Desicritics Author: Alan Dale

Movie Review: Martin Scorsese's The Departed: (Good + Bad) x Cop²

Alan Dale — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 12:32:29 EST

In the Hong Kong crime picture released here as Infernal Affairs (2002), a gangster grooms a young man to be a mole in the special police unit that is trying to shut down his operations. At the same time, a super-secret undercover cop infiltrates his gang. The suspense lies in whether the dirty cop or the undercover plant will figure out the other's identity first.

It's a heroic romance in which the good cop and bad cop are cracked mirror images of each other, but it's fairly dimensionless as romance — i.e., it is not "about" the moral confusions surrounding undercover work. Though the good guy and the bad guy are each disguised as the other, the values nonetheless remain melodramatically polarized. About all there is to engage you is how it's going to be resolved this time around (only one of the cops remains alive at the end, but their personalities are ironically reintegrated — a "tragic" happy ending). In sum, the concept is nifty and the movie runs a sleek 101 minutes.

Martin Scorsese's The Departed transplants the story to Boston where the police are trying to bring down a mobster named Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) who has bullied his way to dominance over the working-middle-class Irish neighborhood where he runs a protection racket, a dope ring, a fencing operation, etc. The undercover cop Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the mole Collie Sullivan (Matt Damon) are also Boston-Irish and Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan seem to be reaching for an epic vision of Irish-American corruption in the cradle of American liberty.

You catch the sociological sprinklings — a quotation from Joyce (improbably identified by a 12-year-old); Freud's statement that the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis; the fierce refusal of a bereaved mother to "rat out" her son's killers. But the moviemakers haven't changed the narrative significantly, and the fact that the same story and characters originated in a movie set in Hong Kong should have told them that whatever they were accomplishing by lengthening the movie to 152 minutes they were not by the same process deepening it.

The Departed isn't victim to the self-deception by which Scorsese and screenwriter Wesley Strick spread a little guilt among the "good" characters to make Cape Fear (1991) worthy of their efforts. But it's indifferent enough, a project made with the kind of nondescript moviemaking skill any big-budget generalissimo would be capable of. The Departed is ambitious yet shallow, bloated yet weightless.

Scorsese appears to have believed he could turn a slick gangster picture into an Irish Godfather. I didn't get a feel for the local circumstances that produced Costello and his minions, however. The scene in which Costello recruits the child Collie by buying groceries for his mother is too simplistically illustrative, like the Warner Brothers gangster pictures of the '30s in which the fact that a boy trips a girl on roller-skates for fun is enough to tell us that he'll grow up to be no good. As for Billy's background, we learn it from an abusive grilling by an undercover recruiter (Mark Wahlberg) who is convinced that Billy is too erratic to be a good cop above-ground. This is Wahlberg's best scene, but the exposition about Billy is too clearly announced. Whether showing or telling, the movie is clumsy and obvious. (To do Warners justice, Marked Woman (1937) starring Bette Davis as one of the prostitutes who helps convict the gangster based on Lucky Luciano, has a more nuanced sense of situation than The Departed.)

Too many elements are misjudged. Impossibility is not a fault in romance since romance is the genre of fantastic wish-fulfillment (e.g., Superman to the rescue). But inconsistency, when, for example, the moviemakers don't stick to the terms they themselves have established, is a problem. Thus, we may fairly object when Costello arranges a secret meeting in a porno theater and then gratuitously makes a spectacle of himself with a dildo. The movie is trying to key itself to Costello's ungoverned male self-assertion, to show it, in fact, as a general condition, on both sides of the law, but ends up pushing the hyper-masculine brinksmanship too hard. Wahlberg's role has to be overdone to be done at all (he was more compelling in the low-key party scene in I ♥ Huckabees), which you could also say of Costello and the roles played by Alec Baldwin and Ray Winstone. The contrasting suggestion that Damon's Collie is a latent homosexual serves no respectable purpose at all.

Nicholson has been as overhyped playing Costello as he was playing the Joker in Batman (1989). He's better than that here, but his role hasn't been meaningfully developed from the one-dimensional greasy fatcat in the original. (Some of what's been added makes no sense: why, for instance, does this Irish mobster attend a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor?) In other words, he's been asked for a star performance in a role conceived as a star turn. Rounding out his fourth decade of fame and critical adulation, he has not become a lazy actor. In About Schmidt (2002), he quietly updated for his current age his earliest star persona — the man in a rage against bullshit. He was supported by Alexander Payne's script, however, which completely reconceived Louis Begley's source novel. He's not lazy as Costello, either, nor does Scorsese direct him lazily, as Nancy Meyers did in Something's Gotta Give (2003) (apart from the scene in which he watches Diane Keaton's stage version of their unhappy affair), but his part has been written lazily and it comes to nearly the same thing.

And yet The Departed is compelling, more so than Gangs of New York (2002) and The Aviator (2004), Scorsese's two previous big-prize contenders, put together. (Gangs of New York was so set-bound and stiffly choreographed it's hard not to think of it as Gangs of New York, New York.) What Scorsese gets exactly right is the casting of Damon and DiCaprio as the inversely criminal cops. Damon makes you believe he's the brilliant guy who could pull off the deep-dyed imposture, but he also shows the kind of brittleness that would come from doing it.

This is a breakthrough performance for him because he creates his character in an openly, brashly entertaining way, especially when he's flirting with Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), the police department psychologist. It's such neat work because Damon is "convincing" as the mysteriously corruptible pug-nosed altar boy without taking the role more seriously than the picture warrants. He gives Collie the roundness and vulcanized bounce of a cocky-brainy guy who has never met anyone he couldn't deceive, and it doesn't matter that we don't believe in the means by which he does it — e.g., sending nick-of-time text-message warnings to Costello from a cell phone he has to keep in his pocket to avoid detection. (Surreptitious cell-phone messaging is even less photogenically suspenseful than after-hours file-cabinet rifling and race-against-time xeroxing and computer file deletion.)

