Film Is a Battleground #5 (The Company, The Human Stain, Thirteen)

originally published August 31, 2004

THE COMPANY (on DVD)
THE HUMAN STAIN (on DVD)
THIRTEEN (on DVD and cable)

THE COMPANY (Robert Altman, 2003)
*** (A must-see)

People are least interesting when they’re trying to be noticed. In those moments, people attempt merely to express a single idea or hide a particular truth. When people try to go unnoticed, however, they reveal their complexity, the conflicting nature of the multitude of truths they posses.

Robert Altman understands that uncertainty, captured, almost stolen, onto film reveals not the best but the most in people--contradictory, sub-conscious impulses that register fleetingly--and that a collection of these moments, which would seem to invite chaos, instead takes root in the minds of those for whom such moments imply significant meaning to such a degree that all criticism of that which such a method forgoes (a traditional narrative approach to plot and a defined hierarchy of the import of characters and incidents within the film, individual scenes, or even within a frame) seems utterly beside the point.

It’s an ingenious, imperfect approach. Ingenious as it has proven to be a successful method for maintaining a productive career built upon only a single, unqualified hit made thirty-five years ago. Imperfect because when the volume of those stolen moments fails to coalesce, a film’s flaws are obvious and undeniable.

I am unquestionably sympathetic to Altman’s method. I believe his talent and body of work to be equal to those of the greatest American filmmakers: Hawks, Welles, Sturges, Minelli, Fuller, and De Palma. All of the above made films that didn’t, for a variety of reasons, succeed. None of them, though, given complete artistic freedom, made films as empty and lifeless as IMAGES, QUINTET, or PRET-A-PORTER; films no less technically accomplished than Altman’s best, but completely bereft of insights into the nature of human behavior, the quality that makes comparisons between Altman and Renoir legitimate.

THE COMPANY treads ground dangerously close to that which lead to the creation of the above three blemishes on Altman’s body of work. Like IMAGES, THE COMPANY constructs itself around its leading lady’s real-life extracurricular interests. Like QUINTET, it forgoes conventional narrative structure, revealing its structure gradually and mostly without expository dialogue. Like PRET-A-PORTER, it examines a particular, insular milieu without a distinct point of view such as Altman brought to the western with McCABE AND MRS. MILLER; to the detective film with THE LONG GOODBYE; to race, jazz, love, and politics with KANSAS CITY. Yet, despite these similarities with Altman’s most obvious failures, THE COMPANY succeeds. It is a minor masterpiece, a skeleton key to Altman’s method.

I am completely ignorant of ballet and the works on display in THE COMPANY do nothing to foster my interest. I’m completely unqualified to asses their quality, but they left me unmoved. They seemed pretentious and theoretical--thought but not felt.

It is this very disengagement from the film’s main action--the dances--that brought the accomplishment of Altman’s technique into such stark relief. Chief among them Malcolm McDowell’s performance, which so many critics have consigned to the comic-relief ghetto with faint praise (much as they emptily praised De Palma merely for making an effective thriller upon the release of FEMME FATALE), but which contains significant, substantive elements possibly derived from Altman’s work, years ago, to adapt ANGELS IN AMERICA for the screen. McDowell’s comic moments are infallible but his more serious asides about art, identity, and sexuality place the insular society of the ballet company in the context of our larger society. These moments, one public, one private, are moving. They sneak up on the audience; their straightforward revelations lack the self-congratulatory air of Mike Nichols’ leaden touch that rendered the most delicate elements of Kushner’s aesthetic embarrassing in the HBO film.

Similarly, the film’s love story exists not as a sop to the conventions of narrative drama, but in accord with the collection of incidents that makes up the film. The economy of photography and montage with which Altman conducts the courtship between James Franco and Neve Campbell mirrors itself in their performances. All the necessary information is conveyed with the minimum of, almost to the exclusion of, dialogue between the characters. Furthermore, in a film averse to drama, their relationship, based on shared artistry, youth, and sexual attraction, represents a modest, realistic model. Their relationship seems both undeniably pleasant and unlikely to be either permanent or life altering.

James Franco, despite having almost no dialogue, takes advantage of his best role (and the only one to call upon the entirety of his talents) since FREAKS AND GEEKS and Neve Campbell delivers on the promise of her performance in PANIC. The timid indecisiveness of her previous, mediocre work didn’t hint at the confident, controlled actress she’s become. In both THE COMPANY and PANIC, she commands the complete attention of a substantial leading man without the audience ever questioning his behavior.

Most interestingly, the film expands upon the possibility of digital video existing as an artistic choice rather than as the last resort to get an under-budgeted film made or as and excuse for sloppiness and an absence of talent. The common element of the most effective (and most affecting) video photography, found in THE COMPANY, IN PRAISE OF LOVE, waydowntown, and the coda to Kiarostami’s A TASTE OF CHERRY, is their celebration of vibrant colors, colors too bright to caught crisply on video.

But, whereas the other films listed above use video in counterpoint to equally accomplished film photography, THE COMPANY uses video exclusively. Director of Photography Andrew Dunn’s color compositions redeem the film’s final, ridiculous ballet. “Blue Snake” is not, I contend, about anything. The choreographer’s explanations of his work are either scathing self-parody or evidence of Altman’s bullshit detector, but the filming of the dance, the integration of camera movement, composition, and editing with the dance’s choreography equals the achievement of Gene Kelly’s collaborations with Stanley Donen and Vincente Minelli. The film even presents itself as a less rambunctious version of the putting on a show about putting on a show genre most gloriously exemplified by Donen’s SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN and Minelli’s THE BAND WAGON.

