It's a Wonderful Life: cold comforts

Grudging altruism, ceaseless compromise, half-measures, a natural talent for holding down the fort, unfulfilled longings that, more harrowingly, perhaps never really could have been fulfilled: all of these things, accumulating over half a lifetime, drove George Bailey to get stinko, drive into an old tree, then stumble toward that snow-caked bridge over which he planned to tumble into the oblivion of river below. Suicide is painless when you’ve never once tasted what you truly craved, when the walls close in. And, for the third time in the movie, George does fall into the water. (Am I the only one that sees Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart makes the plunge, over and over, first for his brother, then into the hidden pool, and then into the river?) Only it’s to save a man from drowning, not to drown himself—yet again, George is a slave to self-sacrifice. That the drowning man is really a trickster guardian angel who proves to George that he’s well-friended, even beloved, that his town would be a nastier place (though one with a far more bustling night life) without him, doesn’t entirely remove the ache of it all, the fact that George Bailey still never got the hell out of Bedford Falls. And I think this is one of the enduring things about It’s a Wonderful Life: the magical consolation that ends the movie is, in the long run, in the years we imagine to come, only marginally consoling. Life will probably not get much easier for George Bailey. But, like some poor soul from Beckett, he’ll go on.

I’m only slightly embarrassed that I’d never seen It’s a Wonderful Life until last night. Everyone I know has seen it on TV; I don’t watch TV. But anyway what’s especially interesting about the movie is the way it actually seems designed/destined to be watched long after its making. It was a box office disappointment in its day, won none of its Oscars, and only became a holiday broadcast staple in the 1970s. It’s a movie about everything that leads us up to our worst moments, the long march of our pasts and the hard work of accepting cold comforts. The movie was always meant to be a classic, which means to be loved sometime in the future, when everyone involved was dead or dying and nostalgia has wrapped itself tightly round the movie’s breast. The sad truth: apparently George Bailey really is worth more to us dead than alive. Though while the screen is alight, he is, somehow, alive. And, as it turns out, he’s in a pretty wonderful movie.

Haunted by these images: The Film That Changed My Life

Something happens to us when we try to come to terms with formative experience. Some of us can articulate what constitutes the turning point in our lives. Some slip into reverie. Some are forced to acknowledge that there’s nothing more ineffable than the things that set fire to our imagination. Can something that blows your mind be analyzed? Does the fact that it blows your mind not preclude the inability to do just that? These questions haunt The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark (Chicago Review Press, $18.95). They give you some idea of what works and what doesn’t in this book of transcribed interviews conducted and edited by Robert K. Elder.

Alex Gibney

Some of the selections in The Film That Changed My Life are genuinely surprising, such as Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce on The Godfather, or, most interestingly, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney on Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Gibney tells a nice story about his brief correspondence with Buñuel, and goes some distance toward explaining how he was influenced by Buñuel’s cryptic surrealist techniques while commenting on the intermediary walking scenes in Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: “It’s like finding some random shot as a documentarian, and throwing it in there because it has some kind of power you can’t quite identify.” Elsewhere, The Last Seduction director John Dahl recalls seeing A Clockwork Orange at a drive-in in Billings, Montana. “It was the first time I paid attention to the sets,” he says, which probably tells us something about the cinema of Stanley Kubrick.

Danny Boyle

Many choices however, especially those from directors with a large and familiar body of work, are more predictable—and why wouldn’t they be? And who can blame Peter Bogdanovich if he doesn’t have anything especially fresh to say about Citizen Kane? 8 1/2 changed Henry Jaglom’s vocation from actor to director. Richard Kelly believes that “We get closer to Brazil with each passing week.” Danny Boyle declares Apocalypse Now “a celebration of the destruction as well as a condemnation of its subject matter.” Boyle laments the loss of the sort of quixotic ambitions that could drive a film during Francis Ford Coppola’s salad days. He also claims cinema is fundamentally a medium designed for young men, which I probably tells us something about the cinema of Danny Boyle.

