resuscitated. It does have one great line: “I’m going to a put a price on your head so high,” Tony Goldwyn’s baddie tells Statham, “every time you look in the mirror you’re going to want to shoot yourself in the face.” I’m glad Statham doesn’t actually shoot his own face, but I kinda wish he’d sever ties with his agent.

Charlie don't slurp

Inner-life during wartime: The Thin Red Line

It opens with visions of swimming in glaucous waters, rowing out to sea, familial bathing, running a wheel barrel race with the child inhabitants of this mercifully ignored Pacific paradise. But the voice-over narration wonders on the essential duality of man and nature that perpetuates conflict, and soon we’re gearing up for a long and arduous battle. Based on James Jones’ 1962 novel about the taking of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line (1998) is a group portrait of men at war, underpinned by, or more aptly, given an undercurrent of daydream speculation regarding mankind as a single, multifaceted soul. The collective anxiety of these men, most of them young and relatively inexperienced, as they board the carriers that will usher so many of them to their deaths is almost palpable. Time is invested in establishing rank, but when grown men whimper and cry their hierarchies dissolve. We see men shudder with panic, men sick with fear. There are plenty of great war films, but The Thin Red Line, newly available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion, might be the only one I, who’s never been close to a war, relate to so fully. It’s because of its painstaking emphasis on brotherhood, and it’s because of the fear.

This was the first film from the reclusive maverick director Terrence Malick in 20 years, after having made only two films during the decade of the New Hollywood, Badlands (73) and Days of Heaven (78). Only two, yet the both of them immensely memorable and immensely individual. Malick’s return to the movies would be a far bigger production than both of its predecessors combined, yet his signature would remain unmistakable: there would be a lot of voice-over, some of it playing dissonance with the images; there would be earnest philosophical questions, often posed by decidedly credulous characters; sooner or later, something would be set on fire. But the ambitions that separated The Thin Red Line from Malick’s earlier work wouldn’t be confined to questions of scale—this new, older Malick sought to locate his poeticism in collectivity. Butterflies, birds and bats oversee the carnage and ripping of earth. The film sweeps across landscapes to light down upon varied characters and their interior voices, swooping into their consciousness in search of some unuttered emotional truth, so that each of them becomes our protagonist for a time. Yet the film’s protagonist is also some presence beyond the brutal drama unfolding on-screen, some hand guiding the camera, especially when mounted on a crane, soaring through tall grass and the smoke of freshly detonated ordinance, gliding past soldiers running, screaming, being torn to shreds, propelled upward by blasts or standing in stunned silence. The camera itself becomes our narrator, the ghostly observer that brings some supra-natural coherence to so much chaos.

To realize such a sprawling narrative required an enormous and diverse cast; to finance it required stars. So Malick chose to assemble a cast split evenly between knowns and unknowns, with the latter most often playing the larger roles. (It’s astonishing to watch the audition tapes featured on Criterion’s disc and see just how many great actors didn’t make it into the film.) If you were to make a shortlist of your favourite American actors of the last fifteen years or so there’s a good chance you’ll find a couple of them lingering somewhere in the populous canvas of The Thin Red Line. There’s Elias Koteas as the god-fearing, soft-spoken Greek captain. There’s Sean Penn, beginning by this point to look older, calmer. There’s Adrian Brody, his eyes looking wider than his narrow face. There’s John Travolta, with a ridiculous moustache. There’s John Cusack and John Savage. There’s Nick Stahl, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Ben Chaplin. Nick Nolte looms large over the central sequence concerning the taking of a hill that incurs heavy casualties. Nolte quotes Homer though it’s really just to show off. All worked up and phlegmy, his lipless mouth a frightening maw, he narrates the slaughter like a peppy football coach. But we also hear his inner thoughts: “Shut up in a tomb. Can’t lift the lid.” He’s trying to stage manage the whole thing, sculpt the most compelling narrative, the one that’ll ensure his belated promotion.

Closest to embodying a single central character is Jim Caviezel’s Witt, the boyishly handsome, blue-eyed private thrown back into action after going AWOL. A Melanesian woman tells him he “looks army,” but to me he looks like a dreamer. Where the other men remember beautiful women and inviting houses on the other side of the world, Witt’s flashbacks are to the island idyll he was taken from only days earlier. His voice-over speaks about the mystery—or lack there of—of death, and throughout the film Witt personally oversees many deaths, peering into the eyes of his comrades as they meet their demise, driven crazy with terror. He doesn’t seem the macho type, nor dies he seem suicidal. Perhaps he just thinks he’s lucky, because he keeps volunteering for the deadliest tasks. “If something bad happens” he says, “I want to be there.” Maybe he’s Malick’s avatar, which for better or for worse will make him the embodiment of a somewhat glorified naïveté.

