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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Film Is a Battleground #10: I Only Have Two Nice Things To Say About Mike Nichols (Closer, Coffee and Cigarettes, and more)

CLOSER (in theaters)
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (on DVD)
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS (on HBO)
ELF (on DVD)
SUPER SIZE ME (on DVD)
ENVY (on DVD)

CLOSER (Mike Nichols, 2004)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)

1) I have great respect for Nichols and May both for the quality of their work as writer-performers and the unequivocally pervasive influence their work had on comedy.

2) He is excellent in David Hare’s film of Wallace Shawn’s THE DESIGNATED MOURNER.

Thus concludes the complimentary portion of Film Is a Battleground #10.

For his first film following the uneven television adaptation of ANGELS IN AMERICA, Nichols chose to direct material so thin that there would be no chance to repeat the disappointment of ANGELS IN AMERICA. Kushner’s ambitious vision suffered under Nichols’ pedestrian direction. When Nichols tried to express the play’s imagery via visual grammar, the results were embarrassing and undermined rather than elevated the text. Thankfully, Nichols is not an especially ambitious director. His generic, anonymous work allowed ANGELS IN AMERICA to contain plenty of fine scenes buoyed simply by the quality of the writing and acting. Patrick Marber’s script for CLOSER demonstrates no ambition whatsoever. It’s a perfect collaboration.

CLOSER consists of pre- and post-coital scenes between various combinations of four actors (Jude Law, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman, and Julia Roberts). Sadly, none of the actors have a character to play. They are simply four people who are emotionally distant, selfish, and immature. The film takes place over the course of four years, but the audience is only witness to the most contrived, shoutingest exchanges of the fluid couplings.

Unfortunately, the physical relationships remain strictly heterosexual, because the film only comes briefly alive in the two scenes between Jude Law and Clive Owen. In their exchanges, the macho, confidant doctor played by Owen and the weak, unsuccessful novelist played by Law verge on making a point about the nature of masculinity before reverting to treating and being treated badly by women.

CLOSER (both the play and the film) has been compared to Neil LaBute and I think that, having seen CLOSER, I better understand the experience of those who find LaBute a meaningless misanthrope. Marber’s characters, like LaBute’s, are unpleasant, but Marber lacks LaBute’s moral vision. LaBute denies his characters obvious redemption, but he strips them of the illusion that they are without sin. Marber and Nichols simply traffic in chic emptiness, reinforcing the disaffected amorality that LaBute attacks.

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (Jim Jarmusch, 2004)
*** (A must-see)

An admittedly minor Jarmusch film, but one that restricts itself to the key concern of all of Jarmusch’s films: the interaction between culturally different and/or distinctly eccentric individuals. As well it should. Its individual segments shot over the last seventeen years, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, like MYSTERY TRAIN and NIGHT ON EARTH before it, draws its meaning from the juxtaposition of thematically similar short films.

Just as DOWN BY LAW seemed to be inspired by Jarmusch’s desire to put John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni together in a confined space, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES bases most of its characters’ eccentricities on the actors playing them. Jarmusch combines DEAD MAN’s exploration of identity and art with YEAR OF THE HORSE’s exploration of work and celebrity.

The film is essentially a pop riff on the great tension of DEAD MAN, between the European-educated American Indian “Nobody” (Gary Farmer) and the American accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp). Nobody, cast out of Europe when his novelty wore off because he became too much like his hosts, believed Blake, who may or may not be dead, to be the spirit of the artist William Blake. Blake’s ignorance of William Blake’s work and the incongruity of a Caucasian Western hero being tutored, both in the native ways of the West and the ways of Western Culture by an American Indian allowed Jarmusch to simultaneously explore varied spiritual visions, American cultural and economic history, the Western genre, and the basis of art in life.

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES peaks when artists, whose talents have been turned into a commodity by the entertainment industry, attempt to interact free of the burdens of celebrity. Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, the RZA, the GZA, and Bill Murray, Steven Wright and Roberto Benigni all meet for coffee and cigarettes in the hopes of forming some sort of connection grounded in reality. They reveal hidden interests yet shy away from revealing vulnerabilities. They attempt to see the other person as a person rather than a celebrity image. None of the exchanges succeed profoundly, but the attempt redeems those involved.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS (Stephen Hopkins, 2004)
* (Has a redeeming facet)

Functioning as little more than an excuse for an entertaining and impressive star turn for Geoffrey Rush, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS fails to provide more than broad explanations for either Sellers’ genius as a performer or his failure as a husband and father.

The talented actors surrounding Rush are all overqualified for their roles. Though John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci are credited as playing Blake Edwards and Stanley Kubrick respectively, they do little other than appear and announce their identity before bearing witness to Sellers displaying either his genius in front of the camera or his immaturity off-camera.

Similarly both Emily Watson and Charlize Theron are called upon to be little more than observers for the swings between complete inaccessibility and uncontrollable rage that seems to have characterized his marriages.