I wondered soemtimes if The Film That Changed My Life mightn’t have been better as a series of magazine pieces. Some of Elder’s choices of interviewees might have seemed less puzzling in that context. (Bill Condon? Brian Hertzlinger?) It also might have forced him to be a more judicious editor. There are numerous repetitions that sound fine in conversation but in print read as mere redundancy. There’s also a lack of spontaneity in some pieces that I can only assume arises from Elder’s insistence on using same questions every time out, whether or not they go anywhere. The best interviews in here are the ones that seem to indulge tangents—that’s when Elder’s subjects, as well as Elder himself, really engage and come to life.

Guy Maddin

I’m happy to report that two of the very best interviews are with Canadians, and I take comfort in knowing that both directors in question discovered the movie that changed their life while channel-surfing late at night for glimpses of accidentally uncensored nudity (something I myself have experienced—is this a Canadian thing?). Had he never seen L’âge d’or, Guy Maddin, a man not adverse to hyperbole, claims that he would have never picked up a camera. “It’s just a love story,” Maddin says, “every bit as surreal as a love story deserves to be.” Atom Egoyan meanwhile is extremely sharp about Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, describing its sculptural qualities, how it emphasized the friction in language and the role of the listener. He also says one thing in particular that nearly sums up the entire book: “We are never more alive, I think, as when we are trying to ascertain our relationship to something which is completely mysterious to us.”

All the news that's fit to primp: Broadcast News

Tom (William Hurt) met Jane (Holly Hunter) when Jane gave a lecture at an industry conference about the moronization of the TV news. Nearly the whole of Jane’s audience of cynical, careerist colleagues just rolled their eyes, but for Tom, Jane’s words fell upon him with the force of revelation. Because Tom’s a symptom of precisely the problem Jane’s addressing. Tall, handsome and Aryan, sporting a pleasing baritone, displaying no special talent whatsoever for journalistic insight, Tom was a born anchorman. Soon he becomes Jane’s anchorman, and Jane his producer, whispering instructions in his ear at just the right on-air moments, which causes all sorts of problems not just for Jane’s sense of professional integrity—this is a woman who forces herself into sobs on a daily basis just to assure herself that she hasn’t lost her ability to feel—but for her personal life, since she discovers that she fancies Tom, and once her old buddy, the devoted reporter but less than telegenic Aaron (Albert Brooks), discovers that Jane fancies Tom, Aaron realizes that he’s always fancied Jane, and Aaron really needs to hate Tom, even though Tom makes it hard by being a basically nice guy. Things get complicated, and it’s to the credit of writer/director James L. Brooks that Broadcast News (1987), never compromises those complications by imposing facile resolutions.

Seeing Broadcast News for the first time, it initially struck me as jarring to imagine William Hurt and Jack Nicholson inhabiting the same movie—there are simply certain stars, or certain star egos, that seem to burn too boldly to share a constellation. Brooks himself tacitly acknowledges something momentous about a Hurt/Nicholson collision by taking their few seconds of shared screen time and filling it with an enormous close-up of their shaking hands. As it turns out Nicholson’s role is almost small enough to be considered a cameo, the bulk of his performance playing out on TV monitors watched by the other characters, a little bit like Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome (83), but with better grooming and less zeal.

What’s more deeply unsettling is the experience of witnessing Criterion’s spinning “C” introductory logo being followed by the whimsical, overly illustrative strains of Bill Conti’s musical score. Whether issuing works from the giants of foreign art cinema, studio era classics or psychotronic cult obscurities, Criterion has nearly always been synonymous with durability and keen, eclectic taste, so it takes some time to reconcile their brand with music from the dude who conducts the Oscars. But, okay, so I’m sensitive to sappy music. Fact is Broadcast News does represent the zenith of a particular kind of Hollywood film, one Brooks has made a career of, sometimes winningly, sometimes disastrously (How Do You Know), sometimes problematically while under the impression that this is As Good As It Gets. His are brainy, ambitious comedies with an interest in group dynamics, social milieux and romantic frustration, that delve into their characters’ eccentricities rather than simply use those eccentricities for superficial colour. Broadcast News has also accumulated tremendous historical value by having examined how televised news was generated, consumed, and essentially downgraded at a key moment in its development, and benefits enormously from Michael Ballhaus’ superb camerawork every time we’re offering a peek behind the scenes. It’s also, of course, fairly entertaining, thanks for especially to Hunter, who can somehow be at once zany and emotionally grounded, and Albert Brooks, rather moving and very much in his element, playing a character whose relationship to his female colleague is remarkably similar to that of Brooks’ character in Taxi Driver (76). Yet, as with some other James Brooks films, I couldn’t shake the feeling while watching Broadcast News that its clever gags were actually intended to be much funnier than they are. It might be a matter of rhythm: I recall at least two scenes that end with Albert Brooks saying or doing something funny, but instead of cutting on the joke, the scene ends with Hunter’s laughing reaction. I’d have preferred it if Brooks let me laugh instead.