“Who are you that lives in all these many forms?” “We. We together. One being.” “Love. Where does it come from?” These shards of reverie that emerge from the chorus of voice-overs—sometimes it’s hard to know who is who—can seem profound or pretentious depending on your mood. Yet by the time you’ve gotten say, half an hour into The Thin Red Line’s 170 minutes, it’s hard to imagine not surrendering to it utterly. It’s a genuine war epic, elegantly staged and chillingly violent, as well as a Tarkovsky-like meditation on nature, and one of the most penetrating and immersive mega-budget movie experiences I can think of. The new sound mix on Criterion’s new edition—at least on the Blu-ray I was able to sample—is particularly enveloping, dynamic in its depth and at times bracing. The overall effect of The Thin Red Line is to leave us by its end feeling as though we’ve been pushed through something, bore witness to something grandiose that only the cinema can offer. We feel closer to a particular vision, at once infernal and beatific, at once helmed by a single and singular artist and the portrayal of a difficult to fathom experience shared by hundreds. There’s almost nothing like it.

The Thing: Fear the familiar face!

When Hollywood endeavored to remake The Thing From Another World (1951), the late screenwriter Bill Lancaster wisely opted for a radical re-imagining, going back to the source material for inspiration, a novella by John W. Campbell Jr. entitled Who Goes There? Chief among the distinctions between The Thing From Another World and what would simply be called The Thing (82) was the decision, very much in keeping the Campbell’s narrative, to render the titular alien not as an angry salad bar in human form but rather an interplanetary chameleon, a parasite able to rapidly assume the form of whatever host organism it came into contact with after being thawed out by a Norwegian research team in Antarctica. They say mimicry is the highest compliment.

However, Lancaster’s script also differs from the earlier movie in that it features not a single woman. While the presence of women in the earlier movie could be written off as pandering to a broader audience with the arbitrary injection of a love interest, an argument of equal merit could be made that a great opportunity was lost in the resolve to make this an exclusively masculine story. A feminine perspective could have pleasingly complicated the deeply uneasy, paranoid group dynamics of The Thing, and you have to wonder if the absence of women didn’t emerge above all from squeamishness on the part of the filmmakers, all of them men, who may have felt uncomfortable with desecrating female bodies with the same infamously ferocious and nauseating zeal applied to those of men and canines throughout.

The Thing begins with a pretty corny looking flying saucer crashing into Earth, leaving no ambiguity as to what we’re dealing with from the get-go. There’s only a short, divertingly portentous half-hour or so between this cosmic establishing shot and the first manifestation of the alien presence in the encampment’s Husky cage, with flesh flying off of this poor pooch’s skull like a self-peeling banana, and blood-smeared spaghetti whipping around the room to ensnare the other dogs. The alien’s use of familiar flesh as a sort of Trojan Horse reveals a similar tactic to that of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), which was also imaginatively updated and remade in a version directed by Philip Kaufman in ’78. But in The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, the process of transfiguration is itself the central concern of the movie. It veers away from the concerns of science fiction and into that of horror, emphasizing repeatedly the body as a site of grotesque violence and chilling anonymity.

The Thing, when not making you want to vomit, is pretty fun, another Carpenter siege drama where evil is evil and the good guys do what it takes. But I can’t help but imagine a David Cronenberg version, a movie far more curious, speculative and precise in its biological exegesis and bearing greater pathos. Undoubtedly Cronenberg, like the scientist in The Thing From Another World, would be more sympathetic to the alien than Kurt Russell, who rarely puts on a hat in the –40 tempests and eagerly torches everything in sight. But maybe we should be imagining a Werner Herzog version. Early in The Thing a characters named Windows tries to get in touch with his colleagues at McMurdo Station, the setting of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (07). Would those endearing misfits at McMurdo, spanning many countries of origin and encompassing both genders, have been able to fight off the alien? Or might they have embraced it as just another fellow outsider, far from home and in search of communion?

