Film Is a Battleground #15: Semi-Lost Films By the American Godard and the American Renoir (Hi, Mom!, California Split)

HI, MOM! (on DVD)
CALIFORNIA SPLIT (on DVD)

Two great films from the two greatest American directors of the last 35 years I don’t consider it insulting to say you likely haven’t seen. HI, MOM! briefly surfaced on home video in the late ‘90s. I first saw CALIFORNIA SPLIT panned-and-scanned on pay cable a couple of years ago. It’s never been released to video (even now, really, as I explain below).

HI, MOM! (Brian DePalma, 1970)
**** (Masterpiece)

HI, MOM! (originally titled “Son of Greetings”) was conceived as a sequel to DePalma’s 1968 film GREETINGS. It may help to see GREETINGS prior to watching HI, MOM! though it’s not necessary. The original title could have been dropped due to either the limited commercial success of GREETINGS or the great artistic growth demonstrated by the latter film.

Both films are structured haphazardly. Neither has much of a plot. Instead, their overriding thematic concerns drive the characters’ behavior through a series of politically and socially satiric sketches filled with allusions to other films, most often those by Hitchcock and Godard. Robert DeNiro, for example, plays an aimless, perverse film nut named Jon Rubin in both films but the character functions more as series of satirical poses than as an attempt to characterize one man’s existential malaise. The non-specificity of DeNiro’s role presupposes the malaise as universal and generational. DeNiro’s performance, in retrospect, seems a clear preparation for playing Travis Bickle though in these films, appearing as a nebbish voyeur, DeNiro gives no hint of the hardness of the men he would gain fame playing. He does, however, demonstrate in his scenes with Allen Garfield a skill for comic improvisation and a hint of the mania he brings to his performance in MEAN STREETS.

DePalma has always been cool about actors. Three of DeNiro’s first five film roles (and his first starring roles) were in DePalma films, the first of which, THE WEDDING PARTY, also starred Jill Clayburgh. Charles Durning’s appearance in HI, MOM marked only his third film role. John Lithgow’s key supporting turn in OBSESSION was only his second film role. Amy Irving and John Travolta both made their film debuts in CARRIE. DePalma, along with Altman, gave Dennis Franz almost all of his film work in the late-70s and early-80s. Patricia Clarkson made her film debut, and Andy Garcia first gained widespread attention for his role in THE UNTOUCHABLES. John Leguizamo, John C. Reilly, and Ving Rhames were not in-demand character actors until the mid- to late-90s, but DePalma used all three of them in 1989 for CASUALTIES OF WAR.

Gerrit Graham plays ostentatiously serious young men in both films. Where DeNiro’s character attempts to break out of his malaise through sex and film, Graham’s character, no less of a lost loner than DeNiro’s, heedlessly immerses himself into the counterculture without ever belonging. This blind activism for abstract righteousness reveals itself as personally dangerous. Graham’s role isn’t conceptually different, but the character’s name is presumably because the Kennedy assassination obsessive he plays GREETINGS is himself assassinated (a compelling comic rough draft of BLOW OUT).

Ultimately, GREETINGS is interesting mostly for its early manifestation of DePalma’s overriding concerns (sex, politics, cinema) and as the rare example of an explicitly anti-Vietnam film (specifically anti-draft) made during the course of the war. Radical, anti-war satire continues in HI, MOM!, but the later film focuses primarily on race, and, to a lesser extent, class, relations.

DePalma doesn’t examine race relations by placing black radicals in opposition to white reactionaries but rather to white liberals with their homilies about understanding and compassion constantly at the ready, while their behavior remains unchanged.