Industrial strength: A talk with Mike Judge

The blue collar cousin to his 1999 cult film Office Space, Mike Judge’s Extract examines the ironies of hierarchies in the work place. Joel (Jason Bateman, perfectly cast) built his company from the ground up. His patented flavourings and the small company that produces them have helped Joel ease his way into a big suburban house, a big pool, a big car, and other middle-class comforts that are slowly transforming him into a depressive eunuch, unloved by his bored wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig), unappreciated by his resentful employees, left with nothing to do in his spare time except masturbate in one of his three bathrooms while Suzie watches Dancing with the Stars or get drunk with his New Age dope fiend barkeep buddy Dean (Ben Affleck, alarmingly convincing).

A thread of emasculation runs through Extract, whether it’s Joel’s dwindling sex life or the literal testicular injury suffered by staffer Step (Clifton Collins Jr.). The only sexually satisfied male character in the movie is a supremely dimwitted young stud-for-hire, and in his case that’s all he has going for him. Genuine empowerment is enjoyed only by Cindy (Mila Kunis), a small-time grifter hoping to make a big score by convincing Step to sue Joel and the ultra-manic bus stop ad lawyer played by Gene Simmons, groomed here to most closely resembles a rabid poodle. Joel will make numerous attempts to break out of his rut, including selling his company, having an affair, and smoking a bong the size of a lamppost. But in the end he may find his greatest consolation in Step, who for all his flaws is truly proud to consider himself “just a working man.”

Extract is unusual among mainstream comedies in that Judge conveys affection for his characters while at the same time refraining from sentimentalizing them. In the case of one of the film’s most memorable supporting bits, amusingly embodied by Beth Grant, he doesn’t shy away from making her a flat-out racist. When I spoke with Judge he recalled how a friend once described to him the real-life model for Grant’s character, listing all her external traits. Judge (see below) felt like without having met the woman in question he absolutely knew her as a type. And perhaps herein lies some of the problems with the characters in Extract. So many of them feel much more like types than people. There are times you can’t help but wonder if it would all come off better as a cartoon, like Judge’s greatest successes, his television shows Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill. To be sure, there are a lot of funny scenes in Extract, but some of them are so broad and familiar it’s hard to feel completely invested in them.

Mike Judge

I can’t say the same for my experience of meeting Judge. His demeanor was somber, yet his responses to my questions were never less than playful, bouncing improbably from his admiration for both Badlands and The Big Lebowski—“the kind of comedy you can meditate on”—to the unlikely kinship between Bob Newhart and crime novelist Jim Thompson.

JB : When you have an idea do you know right away if it’s a television show or a movie?

Mike Judge: There were moments when I was working on Office Space where I thought maybe it should’ve been a TV show. I’d be doing scenes with Gary Cole and Ron Livingston, or Gary Cole and Stephen Root, and thinking how fun it would be to just keep writing stuff for these guys and see where it goes. But for the most part the stuff I’ve made were things that always knew what they wanted to be from the beginning.

Office Space

JB: It must be tempting to turn any idea into television because then, in theory at least, you have an opportunity to build an audience.

MJ: At one point Fox did want to make a TV show out of Office Space. This was before the British version of The Office came out much less the American one. Now I feel like we’ve had two great shows about offices and we don’t need another one.

JB: Has your idea of what makes good TV or good movies changed since you started out, given that the industry has changed so much?

MJ: I think it’s the same. I always think in terms of classic TV. I haven’t really watched prime time TV since I started in this business. I watch a lot of TV but mostly late at night, so I tend to see reruns of old shows. And reality shows. I was actually hooked on American Idol for several seasons. I think in a way that’s a sort of classic. It could have been on in the 1950s.

The Bob Newhart Show

JB: Are there shows that were on when you were coming up that still feed you creatively when you see them now?