Closer and closer readings: Farber on Film

An essential volume on any film-lover's shelf, the new Farber on Film: the Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, $40 US/$50 CAN) was edited by Robert Polito, who authored a terrific Jim Thompson biography some years back called Savage Art. Farber died last year at the age of 91. He hadn’t written about film since the 70s, when he dedicated himself full-time to painting. Yet his perspective retains a colossal vitality. He wasn’t bent on prescience. On the contrary, he was rigorous about seeing movies as they played to their moment in time. (It’s why he was wrong about the protagonist’s motivation in Taxi Driver—Travis Bickle’s gnomic personal obsessions have aged better than Farber’s suggestion that he should have been driven by pure need for celebrity.) But Farber immersed himself in films with an observational prowess that the rest of us are still trying to catch up to.

Taxi Driver

As promised in the subtitle, this doorstop delivers the whole course of Farber’s critical career, nearly 800 pages worth. The book has an exhaustive index and lends itself to random browsing, but there’s something cathartic in reading from cover-to-cover, in watching Farber develop his sensibility through the 40s in regular columns for The New Republic or The Nation before seeing that sensibility come to full fruition in the expansive essays that populated his revered late collection Negative Space. As Polito notes in his superb introduction, “Farber is perhaps the only American critic of modernism to write as a modernist.” From the first sentence Farber is cantankerous and muscular and eager to push the language. From the first he’s broad in vision, weaving the state of wartime US politics and culture, the state of film industry and film art, into his arresting, provocative prose. From the first he thwarts the urge toward quick-fix criticism so that you can’t even tell if he likes something, and who cares when he’s drawing us always closer to really seeing and hearing what the movies are doing, what they can do, what they don’t do, what they should.

Double Indemnity

The title Negative Space is apt: Farber can be pretty damned negative at times—at first blush you might wonder if he actually likes movies—while his roaming senses, trained by painting and photography, not to mention sports, always peruse the whole of the filmic space, digging into corners, probing the cavities, sometimes at the expense of certain elements we often cling to as being essential, like theme. While getting high on his championing of underdog works like Moontide or The Set-Up or anything produced by Val Lewton, my head spun and my jaw dropped when Farber, at times given to contrarianism, laid into Double Indemnity, The Magnificent Ambersons, Laura, My Darling Clementine, The Third Man, Sunset Blvd with such merciless, surgical precision. But Farber's readings feel more alive, more actively wrestling with these films and what they represent—where they fall in the culture—than the vast bulk of comfortably reverential, historically assured writing they’ve generated from hundreds of other writers—myself included. True, Farber’s take on Rashomon feels excessively sharpened by preconceived suspicions about Kurosawa’s flashy technique while basically ignoring the dark tide of uncertainty that undercuts its every scene, just as his dismissal of Billy Wilder’s cynical adoration of tough-talking lowlifes seems the product of Farber’s general repugnance toward Wilder’s employment of gloss. But unlike every other critic who’s ever used that laziest of pejoratives, “arty,” Farber invested the first half of his career in defining precisely what sort of threat studio era “artiness” posed.

High Sierra

While working through Farber’s ongoing reports from the American cinema of the 40s and 50s there were times I wondered if his division of films into the economical/unassuming/action-driven and the pretentious/Oscar-baiting/self-consciously flashy wasn’t too reductive, not to mention highly oriented toward, and more forgiving of, what can’t help but feel like an almost exclusively masculine sensibility. Yet the narrative inherent in Farber on Film, the long and dogged establishing of a perspective, builds in increments, shaping itself through reflection, reassessment, comparison and cultural change, until we arrive at the first definitive statement of Farber’s thesis-in-progress, the 1962 essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.’ “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” White Elephant Art, by contrast, is plagued by “a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film.” Farber zeroes in on something that can manifest as many things for different viewers: spontaneity, abandon, risk, freshness, process-over-product, attentiveness to the full measure of what film can access, openness to accident. It also favours acting that seizes our fascination by being nothing more than, as he writes in ‘The Decline of the Actor,’ “simply curiosity flexing itself,” that prizes the fleeting exhilaration of something as ephemeral as Bogart glancing up at a street sign when he didn’t have to; the way Ida Lupino "works closely and guardedly to the camera, retracting into herself, steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching"; by the presence of Liv Ullman, "one of those rare passive Elegants in acting who can leave the screen to another actor and still score." The Elephant vs. Termite perspective found Farber embracing B-movies, where filmmakers were better able to wriggle free of the front office and quietly produce subversive wonders in the margins of often seemingly negligible material. It found Farber embracing sly supporting performances that could almost function as critiques of the pompous leads surrounding them. From ‘Pish-Tush’: “Movies that have become classics… are never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in the back of the static mannered acting of some great star.” But while Farber’s dichotomy remained in place, what compelled Farber changed radically as the 1960s changed assumptions about what might constitute artiness, termites and elephants. His gradual admiration and rich appreciations for Godard pays off all the more for the insights of his early skepticism. Defenses of Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks became defenses of artists as potentially "arty" as Chantal Ackerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog. He's actually quite friendly to Easy Rider, and to Terrence Malick. And far from cultivating a strictly male perspective, Farber gradually began to co-author essays with his wife Patricia Patterson. Among some of the best late essays are exhaustive assessments of Herzog, Luis Buñuel and Nicolas Roeg.