The entire film ticks off the supposedly humanizing assumed psychological underpinnings of an artist’s work: overbearing stage mother, weak father, childhood privations fueling the inability to deny the physical pleasures offered upon the advent of one’s fame, material success suffocating creative drive, self-indulgent excess resulting in concrete evidence of one’s mortality, the desire to reclaim the artistic integrity squandered, regrets, and death.

Rush plays almost all the other characters in the film at some point as something like the manifestation of Peter Sellers’ interior monologue from beyond the grave. This conceit elevates the virtuosity of Rush’s performance, but reinforces the film’s lack of context. Better filmmakers than Hopkins (Michael Mann and Julie Taymor most recently) have attempted to overcome the limitations of the biopic form without succeeding either.

ELF (Jon Favreau, 2003)
* (Has a redeeming facet)

Until succumbing to a supposedly heart-warming display of (secular) Christmas spirit, ELF offers some sprightly entertainment. Will Ferrell’s performance in ANCHORMAN put me in mind of Fred Willard, but his performance here, as a human raised by elves at Santa’s workshop recalls Jerry Lewis.

Ferrell’s elfish man-child lacks the maudlin neediness which undermined Lewis’s otherwise brilliant performances. The muted ambitions of this year’s ANCHORMAN suggest that Ferrell may attempt to bring a distinct comic vision to the screen. With Jim Carrey seemingly uninterested in taking complete creative control of a film even as modest as THE BELLBOY or THE ERRAND BOY (it would be unfair to expect anything as ambitious as THE LADIES’ MAN or THE NUTTY PROFESSOR) Ferrell may be our best hope for reclaiming the ground potential writer-director-performers have (with the possible exceptions of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) ceded to Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, and the Farrelly Brothers.

SUPER SIZE ME (Morgan Spurlock, 2004)
* (Has a redeeming facet)

SUPER SIZE ME is perfectly watchable and director-host Morgan Spurlock a pleasant tour guide, but like FAHRENHEIT 9/11 it merely offers a light gloss on old news. I guess that there are potential viewers who aren’t hip to the dangerous cynicism of this particular corporate culture and that they may be moved to read Fast Food Nation for a more in-depth study of the topic. That would be useful. Barring that, however, the film exists as little more than a brief diversion.

ENVY (Barry Levinson, 2004)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)

ENVY sat on the shelf for over a year, seeing the light of day only following the box-office success of SCHOOL OF ROCK. As an admirer of supposed failures JIMMY HOLLYWOOD and BANDITS, I generally give Barry Levinson the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his smaller film projects. ENVY may make me reconsider that policy.

The film appears to have suffered either a fair amount of re-cuts or a problematic production. It has the unfortunate distinction of appearing to be a would-be dark fable made on the cheap, more flimsily tacky than magically subversive. There is no hint as to what compelled Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, Christopher Walken, and Barry Levinson to become involved though Executive Producer Larry David is rumored to have uncredited involvement with the script which is plausible considering its surfeit of flaws.

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Film Is a Battleground #1 (Fahrenheit 9/11, The Terminal)

originally published July 20, 2004

FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (in theaters)
THE TERMINAL (in theaters)

FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004)
** (Worth seeing)

Michael Moore’s long-standing method of confronting unawares those who exercise power uncritically has often undermined the legitimate points he attempts to illustrate. The sight of Moore waddling after mid-level executives or congresspersons, common people in tow to grant him moral legitimacy, has often made me uncomfortable, especially when I agree with the point being made. Moore’s willingness to behave as a disingenuous trickster highlights the complex, unacknowledged tension of his relationship with those whose cause he takes up. His predilection for turning protest into a self-aggrandizing performance piece often allows for just complaints to be easily dismissed. Moore’s work on film and television illustrates why socialism has failed to work for the American left. One’s desire for equality and justice for all does not preclude an equal or greater desire to succeed, nor does it diminish one’s ambition to transcend the station of the proletariat.

Times have become so strange and troubled that Michael Moore has exhibited his first signs of humility. The genuinely moving sight of an almost speechless Moore accepting the Palme D’or in May was an appropriate prologue to the film itself. The perfidy of the Bush Administration, their lack of shame and contempt for the concepts of truth and honor, has focused Moore’s anger. His desire to enact social change has surpassed his desire to provoke and preen.

Though Moore narrates the film, he keeps his on-screen appearances to a minimum, and uses his public stunts briefly, as buttons to punctuate his satiric points with a laugh.

With Moore’s penchant for self-aggrandizement held mostly in check and the object of his derision so deserving, the only complaint one can have regarding the film itself is that it merely scratches the surface of the regime’s corruption says more about the ingrained, long standing, and far-reaching nature of that corruption; a full study of which would be exponentially longer than FAHRENHEIT’s running time and necessitate daily updates. My reservations regarding the film are mostly extratextual.