In other words, Damon plays his role comically, in a slightly distanced, aestheticized manner. If he doesn't quite have the high artifice of certain commonwealth actors, from Laurence Olivier through Peter O'Toole right on up to Guy Pearce, Ewan McGregor, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, he does take as much gleam-eyed pleasure in acting here as Montgomery Clift did in Red River (1948) and The Heiress (1949), and without Clift's youthful indolence and self-regard. Damon is hard-working but all the desperation is Collie's.

Damon is lucky that the earnestness has been left to DiCaprio, who's better at it. The undercover cop's role has been expanded more from the original, though to less effect. I do believe that Scorsese, Monahan, and DiCaprio think that there is some genuine psychological probing of character going on here, i.e., the wages of doing good by doing bad. Concededly, Billy's activities are more plausible than Collie's; he does the kind of things undercover cops have to do. But psychological realism is built up from observation, and that is clearly not how The Departed was written. Moreover, to the extent DiCaprio pulls realism off, the movie becomes lopsided.

I found the claims of psychological depth easier to dismiss than DiCaprio's performance, however. He's so imaginative and physical an actor that the role of a sheep in wolf's clothing — more conceit than character — comes together. DiCaprio has beefed up and as a result has a carnal presence, and a command of means and space, unlike anything he's shown onscreen before. He can't overcome Damon's advantage in not taking the proceedings too seriously, but I can't imagine any other actor who could have made DiCaprio's choices and performed them any better.

The movie gains life entirely from the interplay among the actors, and both of the young stars are wonderful opposite Farmiga, who, with her mournful receptiveness, is possibly the least bland shrink in movie history. (No actress has ever been more memorable in the classically thankless role of the good girl observing the men in a crime picture.)

The biggest shock is that Scorsese's moviemaking is so untoned. Even Casino (1995), disastrously over-narrated as it was, showed more technical control. Here the cinematography is edgy in what seems like an entirely random way. (You pick up the visual references to The Third Man (1949) precisely because they stick out like cowlicks.) There's no click here between the director and his subject matter, and because he hasn't thought the material out in terms of sequences, the movie has no discernible larger rhythms. The actors are good enough that the movie is interesting moment-to-moment even though it feels aimless compared to the tight original. After it lumbered to a close, it took me about ten minutes to realize how much I had liked Damon's performance, and another day for DiCaprio's to register.

Scorsese has never been more respected than he is now and yet in his latest movies he's been turning into a monument to his former glory. It may be an inevitable fate for the most "intense" director in American movie history. By age 64 it shouldn't be surprising if he's burned through the kinds of obsessions and passions that made him famous, but, hell, Wagner with Parsifal, and Verdi with both Otello and Falstaff, were still pushing their art forward when they were even older. If any veteran director still has great work in him, I would bet it's Scorsese. If, unlike The Departed, that great work doesn't take the form of projects he can pre-sell to the industry gatekeepers based on his previous successes, however, we may never get to see it.

Movie Reviews: The Cooler and 21 Grams: Three Directions at Once

Alan Dale — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:12:46 EST

The Cooler

Wayne Kramer's first feature The Cooler starts from a terrific comic-ironic premise: Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) radiates defeat so penetratingly he works at a Vegas casino spreading it around. Management keeps an eye on the floor and dispatches him to tables where people are winning and sure enough winners become losers. He can do it by playing blackjack next to a guy on a streak but sometimes just speaking to a player is enough. There's nothing underhanded about it; he cools people's luck just by being himself.

Bernie is the quintessential ironic protagonist, the luckless man. Macy, whose face here looks like a partially-deflated smiley-faced balloon, is perhaps too apt for the role, because you sense the moviemakers' problem: Bernie's character and situation are so allegorically perfect you hate to see them altered by a plot. The script by Kramer and Frank Hannah does have one expert further move. When Shelly (Alec Baldwin), the old-style, pre-corporate thug who runs the joint sends a girl to Bernie's room to keep him "happy," they fall in love. We thought Bernie's life was screwed into the bottom of the barrel but in fact there is one more turn: when he's happy he doesn't spoil gamblers' luck he increases it, which of course ends his own brief run. Since Shelly gave him the job to pay off a gambling debt (after smashing his kneecap), Bernie's happiness brings the roof down on his head. He's happy, but he's a dead man.

Sticking to these terms, The Cooler would make a wonderful short. It gets at how we identify with ironic protagonists who represent how our lives can feel more ill-fated than mere chance could make them. We don't feel unlucky, we feel cursed--the dice aren't rigged, they want to come up snake eyes, they're enjoying our misery.

But the movie doesn't stick to these terms, and once Bernie and Natalie (Maria Bello), the young woman sent in to him, have fallen in love, it flickers in and out of irony. Natalie is a hard-luck customer, too. A former midwestern beauty queen, she's now a failed Vegas showgirl and a flailing cocktail waitress in the casino. Bernie is a sad-sack shmuck but he's also the best thing that's happened to Natalie in ages, maybe ever. It's precisely his earnestness and ineffectual gallantry--part of what makes him a loser in Shelly's eyes--that she responds to. In narrative terms this means Bernie becomes Natalie's knight, and though he's an unlikely knight, once this has happened the movie becomes a romance in which Bernie has to defeat Shelly the dark knight in order to rescue his damsel.

At the same time, Natalie's role has been written in yet another vein, realism. Natalie is given theatrical exposition of her background, but far from stopping the movie Bello's readings in these scenes single-handedly make it seem as if it's about real people. You may be disappointed as you feel the irony fading, as the movie gets warmer not cooler, but Bello's detailed performance is the most riveting element.

