Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Film Is a Battleground #16: (Sin City, Vera Drake, Z Channel, Left of the Dial)

SIN CITY (in theaters, barely)
VERA DRAKE (on DVD)
Z CHANNEL (on cable)
LEFT OF THE DIAL (on cable)

SIN CITY (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, 2005)
0 stars (No redeeming merit)

SIN CITY is the most morally and aesthetically bankrupt film to find a wide audience since either Catherine Hardwicke’s THIRTEEN or Sam Mendes’ AMERICAN BEAUTY(depending on your definition of “wide audience”). Unlike either Hardwicke or Mendes, whose films were outrageous debut failures, Robert Rodriguez has demonstrated a vital cinematic wit in both his early efforts EL MARIACHI and ROADRACERS (aka REBEL HIGHWAY) and the recent SPY KIDS. The fond memory of those films makes watching SIN CITY all the more dispiriting.

Rodriguez (and/or nominal co-director Frank Miller, who authored the film’s source material) rejects the means of cinematic art. He reduces every composition to the two-dimensional look of a comic book while simultaneously negating the value of montage by having his three male leads laboriously narrate every action witnessed. Ballyhooed by some, the “look” of SIN CITY is even more aesthetically bankrupt than the ugly digital video photography of Rodriguez’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO.

The only explanation for the constant, numbing narration (it’s certainly not used because of the quality of the writing) is that Rodriguez, on some level, understands the emptiness of the project. The actors function merely as tools of the art department. They have nothing to play and the art direction itself is meaningless: second-hand film tropes reduced to two dimensions and stripped of all context. The film’s misunderstanding of the power of pulp and the pretentiousness of its outrageousness expose it as white elephant art masquerading as termite art.

SIN CITY demonstrates the basic contemporary misunderstanding of the power of crime stories be they hardboiled novels or films noir. The exemplars of those genres derive their moral and emotional power from the specificity of the world created wherein the aesthetic means of expression elucidate the characters’ moral dilemmas. SIN CITY substitutes its hand-me-down aesthetic flourishes for meaning. The film’s soul-crushing brutality stems not from its frequent, unreal graphic violence but from its refusal to place the violence in any sort of moral context. The film’s rampant misogyny (bad guys rape, torture, and kill women whereas the good guys only smack them around for their own good) is an outgrowth of its fetishized misanthropy.

In contrast, as boring as KILL BILL was, it was unquestionably personal filmmaking. Even though I dislike the film(s), I still possess some residual fascination about Quentin Tarantino, (billed in SIN CITY as “special guest director,” (No, I have no idea what that means either.)) making a four-hour long, bloody, genre pastiche as a testament to his love for and appreciation of his mother.

SIN CITY demonstrates no such personal inspiration, just the end result of adults indulging their confusions to the tune of $45 million, prefacing every adolescent supposition with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”

No. It wouldn’t be cool at all.

VERA DRAKE (Mike Leigh, 2004)
*** (A must-see)

Mike Leigh makes termite art. VERA DRAKE is at least half-a-masterpiece. My only dissatisfaction stems from a final hour that burrows so deeply into its titular character’s consciousness that its psychological accuracy stalls the film’s dramatic momentum. At least in comparison to the film’s brilliant first hour. Middling Mike Leigh is superior to almost all other directors working at peak form.

The masterful first half places Vera Drake, domestic and volunteer caregiver, in her socioeconomic context, clarifying the void she fills for poor women when her volunteer caregiving extends to performing abortions. Quite simply, Leigh deftly demonstrates that wealth provided access to illegal abortions in a medical setting while poor women with unwanted pregnancies had no such sterile, underground infrastructure. (He also delineates the elaborate social ritual created by the wealthy to hide the reasons for and nature of the procedure accessed. The disturbing immediacy and intimacy of the abortions Vera Drake performs in women’s homes by their own arrangement implies that a lack of means requires taking greater responsibility for the events of one’s life.)

The evenhandness of the contrast between the lives of rich and poor demonstrates that Leigh’s collaborative method prevents not just condescension toward the characters but precludes the depiction of uncomplicated villainy or heroism. Leigh and his actors show behavior, both generous and selfish, by both rich and poor without resorting to the shorthand of showing good or bad people. It’s this characteristic modesty as a human being that makes Leigh a great artist. I don’t know of another director who could have kept the bravura star turns of David Thewlis in NAKED or Brenda Blethyn in SECRETS AND LIES grounded in their social realist contexts, thus maximizing the emotional and intellectual impact of their technique. Similarly, who else could make an overtly political film about abortion that possesses a compelling point of view that extends beyond the particular politics of abortion itself? Leigh contextualizes his politics within our common humanity.

Z CHANNEL (Xan Cassavettes, 2005)
** (Worth seeing)
LEFT OF THE DIAL (Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, 2005)
* (Has redeeming facet)

These two films, which premiered on IFC and HBO respectively, serve as a reminder of the value of documentaries that exist to reveal something other than the director’s need for attention. Neither film demonstrates tremendous ambition but both provide the satisfaction of a story well told.

Z CHANNEL is the better of the two films, offering both a more compelling subject and a more thorough examination thereof. Z Channel was an L.A. premium movie channel that predated both HBO and home video. Cassavettes depicts the in-home repertory cinema and accompanying monthly magazine (with schedules, review, and features) as a cinematic utopia nestled inside the dystopian film industry. I, of course, found this depiction quite heady.

Cassavettes balances the testimonials about the importance of Z Channel (from Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, Henry Jaglom, Tarantino, James Woods, Vilmos Zsigmond, Alan Rudolph, Theresa Russell, James B. Harris, Paul Verhoeven, and others) with a biography of Z Channel’s programmer, Jerry Harvey. Harvey created a working model for much of the current film-watching experience (home video, pay cable, niche pay cable, director’s cuts, and the commercial viability of films with a limited, but devoted audience). Prior to Z CHANNEL I was completely ignorant of the impact Jerry Harvey has had on my life.

A frustrated filmmaker (the script for Monte Hellman’s CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37 being his only credit), Harvey successfully channeled his cinematic passion into film programming. Altman, Jaglom, Verhoeven, and James Woods all credit Harvey’s support for and screening of their films with boosting their careers and Harvey developed close personal friendships with both Peckinpah and Cimino. (Harvey was instrumental in making the long version of HEAVEN'S GATE available to audiences after the initial, disastrous New York screenings.)

Unfortunately, Harvey found no such outlet for his personal frustrations. Harvey’s associates don’t deny that he was an obsessive, difficult, and often unhappy man. Cassavettes makes great use of a radio interview of Harvey to augment those recollections of his colleagues and friends so that the end of Harvey’s life (he shot and killed his wife before turning the gun on himself) is sad rather than gruesomely shocking.

LEFT OF THE DIAL is little more than watchable but it does achieve its modest ambitions. In depicting the launch of Air America Radio, Farrelly and O’Callaghan demonstrate that corporate malfeasance crosses ideological lines (and enhances one’s skepticism of Robert Reich’s thesis). Though the film leaves one wishing for a more exhaustive account of what happened to the money the network purported to have for its launch (Was it misused? Stolen? Did it never exist?), it did have the benefit of causing me to listen to Air America again and discover that it has become surprisingly good. The once-funny Janeane Garafalo and Democratic Party shill Al Franken appear to have re-gained some of their creative spark (or maybe being a shill for the Democratic Party doesn’t seem like such an act of malfeasance anymore though that’s likely just typical, liberal moral relativism on my part), while Marc Maron and Mark Riley have developed a fine morning show. I’d encourage anyone who tuned out after the network’s unsuccessful launch to give it another try.

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