Films Seen - June 2000

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

AMERICAN PSYCHO (61) (dir., Mary Harron) Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Chloe Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon [Brownie-points aplenty, but could this project ever really have come together? Satire has to be the way to play it, especially from today's vantage point - taking this milieu seriously would've seemed grotesque - and the film is indeed a delicious satire of 80s yuppiedom, with its brand-names and nouvelle cuisine and execrable taste in music, and its characters seemingly plucked from some unusually evil-minded Whit Stillman movie ; but satire short-circuits any tension, and there's nothing to turn to once the joke is told - even the larger, deeper joke, the anti-hero's secret sickness representing the rottenness beneath Society's glossy surface, seems a little dubious when Society translates into such vapid, ludicrous people (that, despite their competitiveness, they're actually interchangeable is a nice touch ; that, despite their workaholism, they never actually do any work is even nicer). The end result, in fact, emphasised by Bale's fiercely intelligent performance, may well be the opposite than intended in the original novel (which by all accounts took itself pretty seriously) - this psychotic serial-killer not a symptom of a larger disease but in fact the only real, halfway-human character in a world of vacuous ciphers. Which of course is also a good joke - but a rather pointless one...]

MAGNOLIA (80) (dir., Paul Thomas Anderson) John C. Reilly, Tom Cruise, Philip Baker Hall, Melora Walters, Jeremy Blackman, Julianne Moore, Jason Robards [People say P.T.'s style is "manic", but I'm not so sure ; more a case, I suspect, of making films in the style of a manic-depressive, just as Scorsese's style is obsessive-compulsive and Oliver Stone's psychotic : lots of sudden mood-swings, and exuberant hyperactivity aimed at covering a pit of darkness and despair (it's why he's so in love with music, and its power to vault across the emotional spectrum - from despondency to exhilaration - in a matter of seconds). All the talk of BOOGIE NIGHTS being a film about pleasure tends to obscure the melancholy lurking beneath its gaudy surface, just as this complementary piece, a film about melancholy, throbs with a sense of pleasure just beneath its ravaged human landscapes - pleasure in action and the switch from major to minor, swooping from the crashing chords of Cruise's in-your-face demagogue to the intimate diminuendo of Robards on his deathbed, or the pleasure of stretching out sadness as far as it'll go then suddenly releasing it through an outrageous coup de cinéma. P.T. overdoes the stretching-out slightly, and in fact the film becomes unbearably maudlin for about 10 minutes in the final act, round about the time of Cruise's big reunion scene (his showy performance is the film's weak link, Oscar nomination notwithstanding : trying too hard, as ever) - it actually works better on second viewing when you can switch off for a while, reflect on the strongest middle section since THE THIN RED LINE and look forward to the good stuff at the end. The film doesn't wholly live up to its opening salvo about lives intersecting in strange ways - its characters barely intersect at all, except in the rather coy PLAYING BY HEART way of being invisibly connected to each other - but its pyrotechnics do build up a sense of wide-ranging humanity, a world of extremes where the same pains and problems nonetheless recur : sickness, infidelity, loneliness, abuse, all kind of floating around, attaching themselves to different characters at different times. It feels loose but solid, held together by the brash, confident style, equal parts heartfelt, self-indulgent and brilliant, remarkably grim yet remarkably packed with enjoyable detail - every scene has at least a nugget, even if it's just a line or a bit of business. Reilly's earnest speech about the listening-level on his hi-fi, Henry Gibson's patrician gibes in a gay bar ("Better go now friend, your dessert's getting cold") and young Blackman trilling "La Habanera" among my personal favourites ; Philip Baker Hall's approximately four-stage rendition of knocking back a shot of whisky while your heart is breaking is an education in itself.]

