2009. Starring Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Directed by Scott Cooper.
I’ve probably watched a total of 15 minutes of American Idol over the years, usually early in the season when they focus on those who perform, well, less Idol-like. Those not-ready-for-prime-time singers get a inordinate amount of airtime — enough so the audience can relish the dream-crushing coups de grace from the show’s judges. Whether the early cuts take their discouragement in tears or by rejecting the judgment they lusted for minutes earlier, they have to accept that they have failed. Their belief in themselves has betrayed them.
I’m guessing that most of those rejected abandon their dreams as a result of their nationwide embarrassment. That’s too bad, because a real artist would find inspiration in that rejection, defiant reinvention in that condemnation. They should find pain in every rejection, and their development as a real artist — not one stamped out of the standard reality-TV mold — should be built on steps of heartache.
Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges in a well-deserved Oscar-winning role) is a throwback country-western singer, one who takes little phrases, assembles them into rhymes, backs them with a fingerpicking and steel guitar, and sends shivers down the backs of his fans. But he’s become preoccupied with money, with the two-month tour his agent has put together, the grim bowling alleys and bars where he finds an audience, and the envy he feels toward a protege (Colin Farrell) who has eclipsed him. He’s also an alcoholic who has lost faith in his own talents. He grinds it out, with little joy, until he meets Jane (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a writer, and falls for her.
Bad has earned his nickname through the traditional vices, and he’s also a long-lost father who has never spoken to his son. He drowns his loneliness, his disappointment in whiskey, and seems doomed to sabotage a career revival. He returns to Jane and befriends her son and imagines a meaningful future, but his self-destructive nature won’t allow it. Bridges plays Bad as the grizzled, chain-smoking outlaw hero familiar to country-music fans, but he’s not a likeable character until he tries for something out of his reach.
I had hoped that Crazy Heart would focus more on his career, the triumph of authenticity over phoniness, the satisfying scratching-out of a tune that would redeem the broken hero. When I saw the romance coming, I was ready for the film to go off the rails. I was wrong. There are few movies willing to portray romance this realistically. His pursuit of Jane reawakens something inside him. The physical distance between them, the regret and, of course, the spell of the bottle all combine to force the songwriter to huddle down with his guitar and try to tame the awful, demanding desires by expressing them. When he returns again and again to a fragment of a song, he knows he’s onto something.
Two musical aspects make Crazy Heart even better. The Bad Blake songs were written by Ryan Bingham (who has a small role), which are appropriate for the aging honky-tonk singer, including an old hit with the defining line “Funny how falling feels like flyin’, for a little while.” The film’s soundtrack was produced by T-Bone Burnett, and includes the Louvin Brothers and Buck Owens. Appropriately, in an odd scene featuring a hot-air balloon, we hear “If I Needed You” by Townes Van Zandt, the late, great songwriter and singer who squeezed every ounce of pain from his talent before drinking himself to death in 1997.
In the end, it’s not the tickets that Bad Blake wants to sell, or the fans he hopes to win over — it’s the hurt he wants to reveal, the discovery of love and desire he wants to share, that makes him an artist. Baring his pain and doubt, he manages to reach out and touch something in everyone listening. The singer who shares his true self and doesn’t give up will never lack for fans cheering him on. Something those rejected on reality TV should remember.
1937. Starring Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi. Directed by Leo McCarey.
Leo McCarey’s Make Way For Tomorrow is known by more than one critic as “the saddest movie ever made.” I think that claim could be challenged if you consider sadness to be tragic, cruel and the result of the too-often human disregard for humanity. In that case, you’ve got Schindler’s List, The Killing Fields and Fires on the Plain to compete with. No, the kind of sadness that permeates Make Way For Tomorrow is a sentimental weariness concerning the passing of time and the changing role of parents as time overtakes them.