Farber, with typewriter and white-out

What’s great about Farber on Film is that it emphasizes how good criticism takes nothing for granted. Writing an essay called ‘The Subverters’ in 1966, when film studies departments and popular critics were busy trying to build a canon, “to bring some order and shape to film history,” Farber declared such efforts “doomed to failure because of the subversive nature of the medium: the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of a film.” This persistent unruliness of movies is among the things that make it so seductive to some and infuriating to others. The medium is all about motion, and it refuses to sit still and politely concede to definitive, settled judgments. So Farber moved along with it. His opinions were strong and ruthless—and always open to adjustment. He’s one of the only critics whose reviews the reviewed filmmakers—that all filmmakers—can actually learn from, to say nothing of audiences. I know I’m a better, more fulfilled, more stimulated film watcher for reading him. I only hope it can make me a better film critic, too.

Wild men on the verge of a nervous breakdown: Cassavetes' Husbands on DVD

We first see them in a series of snapshots, four shirtless guys in their early 40s mugging for the camera in beefcake poses by the pool. We then see them in motion, whittled down to a trio now that one of them has suddenly died—we’ll never know him as more than a frozen ghost, hardly mentioned yet looming over everything that follows—and they all wear black suits, white shirts, black overcoats. Like they’re all on the same team. The funeral ends and instead of going home to their families they go out to get very drunk, staying up all night, singing in the streets and then going to a gym in the early morning to play basketball and swim, one long fury of masculine desperation to assert their aliveness. This desperation will consume the full two hours and 20 minutes and by the time its all over the exhaustion and the wreckage feel cleansing and dirty at the same time, like sweating through some arduous outdoor task on a scorching summer’s day. That’s John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).

Some say it’s one of the messier or more troublesome Cassavetes films, maybe not the best place for the uninitiated to start. That may be true, yet so much of what makes Cassavetes great is present and accounted for: the scenes that we crash into with no buffering transitions, that seem to go on and on with no direction until some startling emotional truth just happens before out eyes, where humour erupts out of the bursts of craziness and someone’s always shouting over someone else, often to tell that person, however dubiously or confusedly, that they love them. The only essential Cassavetes ingredient missing here might be women, that half of the human race we suspect that Cassavetes trusted in far more, a trust that can be seen as either respect and admiration or as condescension and bewilderment. Husbands is very much about men—the truly inspired combo of Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, and Cassavetes himself, with those Satan eyebrows—manly men fearful of women, who treasure their male friendships and the affectations these friendships encourage, men clinging to each other like life preservers in a tempest. Men who seem hopeless with women but more hopeless without them. The fourth musketeer dies and in some loopy method of mourning his disappearance they all go to London to gamble, gallivant and sweet-talk ladies who seem as on edge as they are. That’s about it for story, so watch it for something else. Maybe consolation.

Husbands followed Faces (68), which was a big hit for Cassavetes and a milestone for independent film. Cassavetes knew he wanted Falk and Gazzara, both of them actors who made an enormous impression on the stage but were dissatisfied with what came their way in film and were gradually fazed out of the studio rolodexes. He got some money in Italy and he had a valiant producer in Al Ruban. The script, so it’s been said, was just a blueprint and there was a great deal of improvisation developed between the men, who became best friends through the process. It’s interesting to note that the male leads were all highly trained actors who got a lot of rehearsal time, while the women were mostly non-professionals who had to work on the fly—were the women genuinely that much more “natural” on screen, or did Cassavetes just want more time with the boys? There’s an interesting debate here, but in the end the results speak for themselves. Every performance is wild and immaculate. Each of these men are by turns terrifying, repellent, very moving, and insanely, almost nonsensically funny. “We’ve got five children between us,” Falk tells Cassavetes, “I hope they’re individual!” Cassavetes’ camera, wrangled by an unseasoned but very game Victor Kemper, is utterly devoted to letting the unbridled interactions play out, in bars and public bathrooms, in hotels, in terrorized living rooms, and on the street, often in close-ups that careen to catch the action, close-ups so tight that they become abstract, of faces, hair, mouths, feet, hands, hands covering faces, hands inside faces. Nearly 40 years on, Husbands, like much Cassavetes, boasts an intimacy that still feels exceptionally rare in film.