Bello has the mug-shot beauty of a B-actress in a film noir but a much ampler talent. There's nothing cut off about her, even before she responds to Bernie. We can see how this draggle-tailed woman puts her defenses in place and maintains them when she's stiffing the bartender of tips and trying to stay on Shelly's good side, and once she has opened up we see right into her. Her armor was always made of glass but her very skin seems to become transparent when she finds she can talk to Bernie.

Bello is so good it causes problems. For instance, Macy and Bello don't have the kind of chemistry that would make sense of the romance because in essence they're in different movies. It doesn't help that Macy is all wrong for the heroic romance, for the very reasons that he's perfect for the irony--the globe-eyed, "hit-me" gaze; the cartoonish silhouette and shamble; the whole peewee air about him. Given this, it infantilizes him to ask us to root for him, as if he were a heart-touching runt. (In Fargo Macy's character was totally enclosed in the irony and yet we could identify with his desperate puniness without hoping for him to get away with his crime.) Also, a subplot involving Bernie's son and his girlfriend functions as realistic contrast, showing us what Bernie and Natalie might have been with bad character on top of their bad luck, but this resonates more when Natalie interacts with the son than when Bernie does. This has to count as a defect though Bello's brief scene with Shawn Hatosy will make your flesh creep.

Finally, with Macy and Bello heading in different stylistic directions away from the original premise, Baldwin is stranded holding down the irony alone, making Shelly so-awful-he's-fabulous. (Shelly's relationship with Paul Sorvino as a strung-out former headlining singer is mishandled, and his melodramatic dealings with a soulless young suit who's taking over the casino is entirely misbegotten. Are we really expected to wax nostalgic for the good old knee-smashing days of Vegas in its "glory"?)

The ending manages to restore the romance by a stroke of irony but by that point the movie has torn itself apart. Kramer vitiates a great premise in the process of developing it, but he brings us Bello as a dramatic actress and she's a revelation.

21 Grams

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams from Guillermo Arriaga's script, has three protagonists whose stories, told in tiny, nonsequential segments, eventually converge in a bungled homicide, but there are only two types of narrative at loggerheads here, not three as in The Cooler. The central figure is Jack (Benicio del Toro), an ex-con and recovering alcoholic who has gone straight and become an evangelical Christian. He finds his calling in bringing redemption to young criminals, and his family, with both fists.

Jack talks tough to a young con and he expects his example to carry weight with the kid. He was the lowest of the low but Jesus raised him up, set him on the right path, gave him a truck. When the kid backslides Jack charges in and wants to slap some sense into him. When his son hits his daughter at the dinner table, he makes the little girl hold out her other arm so the boy can hit it, too, to exemplify Jesus's command to turn the other cheek. After his disgusted wife takes the girl away from the table Jack then smacks the boy.

Spiritual pride is a great theme, central to Fred Zinnemann's marvelous 1959 movie The Nun's Story in which Audrey Hepburn's Sister Luke is disappointed when her knowledge and skills aren't put to what she feels would be their best use. It's always hard to accept movie stars as dedicated nuns precisely because they're stars; The Nun's Story is able to use this because Sister Luke's delicate dilemma is wanting to be the very best nun in her order, which constitutes pride, which disqualifies her from the top honors, so she castigates herself to be humbler, and hence better, but must be careful not to congratulate herself for the effort or look for success. The movie brilliantly brings out the A-student egotism of this unrelenting, literal-minded young woman. Sister Luke can't laugh but her situation is profoundly comic: she's trying to stand out in a hierarchical institution the point of which is to humble her in the service of the Lord, to annihilate her ego as a way of ensuring her salvation. Hepburn's luminous eyes shine out from under her compulsively buckled brow as Sister Luke moves toward renunciation; she will finally feel calmly humble only in failure.

Jack's story is, of course, much farther down the social scale than Sister Luke's--he loses a job as a caddy at a country club because the clubmembers are uncomfortable with the tattoo on his neck--and not surprisingly that makes his situation worse. Spiritual pride is the only pride Jack has left; when it's gone he's beyond consolation. And of course the lower depths are no barrier to the work required for naturalism, which is all about actual details as you'd find them in the real world. Jack's story would have been wonderful shot in sequence by itself.

Especially if Jack's wife Marianne (Melissa Leo) had been developed more. What we get is that while she is better off with a law-abiding and sober husband, he's still headstrong in a way that makes her life barely manageable. Having to sneak a beer in the kitchen during a party is nothing compared to his bewildering insistence on turning himself in to the police after he's accidentally run over a man and his two little girls with the truck Jesus gave him.

Meanwhile, the dead man's wife Cristina (Naomi Watts) approves the donation of his heart and it ends up in Paul (Sean Penn), a gravely ill man whose wife is trying to get pregnant by him before he dies. The transplant actually brings about their separation and Paul tries to rediscover his identity by finding the protected name of the donor and working his way into her life. Since the accident Cristina has headed back to the heavy partying she had stopped when she got married, but when she finds out who Paul is she insists that he help her kill Jack in order to get her life back on track.

Cristina's justification is that had Jack stopped and taken his three victims to the hospital, her younger daughter might have lived. What the vengeance plot does to the movie is to turn the story into an ironic romance--Paul becomes the knight out to avenge the wronged damsel--and crank up the histrionics. It's ironic because we don't believe the quest is just or that the knight is up to the task (Paul's body is rejecting the heart and he can barely keep from vomiting while carrying it out). Not to mention the fact that Jack, who has abandoned his family and is trying to eradicate the last vestige of himself in physical labor and solitude, would like nothing more than to be dead.