Bart (Victor Moore) and Lucy (Beulah Bondi) portray the aged parents of five adult children. The couple are losing their house and longtime home to an indifferent bank. The children are shocked, and scramble to figure out who will take in each of the parents, but it quickly becomes apparent that they are all selfish and intolerant of such an imposition. Finally, the eldest son makes room for the mother and the father is sent away to live with a daughter.
Separated and isolated, they don’t fare well in their new homes. The mother is a burden to the social life of her son and daughter-in-law (absolutely ruining bridge night, heaven forbid, and sending the only clean tuxedo shirt to the cleaners). She also fails to be a benefit to her granddaughter, a somewhat slutty teenager who runs off to meet various men of varying ages. Meanwhile, up north, the father pathetically entertains hope of finding work in his new town, and succumbs to several colds that require nursing by the suffering in-laws.
Bart and Lucy live for the next communication allowed between them, through loud phone calls and hard-to-read letters, and their children take no joy in having them around. When the decision is made to send the father off to live with the prodigal daughter in California — for his health — both realize that they may never see each other again.
According to Peter Bogdanovich, who provides some history of the film on the Criterion Collection disc, when director McCarey was given the Academy Award for The Awful Truth — made the same year — he said, “You gave me the award for the wrong picture.” I’m not going to take up that argument, but will say that McCarey has an very deft touch in dealing with what could be a maudlin, melodramatic story. Instead, he gives us a bittersweet but honest tale of growing old and then getting out of the way, and finds room to let in some much-needed humor. Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play characters much older than their own age, but their portrayals are genuine and complex. Their kids, who could come off as real villains, are instead just a bit incompetent and caught up in their silly modern lives, circa 1936.
Much has been discussed about the ending, which won’t tug so much on your heart as pull and twist. The revealing scenes to me, however, are those when the old couple — useless to all whom they trouble — are briefly reunited. In those scenes, the sweet old couple encounter many strangers while wandering around New York City on the last day they will spend together in their long lives. Knowing them only for minutes, those strangers show kindness and appreciation for those the old-timers, who are full of stories and clearly in love after 50 years of marriage. Why their children do not see them in this light is the saddest thing about the film, and may be the awful truth that McCarey tries to show the rest of us.
2002. Directed by Chan-wook Park. Starring Kang-ho Song.
American movie portrayals of “vengeance” are crowd-pleasers. Mel Gibson has practically adopted the motivation as a screen persona. Vengeance as a plot device kept Charles Bronson employed for many uninspired years. Picture Harrison Ford in almost any movie in the past decade-and-a-half and he’s probably yelling, “Give me back my daughter!” or “I want to know what happened to my wife!” while the veins in his neck threaten to secede.
The Korean director, Chan-wook Park, has explored vengeance in a trio of movies — Oldboy, Lady Vengeance and, in the first of these, Sympathy of Mr. Vengeance. Vengeance in Korea seems to be served slowly boiling, bitterly seasoned and with excruciating violence.
The plot is not a simple one: Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) is a deaf and mute factor worker with a dying sister, who desperately needs a kidney transplant. He turns to the black market and not only loses his money, but one of his own kidneys. With his anarchist girlfriend Cha Yeong-mi (Du-na Bae), he decides to kidnap the daughter of the factory owner (Kang-ho Song) to raise the transplant money. His girlfriend suggests that it would be “fun” for the child and, because they wouldn’t ask for much money from a rich man, it would level off the unfairness of society just a bit.
Plans often go awry in vengeance movies. When the kidnapped child accidently drowns, the factory owner exacts intense and almost wordless justice on the plotters. What follows is — and it’s worth being prepared for it — suicide, murder by baseball bat and scalpel, torture, dismemberment and sweet poetic justice. And a dark surprise at the end.
Instead of the roaring lines familiar to fans of Harrison Ford movie trailers, the director uses haunting and beautiful imagery to increase the impact: Ryu hitchhiking along a highway in the early daylight, naked and scarred from his kidney transaction; the kidnapped child’s orange dress floating in the river; the bleak and grimy factory whose noise is invisible to the deaf Ryu; even the scenes of violence, often shot with a comfortable measure of distance or blocked perspective.