Sony’s new disc marks the first time Husbands and been on DVD, and they’re done a terrific job of it, using a version longer and reputedly much better than many of the shorter ones that have circulated in the past. The transfer is lovely and the sound mix impressively crisp given the chaotic nature of dialogue, especially in the more crowded scenes. There’s a very good half-hour documentary with enlightening comments from Ruban and Gazzara, who obviously found Cassavetes’ unorthodox and often financially foolish methods at once punishing and the most rewarding events of their careers. Marshall Fine, whose Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film came out a few years back, gives an informative, affectionate yet skeptical commentary track. Husbands, to be sure, can be a difficult film to digest, and the appendices in this package can help a viewer to deepen their experience of it without claiming to dissect it.

Iraq into fragments: The Hurt Locker and the explosive vagaries of heroism

It is an action movie, and we’re accustomed to having the spectacular violence that is the genre’s lure delivered with a more or less clear hierarchy of values. The suspense and catharsis of the set pieces depend on our rooting for one side over another, for one sensibility or approach over another, to generate that extra charge. But among the more peculiar virtues of The Hurt Locker is the lingering ambiguity as to where it assigns greater value within its conflicting codes of conduct.

The setting is US-occupied Baghdad. The central characters are Explosive Ordinance Disposal techs, a small team of men with strict lines of protocol geared toward the dismantling of Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, which have been responsible for half of all US casualties in Iraq. It opens with a scene in which likable, professional, quietly heroic men, exuding solidarity, do their jobs with precision and conviction. By the scene’s ending, the most heroic of them dies. Another man comes to take his place and everything about him seems designed to prompt our disdain. Compared to the dead hero this replacement seems reckless, cocky, unsupportive of the others. In short, he acts like a cowboy, an anachronism from an era of war narratives in which machismo is flamboyantly prized. We wait for his comeuppance. We keep on waiting.

Written and produced by Mark Boal, who was himself in a Baghdad bomb squad back in 2004, and who’s credited with the story for In the Valley of Elah, and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose films, such as Point Break, have shown an affinity for rites of masculinity and furious rushes of adrenaline, The Hurt Locker is at once imminently recognizable in its genre tropes, character types and emphasis on cultivating tension, and truly odd in its structural looseness and inconclusive morality. Like some shotgun wedding between Don Siegel and Claire Denis. Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) swaggers into the movie without making any great effort to ingratiate himself to anybody, and in the thick of a palpably fraught assignment tosses off his protective gear and even his headset. He feels inhibited not only by the items designed to save his life—helmets are for pussies—but by the burden of having to actually communicate with conscientious colleagues Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who each have only a handful of weeks to go and are eager to end their tour in one piece.

Surely this arrogant lone wolf has no place in a serious story about getting through war alive, yet he gradually becomes emblematic of something primordial, a way of being that exists beyond shifting attitudes toward heroism or political correctness. He’s the existential man of action, trusting honed instinct above all and rewarded for his faith with the fact of his survival and an impressive number of trophies kept under his bed, pieces from every bomb that could have killed him kept reverentially in a cardboard box. We can argue with a character like James but we can’t argue with his results, and we all know that there are people like him who, despite our misgivings, have saved lives. Renner’s performance radiates exactly the sort of inarticulate confidence that drives someone like James, as well as the inner desperation that arises from the understanding that you might only ever feel alive, might only ever feel that your existence has any meaning, when forced to make a life-or-death decision in a matter of seconds.

Bigelow is clearly right at home in this sort of movie, a creative problem solver and an apt pupil of the best, most thrilling and most coherent action sequences of the 1970s heyday. A few scenes are overcooked, such as the one where Eldridge flips out while playing a video game and talking with a well-meaning army shrink, but most are lean and vivid. Her use of handheld camerawork is tightly focused and nerve rattling, with special attention always paid to the geometry of gazes shared by the central characters and the many onlookers, often casually dressed Iraqis who may or may not be complicit in the planting of the IEDs at hand. They are unknowable, and no apology is made for this.