The problem is that despite the complexity of the story Inarritu doesn't have much feel for details, which gets lost in the fragmented, time-hopping presentation. There's a moment when Paul has followed Cristina into and out of a bar where she has bought drugs from her old dealer and taken them and he convinces her to let him drive. She's stoned and hollering at the attendant who wants to call her a cab and then smashes into the car in front of her, but once Paul talks her into scooching over and giving him the wheel she settles into the passenger seat glassy-eyed ... and fastens her seat belt. I laughed, assuming that Inarritu caught the irony of it, but it stayed in the undifferentiated middle ground along with nearly everything else, and then the moment had flown.

What you get instead of attention to details is USDA beefy dramatic acting. It's the same problem as in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, in which the moviemakers and actors are so intent on the dramatic impact of the story that the story becomes secondary. Maria Bello is so fine in The Cooler because she builds her realistic character out of the specifics of Natalie's story, her futureless past and present, without self-consciousness about the scale or importance of her performance. 21 Grams never gives you a break from its sense of importance. And you know it's serious because the leads have all been made as unattractive as possible--Watts looks like she has cotton stuffed in her lower lips, Penn's face is all crow's feet and beak, and the skin around del Toro's eyes looks like sphincter tissue. With the exception of a bit of offhand flirtation when Paul approaches Cristina at her health club, there isn't a light moment in over two hours. Could someone please spread the word to the awards-seeking moviemakers of the world that unrelieved solemnity is not truer to life, not even in our worst moments.

The presentation of Jack's religious pride at least has a thought-out shape, an ironic one: the believer who wants to be the most devoted messenger and therefore the most valuable servant. But you don't have to experience it from an ironic distance because it's an irony you can identify with. After the accident we see the young man Jack had worked with looking over at him in church with a great, ambiguous expression and the impact is enormous: pride goeth before a fall but you have to keep living after the fall and how do you do that.

Penn has an annoying tendency to hunker down into drama, letting the air out so he can keep his performance within the conception of the role (like an anal kid who too carefully crayons within the coloring-book outlines), but the heart transplant plot is too arty to win him the accolades he got for his monotonously determined performance in Mystic River, and it doesn't fit stylistically with Jack's story. And while we're not encouraged to side with Cristina in her vendetta against Jack, neither is that ironic distance which we do maintain accented enough. (For all the fancy editing, Inarritu does nothing special to make us wince when someone tries to convince Cristina to press charges against Jack by stereotyping him as an ex-con and therefore indifferent to the consequences of his actions.) Naomi Watts is a fantastic actress, but even that scarejerker The Ring (2002) made better use of the glimmer of perversity visible in her spring-flower face, the quality that made you accept that a malevolent bogeychild might contact her (and that made her just right for a David Lynch protagonist in Mulholland Drive (2001)). Here, when she howls her pain it seems like an acting exercise.

21 Grams is more endurable than Mystic River because Jack's story is solid in itself, and, to be frank, the jigsaw structure adds a certain amount of incidental interest. But I was more interested in putting the pieces together than I was in looking at the picture once I'd finished.

Book Review: The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

Alan Dale — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 09:50:28 EDT

We must… educate the people in sterility. We might have a little pageant in its honour….
—Black Mischief (108)

LIFE, ARTICLE

In 1947 MGM wanted to make a movie of Brideshead Revisited; its author Evelyn Waugh had no interest but played along and got an expenses-paid trip for himself and his second wife to Los Angeles. He brought his violent prejudice against the U.S. with him (Stannard 186) and quickly figured out the movie would never be made: "The trick was to keep the Americans on the wrong foot while he imbibed Hollywood's extraordinary atmosphere" (Stannard 189). The focus of his amazement was Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the cemetery in Glendale that managed to offend his aesthetic and religious sensibilities at one go.

In a magazine article about Forest Lawn published later that year Waugh begins amusingly by viewing Los Angeles as an archaeologist of 2947 decrypting his findings -- e.g., "the idol Oscar -- sexless image of infertility," "a temple designed in the shape of a Derby hat" (Essays 331-2). It becomes clear, however, that Waugh feels Forest Lawn is only a symbol of all he found amiss in Southern California and America. Sadly, the writing that resulted is not his freshest. As Edmund Wilson wrote of The Loved One, the padded-out fictional version of the Forest Lawn article, "[It] suffers a little, for an American, from being full of familiar American jokes which Evelyn Waugh has just discovered" (304).

Thus, Waugh's description in the article of the "flimsy multitude of architectural styles" comes a decade or so behind similar descriptions in Dodsworth and The Day of the Locust. At points this material descends to the downright rubbishy, his complaints, for instance, about "the pathological sloth of the hotel servants," and about sun-seeking retirees who "warm their old bodies and believe themselves alive, opening their scaly eyes two or three times a day to browse on salads and fruits" (Essays 335).

In the article, Waugh is on firmer ground on the topic of religious expression as evidenced by the design of Forest Law and yet still manages to be wrongheaded. After noting the purposeful absence of deciduous trees, Waugh quotes from the Art Guide of Forest Lawn With Interpretations to the effect, "The cemeteries of the world cry out man's utter hopelessness in the face of death… Here [in contrast] sorrow sees no ghastly monuments, but only life and hope," to which he snorts in reply, "The Christian visitor might here remark that by far the commonest feature of other grave-yards is still the Cross, a symbol in which previous generations have found more Life and Hope than in the most elaborately watered evergreen shrub" (Essays 332). Here Waugh considerably underestimates the importance of the tree in Christian semiology. As Simon Schama has written, "Why should Christianity have denied itself the irresistible analogy between the vegetable cycle and the theology of sacrifice and immortality? Had it been adamantly ascetic, Christianity would have been unique among the religions of the world in its rejection of arboreal symbolism" (218).