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (73) (dir., Sofia Coppola) James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst [Didn't think I'd like this one much - a vanity-project fuelled by nepotism, cashing in on 70s nostalgia - but it really works, at least till it turns conventional in the final section : the nepotism, e.g. the appearance of celebrity friends (Scott Glenn, Danny DeVito) in cameo roles, merely throws the strangeness of the rest of it into relief, and the nostalgia builds into a more generalised, unexpectedly potent echo of lost adolescence. The film dwells unrelievedly on teenage awkwardness, the clammy clinging quality of half-formed hormonal lust which, not finding any clear outlet, sticks to everything ; the whole thing is eroticised, in a dreamy, unspecific way rarely found in movies (the closest equivalent I can think of are perhaps the glimpses of pudgy chorus-girls in their undies in backstage musicals of the 30s - an imperfect, inchoate kind of sensuality) - the kids' very clumsiness is charged with sensual promise, yet the knowledge of impending death (which we know about from the very first scenes) curdles that promise, giving the proceedings a sort of rancid sweetness, something close and musky : if it were a smell, it might be the smell of sweat on perfumed skin. Genuinely suggestive and disturbing, bolstered by great period detail and a memorably dorky comic turn by Woods ; shame it gradually dissolves into a familiar tale of horny teens and repressive parents...]

GOHATTO (57) (62 - second viewing) (dir., Nagisa Oshima) Beat Takeshi, Ryuhei Matsuda, Shinji Takeda [For a film about the destructive power of Beauty, surprisingly beautiful - beige, brown and black predominant in a limpid, strengthless light, visually harmonious in a rather austere way as befits its melancholy theme : it's a samurai movie but also a lament for the samurai philosophy, set in a post-feudal Japan where merchants get more respect than warriors and younger samurai are beginning to question the more inconvenient aspects of the code (like committing hara-kiri when your leader's killed in battle). The result is, predictably, rather old-fashioned, unexceptionably so in its visual consistency and straightforward, rather talky staging, more controversially in the apparent view of homosexuality as opposed to rather than resulting from military life (cf. BEAU TRAVAIL), a pernicious "penchant" that distracts the soldiers from their job and must be discouraged at all costs. All seems a bit simplistic (though it's possible my reading is mistaken, due to having seen the film with imperfectly-understood French subtitles ; certainly the presence of Takeshi would suggest a level of irony in the goings-on), and it certainly rambles somewhat in terms of narrative, drifting from character to character ; delicately worked, but not quite enough to warrant a 15-year hiatus by a master film-maker.] [Second viewing (with fully-comprehensible subtitles) makes a difference after all. Still a question of nuance, but it seems pretty clear the film isn't as reactionary as I first thought - indeed, it seems clear it's poking fun (just like BEAU TRAVAIL) at these macho soldiers trying desperately not to acknowledge the "penchant" that's part and parcel of military life, constantly having to stop and put 'inappropriate' thoughts out of their minds (Takeshi's twitchy performance is especially amusing). Nor is Matsuda - the beautiful-but-deadly figure, cynosure of all affections - as straightforwardly pernicious as he first seemed : he's in some ways the purest samurai of them all, looking past the various hypocrisies (the rules of conduct, or the fiction that "everybody's equal" in the corps), wanting only to kill, which is the whole point of being a samurai in the first place. It's as if he's embarrassed by his androgynous beauty, an unwanted distraction from the business of killing - though, as the film points out, bloodlust and ordinary lust are merely sides of the same coin. Still not the most compelling movie, narrative-wise (it rambles just as much on second viewing), but definitely worth a look. And really quite beautiful.]

THE BIG ONE (66) (dir., Michael Moore) [Moore's trash-talk is hilarious, his riffs raising commonsense bafflement to a kind of righteous comic eruption (you can feel his joyous disbelief at being presented with such easy targets) ; but he never quite manages to protect himself against charges of being a celebrity rather than the Regular Guy he pretends to be - shamefaced admission that yeah, the-book's-a-bestseller-and-I'm-making-a-shitload-of-money doesn't really do it - and his populist m.o. turns out to be self-defeating. It's predicated entirely on failure, i.e. being denied access, allowing him ruefully to ally himself with a downtrodden Us vs. an implacable Them ; success, i.e. finally cornering a CEO (Phil Knight of Nike), leaves him with little to say, because his bolshie-sentimental, up-the-people persona makes common ground impossible (he projects - or affects - a simple-man naivety, asking Nike to build a factory in his hometown, deflating any real debate : you get the sense Knight would like to defend his company - maybe argue that employing Third World teenagers actually amounts to saving rather than destroying their lives - but is too embarrassed by the level of the conversation). Doesn't really say a lot for America that its chief (non-academic) scourge of capitalism should be a loud-mouthed gadfly programmed to self-destruct the moment things get serious ; pretty funny, though.]