Where Iraq in Fragments, arguably the most insightful movie about the conflict thus far, was founded in a multiplicity of perspectives, The Hurt Locker generates strength through narrow singularity. It protagonists do not pretend to understand their elusive enemy nor the general citizenry of the country they’re occupying, and I think they can be forgiven for placing far greater priority on the more pressing concerns of effectively executing their specialized task. And in this sense the characters are very much like their director. Bigelow has made a truly extraordinary movie by putting all she’s got into depicting the urgency of each moment with as much compelling intensity and complexity as possible, and wisely leaving the figuring out what to make of it all to the rest of us.

Crime doesn't play: Public Enemies

The very public slaying of legendary bank robber John Dillinger outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre in 1934 is as much a moment in the history of film as American crime. The poetic unity of the event is the stuff of dreams. In typically flagrant disregard for his own infamy and imminent peril, Dillinger left a jam-packed screening of the gangster flick Manhattan Melodrama with two attractive women when the heat closed in. They were not there to make an arrest. The fatal bullet exited just below one of the eyes that had been watching the silvery likenesses of Clark Gable and Myrna Loy only moments ago. So the life of John Dillinger ended with the movies, and the movies would soon make a habit of resurrecting him.

Public Enemies is the most recent and surely most expensive retellings of Dillinger’s legacy, and most of its 133 minutes as perplexingly lifeless as Dillinger’s bullet-strewn body once the ambulance arrived. The material, derived from Bryan Burrough’s book of the same name, seems tailor-made for director Michael Mann, yet I’m not sure that any Mann film—and there are contenders—has ever seemed so prosaic, so mechanical and museum-like, so, well, dull. The showdown of masculine archetypes so boldly rendered in films like Heat is here a sort of Hollywood kabuki, stately and un-invested with tension, much less flamboyance.

Questionable choices were made at the executive level. The casting of beautiful and delicate Johnny Depp in a role previously—and marvelously—embodied by the likes of Lawrence Tierney, Ralph Meeker and Warren Oates does neither the often very fine actor nor the film any special favours. With Christian Bale playing the FBI’s top Dillinger hunter Melvin Purvis and, most especially, Billy Crudup playing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, there seems to be a conspiracy of prettified historical revisionism that even by Hollywood standards reads as laughable. While Bale gives an especially remote performance here that does very little to endow Purvis with texture, Crudup provide several of the film’s finest moments in his small role, using a bare minimum of facial and vocal mannerisms to convey a barely restrained and perverse rage for power. It almost makes you forget that this cutie is supposed to be playing a man that more closely resembled, let’s just say it, a troll. Marion Cotillard provides the film’s sole source of warmth as Dillinger’s devoted girlfriend Billie Frechette, yet what seems ostensibly her showcase scene, where she’s tortured by a sadistic and misogynistic cop, is saddled with dialogue that’s strictly boilerplate gangster’s moll.

It’s unclear whether Mann and company are interested in the brutal facts—some of which are present, others ignored, none of which convey new insights—or glamorous myth—the fedoras are so uniformly crisp, the coats splay just so, the cars so clean. There’s so little glamour or fun of even the most vulgar variety in Public Enemies. Though he does have a handful of wonderfully delivered one-liners, Depp mostly seems to be enjoying himself relatively little. Dante Spinotti’s handheld HD cinematography, with its emphatic fleetingness and the weird oiliness of the imagery when brightly-lit and in motion, is deeply exciting in how it furthers the frontiers of this new technology’s visual vocabulary, yet the way it, in collaboration with the costumes and production design, drains all colour from the Great Depression—a potentially timely sociological factor barely registered by the script, incidentally—feels like an empty cliché, making the whole film seem like it was reflected on the surface of an ice-cold razor. The action scenes feature impressive sprays of Tommy gunfire, especially during the nocturnal raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge, yet there’s little spatial coherence, and the piling up of identically dressed and bloodied bodies—some of them famous actors in non-cameos—is easy not to care all that much about.

I can imagine how the overriding aesthetic of Public Enemies could be regarded as admirable, as lean and cold and maybe kind of Jean-Pierre Melville, if you wanted to go that far. But such a take doesn’t account for all the other things the film seems to want to do, like tell an oft-told tale with some new imperative, give us a thrill, or speak to our need for outlaws.