I’m haunted by this movie’s slow, relentless build. I woke up through the following night, thinking about the twists and turns of the plot, how good turned to bad and back again, everyone cheating and being cheated, and how violence was met with deserved violence somewhere down the road. What proves to be especially challenging for western viewers isn’t the violence — although that is pretty graphic — but the measured pace of this film and others like it (like the excellent Memories of Murder, also starring Kang-ho Song) that do not build to a predictably frantic conclusion.
This Korean meditation on personal justice isn’t all that different from its American counterparts — the fury of an anguished father translates well — but I think it better demonstrates that the pursuit of vengeance doesn’t end with anyone’s clean hands. Achieving vengeance may require destroying everyone, including yourself.
You learn something every day. One day, you know nothing about a Canadian heavy metal band named Anvil, and suddenly you learn that they’ve recorded twelve albums (and are working on numbers 13 and 14) and were considered to be a contemporary of metal legends like Metallica, Anthrax and Motorhead. You might not have known that Slash of Guns ‘n’ Roses was a teenage fan and that, once in their youth, they met with head-banging reverence by festival crowds.
And, surprisingly, you learn that a documentary about a past-their-prime Canadian heavy metal hair band on a long, long losing streak can be an enlightening rumination on what it means to have a dream, and to keep it alive long enough that it might come true.
I’ll admit to once having a few Kiss and Judas Priest LPs in my collection. I may have turned the radio up to blast “Back In Black” while alone in the car. But I’m no metal fan. When I began to watch Sasha Gervasi’s excellent documentary, I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t a “This Is Spinal Tap” tribute. Early scenes capture Steve “Lips” Kudlow working his depressing catering job and the band embarking on an ill-fated European tour. There are so many Spinal Tap moments here: devoted fans “Cut Loose” and “Mad Dog” (who pounds a beer through his nose), a lead guitarist who plays with a vibrator, and the local television show reveling in Anvil’s dirty rock lyrics. Their song “Metal On Metal” even sounds like Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottom.” When band co-founder and drummer Robb Reiner was introduced, I was sure it had to be an homage to the director of the greatest-ever rock mockumentary.
But then something really unexpected happens: Anvil as a heavy-metal joke disappears, and the guys become very genuine people who you wish would find success and fulfillment in their music. Watching Kudlow record an enthusiastic radio-station promo and being told that, oops, we forgot to turn on the tape, you’ll be amazed that he doesn’t stop smiling. Even during the difficult behind-the-scenes moments when he childishly argues with Reiner, with whom he has rocked since a teenager, you can see the nice guy beneath the black t-shirt.
So the European tour is a failure, and the band returns to Ontario to get back to their lives. But they’ve recorded some demos and Kudlow sends a copy off to the producer of their early albums. He refuses to let his dreams die, even as he celebrates his 50th birthday, and despite a music scene that has changed dramatically since the band formed.
The core of Anvil! is definitely the bond between Kudlow and Reiner, who seem to consider each other as a brother, although they continue to butt heads. Kudlow is the overgrown kid who believes in the possibilities of rock and roll, and Reiner supplies the steady propulsion and balance expected of a drummer. Both have families that wearily support them — Reiner’s sister is the one downer — and enough hope shines through to keep them pursuing fame. Eventually, the producer calls back and the band faces difficult decisions that test their commitment. I’ll leave it at that.
This should be required watching for anyone in a band, for anyone who wants to be a musician — not necessarily as a lesson in how to become a success or avoid becoming a failure. The film is really a testament to the tenacity of dreams. Reiner expresses frustration that success hasn’t found Anvil, and seems well aware that their last chance has to happen pretty soon. It seems like only death will stop Kudlow — they will have to pry the Flying V from his cold, dead hands.