SWEET AND LOWDOWN (65) (dir., Woody Allen) Sean Penn, Samantha Morton, Uma Thurman [Lovely coda bumps it up a notch, and Woody's certainly found the knack of making smooth, fluent entertainments ; trouble is, this return to BULLETS OVER BROADWAY turf (the Artist front and centre, period tunes and comic gangsters in the background) with a pinch of ZELIG (talking-heads interview format) is so smooth and fluent it washes right over you. Made with care rather than commitment, though the actors do their best (even if Morton's subtle Giulietta Masina imitation will depend on how much you like Giulietta Masina). Isn't it a shame casting James Urbaniak without giving him anything to do, though?...]

OF FREAKS AND MEN (57) (dir., Alexei Balabanov) Sergei Makovetsky, Dinara Drukarova, Viktor Sukhorukov [Hell of a thing, deliberately so : the mix of S&M, Siamese twins and various sleazy characters (esp. Sukhorukov's giggly Igor figure and Oleg Menshikov / Stephen Rea lookalike Makovetsky gazing lugubriously into the distance) is pretty heady, like some weird Eastern European cabaret where you struggle to decide if the goings-on are meant to be allegorical or just plain kinky. But the conceit of its being shot like a Silent movie (in keeping with the theme and period) doesn't survive beyond the first 5 minutes, which is typical of the rather half-hearted approach : recurring theme has something to do with the idealism of early cinema, the notion that films can somehow show the "truth" about Life, and the way that gets perverted into gratifying baser instincts (though the whole concept of film-truth is suspect, as when the staged scene of the girl being birched gets passed off as a real-life punishment - and meanwhile the film's intertitles, juxtaposing (say) a woman's sexual humiliation with the line "And so Kirillovna fell in love for the first time", are giving us a different layer of truth altogether), but it's mostly a case of striking images and irresistible comic touches, like the cameraman's absurd chequered outfit. Balabanov's an original, but the film isn't up to much ; when Prokofiev's majestic "Montagues And Capulets" booms over one sequence it seems to dwarf rather than complement the proceedings.]

THE FILTH AND THE FURY (71) (dir., Julien Temple) ["Definitive" invariably means "too long", certainly in this case : only so many times we need to hear what a heartless bastard Malcolm McLaren was, not to mention Temple's over-enthusiastic way of finding apposite images for absolutely everything that's said ("It was like a monkeys' tea-party," says Johnny Rotten ; cue a clip of chimps sipping you-know-what) ; and of course it's all part of the rather backhanded 70s-nostalgia craze anyway, defined as a time of bad hair and general uselessness (even the weather forecasts on TV are useless, the little black rain-clouds refusing to stick to the map of England). All that said, among the most stimulating docs in ages, just because it is definitive and does want to cram in as much footage as possible, ranging from RICHARD III to a young and shaggy Ricky Jay, all of it grungy-looking and evocative, making some excellent points - e.g. positioning punk within the "music-hall tradition", a British vaudeville - and, above all, emphasising the movement's energy and innocence, borne of young people trying to have fun in a stifling society without (initially) any bitterness or malice. Fascinating, which is no surprise ; life-affirming, which is.]

GALAXY QUEST (56) (dir., Dean Parisot) Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub [Not a million light-years from Allen's TOY STORY gig, only it's Buzz Lightyear in reverse - characters having to embrace delusions of superhero-dom rather than abandon them. Groovy concept but the balance isn't there - characters should be both overwhelmed by the situation and trying to make the best of it, but in fact they're remarkably stupid about catching on to the obvious strategy of reverting to their TV selves, mostly act like jerks and bitch among themselves, waiting for the writers to supply them with phony Hollywood motivation (viz. fighting for the sake of the childlike aliens who hero-worship them). Hard to despise a film that's so generous towards the wide-eyed credulity (or, of course, dangerous dementia) of obsessed sci-fi fans - the aliens being a reductio ad absurdum of the typical Trekkie - but this really should've been better, wasting its first half in pointless bickering then rushing the action in the second ; and am I alone in thinking it would've been a far better ending for the evil General Sarris (kin to General Kael in WILLOW and Mayor Ebert in GODZILLA) to have made a sideways move from monsterdom to TV stardom, joining our heroes in the New Adventures?...]