Worldly goods, worldly bads: Clive Owen follows the money in The International

“I’m from the Bronx, so you gotta make it simple,” says a soon to be disposed of INTERPOL agent. Discreetly poisoned, he collapses only moments after his Berlin rendezvous with a representative of the evil International Bank of Business and Credit. As fellow agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) rushes to his rescue—only to himself collapse after being knocked upside the head by a truck’s side mirror—we quickly reckon that the intrigue we’re about to be plunged into will be anything but simple. Yet The International, written by Eric Singer and directed by Tom Twyker, wants to cater to those intellectually self-effacing Bronx-dwellers and other ostensibly dopey audience members, so while the plot becomes more wildly convoluted with each passing scene, the glut of platitudes and expository dialogue will attempt counterbalance.

The IBBC trades in more than cash. They’ve cut deals with just about every multinational, hold ties with multiple government agencies, and are single-handedly backing an armed revolution in Liberia. Apt pupils of the shock doctrine, their goal is to cultivate conflicts and control incurred debt. Along the way they’ll force a few hands, if not cut them off. From a previous post at Scotland Yard to his current gig with the apparently ineffectual INTERPOL—the other International of the title—Salinger’s long been crusading to bring these jackals to justice. With the help of a Manhattan DA lawyer (Naomi Watts), Salinger may finally be closing in, valiantly following a series of brutal incidents that could lead to the top: an IBBC VP dies under questionable circumstances, an Italian arms manufacturer and presidential candidate is assassinated, a tailing operation leads to a major shootout in the Guggenheim.

There are splendid bits of character work, such as Salinger’s tendency to have his ears injured, this man who hears too much. There are riveting set pieces, the one in the Gug being especially bracing. There is a surprisingly sinister resolution implying that vigilantism maybe the only way of dealing with powers higher than governments, and there's something weirdly assuring in how it proves that criminal networks will ultimately take care of their own. There’s also an inspired cell phone gag, though elsewhere Twyker’s attempt to wring tension out of text messaging falls flat. And there’s a lot of dragging scenes out, with padded entrances and exits or yet another show-offy bird’s eye shot, even when the scenes in question aren’t very exciting or essential to the story. When it all comes together it’s a great coulda-beena-Bond part for Owen and a decent stab at exposing the perils of globalization, but the state of the dialogue doesn’t bode well for Singer’s prospects and Twyker has yet to recover from Perfume. He made his mark with Run Lola Run over a decade ago, and some—I for one haven’t kept up—argue he’s been smudging it ever since.

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. 

Spiritual vacancy

The fantasy is hardly new, but there’s a novelty to its veneer that holds a certain initial thrill. The hero, a murdered cop raised from the grave, exists beyond death. The villain, too, is invincible. There’s the suggestion they could fight for all eternity, like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, with no limit to the cartoony extremes of meaningless violence they can exact on each other. The women are uniformly astonishing objects, every one untouched by age, imperfection, gravity. Even the rookie cop wears a uniform revealing luscious cleavage. There’s a climactic four-way showdown in some part of town called “the projects,” yet not a single person seems to live there. So we have a world without poverty, pain or unattractive women. Or death. Or even, it would seem, colour, beyond red. Yet there’s no limit to the diversity of weaponry, so rest assured we get plenty of noise. Yes, it’s beautiful in its limited way. But is that enough?

I suppose The Spirit, written and directed by Frank Miller, inspired by Will Eisner’s comic, shot on the same digital backlot that produced the stylistically akin Sin City, represents the future, or maybe just the sluggish-to-catch-on present, of movies. But I dearly hope it’s not the only future, this hermetically sealed world that eschews what some of us love about movies: actual places, sunlight, spontaneity, interaction, evocations of sensual experience. The titular super hero (Gabriel Macht) is a ghost of sorts. Fittingly, he inhabits a city where everything’s the vaguest suggestion of something that might have once breathed. It’s a twist on the texture of film noir, but this twist squeezes out all of noir’s pathos and sweat.

“My city needs me,” the Spirit soliloquizes. “She is my love. She is my life.” There’s no mistaking this for anything but unabashed melodrama, and that’s fine—there’s plenty of room in the movies these days for alternatives to the standard of supposed naturalism. But characters speak exclusively in shopworn hard-boiled patter, expository monologues, or declamatory statements that extinguish subtext. There are flourishes of visual expressionism: an automaton created by evil genetic scientist the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) commits ritual seppuku, and the background’s consumed with the blood-red rays of the Japanese flag; characters swim in waters so murky they could be drifting through gaseous portals in space. But all the eye candy, from the misty skies of fluttering snow to Eva Mendes’ immaculate ass, begins to wear as the story proves itself bereft of feeling. The characters are stereotypes. Their stories get very boring.

There’s not much point in talking performances here, though Jackson seems to have a good time. And I am kind of fascinated by the Octopus’ emphatic dislike of eggs, which seems counterintuitive given that, besides being a beloved breakfast staple, eggs are a symbol of rebirth, and Octopus is singularly obsessed with immortality. And they’re luminescent white, one of few colours Miller permits. They’re also as thin and fragile as Miller’s story, which threatens to grow into a franchise where hero and villain just keep beating the, er, living shit out of each other in the presence of fawning babes, against a backdrop of absolutely nothing.

Fact is, he was talkin' to all of us

The yellow cab emerges silent, hulking, opaque and phantom-like out of the plumes of steam that waft up from the gutters, the gauzy, rain-slick streets bleed super-saturated reds and blues, the brass and snare drum conjure up oppressive waves of portent, and finally the darkness parts its curtain for God’s lonely man to make his entrance. He comes from nowhere, peers the world through slatted fingers, and can’t make convincing small talk to save his life. By his own claims he’s a Vietnam vet, an ex-marine, with no friends or family with whom he can connect or accept consolation from. A genuine outsider with only the most marginal sort of charisma imaginable, he seems somehow the unlikeliest of characters to mount the stage of movie history, but more than 30 years after making his first appearance there’s no denying that he’s earned his place there.