Finally, almost at the end of the article, Waugh describes the memento mori of the European tradition of funerary sculpture - "the corpse half decayed with marble worms writhing in the marble adipocere" - in such a way that he seems to be speaking of his own artistic project: "These macabre achievements were done with a simple moral purpose - to remind a highly civilized people that beauty was skin deep and pomp was mortal"(Essays 336-7).

This felicitous phrase is a late save for a sophisticated yet mulish and rancid article, the most presumptuous kind of travel writing. When the Forest Lawn article became The Loved One, however, the insights got lost in a cruder form of expostulation - for the first and only time in Waugh's longer fiction the satire is mostly topical. Thus, it falls within literary scholar Leon Guilhamet's category of "demonstrative satire," which "encompasses direct attack in the present tense against individuals or specific groups," is "the most vituperative of satiric expressions," and takes "quite naturally the shape of demonstrative rhetoric" (27).

BOOK

In other words, The Loved One is a travel-writer's withering editorial fitted out with a narrative, which leads to another peculiarity. Although the protagonist Dennis Barlow is a rogue on the order of the Basil Seal of Waugh's Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, and although Waugh contemporaneously wrote in a letter of the "ineradicable caddishness" of all his heroes (Stannard 200), by comparison to the Southern Californian scene and populace Dennis ends up with a hero's pull.

Dennis is a 28-year-old English poet whose screenwriting contract with Megalopolitan Pictures has lapsed and who takes a job at the Happier Hunting Grounds, a pet cemetery, where his bosses like him because his melancholy and his accent give him a "reverent" air. The Happier Hunting Grounds patterns itself after Whispering Glades (itself modeled on Forest Lawn), where Dennis goes to arrange the funeral of Sir Francis Hinsley, an English artist who kills himself when his studio contract is not renewed. (Sir Francis had said to Dennis over drinks, "I am your memento mori. I am in deep thrall to the Dragon King. Hollywood is my life" (14).)

Dennis, "a young man of sensibility rather than of sentiment" (37), is himself "held… in thrall" (79) by the mystique of Whispering Glades and is particularly drawn to Aimée Thanatogenos, an apprentice cosmetician there. Aimée must decide between mother-loving Mr. Joyboy, Senior Mortician at Whispering Glades, and Dennis, who passes off classic English poetry as original compositions and plans to be ordained as a non-sectarian minister in order to impress her (but who must hide his job at the Happier Hunting Grounds from her). Aimée confides her romantic confusions to the Guru Brahmin, a newspaper advice columnist, who, eventually, tells her to jump off a building; instead she kills herself with a lethal injection in Mr. Joyboy's work-room. A desperate Mr. Joyboy asks Dennis to help him dispose of the corpse at the Happier Hunting Grounds; Dennis bargains for Mr. Joyboy's savings and returns to England, "carrying back… a great, shapeless chunk of experience, the artist's load" (163).

Dennis is the ironic protagonist who outfoxes the other characters (and merges at the end with the writer of the book we've just read) but the keystone figure of The Loved One is the Dreamer, the visionary who established Whispering Glades and whom Waugh modeled on Hubert Eaton, the sales agent who was hired by a run-down boneyard to market "before-need" plots and who transformed the enterprise into Forest Lawn, with its insipidly comforting commercial-religious creed. We never see Waugh's Dreamer, but we read inscriptions based on his beliefs ("Behold I dreamed a dream and I saw a New Earth sacred to HAPPINESS" (39), and "hear" his recorded voice from various speakers in the vast burial ground.

Waugh's Dreamer bathetically ties The Loved One to the medieval literary tradition of the dream vision, which includes the Consolation of Philosophy, the Dream of the Rood, the Romance of the Rose, the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, and Piers Plowman, a tradition which, as John Fleming has written, typically "leads an at first uncomprehending narrator from ignorance to understanding or from despair to consolation" (52). These are visionary works but may be thoroughly compatible with satire. As Fleming writes of the Romance of the Rose, for instance, "Jean de Meun follows the typical course of the dream-vision in that he exposes his dreamer-narrator to the doctrines of various allegorical abstractions, but, atypically, he makes the hero seem increasingly stupid in his perverse rejection of good counsel for bad" (52).

There's no question about what Waugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism, thinks of the Dreamer, as he makes clear in the Forest Lawn article, e.g., "Dr. Eaton is the first man to offer eternal salvation at an inclusive charge as part of his undertaking service" (Essays 336). The question is what we are to think of Dennis, who neither achieves a higher understanding nor stupidly rejects it. Furthermore, although Dennis is a scoundrel, he is an outsider in both Hollywood and Whispering Glades and so doesn't represent what's wrong with them. Rather, he's impervious to the spiritual values that Southern Californian culture (presumably) gets wrong but not above exploiting those values, chiefly to seduce Aimée (much like the protagonist of the Romance of the Rose (Fleming 50)).

Waugh creates character here on the expedient principle that the enemy of an enemy is friend enough. Thus, unlike Basil Seal, whom Waugh always views dispassionately as a virulent symptom of a rampant condition, Waugh seems glad as not to have Dennis get away with Mr. Joyboy's savings. That is, Waugh suffers the embarrassment of identifying unironically with the scoundrel protagonist of The Loved One, who becomes a hero by default.

Here the victim is Aimée, but unlike Tony Last in A Handful of Dust she's not appealing or plausibly drawn so there's no urge to object when punishment is meted out to her far more severely than conventional romantic or naturalistic storytelling could justify. With Aimée, Waugh seems to be compacting a number of views on American culture—she was named for the (Canadian) Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson but became "progressive" in college (102) but is devoted to the Whispering Glades "dream" and takes to her work "like a nun" (69).

