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.

Crisis of conformity: Bigger Than Life on DVD

Ed Avery must have come from somewhere other than the anonymous suburb where he now lives with his wife and young son and teaches grade school. He has that mid-Atlantic accent, untraceable yet distinctive. He once played football, but now wears bowties. He seems patient with his students and friendly with his colleagues, but might there be a subtle tone of condescension in his voice? There’s a curious tension between his emblematic middle-class Americaness and these hints at Otherness.

Ed moonlights as a taxi dispatcher, something he hasn’t yet told his family about. He’s overworked, and maybe that’s why the shooting pains he’s been suffering get worse until Ed finally collapses, is taken to hospital, and following a series of uncomfortable tests is told he has a rare inflammation of the arteries which kills those afflicted within a year. His only recourse is to take cortisone, a new ostensible wonderdrug still to be satisfactorily tested. The drug indeed makes Ed feel wonderful, charged, optimistic, ready to re-apply himself to his vocation and familial role. But this new life rapidly descends into nightmare. Ed becomes moody, flamboyantly arrogant and short-tempered, cruel to his wife and unreasonably demanding with his boy. The Avery home becomes a house under siege by its increasingly deranged patriarch. But here’s the thing about Bigger Than Life (1956): I never really believe that Ed’s behaviour is the fault of the cortisone. Helpless as he is to the threat of pain and death—that force that ultimately proves to be bigger than life—Ed’s peculiar rampage feels like the release of some long repressed attitude toward the rest of the world. Ed the eager-to-assimilate outsider, perhaps more than his indigenous peers, has bought fully into the American Dream, and it may have simply been a matter of time before it made him crazy.

Bigger Than Life, now available from the Criterion Collection, is among the finest achievements of director Nicholas Ray’s career. Coming quickly after Rebel Without a Cause (55), it represents the zenith of Ray’s explorations in the realms of both Technicolor and Cinemascope, resulting in expressionistic flourishes of red and orange against a generally muted palate and framing that gradually forces the walls of the Avery home to seemingly close in on its inhabitants. Based on a New Yorker article by Berton Roueché, to which the script, written by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, with uncredited contributions by Clifford Odets, is surprisingly faithful, Bigger Than Life also represents the height of Ray’s profound interest in social problems, especially those that refused to be facilely dismissed by way of class or race. The critique of postwar consumerism threaded through this vivid and continuously unnerving film is fairly overt without being chastising: when Ed ’s workmate mentions she’s having car trouble, Ed immediately suggests she just get a new one; when Ed arrives home from work the first thing his son Richie does is ask if Ed brought him anything; when Ed leaves hospital, despite increasing worry over medical bills, the first thing he does is take his wife Lou out to a fancy dress shop where he bullies her into elaborate gowns they can neither afford nor have any practical use for. Spending money seems the only way for Ed to express his feelings of anguish and exhilaration. That is, until he re-directs his energies toward an oppressively disciplinarian, reactionary vision of pedagogy, which then builds to quasi-religious delusions of grandeur. During the film’s climax Lou tries to remind Ed of God’s fundamental forgiveness. “God was wrong,” Ed tells her.

Part of what makes Bigger Than Life so persuasive are its finely tuned performances. The inspired casting of James Mason, also the film’s producer, provides Ed with layers of neurosis that a more obviously “average joe” sort of actor would never yield. During parent-teacher night Ed holds court, declaring childhood “a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it.” Such audacious outbursts are delivered with a subtly bizarre mixture of conviction and childish provocation, with Mason looking at once oddly oblivious and surveying the room to gauge reactions, perhaps gleeful over the more outraged faces. At other times Mason’s pain and confusion seems chillingly acute, such as in the scene that finds him staring into a fractured mirror after having driven the previously obedient Lou to the point of exasperation. Barbara Rush provides Lou with a heart-rending, if frustrating, inner-conflict between whether to coddle or berate her husband. She’s often in a state of terror, desperately calculating under attempted placidity as to how to best pacify Ed. There’s also sturdy support from Walter Matthau as the bachelor phys-ed teacher whose relative youth and physical strength seem to threaten Ed. (In one of the disc’s best supplements, author Jonathan Lethem makes a case for Matthau’s character’s hidden homosexuality. Of course Lethem also goes on a very amusing tangent about the pompadour created by James Mason’s shadow.)

The performances help imbue Bigger Than Life with the balance of identification and strangeness, of urgency and ambiguity that Ray seemed to be nurturing on every level. The film is unrelenting in its disquiet, which may account for its being so unloved in its time. It wears the vestiges of a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama, yet it at times feels like pitch-black comedy, and with its noirish shadows and claustrophobic interiors, it comes to resemble a horror movie, complete with a finale in which the monster hasn’t died but rather seems to be sleeping, waiting. The desperation with which Ed clutches his family in those last moments is genuinely touching. I truly believe his need and his fear and even his love. It’s just that his clutching could so easily erupt into a stranglehold.