There’s more talk about life and aspiration in this film than a thousand afterschool specials. Kudlow’s successful, professional siblings are incredibly supportive. A scene where his older sister states her support for his dreams (and yet fights back tears and a troubled brow) is nicely concluded with his observation that “family is important shit, man.” Lasting fame may not find the band, but I’d say these guys are successful for having the support for their unlikely rockin’ dreams.
2009. Directed by Louis Psihoyos.
I put off watching The Cove because I knew what I was going to see. Sometimes you need movies to escape the depressing aspects of life, rather than focus on them. But witnessing what happens in this brave documentary is important.
The debut of this film was the first I’d heard about the dolphin capture and slaughter in a hidden cove near Taiji, along the coast of Japan. From September to March of every year, dolphins are detoured from their migratory route, chased by boats with men aboard banging on pipes, and herded into shallow waters to be speared and left to bleed out. Some are captured for export to entertainment parks. The local fishermen are extremely aggressive in keeping activists away and, for a long time, were very successful at it.
As much as I dreaded watching it, The Cove was rewarding to watch due to the way the situation is filmed. First, the man who has led the opposition in Taiji is Richard O’Barry, who began as a trainer on the 1960s television show, Flipper. O’Barry is motivated by the wealth brought to him by the show and the subsequent popularity of captured dolphins for performance in venues around the world. After years of exploiting the animals, he regretted what he’d done and began working to free captured dolphins and end the Japanese slaughter.
O’Barry describes the dolphin’s smile, loved by millions of visitors to Sea World and venues like it, as a cruel joke of nature. The animals are highly intelligent, capable of communication and gentle when encountering humans in the wild. When confined and isolated, they suffer depression and anxiety. Those same people who love them performing in a water park wouldn’t want them captured and confined if they knew how the experience destroyed the dolphins.
Second, the film includes a high-tech adventure story, as director Louis Psihoyos assembles an “Ocean’s Eleven” team to elude the local police, infiltrate the cove and plant audio and video equipment that will document what happens out of sight. Thermal cameras, night dives and reconnaissance missions add some suspense to the substance of the film, which also tackles fish stock depletion, international whaling debates and the mercury poisoning that results from the overfishing.
The most telling aspect of The Cove is the acknowledgment by the fishermen that if the world found out what was happening at Taiji, the killing of 33,000 dolphins each year there would end. The few who benefit continue to hide behind claims of tradition, but most Japanese didn’t know it was taking place and don’t support it. Many don’t realize that inferior dolphin meat was being passed off as more expensive and scarcer whale meat. When the fishermen tried to give dolphin meat to a school lunch program, despite its heavy mercury content, two Taiji city councilmen stepped up to oppose it, endangering their own lives and livelihood.
The footage and sound recordings captured by the activist team is presented without comment, but there really is no need for any. But it’s clear why none of the Japanese involved wanted their faces and actions caught on film. The question that remains is, if they are so ashamed of what they are doing, why are they still doing it?
2009. Starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick. Directed by Jason Reitman.
The irony is thick in Up In The Air. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a happy air warrior who specializes in firing employees for timid employers all over the country. He is summoned back to HQ for a change in direction — a young colleague (Anna Kendrick) has devised a means of firing people through videoconferencing, effectively terminating Bingham from the profession he has perfected.
Bingham sees the benefit of a face-to-face dismissal for every kind of unwanted employee, a way to soften the blow and minimize the blowback, however insincerely delivered. “Everyone who has ever ruled an empire or changed the world sat in the same seat as you, and they would not have accomplished what they did if this hadn’t also happened to them” — that’s his line, polished and appropriated by all his colleagues, meant to disarm and distract the newly axed. “What we do is take people at their most fragile,” he later admits to the colleague, “and set them adrift.”