She quickly becomes a pretext for a number of sublunary jibes at American women. For instance, we read of Aimée embalming herself for a date: "With a steady hand [she] fulfilled the prescribed rites of an American girl preparing to meet her lover - dabbed herself under the arms with a preparation designed to seal the sweatglands, gargled another to sweeten the breath, and brushed into her hair some odorous drops from a bottle labeled: 'Jungle Venom' - 'From the depth of the fever-ridden swamp,' the advertisement had stated" (111). Later Waugh goes on, repeating himself in part: "Aimée Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind… had been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product… " (134).

After Aimée loses confidence in both Mr. Joyboy and Dennis, we read, "Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture" (135). Despite her name and her faith in the Dreamer, Aimée is not an allegorical figure having to do with spirituality but Waugh's proof that if you've seen one mass-produced American girl, you've seen them all, and he seems to mean it literally. He's so insistent about it that he forgets what he wrote when Dennis first sees her - "the girl who now entered was unique" (54; emphasis added).

Waugh constructs the composite Aimée out of crap-sociological "observations" - is any of this material on topic, assuming we can discern one? Waugh wrote of the ideas he had in mind in writing The Loved One, working up from the specific to the general: "1st … and quite predominantly overexcitement with the scene of Forest Lawn," "3rd there is no such thing as an American. They are all exiles uprooted, transplanted & doomed to sterility," and "5th Memento mori, old style, not specifically Californian" (Letters 265-6). Waugh tries to bring it all together by writing as Aimée kills herself, "[S]he had communed perhaps with the spirits of her ancestors, the impious and haunted race who had deserted the altars of the old Gods, had taken ship and wandered, driven by what pursuing furies through what mean streets and among what barbarous tongues!" (149).

This only leads to a further objection: it's one thing to suggest that Anglicans have put themselves out of the way of salvation, as Waugh does in A Handful of Dust, a jeremiadic claim with a basis in the rejection of the true church, in Waugh's view, by the Church of England. By contrast, saying that Americans are damned makes no sense because "American," as depicted here in Los Angeles circa 1947, doesn't represent a spiritual tradition. And if you specify American low-church Protestants like Aimée, as this last passage about her suggests, you're not describing The Loved One as Waugh wrote it, what with all the nonsense about deodorants and mouthwash and public schools, etc.

Worse, Waugh's intense dislike of America drives away the necessary qualities of wit - indirection and understatement. He has so little respect for his subject he doesn't hold himself to a very high standard and ends up making misogynistic comments about American culture that are downright stupid (e.g., "American mothers, Dennis reflected, presumably knew their daughters apart, as the Chinese were said subtly to distinguish one from another of their seemingly uniform race, but to the European eye the Mortuary Hostess was one with all her sisters of the air-liners and reception-desks…. She was the standard product" (53-4)).

Waugh spent six weeks in the U.S.; he doesn't know his subject well enough to hate it accurately or distinctively. (What Mrs. Joyboy says about finding cheaper and better lettuce in Vermont than in Los Angeles, and having "a coloured girl" there who "came in regular," will puzzle anyone who has spent five minutes in that state (115).) The Loved One can't begin to compete with Philip Wylie's execratory blasts in Generation of Vipers, an insider's catalogue of the worthlessness of the various American estates in the early 1940s. While you can tell that The Loved One is intended as caustic drollery, it has the feel of Nathanael West (as noted by Edmund Wilson (304) and Waugh's biographer (Stannard 208)). The Loved One is Waugh's "Burning of Los Angeles," fueled by just enough hellfire to make the arson recognizably his handiwork.

FILM

Almost twenty years after Waugh's junket to Hollywood, the same studio that saw Brideshead Revisited "purely as a love story" without "theological implication" (Diaries 673) was ready for The Loved One, the religious points of which are just part of a choppy attack on American "sterility." The Loved One is coarse enough that it doesn't matter that the moviemakers, inevitably, get it wrong, and make it even coarser. It's the least conventionally unified and yet in some ways the most entertaining of the movies made from Waugh's books.

The American producers did hire an English director, Tony Richardson, and commissioned a script by Christopher Isherwood. The decision was then made, however, to update the story, and the topical satire, to the 1960s. So the American writer Terry Southern, hot off his collaboration on Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, was hired to hipsterize the material. According to Southern's "journal" of the film's production, his script included such things as a one-shot scene in which Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, the book's humorless defender of the respectability of the English colony in Hollywood, appears in drag at a gay leather bar. (Robert Morley refused to shoot the scene, proof to Richardson that he was behaving like "a boorish prima donna" (195)).

This is enough to indicate that Southern's writing has the juvenile impertinence of an undergraduate revue, and though one commentator noted the "imprint of an unadult mind" on Waugh's book (Ward 83), it's puerile in a very different way from the movie that resulted. (Southern's Journal includes a "transcript" of a prank phone call he made to a pet cemetery asking how much a funeral would cost for an 11-foot python that died swallowing a pig.)

In addition, Richardson shot the film "almost wholly in sequence" to preserve "the improvisational potential of the film in creation" (Journal); Southern was considered an expert in ad hockery on the set. This is how the silent slapstick stars worked with their teams of gag men, but Richardson, with his "distinguished" background directing Shakespeare and John Osborne, doesn't have the craft to select and shape knockabout material. A scene in which a wedding ceremony has to be accelerated so that the chapel can quickly be converted into a funeral parlor is about as snappy as it gets.