Road to nowhere

April thought she and Frank must be extraordinary, that they would surely lead extraordinary lives, but then April got pregnant, Frank took an office job, and they bought themselves a house deep in the suburbs, where a second child emerged as alarmingly as the first. Before you know it, it’s 1955, and Frank’s 30. He’s having a liquid lunch, commiserating with some seducable innocent from the secretarial pool over how he found himself embedded in such mediocrity. He comes home on his birthday, and April, as though under some intoxicating spell, tells him they’re going to sell the house and car. They’re going to go to Paris, that place that so dazzled Frank when he passed through during the war. There’s still time for them to be extraordinary.

But of course, there isn’t. Happiness and fulfillment are less than fleeting in Revolutionary Road. They’re abstractions, something we never catch glimpse of, even in traces. The first three minutes of the movie sweep us from April and Frank’s first encounter to bracingly resentful, belligerent arguments on the side of the freeway. We start in neatly designed domestic despair and pretty much stay there, which is to say that director Sam Mendes’ latest film, an adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 eponymous novel, stuck with theatrical, histrionic, dated sounding talk—the script’s by Justin Haythe—makes a companion to Mendes’ breakthrough, American Beauty, which was also rife with neatly designed domestic despair, yet offered flashes of revelation. Even in the crucial scene in which April and Frank resolve to start anew in Europe, there isn’t a single flashing moment of revelation here, no dreamy thrill or sense of connection between them. Nor is there any such moment when they inevitably decide not to go, no relief or resignation, no mourning for opportunities lost or delayed. These scenes, rendered at times in handsome close-ups that do little to help the dearth of chemistry, just die up there on the screen, as the movie slowly sucks the life out of us all.

What is genuinely extraordinary in Revolutionary Road is Kate Winslet’s performance, newly crowned with a Golden Globe. Her April wanted to be an actor, and there she is, acting up a storm every day of her drab life, folding napkins, making supper, cleaning the drapes, playing the role of dutiful wife. Winslet keeps a current of electricity flowing through her better scenes. She’s almost scary, sad, yet sexy, in the one where she’s abandoned at a roadhouse with a fawning neighbour. She gets drunk, and, overwhelmed with angst, looks up at him and suddenly, with a comically grave expression, says, “Come on, let’s do it.” When she's later pinned by this neighbour in the front seat of a car, the way she holds her body rigid is itself interesting and unnerving to watch. April has sex twice in this film, each time lasting all of 30 seconds, and the disappointment registers on Winslet's face in an odd way that keeps you watching and wondering about what exactly is building up inside of her, rather than having her inner landscape all splayed out to mourn over. Before we reach the hysterical climax, Winslet's is a harrowing presence.

Fine actor though he is, Leonardo DiCaprio by contrast gives one of his most fraught performances. His Frank is basically an average guy in way over his head. He's no match for April in more ways than one. There’s a brilliantly gauged scene where Frank meets with a potential new employer for lunch, and DiCaprio’s pent-up frustration, that tension held in his jaw and forehead, makes it all too clear how Frank, for all his talk about his lousy job, realizes that he might be really good at it. And that he kinda likes that. And that maybe that's right where he belongs. Just about everywhere else in Revolutionary Road however, DiCaprio squints, gesticulates and shouts to excess, unable to spend a single moment on screen with a neutral expression. A moment of repose could tell us so much here, letting us catch the character off guard instead of bracing vaguely for a new attack. So DiCaprio flails in uncertainty, yet I can’t completely hold it against him. The material, which indeed devastates, presses too tightly up against the actors, positively stifling them. And Mendes’ approach seems so decided from the start, so obviously superior to the milieu depicted. So in the end I suppose DiCaprio’s rather like Frank: he simply never had a chance.

The war at home: Gran Torino

Gran Torino can be read as a sort of western, and not just because of the immense presence of its iconic director and star. Maybe Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is an old soldier looking for a new war. He served in Korea, worked most of his life at a Ford plant, raised kids who are now middle class twerps and virtually estranged. He’s newly widowed, but continues to live alone, save his pooch, in the family house in some corroded suburb in the industrial wasteland of Detroit, where he mows the lawn, does small repairs, sucks back can after can of Pabst Blue Ribbon on the porch, and works hard to keep others away, sometimes with a snarl and a growl, sometimes with a gun. Always with a string of racist slurs.