MJ: Oh yeah. I saw an old Bob Newhart episode about a year ago and it was just brilliant. That character Carlin, his whole thing was genius. It was that episode where Carlin ends up buying the building that Bob Newhart lives in, so during his therapy session Bob has to explain to his patient about the heater not working and so on, trying to tell the guy he’s a tightwad and a bad landlord. You know there’s this Jim Thompson novel called The Alcoholics. Seeing that episode of Bob Newhart made me think that The Alcoholics could make a good movie.

JB: Really?

MJ: It’s about a guy a guy who runs a treatment centre. He’s kind of a Bob Newhart-like character.

JB: Huh. I know the book. I never thought of it that way.

MJ: That book’s actually kinda funny. You keep thinking someone’s going to get shot or something. Thompson must have been in an alcoholic treatment place when he wrote that.

King of the Hill

JB: What about animation? Do you know when something is going to be live-action or animation? Do economics come into account?

MJ: Yeah. That or my limited drawing abilities. With animation I do best when it starts with something that I drew. What’s harder is writing something and then figuring out how to draw it after the fact. King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead both started as drawings. King of the Hill was initially a panel cartoon of four guys with their beers with three of them saying “Yep,” and then I had Boomhauer thinking “Yep” in a thought balloon. But if it’s something that starts out as a script it’s usually going to be live-action.

JB: Did the script for Extract develop out of the milieu? The characters?

MJ: I remember writing the scene where Cindy steals this guitar. Sometimes I just write scenes. I wrote that not knowing where to go with it. At some point I know I wanted to write a script about a girl that’s really good-looking but kind of a sociopath—I’ve known a couple like that—and just the way that super-hot girls seem to live by different rules than the rest of us. I thought about doing something in the blue collar world, or something in the factory setting but from the boss’ point of view. This friend of mine had been a musician most of his life and had to quit going on the road, so in his late 40s he got a job in this parts warehouse. He started calling me to tell me about the people working there. I’ve worked in factories myself. He said there’s this woman, she sits on a stool, arms folded, shaking her head at everybody. She’s got a Tweedy-bird T-shirt on. She’s like 65, fanny-pack. I thought oh my god, I’ve never met this particular woman he’s talking about but I’ve seen her a hundred times. He had this one line of hers that he’d repeat. “I’m just gonna sit here.” So I just started imagining all these characters that are unique to factories, the same way there are characters unique to cubicles.


JB: And the Jason Bateman character? Did he come with this whole package you were envisioning?

MJ: That came more directly from my personal experience. At one point in my life I went from having nobody work for me to suddenly having 30 to 90 people working for me. I remember thinking, these people are driving me crazy, they don’t appreciate anything. I try to be nice and they take advantage of me. Then I realized, oh yeah, I’m the boss, and I was probably like that to my bosses. See, middle-management types like in Office Space tend to thrive on that stuff I think, the power trip, telling people what to do. I don’t enjoy telling people what to do. But I do enjoy steering the ship and making something on a big scale. That’s satisfying work.

Space issues: Star Trek

“Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence,” so states a flustered Dr. “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban) en route to the heavens in Star Trek. Yet while Bones’ assessment sounds right, those vacuous descriptives don’t really jive with the colossal spectacle of director J.J. Abrams’ film, a fully loaded throwback/re-conception of the beloved 1960s television series with the bountiful offspring. For two solid hours, darkness and silence are held at bay by explosions that dazzle and bellow in the galactic depths and heated debates between crewmembers that echo unnervingly throughout the starship Enterprise.

It starts with plenty of death and one conspicuous birth. I guess it can’t be helped when a lady goes into labour at the precise moment that her husband chooses to sacrifice himself for the survival of millions while under attack, but it sure leaves her son, one James T. Kirk, with a serious case of survivor’s guilt, which will manifest as arrogance self-destructive behaviour when he grows into a young man (Chris Pine). Meanwhile, another troublesome legacy brews when Vulcan dad meets human mom (Winona Ryder!), generating a half-breed burdened with finding the balance between paternal logic and maternal emotion. Baby Spock will grow into a seductively smart and ambitious young fellow (Zachary Quinto) who’ll serve as the perfect foil for the wild, undisciplined Kirk. These guys barely make it into space before unfathomable terror causes their antagonistic tendencies to flare up and only gradually settle into the collaboration necessary to save the universe from some ireful Romulans in possession of some red matter that makes black holes and kills off entire planets in the blink of an eye.