The new method of firing employees online will take away his constant travel and disrupt the life he has also perfected — living without roots, collecting perks from every transaction, slipping away effortlessly from every interaction. He travels light, using his executive status to dash to the front of lines, maxing out his per diems, and eventually meeting his complement in the form of Alex (Vera Farmiga) in a hotel bar. They flirt over preferred membership cards, and have a nice, commitment-free romp before catching their morning flights.
Bingham takes his young colleague on the road with him, to show her the complexities of their trade that can’t be summarized in a dispassionate script. She’s wound as tight as he is loose, but as she unwinds on the road, we learn that she’s vulnerable to the painful toll of relationships that he has built his life around avoiding. He’s even written the book on unburdening yourself of human baggage — a self-help book he travels to promote on his days off.
Eventually, his protege inspires him to examine all the miles he’s traveled and to question where he’s going. “Call me when you’re lonely,” Alex says as they part once again at an airport gate. “I’m lonely,” he replies in an untypical, unguarded moment.
Up In The Air is a terrifically entertaining film, and prescient enough to be released in the middle of our great recession, when downsizing and career-shifting and existential doubt are familiar to many of us. Unburdened by the weight of others holding him down, Clooney’s friendly executioner floats from town to town, helping dismantle the American dream for one middle-class worker at a time. He suggests to one that now might be the time to chase those dreams he’d left behind, that the end he’d been hired to deliver was really a beginning of sorts. Some of those receiving bad news are angry and resentful, and some are ashamed. Most will find a way to land on their feet. But it doesn’t matter to the messenger, because he’ll be long gone before they land anywhere.
Bingham’s approach to his career seems like it should be successful. Without the weights of conscience, commitment and purpose, a guy could really get somewhere. What he finds up above us all, up above the clouds that hover over the rest of us, is that a life without them can be lonely and cold.
Ξ December 28th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movies |
2008. Directed by James Toback.
Mike Tyson’s face is the most convincing proof that he was a boxer. He was shorter than nearly all his opponents. His peculiarly high voice, filtered through an odd lisp that you’d be surprised to hear uncorrected in an adult, made him an easy impersonation, easy to ridicule. His chaotic and scandalous personal life cost him years of freedom, the loss of his fortune, and much of the respect he’d gained in the ring. But I remember his fights. I remember thinking that there was no one more terrifying than Tyson in the ring, fixed with an unblinking and ferocious glare, waiting for the bell so that he could inflict pain.
There was a time that I wouldn’t have surprised to read about Tyson’s death, whether in the ring or in a jail cell. He seemed like an animal — such a loaded term, but a term he applied to himself — when it involved women or opponents. He acted without self-respect or restraint. He seemed almost too conditioned to be a fighter, almost without the personality and character we celebrated in heavyweight champs ever since Ali. After he bit Evander Holyfield, I dismissed him as a wasted soul, beyond redemption as a human being.
James Toback’s documentary challenges your assumptions about Mike Tyson. Nearly the only voice outside of fight clips and TV interviews is that of Tyson. He talks for 90 minutes, steadily and urgently, edited sometimes so that he overtakes his own thoughts, knocking down your expectations and forcing you to confront him through an unguarded, amazingly candid narration.
It’s revealing to listen to this once-furious fighter, renowned for his early and brutal knockouts, to hear him talk about being afraid, being bullied, feeling cheated, at the mercy of an impulsive nature he clearly can’t explain. His narrative mixes metaphors, plows past non sequiturs, earnestly searches for the right words only to settle for something vague and not quite appropriate. But in the hour-and-a-half of recounting his training and career and life since, he says some amazing things for a guy I thought incapable of reflection.
He talks about his pre-fight approach, emerging without a robe and already drenched in sweat, turning his fear into power with each step: “The closer I get to the ring, the more confident I get. Once I’m in the ring, I’m a god. No one could beat me. I walk around the ring but I never take my eyes off my opponent. Even if he’s ready and pumping, and can’t wait to get his hands on me. I keep my eyes on him. I keep my eyes on him. Then once I see a chink in his armor, boom, one of his eyes may move, and then I know I have him. Then once he comes to the center of the ring he looks at me with his piercing look as if he’s not afraid. But he already made that mistake when he looked down for that one-tenth of a second. I know I have him. He’ll fight hard for the first two or three rounds, but I know I broke his spirit.”