I think I’ve probably seen Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) as many times as I’ve seen any movie, yet every time I revisit it I’m always caught off guard at just how abstract, even hallucinatory, those opening moments are that I’ve described above. I’m equally caught off guard by how goddamned young, even asexual, Jodie Foster is as the child hooker Iris, or just how deeply immersed Robert De Niro seems in the role of the titular cabbie Travis Bickle, how convincingly he nurtures Travis’ loneliness, alienated logic, and the notion that his movement toward vigilantism is inevitable and somehow even heroic, cleansing, this 20th century underground man determined to wash the scum off the mean streets.

“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis writes in his diary. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” As delivered by De Niro, the comical, crude poetry with which he expresses his delusions of conformity is marvelous, and just one of several elements that make Paul Schrader’s churned-from-the-gut screenplay one of the most perfectly realized of the New Hollywood era. And you can actually access the script as you make your way through the movie on Sony’s recent Taxi Driver two-disc set, stopping at any point to see how it matches with the final result. Its just one of a plethora of special features designed to entice fans who obsess over the film to a level that competes with Travis’ obsessing over his misguided vocation.

There have been a number of excellent multi-disc packages of Scorsese films in recent years, with the two-disc release of Raging Bull being a major standout. I’m not sure why it took so long to finally get Taxi Driver the same deluxe treatment, but its proven to be worth the wait. There’s good making-of type stuff and testimonies from everybody from Scorsese himself to his one-time student Oliver Stone to numerous New York City cabbies who remember just how mean the city streets were back when the film first came out.

There’s also a pretty smart little featurette that’s got plenty of interesting quotes from the always articulate Schrader, though the highlight of the whole package for me is Schrader’s full length audio commentary, where he discusses where he was at in his life while writing the film (i.e.: in miserable shape), how he’d connected with Scorsese, how they adjusted the project to best accommodate the cast and shooting conditions, how much of the film was scripted and how much improvised, and how little anyone expected the film to become the enormous success it did. Schrader talks matter-of-factly about the underlying themes of racism in the film, explaining why he though it essential that Travis attack blacks in particular, and why the racism in the film eventually became one of the factors that led to Harvey Keitel being cast as the jive-talking pimp Sport, a role originally meant for a black actor.

Taxi Driver is a film that speaks to the ages yet could probably only have come out of the particular conditions of its time. Its fixations are those of young, angry men, and Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro were just young enough to still really feel it. Its singular position both in its response to and shaping of film history is on exhibit all over the place, with Scorsese’s wildly adventurous playing with form indebted to his voracious consuming of the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among many others. And it’s a film that’s finally a product of the heady 70s, that time when young directors with a newly-gleaned sense of film history's continuity could take control of their work, a time when mainstream audiences occasionally flocked to see films for reasons other than fleeting thrills (though Taxi Driver arguably has those, too), and the battle between art and commerce in movies found some near-perfect harmony for a few golden years. Taxi Driver is the grotesque child of that era, and one that deserves to be visited again and again.

The Brave One: This time, it's personal, or maybe it's generic, or maybe neither

When The Brave One cropped up last fall I was knee deep in TIFF and barely noticed it. It was only later that I began to notice how wildly conflicted the critical response was and my curiosity grew. The film’s genealogy as a vigilante thriller is of course impressive, with executive producer and star Jodie Foster in a sense assuming the Travis Bickle role from Taxi Driver, the film in which she played the pubescent prostitute who becomes Bickle’s personal salvation project.

The Brave One cements its kinship with Taxi Driver in its use of voice-over, the evocative New York location work, the convenience store-killing initiation scene, and, at points, even its score, which features surges of nearly atonal brass and strings. As well, there’s the protagonist’s unusual sensitivity to the ever-shifting city via the dictates of their occupation: from the cockpit of his cab, Bickle primarily saw and smelled New York, where Foster’s Erica, a public radio broadcaster who makes field recordings and comments on New York’s evolution on her show, primarily listens to it

Filmic heritage aside, what’s most interesting here is basically the cultivation of Erica’s sense of internal transfiguration. Having survived the brutal assault that killed her fiancé, her isolation and despair compounded by the apparent absence of any other friends or relatives in her life, she feels that she’s literally become someone else, someone now capable of cold retribution. This discovery of one’s basic, killer instincts was effectively mined most recently in A History of Violence, but the connection between trauma and response is more immediate in The Brave One, with Erica going from victim to vigilante in a matter of weeks. Her transformation is quickened by her sudden proximity to random acts of violence, and, while it feels like something of a baldly magical conceit, I liked this element too, the idea that once violence touches you, you suddenly start to see it everywhere.

So far so intriguing, but where everything completely falls apart is in the final act, which climaxes in one of most astoundingly stupid, most grossly misguided finales in recent memory. How could the presumably reasonably intelligent people working on The Brave One possibly agree to such a pathetic resolution? I was hoping that the making-of featurette on Warner’s new DVD might enlighten us.

Basically, the film’s producers explain how Roderick and Bruce Taylor’s screenplay was initially a straight-ahead genre piece, but when Neil Jordan signed on as director they knew it could be so much more and another writer, Cynthia Mort, was brought it to ostensibly smarten it up. Jordan himself says he actually wanted to make a genre film, something in keeping with the work of say, Sam Fuller or Don Siegel. Indeed, these testimonies finally begin to add up: in the end, The Brave One is caught between being exploitation and something more reflective, and suffers profoundly from this indecision.