As I watched Star Trek with a capacity audience, I actually heard some people behind me hyperventilate, usually upon the first appearance of some familiar character with a new face. Full disclosure: I am not one of these people, but, breathing disruptions aside, I know there are millions of you out there and, presumably, unless you had to be hospitalized during the first ten minutes, you’ve all seen the movie by now. I can’t speak for Trekkies, but it seems to me that Abrams’ film, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, whom Abrams worked with on Alias, walks a pretty fine line between homage and camp. Pine and Quinto give engaging, original and fairly nuanced performances, even if Pine succumbs to his own version of Shatneresque excess on occasion. But a number of others work so arduously to invoke the mannerisms of the original cast that it feels like parody, an effect that’s heightened still further by some pretty one-dimensional villains.

This tension between reverence for the old Star Trek and the thirst for innovation is mirrored in an uncertain overall tone. With a plot that hinges on wildly implausible/poetic coincidences (just wait until you see how they manage to wrangle Leonard Nimoy into this thing), this Star Trek feels at times cut from the blunt stencils of ancient myth, yet at others it’s imbued with the clarity and psychology of a very modern, textured drama. I guess there was no way of avoiding any kind of Star Trek that wouldn't get tangled up in trying to be many things to many people. But whatever it is, this Star Trek is relentlessly entertaining, has sequences of striking beauty and otherworldly strangeness, and speaks to the sort of old-fashioned heroism rarely invoked with any conviction anymore.

The constant gardener: Being There on DVD

Going back to its opening scenes, especially as they read in the novel, Being There submits itself as perhaps our most acute modern take on Plato’s allegory of the cave. Before the death of his employer, Chance (Peter Sellers) spent his whole life confined within the high walls of an affluent mansion, meeting few others, tending the old man’s garden, and experiencing the external world entirely through the shadow play of television. The catch to this spin on the allegory is that liberation from his cave doesn’t necessarily enlighten Chance but rather leads to inspired farce, one with the distinctive blend of affection and dismay for American life that marks the perspective of the observant outsider, which is exactly what the late Polish-born writer Jerzy Kosinski was.

Kosinski’s eponymous novella was published in 1970, a sharp if unusually slight work from a period marked by dark, at times positively gruesome novels, including The Painted Bird, Kosinski’s controversial 1965 semi-autobiographical chronicle of an abandoned child’s harrowing survival during World War II. As directed by Hal Ashby, the 1979 film, adapted with surprising fidelity by Kosinski himself, is leisurely, almost whimsical, and, thanks largely to Sellers’ sublimely restrained central performance—his penultimate—it’s also very funny. Chance, who due to a misunderstanding adopts the name Chauncey Gardiner, resembles a permanently sedated child. His mind is placid. He can only convey ideas through gardening metaphors, can only understand human behaviour when it echoes televised simulations. Yet, thanks to outrageous fortune, Chance befriends a wealthy, dying financier (Melvyn Douglas), influences the American President (Jack Warden), arouses the friendship of the Soviet ambassador (Richard Basehart), inflames the passions of a fetching society woman (Shirley MacLaine), and becomes a sensation, a celebrity without a past.

Being There, especially when seen in the wake of the Bush administration, speaks to the adoration of naïveté that can imperil American political discourse. Yet despite the dangers he represents, Chance himself is never rendered as anything more than benignly vacuous, an inoffensive, (literally) impotent blank, a man whose homespun wisdom and pop cultural breeding disguises what finally feels like an alien entity, no more of this world than Benjamin Button or Truman Burbank. He could have easily a creation of Philip K. Dick's. Chance’s TV-derived approximation of humanness is a satirical reflection on reflection itself, the reflection of the world through a sentimental, infantilized, implicitly racist and commercially dictated mirror. So Being There also functions as a documentary on what everybody was watching 30 years ago—remember Cheech and Chong’s star-laden ‘Basketball Jones’?

Despite a bit of unevenness—the scenes of the President in bed with the first lady feel, oddly enough, like a bad sitcom—I think Being There holds up well, and that it will continue to look different for each successive generation. And, along with his appearance in Reds, it remains one of the very few traces of Kosinski’s strange, unusual presence in the movies.