The bulk of HI, MOM! unfolds as a film within a film, a multi-part public television documentary about black radical activism. This conceit allows DePalma to simultaneously satirize radicalism, white liberals, and the superficial arts (public television, avant-garde theater) which cultivates the delusion for both parties that they’re communicating with rather than past each other. The film climaxes with a prolonged documentary segment about an avant-garde theater production entitled, “Be Black Baby,” wherein black performers in whiteface streak white theatergoers with blackface before subjecting them to racial abuse, police brutality, robbery, and molestation. DePalma pushes this sequence past the point of humor into genuine discomfort before it culminates with the same dark, exasperated humor that closes the minor, underappreciated SNAKE EYES. The white audience members, genuinely abused and terrified during the performance of “Be Black Baby,” upon the play’s conclusion, re-deposited on a city street, still in blackface, rush to deny the reality of their horrible experience, falling back on disassociating liberal pieties claiming to derive nothing other than thought-provoking pleasure from the show. This human instinct is the great source of DePalma’s biting political humor. Brought to the brink of enlightenment we will almost invariably retreat into the comfort of unknowing.

DePalma’s criticism of white liberalism, that they can engage in progressive even radical causes without risk because their privilege allows them to be involved on their terms, presumably becomes meta for HI, MOM!’s audience. The audience can laugh at the older, square liberals satirized in the film without submitting their own assured righteousness to a similarly rigorous standard. Unlike the infantile satire and self-aggrandizing hype of Spike Lee’s BAMBOOZLED, GIRL 6, or 25TH HOUR, the “Be Black Baby” sequence continues to challenge the audience, makes even an effective, compassionate satire such as Hal Ashby’s THE LANDLORD seem tame, and will be important, relevant, and upsetting until the end of time.

CALIFORNIA SPLIT (Robert Altman, 1974)
*** (A must-see)

Traditionally, Altman has been underserved by home video more than any other major American director. That’s changed some in the past couple of years. Criterion has released the long-unavailable 3 WOMEN on DVD, MGM did the same for IMAGES, and Fox Movie Channel has shown both an ugly pan-and-scan version of A PERFECT COUPLE and a letterboxed version of QUINTET.

Inexplicably, Altman’s most accessible post-M*A*S*H films prior to GOSFORD PARK, CALIFORNIA SPLIT and THIEVES LIKE US remain unavailable on DVD.

Yes, there’s a DVD entitled CALIFORNIA SPLIT available for sale and rental right now, but as Brad Stevens valuably delineates in Video Watchdog #116, this version of the film is missing three minutes of footage and features several alterations to the soundtrack due to music rights problems. These alterations significantly alter the quality of the viewing experience.

I off-handedly used CALIFORNIA SPLIT as a stick with which to beat the slight SIDEWAYS in Film Is a Battleground #14. Allow me to elaborate here: whereas Alexander Payne shares his assumed superiority to his loser characters with the audience encouraging uncritical, self-affirming laughter, Altman forces the audience into the world of his characters who, first of all, are in point of fact, losers (as gamblers rather than simply being uncool), exist fully, their compulsions driven alternately by self-delusion and lacerating self-knowledge. Elliott Gould and George Segal play characters no less self-absorbed than those that Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church play in SIDEWAYS. Altman, however, possesses the talent and imagination to manifest this self-absorption in the film as a whole. The original music (partly absent on the DVD) serves as a mix between the off-screen narration of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCABE & MRS. MILLER and the variable, all-purpose theme of THE LONG GOODBYE. The music of CALIFORNIA SPLIT (often coming from an on-screen source) explicitly comments on--sometimes affirming, sometimes deflating--the actions and/or emotional state of Gould and Segal. The music displays a rare generosity for Altman. Too mature to find his characters’ behavior charming (though the actors often are) or potentially redeeming, Altman does find that their compulsions derive from recognizable human weaknesses. Though extreme, their behavior isn’t aberrant.

Barring the release of a full version of the film, I can’t in good faith discourage people from watching this bastardized version. It ranks just below Altman’s masterpieces (McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, THE LONG GOODBYE, NASHVILLE, and THE PLAYER) and much of the wit and humor of the performances remains. Segal is excellent and Gould follows up his brilliant Philip Marlowe from THE LONG GOODBYE with another virtuoso turn. For about eighteen months he was as good as any film actor has ever been.

Click here to read the full post with comments

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.

Click here to read the full post with comments