I’ve written previously of how the impersonal, though technically accomplished, work-for-hire demonstrated by De Palma and John Woo in the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films revealed the key themes of their greatest personal films. De Palma’s choice to turn the first third of his movie into a concise re-make of BLOW OUT and Woo’s re-enactment of the climactic fight from BULLET IN THE HEAD in his episode underlined the importance of the original manifestations. Now, in a film that, while not a crass, commercial enterprise, remains one that he was hired to make (both Campbell and screenwriter Barbara Turner are to be commended for insisting that Altman, despite his initial disinterest in the material, direct the film), the method of Altman’s genius appears in its greatest clarity.

THE HUMAN STAIN (Robert Benton, 2003)
** (Worth seeing)

Robert Benton’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain suffers only in comparison to its source material. Benton honors the depth and complexity of Roth’s novel despite making necessary compromises.

Benton transfers Roth’s compelling story intact but sacrifices the novel’s breadth and much of its humor. Benton’s choices are defensible and understandable. Much of the power of Roth’s novel is extremely literary. Little in the history of American literature can match the electric intensity of Roth unfurling a dexterous rant running several pages in length. Benton and Anthony Hopkins do a commendable job of dramatizing what Coleman Silk (Hopkins) expresses internally in the book, but Benton largely drops the internal lives of Silk’s chief tormentors. Ed Harris commands the screen in his brief appearances as Lester Farley, jealous husband and Vietnam veteran. But, because Roth details that Lester torments Silk as part of his struggle to deal with the two seminal traumas of his life: Vietnam and the death of his children. The absence of this material makes Lester less specific, more generically villainous and diminishes the film.

One could hope for a greater exploration of Lester Farley as the plot, even in a condensed form, necessitates his presence. Benton completely excises the importance (and viewers who haven’t read the book likely won’t register the existence) of Silk’s professional tormentor, Delphine Roux. Though one of Roth’s most richly drawn female characters, for Benton to make full use of Professor Roux would necessitate expanding the film’s running time to near-epic lengths.

The distillations of adaptation leave the film with three major characters. Benton has chosen to retain Roth’s framing device of having Nathan Zuckerman tell the story of Coleman Silk’s life. Zuckerman is a distinctly literary creation, a long-serving alter ego to Roth, a fictional manifestation of a confessional narrative voice attuned to the nuanced interaction of narrative, process, and history. As this is a studio film, Nathan Zuckerman is played not by an actor resembling Roth, but by Gary Sinise. Sinise gives a fine performance, serving honorably as Anthony Hopkins’s foil, but he doesn’t, can’t, provide for Benton what Zuckerman provides for Roth.

The best parts of the film flashback to Coleman Silk’s youth, the details of which I won’t reveal here except to say that Wentworth Miller, an actor with whom I am unfamiliar, gives a truly great performance. He matches the nuanced, passionate stillness Hopkins brings to the older Silk. The twinned performances match the skill and import of Brando and De Niro in THE GODFATHER films.

Those flashbacks, Silk’s memories of youth, are driven by his relationship with a younger woman, Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman). Roth created Faunia as an enigma, an empty vessel, the desire for whom compels Silk to re-examine long suppressed memories. Though Kidman’s presence makes Silk’s desires perfectly understandable, her character gives her little to play. Faunia seemed like a plot device in the novel (Her presence in Silk’s life, in the novel, further inflamed Professor Roux, who is for all purposes absent from the film.), but the rich supporting characters which surrounded her made her functional presence necessary to the book’s delights. In the film, her limited function as a character stands in sharp relief. As a result, Kidman strains to make something of a nothing role much as she did in her worst moments in EYES WIDE SHUT.

Unfortunately, of the three characters Benton retains in their (near) entirety only one, Coleman Silk, is compelling. Fortunately, the particulars as to why Silk is a compelling character are multitudinous and worthy. I suppose that, to audiences unfamiliar with the book, my reservations will not matter, and the film, intelligent and compassionately made, will exist on its own terms. It’s a fine film derived from a great work of art.

THIRTEEN (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003)
0 stars (Worthless)

That this poorly conceived and sloppily executed exercise in hype got a distribution deal and earned respectful reviews while Bob Odenkirk’s MELVIN GOES TO DINNER, which also premiered at Sundance last year, made its debut on home video serves as a stronger indictment of the state of independent cinema than anything in Peter Biskind’s most recent book.

As a depiction of a lost generation of teenagers and of the parents who have lost them, THIRTEEN can’t hold a candle to Kinji Fukasaku’s BATTLE ROYALE. That film’s use of elements derived from LORD OF THE FLIES and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK creates not just a significant example of genre filmmaking but an abiding interest in the very real problems on which its premise rests.

It is, I propose, the very rigor of thought and clarity of action necessary to create an efficient genre film that THIRTEEN most clearly lacks. It’s not that the film’s luridness that is inherently offensive; rather, the film deadens the soul because it is merely lurid.

THIRTEEN fails to present a single coherent thought or perceptive insight. Instead, we witness a middle-aged director get off on images of teenage depravity. Reminiscent of Larry Clark, though lacking even his limited compositional skills, Hardwicke has no interest in creating characters. Thus, instead of revealing something about life through the endless depiction of shocking behavior (basically the subject of every cover-story expose in The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, or New York over the last five years designed to make concerned parents hysterical), we merely witness two young, not very talented actresses play a lurid game of dress up.

The entire spectacle is decidedly unpleasant, the praise the film garnered inexplicable, and the film’s finale, lifted from THE 400 BLOWS, borderline criminal.