Unfortunately, Tyson excuses himself for his abusive behavior toward his wife of eight months, Robin Givens. (Watching him clearly and calmly growing furious during a Barbara Walters interview is unnerving.) And he viciously attacks Desiree Washington, whose charges of rape sent him to prison. But the same angry face with its framing Maori tattoo struggles to stay composed while describing the encouragement and support of Cus D’Amato, the man who first believed in him and trained him to be a champion.
And two amazing post-defeat moments that end Tyson’s career, as well as the film, help illustrate the complexity of the fighter. In the first, after a brutal rout, he gently wipes blood from the face of a triumphant Lennox Lewis, then, in a moment after a humiliating loss that ended his professional career, admits to an interviewer that there’s no fight left in him, that he knew he couldn’t win even before the fight, then graciously wishes the new champ luck with his life and career.
Stories capable of changing your established viewpoints don’t come along everyday. I knew what I thought of Mike Tyson before watching this film, and now I’m not sure. I think boxing is brutal and I think the sport is cynical and exploitative, and I think Tyson was already a dangerous and angry kid before they taught him how to destroy others with his fists. But after listening to him, without the bluster necessary of the ring and without asking anything of him other than his candid recounting of his life, flaws and all, I believe he is a fragile and confused human being, like all of us. And like each of us, I think he is redeemable.
Ξ December 20th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movies |
Seeing old photographs at a garage sale or in an antique store bothers me. Once separated from an ancestor, those photos become untraceable. The faces lose their names, and that person, so real and human during their short toil on earth, becomes a ghost.
My ancestors have been diligent at saving and identifying photographs. Among them are a handful of tintypes, a means of photography in the late 1800s created through an emulsion made on a piece of metal. Several of the ones I’ve got are identified, but one has always puzzled me — a tintype of two Civil War soldiers, one wearing a very comfortable-looking stocking cap.
I’d guessed that the standing soldier is my Great-Great-Grandfather Luther, but couldn’t be sure of the other man, sharing the rare occasion to be photographed with him. This week, my cousin, Jim Frasier (whom I’ve only ever met online, after connecting with him a few years ago), helped shed light on the mystery. Jim guesses that the sitting man is Luther’s brother-in-law, Lorenzo, who enlisted at the same time, back in 1862.
Luther would fight at Fredericksburg, be wounded and discharged to eventually make his way to Wisconsin. Lorenzo would fight at Harpers Ferry, in Florida and Virginia. He would be taken prisoner and held in Illinois, then be killed in an explosion in North Carolina before he was 20 years old. I don’t know much about him. All I’ve got is this image and the details of his service. I don’t know if he was married or had a sweetheart, but I know that when I hear this song, I think about the young men like him who said their goodbyes knowing they likely wouldn’t return to their once-happy lives.