Most importantly, the film is not a work of art, political or otherwise. PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET is political art. WEEKEND is political art. BOB ROBERTS is political art. THREE KINGS is political art. BULWORTH is political art. Those films engage and embolden both mind and spirit. FAHRENHEIT 9/11, though a useful, effective piece of political propaganda, contains nary an original thought (nor an obvious inaccuracy). Neither should Michael Moore be mistaken for a talented filmmaker. At best, he is a competent filmmaker in possession of a few rudimentary tools of the craft.

The outsized audience for the film so far (and again, I want to make it clear that the film offers merely an overview of the Bush Administration’s abuses of power) should embarrass the mainstream media for choosing to ignore and/or being complicit in suppressing much of the information in the film. Moore may have a conflicted relationship with working-class Americans, but that’s far better than the disinterest with which the political media treats anything occurring outside their immediate, insular world.

Given that the film intends to call the otherwise apathetic or uninformed to action this November, rather than examine how our nation might extricate itself from the compounding, destructive policies of the current administration, the degree of Moore’s success or failure will not be clear until the ballots are counted.

THE TERMINAL (Steven Spielberg, 2004)
*** (A must-see)

Unlike FAHRENHEIT 9/11, THE TERMINAL expresses its political criticisms through the artistry of its director. Sadly, Spielberg’s empathetic vision of American achievement and potential has been overshadowed by Moore’s polemic. Moore’s film will give you some of the news deemed unfit to print, but he lacks Spielberg’s ability to uplift the spirit.

Spielberg has often been criticized, accurately, for his unbridled optimism. I, for one, found SAVING PRIVATE RYAN to be the ultimate manifestation of Spielberg’s willingness to demonstrate his technical mastery unburdened by any ideas.

A.I., however, demonstrated a profound change in Spielberg’s methods. The emotional immediacy of his technique, for once, did not occur in a void. The cold ironies of Kubrick’s script brought the feeling Spielberg arouses from audiences into sharp relief. A.I., MINORITY REPORT, and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN all featured heroes emotionally shattered by the disintegration of the family unit. Those films’ individual and cumulative power derived from the self-destructive, obsessive attempts the heroes made to reconstitute their families. It’s interesting that the only false note in those three films occurs at the end of MINORITY REPORT, where the vision of a successfully reconstituted family undermines and diminishes everything that has come before. A.I. and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN are Spielberg’s masterpieces because Spielberg empathizes with his characters need to undertake their journey while understanding their efforts to be futile. He finally engaged themes worthy of his technical gifts and emotional facility.

In THE TERMINAL, Tom Hanks portrays an obsessive acolyte of the family. Stranded in the International Terminal at JFK because his home nation fell into civil war while he was in flight, Viktor Navorski (Hanks) finds himself a man without a country and thus unable to be processed through the system. Upon arrival Navorski does not speak English. Thus he must express himself physically.

Hanks hasn’t really had a chance to exhibit his skills as a physical comedian since BIG. His skills have matured since then even though he’s too rarely taken roles worthy of his talent. The precision of intention and execution he brings to the film’s physical moments have drawn just comparisons to Tati. It’s a tremendously inventive and accomplished performance. Though his character’s physicality dominates the first third of the film it does not disappear once his character learns English and establishes his verbal intelligence and wit. Viktor Navorski proves to be a gifted artisan, and it’s this element of his physicality that makes it clear that though he is stranded, he is not helpless.

Spielberg also gets an outstanding performance from Stanley Tucci. Playing the putative villain, Tucci rejects the opportunity to manifest oppression. His petty torment of Navorski is motivated by short-sighted self-interest rather than innate malevolence. His growing resentment of Navorski remains impersonal; he doesn’t like the man simply because his presence exemplifies systemic inefficiency and failure. He wants only to make this unclassifiable man someone else’s problem. Tucci’s reticence and sublimity is repaid in a scene where, upon the occasion of Navorski’s arrival, he coolly and clinically informs an uncomprehending Navorski of the impossibility of his situation. Tucci has always been at his best in two-handed scenes where some unspoken resentment or slight informs a surface of polite conversation. Hanks provides him his best foil since Oliver Platt in THE IMPOSTORS. The scene plays like the lost segment of Jarmusch’s COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, the cross-cultural exchange of polite good intentions ineffectually disappearing in the void between them.

Though THE TERMINAL offers a much sunnier world view than do Spielberg’s previous three films, the lives on view exist in the context of war, dislocation, poverty, bureaucratic power, and adultery. Though most reviews have accurately compared certain sequences to Tati, the film put me more in mind of Preston Sturges. Sturges always presented his social satire in an optimistic context, though Spielberg’s optimism is relentless where Sturges found optimism to be a slightly absurd mental state. In our current climate of fear orchestrated by an Orwellian executive branch, optimism, especially the multi-ethnic, land of opportunity optimism Spielberg practices here, seems less naïve than a form of social protest.

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