But Gran Torino, written by Nick Schenk, is among other things the story of Walt’s redemption. Thanks partly to the awkward machinations of the script, but thanks to a greater degree to Eastwood’s particular integrity, this redemption will not come easily. Walt’s encounters with his Hmong immigrant neighbours, the kids especially, will force him to bust his cloistered existence. Teenage siblings Sue (Ahney Her, who tends to swallow her words but is so utterly the character) and Thao (Bee Vang) engage Walt, the former through smart talk, a preternatural insight into curmudgeonly psychology and offerings of delicious Hmong chow, the latter by trying to steal Walt’s prized Gran Torino under pressure from his gangbanger cousins. Walt finds new purpose as Sue and Thao’s protector and will ultimately stop at nothing to ensure they get a fighting chance to wriggle free of the ghetto. He’s an old hand at intimidation, so why should some stupid punks with tattoos and guns worry him? I can’t claim that I buy how it all goes down, but that doesn’t meant it’s not a story worth telling.

Eastwood manipulates his star image brilliantly. He knows the audience sees Dirty Harry up there, that we associate him with vengeance and vigilantism, and he lets all these extra-filmic elements hover around him and feed the tension. Though his directorial work can sometimes slip into implausibility and half-baked sentiment, Eastwood likes his stories tough. And he’s that rare mainstream American filmmaker who tries to make movies about what it means to live in America today. This alone is a reason to if not treasure at least respect his body of work. Rather than mindlessly celebrate his country’s puffed-up triumphalism, Gran Torino surveys a corner of the US that resembles a third world shit hole more than some glorious embodiment of ambition and affluence.

Whatever promise of a better world can be gleaned in Gran Torino must be found in the margins, in the implication that even the least tolerant of us, the disdainful dinosaurs who cling to antiquated notions of masculinity and tribalism, might be lured back into active engagement with others. The film trades in cliché. It cheats here and there to get Walt to the finish line. But Walt himself, which is to say Eastwood the conservative closet humanist, is never less than riveting, and it’s the throwaway moments he shares with his unexpected new friends that are the film’s finest and most affecting. There might just be hope for my cranky old uncle Rick yet. I just hope the movie plays in Gananoque, Ontario, so he can see it. 

The good neighbour policy: Sam Jackson does a little creative gardening on Patrick Wilson's white ass in Lakeview Terrace

The first two-thirds of Lakeview Terrace feel like Marxist propaganda, the last third like capitalist propaganda, the whole thing like some sort of distinctly American nightmare, with some surprisingly curious politics and one hell of a dunderheaded narrative. Abel (Samuel L. Jackson) is old school LAPD, a widower with two-kids, a humongous piece of carefully manicured residential property and a chip on his shoulder the size of Plymouth Rock. He’s a hard-ass with a knack for intimidation as well as flights of charm and manipulation. (The movie’s got plenty of good cop/bad cop—in the same cop!)

Abel’s also got some serious issues with racial integration and cultural appropriation—in a memorable early scene, he menacingly reassures his new next-door neighbour Chris (Patrick Wilson) that he can listen to hip-hop all night long if he wants but when he wakes up the next morning he’ll still be white. More importantly Abel’s stridently territorial—at one point he even hires some slob to piss in Chris’ shirt drawer. Chris and his conspicuously fetching black wife Lisa (Kerry Washington) are thus shamelessly sullying Abel’s suburban enclave, practically asking for the full brunt of our man Jackson’s wrath—which apparently is precisely what the very loud, obnoxious but nonetheless jovial audience at the sneak preview I attended came to gobble up. I felt like I was at a wrestling match. These guys actually talk to the screen.

Though I was initially surprised to see Neil LaBute credited as director, it’s actually not that hard to see what attracted him to this material, which, incidentally, was dreamed up by David Loughery, the guy who brought you Money Train and Passenger 57. Right from his earliest films—In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors—LaBute’s fancied himself something of a moralist and provocateur, though the results have dwindled to the point where his last movie was the outlandishly dumb remake of The Wicker Man. Yet Lakeview Terrace shares with The Wicker Man a gleeful immersion into an essentially closed community lorded over by those who would shape it into some sort of fascist paradise, and the fires consuming Southern California and creeping toward Abel and Chris’ pissing contest carry a certain apocalyptic portent that no doubt agreed with LaBute’s natural pessimism.

Of course it all goes nowhere. At least nowhere all that interesting. The prickly marital squabbles that burble up in the midst of the war-like neighbourly ones feel lazily tacked on, and Chris’ paranoia being surrounded by pushy, Alpha Male Negroes doesn’t build up to a confrontation worthy of the concept. There’s a lot of motivational overkill—like the monologue about the deceased wife’s carrying on with her whitey boss—perhaps to help us understand Abel’s little attitude problem, but in the end he still goes down in a hail of flamboyant nonsense instead of prompting further intrigue or audience implication, and—hooray!—property ownership and vague liberal values rule the day.

(For something more substantial on suburban angst, check out Gary Burns and Jim Brown's Radiant City.)