When The Roses Bloom Again (written by Will Cobb and Gus Edwards)
Performed by Laura Cantrell
Well they’re strolling in the gloaming when the roses are in bloom
A soldier and his sweetheart brave and true
And their hearts are filled with sorrow for their thoughts are of tomorrow
As she pins a rose upon his coat of blue
Do not ask me love to linger when you know not what to say
For duty calls your sweetheart’s name again
And your heart need not be sighing that I’ll be among the dying
I’ll be with you when the roses bloom again
When the roses bloom again and the sun is on the river
The mockingbird will sing its sweet refrain
In the days of auld lang syne I’ll be with you sweetheart mine
I’ll be with you when the roses bloom again
With the rattle of the battle came a whisper soft and low
Our soldier has fallen in the fray
I am dying I am dying and I know I’ve got to go
But I want to tell you before I pass away
There’s a far and distant river where the roses are in bloom
And a sweetheart who is waiting there for me
And its there I pray you’ll take me, I’ll be faithful don’t forsake me
I’ll be with you when the roses bloom again
When the roses bloom again and the sun is on the river
The mockingbird will sing its sweet refrain
In the days of auld lang syne I’ll be with you sweetheart mine
I’ll be with you when the roses bloom again
Cantrell’s version of the song is one arranged by Wilco and Billy Bragg, who found the lyrics among those belonging to Woody Guthrie — the lyrics they used to create the Mermaid Avenue record — but Guthrie didn’t write the song. Johnny Cash recorded a very similar version, with a different arrangement. Both are probably based on a traditional song, which wouldn’t surprise me since every generation has sent young people off to die for a cause, and finds reasons to sing about their heartbreak.
Happy revelations like this don’t happen often enough when doing family research. I feel like I’ve got another relative, even though his life was short and long ago, and his story so tragic. Welcome back to the family, Lorenzo Frasier.
1956. Starring Randolph Scott and Lee Marvin. Directed by Budd Boetticher.
A reference somewhere to Budd Boetticher as a “cult director” was enough to get me to see one of his late 1950s westerns, so I thought I’d watch the first, Seven Men From Now, and build up to the better-known and much-respected The Tall T. I love westerns but have had my fill of the conventional ones, and it’s not often that someone tinkers with the old formula enough — with a great story and performance like Unforgiven, or the ensemble masterpiece that is Deadwood — to make an horse opera worth its oats.
Budd Boetticher, from all accounts, was an outsider to the Hollywood way of making pictures. He began his film career unconventionally — after training as a bullfighter, he became a technical advisor on the bullfighting epic, Blood and Sand. This gave him a chance to direct his own film, The Bullfighter and the Lady, for John Wayne’s production company. This naturally led to directing westerns, which fit Boetticher’s preferences of directing from a saddle and using natural backgrounds instead of studio sets. He made a series of seven westerns known in the world of cinema as the “Ranown Cycle” and hailed, as is usual, in retrospect rather than box office receipts.
Seven Men From Now is a great start to that series. Randolph Scott stars as Ben Stride, the silent, square-jawed ex-sheriff on the trail of a group of seven outlaws who robbed the Wells Fargo office and killed his wife, who was working as a clerk. On the trail — and after dispatching the first two of the seven — he rides shotgun for a married couple (Walter Reed and the pale-blue-eyed Gail Russell) who clearly need help from the mysterious stranger to avoid a scalping. Soon, they are joined by a pair of troublemakers, including Bill Masters (Lee Marvin) who hangs around in case that Wells Fargo box with $20000 in gold goes up for grabs.
Stride once arrested Bill Masters, who claims not to hold a grudge but will clearly do whatever is necessary to end up with the gold. That includes recognizing Stride’s interest in the young wife as a way to divide the whole wagon train. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Lee Marvin turn in a less-than-fantastic performance (doing everything I can to avoid thinking about Paint Your Wagon), and he’s great in this role. Boetticher is credited by fellow directors with creating the “likeable villain” and Marvin fills that role as Bill Masters — funny and with a sense of justice one minute, willing to cross and double-cross the next.
I was also impressed and surprised by Randolph Scott’s performance. His portrayal of the silent, simmering loner seeking revenge rather than reward seemed a bit ambiguous, and I like that. You’re never sure that you like Ben Stride (a role originally meant for John Wayne), but you want him to be the last man standing.
Seven Men From Now feels so much different from other westerns of its time. With the exception of a passing drunken prospector, the characters feel original and unburdened by western movie cliches. The Indians who threaten the travelers early in the film aren’t bloodthirsty, but starving and desperate, and Scott’s character shows compassion for them. Even the character’s motivation is original for a western — he is driven by guilt for having refused a deputy job, forcing his wife to work in the dangerous Wells Fargo office. It also features one of the best and most-memorable shootout death scenes ever choreographed.