Sparring with the past

The extraordinary life of Mike Tyson as vividly described by Mike Tyson in James Toback’s Tyson constitutes a startling essay on American fame, race and sex. Never a well-behaved filmmaker, Toback seems too fascinated, perhaps even in love with his subject to soberly editorialize in the margins of this documentary portrait. Instead, he steers and shapes the film by way of carefully calibrated and provocative juxtapositions. Throughout Tyson the lisping, soft-spoken and now flamboyantly face-tattooed former boxer’s testimony is offered in overlapping images and soundtracks, sometimes featuring Tyson giving multiple divergent responses to the same questions. At first the technique seems like empty flash, but soon it reveals itself as an inspired method of portraiture, resulting in a Rashomon-like poem on human contradictions on a spectacular scale, moving from inspiration and thrills to horror and confusion to an evocation of the purgatorial existence of a man whose meteoric ascent and titanic career sank into the abyss around the age most of us are just getting properly started with our lives.

Great portraits typically dispel myths, yet the closer Toback gets to Tyson the more Tyson’s story feels like myth. Not myth as broad gloss but as dense tapestry of heightened experience that spans the breath of several ordinary lives. Tyson’s movement from an impoverished fatherless Brooklyn youth of raising pigeons, getting brutalized and living in fear; to the discovery of a rage so great as to knock men down and a proclivity for thuggery; to juvenile detention, self-actualization and the great fortune of finding a generous and encouraging father figure; to becoming an unbeatable human juggernaut, heavyweight champion of the world at 21, impossibly naïve about so much, yet with the world’s riches and women splayed at his feet; to rape conviction, prison, countless scenes of public humiliation, ear-biting and isolation: all of these phases are explored in a wholly first-person account illustrated through a wealth of archival footage, culminating in a story of a figure not so much larger than life as stranger than fiction.

Have you all seen Fingers? Because Toback’s 1978 startling directorial debut, which stars Harvey Keitel as a mafia collector with a deeply frustrated gift for music, holds the key to so much of what makes Toback’s work distinctive, vital and repulsive, the self-flagellating fantasy of an unabashed wigger. It also makes a dynamite double feature alongside Tyson. (Mind you, Raging Bull wouldn’t make too shabby a pairing either. Nor would The Wrestler.) What Toback offers us in these films and others—including 2000’s Black and White, which features Tyson in a scary, homophobic cameo as himself—is an excavation of male psyches stunted through punishment and empowerment, their empathy drained through brute force, plagued with an inability to reflect that leads to impotency, a sense of being involuntarily thrust into violence, a hunger to at once dominate and be dominated by women, and the inhabiting of some regressive ideal of blackness, regardless of the race of the subject in question. Films like Fingers and Tyson possess a rare transparency. Grotesque and shamelessly entertaining, they infuriate and intrigue. And of we had a few more movies like them we may just learn something of fundamental importance about how men become monsters. Or perhaps how some of us have to work against our instincts just to not become monsters.

"Please. Help. Jean-Claude Van Damme is robbing a post office!"

What is surely the world’s first major meta-martial arts movie opens with a bravura tracking shot that forces Jean-Claude Van Damme, portrayed by Jean-Claude Van Damme, to kick, punch and jab his way through dozens of anonymous opponents to the sounds of some vintage Curtis Mayfield soul. The sequence just goes on and on, rather hilariously, until Van Damme begins to run out of steam, he misses a mark, and the whole thing literally collapses. “I’m 47!” he protests with affecting vulnerability to the frustrated crew. “Just because he brought John Woo to Hollywood doesn’t mean he can rub my dick with sandpaper,” the rather unforgiving punk of a director mumbles to his AD. A sort of companion piece to The Wrestler, but way goofier, JCVD gives us a fading action star waxing reflective on his own anxieties over struggling to keep up with the action.

Reeling from divorce and child custody suits, amassing vast debt, tiring, both physically and spiritually, of headlining an endless string of actioners that are virtual remakes of the same thing over and over, the muscle from Brussels returns home to lick his wounds and settle some business. But life will soon imitate art, and weirdly. It starts, aptly enough, in a sleepy video club that will soon be crammed with cops, some of whom wear only their underpants. They’re responding to one of the most memorable radioed-in cries for help in recent memory: “Please. Hurry. Jean-Claude Van Damme is robbing a post office!”