Richardson can't think in either Waugh's or Southern's terms, as is shown by the casting: as Dennis, the American Robert Morse, with his boyishly impudent air, isn't brazen enough for Southern or Waugh (and doesn't seem to come "of an earlier civilization with sharper needs" (54)), and as Aimée, the conventionally whiny ingénue Anjanette Comer lacks the skill to make something of that wobbly character, sententious yet diffident, and "doomed to sterility." (Among young actors of that era Terence Stamp and Barbara Harris, for instance, would have been better choices.) And while Richardson later wrote that the all-star supporting cast (apart from Morley) got into the spirit (195; the cast includes John Gielgud, Jonathan Winters in two roles, Rod Steiger, Milton Berle, Margaret Leighton, Roddy McDowall, Dana Andrews, James Coburn, Liberace, Tab Hunter, Lionel Stander, and, in roles cut to "whittle" the movie from five hours down to two, Ruth Gordon and Jayne Mansfield), the actors seem to have been assembled for a variety of reasons having little to do with appropriate comic talent. Anarchy is not that hard to achieve if you don't pay attention to what you're doing. The result inverts Waugh—irreverence is the only thing holding the picture together.

In his Forest Lawn article, Waugh contrasted the cemetery of the future with the right-thinking traditions of the past; Richardson's movie goes futuristic. To clear Whispering Glades of economically unproductive dead bodies and turn it into a retirement home (with the attendant advantage of higher turnover), the Dreamer collaborates with the Air Force to re-"bury" the dead in outer space. Although the movie deals with the empyrean, it deals with it literally. There is no spiritual dimension to the picture at all, and what the satire of the military adds is on a par with Southern's belabored work on Dr. Strangelove (less deft in the execution, however, because there's no comedy specialist of Peter Sellers's caliber at the center).

The movie also contains fleshpottery absent from the book—an orgy with go-go girls in the casket showroom; an Air Force hero's lascivious stripper wife who demands Dennis's services in return for endorsing Whispering Glade's space program; living statuary that gyrates, simulating copulation. The movie is so broad that it readily accommodates the kind of burlesque that functions as satire at the same time that it turns the audience on, without self-awareness and so without irony.

Although Richardson desecrates Waugh's work, the funhouse approach isn't as much of a violation as Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's recent adaptation of Vile Bodies was. Anarchy is generally the target of Waugh's satire rather than its goal, but messing The Loved One up is perhaps just what the book needs, seeing as Waugh runs off course and bores us with his cranky travel skimmings. In any event, because of the split between text and performance, a movie that one rejects for almost every conceivable reason can still be roughly entertaining.

Rod Steiger, for instance, is able to give Mr. Joyboy more power than this kind of doughy American eunuch ever had onscreen. (He's like a carnivorous Grady Sutton.) Steiger was always the most fearlessly stylized actor of his generation, as anyone who has seen him in Clifford Odets's The Big Knife knows, and he's the one performer in The Loved One who stays ahead of the curve no matter how bent. He confects an insane blend of prissy blandness and queeny bizarreness as the Mom-obsessed kitsch craftsman, the embalmer who is all the creepier because, in his antiseptic American way, he remains oblivious to the macabre side of what he does. (Steiger is so blandly creepy he makes the presence of Liberace as the casket salesman superfluous.)

Mr. Joyboy invites Aimée over to meet his "Mom," an obese, bed-ridden hag who moans in ecstasy over food commercials on TV while her aproned son cooks for her and tells Aimée that he plans to buy a big tub to give Mom her sponge baths in. (This outdoes even Philip Wylie's spewings on the subject of the American mother (194-217).) When Steiger's Mr. Joyboy shows Aimée his bedroom he says with breathy maidenliness, "I wanted you to see it—I don't know why," and effectively sends up the curdled euphemistic propriety that has been the bane of American popular culture since forever and is the one target Waugh hits dead on with his book (and gives it its title).

The movie's best sequence, however — involving Milton Berle and Margaret Leighton as a wealthy couple whose beloved pooch Arthur has died — is an invention. When Dennis arrives to collect the corpse and arrange for its disposal, Mr. Kenton is in the midst of managing his wife's hysterical accusations that he killed Arthur by not loving him enough. (He refused therapy.) It's a nightmare situation, as if Mr. Kenton (rather than Berle) has been miscast as a supporting player in his wife's histrionics and yet he can't refuse to play his part. He tries to reason with her, her voice ripe and yodelly with grief, but whenever he turns to Dennis, Berle's show-biz vet's weariness shows right through and he's instantly nothing but business.

After his wife slaps him and then asks why he must always hurt her (Leighton gives a towering parody of grande-dame theatrics), Mr. Kenton pours himself a drink (once he gets the glass upright) and sits down to work out the details with Dennis as quickly as possible. Dennis asks him in the ornate euphemisms of the trade how he wants the dog's body disposed of — entombment, empyrement, dissemination, or eternalization — to which Mr. Kenton replies, "I don't know what the hell you're talkin' about." When Dennis explains, Mr. Kenton thinks that burning sounds good. Dennis then asks, "Will you require a niche in our sanctum sanctorum or would you prefer to keep the ashes at home?" at which Mr. Kenton almost chokes on his scotch and mutters, "Not at home, pal, not at home, no."

Berle's gulp and no-nonsense answer suggest more than the rest of the movie in its entirety how far from common feeling the funeral biz has strayed. That one reaction is actually more expressive than Waugh's book as well, because Waugh, as was his style, condemns by implication rather than overt statement, which is fine, until his wit deserts him as it did in The Loved One. Berle may not be subtle but he is concise and pungent, and that moment is a pearl.

The rest of the movie is considerably less precious. It comes within sight of a rousing thematic variety show, like The Big Broadcast of 1938 with a raft of comedy stars and specialists (including Bob Hope, W.C. Fields, Martha Raye, Lynne Overman, Ben Blue, as well as the incongruous musical guest Kirsten Flagstad), but Richardson and Southern aren't qualified for such proceedings. Instead they turn The Loved One into mere perversity, somehow intended as punitive yet seemingly served as both a delicacy and an intoxicant. Perhaps the only way to enjoy it is to accept that saying something offensive is better than saying nothing at all. The Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One might have agreed with that, at any rate.