Several times, Boetticher makes the unusual choice of cutting away from the action — a gunfight where you don’t see the fatal draw, for example. His instincts to film the opposite of what you’d expect pay off in every instance. It was only after watching the extras on the Seven Men From Now DVD that I learned how much I liked and appreciated his unconventional attitude toward his work. While watching the film, I couldn’t shake my irritation of the inclusion of a godawful theme song over the opening credits. And I happily learned that Boetticher hated it too, had been forced by the studio to include it, and tried to get it removed when the film was restored. It’s no wonder that Boetticher doesn’t wrap things up with a simple ride off into the sunset.
Ξ November 17th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movies |
1991. Starring Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy. Written and Directed by David Mamet.
I may have forgotten when I put Homicide on my Netflix list that it was written and directed by David Mamet. I knew that it was a new release from The Criterion Collection, and there are few films among them not worth watching. And I knew it starred Joe Mantegna, who also starred in House of Games, a particular favorite of mine, also released by Criterion. But I should have realized that Homicide, like House of Games, was written and directed by Mamet, and it always takes me a while to warm up to his films.
Mamet, any movie review will feel the need to remind you, is primarily a playwright, and in doing so prepares you for the awkward, stilted dialogue so packed together and overlapping and filled with unlikely statements and responses that it will seem like a dubbed foreign film or filmed amateur performance. Characters in his films either speak with no emotion, rapid-fire and without subtlety, or they over-react, with stagy conversation and what seems like a clumsy delivery. Of course it’s not. These are great actors, and wouldn’t turn in such a performance, unless directed to in pursuit of the director’s particular style.
I’m not saying that Homicide is a bad film; it may be a difficult one. You can’t spend half of the film acclimating yourself to Mamet’s rhythm — the distraction will lead you to miss the development of the story. Try watching Glengarry Glen Ross a week before watching this. It’s a great film, absorbing, with a few enormous roles that typify Mamet’s style. Alec Baldwin and Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon turn in iconic performances, not to mention Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Alan Arkin. . .
Anyway, I was talking about Homicide.
Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, a Jewish homicide detective — always “the first through the door” despite his assignment as a hostage negotiator, which his cop buddies seem to regard as a weak role. He’s partnered with Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy) on a high-profile case to track down a cop killer after the FBI has struck out. The pair have the inside track on the fugitive, thanks to a prior case, and are ordered to close the case as soon as possible. Before they can check on their inside contact, Gold gets reassigned to the case of an elderly Jewish woman’s murder in her black-neighborhood candy shop. Gold begs to pass on the case, which he believes is a simple robbery, but is ordered to change his priorities, and believes that “downtown” Jewish powers are getting in the way of his policework.
There’s enough internal conflict here to cause spontaneous combustion. Gold is reminded by the family of the murdered shopkeeper that he’s Jewish and has an obligation to respect the culture and know his history, and is reminded by fellow police officers that his obligation is to his professional oath and his partner. He feels like an outsider, a man without a country, an officer valued in his unit because he understands how the fugitive feels. He faces the question of “Who am I?” with every turn in the case.
While investigating a reported gunshot at the home of the shopkeeper’s family, he finds evidence that causes him to believe that the murder was a hate crime and leads him to a shadowy group of Jewish anti-fascist fighters, and forces him to confront a few unresolved issues about his identity. I have to admit that this is where Homicide lost my interest for a while.
But don’t let it shake you off the trail. There’s something about the internal struggle that drives Mantegna’s character and changes the usual police procedural into an existential sleepless night for Detective Gold. Mamet is pulling the strings all along, like a good playwright should, and you’ll want to watch Homicide until the final shots are fired, the cards are turned over and the case is wrapped up. At the end, the missing piece changes the entire subject of the puzzle.
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