It appears Van Damme’s gone postal, though the truth is more complicated, involving hostages, many layers of theatre, meditations on the social duties of celebrities, a really bad and quite annoying bad guy with John Cazale’s haircut from Dog Day Afternoon, and a humiliating courtroom scene where a prosecuting attorney slaps down DVDs and rattles off the countless ways Van Damme has meted out death upon fictive victims for the last two decades. As helmed by Mabrouk El Mechri, JCVD is pitched somewhere between Jean-Luc Godard, Charlie Kaufman, a midnight movie and a cartoon. He bathes the whole thing in this bizarre, ugly, sort of bronzing ethereal haze that’s perhaps meant to resemble what the world looks like after 18 consecutive hours in a tanning bed. Like the enjoyably throwback score, the Dutch angles, or the long takes which frequently fix solely on Van Damme’s face even during a conversation, it’s one of many choices that render JCVD stylishly stoned and indiscriminate. But it’s never less than watchable and utterly diverting.

What grounds all this at all is obviously Van Damme himself, who seems to be genuinely laying his heart bare, slumped in chairs complaining about shit scripts, signing autographs and posing for pics, doing a few high kicks, and flipping out when he can’t make a simply bank transaction. The movie’s key scene has Van Damme drift out of the action altogether for a few minutes, floating up to the ceiling like the hero of Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist, delivering this rambling, semi-coherent, Brando-esque monologue about fame, drugs, women and whatever else haunts the tired mind of a Belgian kickboxing movie star. In some parallel universe it just won him the Oscar.

Appaloosa: this town isn't big enough for generic innovation, but some solid character work should fit quite cosily

The post-classical western characteristically concerns a world in transition, but just as every trail must reach its terminal point, the genre lends itself equally well to tales of lives in transition, especially the end of male friendships. Based on the novel by Robert B. Parker, Appaloosa begins with Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) entering the eponymous town, still in its infancy, and thus easily overrun by opportunistic criminals. Both being men of few words, the town tamers’ arrival is accompanied by voice-over from Everett that immediately hints at Appaloosa’s role as a catalyst in their partnership, and the subsequent appearance of the widow Allison French (René Zellwegger) clearly seals the deal: she catches Virgil’s eye, and the elder gunfighter’s dormant urges toward domestication rise to the surface, softening his ruddy face and pale eyes and spelling the end of something as surely as the beginning.

The first film helmed by Harris since Pollock, his striking, bleak-poetic biopic and directorial debut, Appaloosa feels like a throwback, making few attempts to depart from the western’s established vernacular. Yet as these characters develop, as these actors flesh them out, and especially as the subtly sophisticated dynamics of their relationships inform the proceedings, it seems as though Appaloosa actually benefits from its comfort with generic tropes: by situating us in familiar territory, Harris help us focus on the details.

As embodied by Harris with transparent inner turmoil, Virgil’s flustered response to Allison’s presence is endearing, as are his attempts to culture himself by reading Emerson and checking with Everett every time he tries out some newly acquired vocabulary. Heightened by Mortensen’s remarkable ability to convey multiple agendas in concert, Everett’s guardedness around Allison makes an intriguing counterpoint, especially once she begins to reveal her true colours, a habit of zeroing in on whichever man seems to be “the boss stallion.” Her opportunism finally feels less like a punishable character defect than a perfectly honorable survival technique for any single, no-longer-young woman trying to eek out some kind of security in the untamed west. Zellwegger feels miscast here, less able to exhibit Allison’s extremes of beguiling and repelling than other, less ingratiating or mannered actresses, yet crucially, she never seems to judge her character, and her conflicted desires remain sympathetic.

The A-story of Appaloosa, in which Virgil and Everett contend with a corrupt, weak-willed establishment while trying to run the local, foreign-accented nasty (Jeremy Irons, suitably nasty) out of town, functions well enough, but is most interesting as a backdrop to the more diverting and subtext-dependent story of Virgil and Everett’s long goodbye. There is however a wonderful showdown scene that passes with brutal quickness and decidedly unceremonious bloodletting. “Everyone could shoot,” Harris’ Virgil offers by way of blackly humorous explanation. He could just as easily be referring to his considerable directorial skills. I don’t suspect he’ll win over as many admirers with his sophomore effort, but in the long view I believe Appaloosa, with its complex moral-twisting culminating in a memorable final sequence, will stand-up as a solid part of Harris’ hopefully still-growing directorial filmography.