Works Cited

Fleming, John V. The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Guilhamet, Leon. Satire and the Transformation of Genre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

Richardson, Tony. The Long-Distance Runner. New York: William Morrow, 1993.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Southern, Terry. The Journal of The Loved One: The Production Log of a Motion Picture. New York: Random House, 1965.

Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.

Ward, A.C. Twentieth-Century English Literature: 1901-1960. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964.

Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. 1932, 1938, 1948, 1957. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

-----. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.

-----. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.

-----. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. New Haven and New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1980.

-----. The Loved One. 1948. New York: Little, Brown, 1999.

Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1958.

Wylie, Philip. Generation of Vipers. 20th Ed. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1955.

Movie Review: Oliver Stone's World Trade Center: Knights in Distress

Alan Dale — Fri, 1 Sep 2006 09:44:56 EDT

I was so grateful that Oliver Stone's World Trade Center wasn't overheated to the point of derangement, in the manner of his "political" hallucinations JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995), that I feel a little guilty for not responding to it more. Stone should be encouraged to stay off whatever he used to smoke, but he tones it down so much that World Trade Center is like a yawningly uplifting TV movie. There are many states of mind between delirium and coma, but whatever else it may be, Stone's talent is not a moderate one.

World Trade Center is the story of two members of the Port Authority Police Department who were among the last, few people to be pulled alive from the rubble of the collapsed towers on September 11th. Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) is an unsmilingly earnest 21-year veteran who knows the building complex intimately. When he hears news of the first plane, he heads downtown and leads a troop of volunteers into the burning buildings to rescue people on the floors above. Willy Jimeno (Michael Pe�a) is a rookie under McLoughlin, who knows he's following the best leader. But no one could have achieved what these men attempted; they're still in the Concourse when the South Tower collapses. Both McLoughlin and Jimeno are pinned under slabs of concrete twenty feet below ground level.

Structurally, the screenplay by Andrea Berloff is an oddity. McLoughlin and Jimeno are two fearless knights who are alert but helpless during the battle of their lives--they're heroes almost entirely in intention. For most of the picture they're pretty much immobile (except for one arm apiece), unaware of what has happened, unsure if anyone will find them before they fatally hemorrhage or are crushed. All they can do is fight off sleep, in the belief they'll live longer if they do, though McLoughlin thinks they have only 14 hours.

The entire action thus covers what would be a single episode in an epic narrative; it's as if the Odyssey, for instance, featured only the adventure in Polyphemus's cave (and ended with an unfraught reunion with Penelope). In other words, World Trade Center reduces narrative entirely to a single ordeal (albeit part of a larger ordeal that will be a bold heading in future history books, as one character points out). It's a trial in which the knights remain nearly motionless, their great struggle simply to stay awake.

The movie doesn't stay below ground with the trapped knights, however, but opens the situation up by showing what McLoughlin and Jimeno remember about their wives, and what their distraught wives remember about them. McLoughlin's wife Donna (Maria Bello), mother of his four kids, is a relatively stoic woman who believes all she can do is wait for word. Her younger son, who mistakes her stoicism for indifference, prods her into going to Manhattan to find John. Jimeno's wife Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), pregnant with their second daughter, is more impatient than Donna, but her energy is mostly wasted. She can't sit still, but of course she can't accomplish anything, either. (Her restless trip to the drug store is a highlight because it makes its point without undue emphasis--Allison is dizzy in anticipation of grief.)

Both damsels help their imperiled husbands more than they know, however, by giving them something to hang on for. That becomes the rationale for the movie's back-and-forth between the men losing strength in the bowels of the ruins and the women fretting and hoping. Currently there are no actresses I'd rather watch than Bello and Gyllenhaal, and they're never trite here (though neither is quite convincing as a working-class woman, in part because of the formulaic way the script has them interact with their children), but this structure is a mistake, and not only because Stone imposes no discernible movie making rhythm on it. The movie's real mistake is to take as its focus the single least unusual aspect of September 11--the fact that the murdered and wounded loved their families and were loved back. Though the script is fact-based, it inevitably smacks of old-fashioned Hollywood idealization: would the men's ordeal be less moving if they had been on the verge of divorces, or lousy fathers?

The handling is nonetheless slightly eccentric, in that the memories of the alternately numb and pain-wracked men merge with phantasms. The parched Jimeno can see lights above through a parting in the wreckage and it becomes a vision of Jesus with a burning heart coming to him with a plastic water bottle; an apparitional Donna tells McLoughlin to get off his ass and come home to finish the cabinets he started. The latter would play better if we hadn't already been cued by dialogue that Donna was upset about her unfinished kitchen. The script's generally kinkless, unideological approach could use more of this kind of particularity, and a subtler, even comic touch. The only detail with the right kind of incidental charm is when Jimeno reminisces about wanting to be a cop since watching Starsky and Hutch as a kid: as soon as he heard the theme song he'd chase his sister around the house and arrest her.

The men are rescued through the efforts of Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a senior accountant with Deloitte & Touche in Connecticut, and a devout ex-marine, who feels called by the attacks to defend his country. He confides in his minister, gets a high-and-tight haircut, and walks into Ground Zero, identifying himself as an active marine. He'd rather give up his name than his rank; when asked for a shorter handle than "Staff Sergeant Karnes," he says, "You can call me Staff Sergeant." Stone doesn't get the full nutty flavor of this exchange (Karnes's eccentricity may itself explain why he undertook this mission at all), but the director doesn't seem very committed to the religious aspect introduced by Karnes, either. Karnes's actions are based in fact, but there's something ectoplasmic about the character that Stone doesn't quite know how to integrate into the straightforward power-of-familial-love context. Shannon starts giving off a psycho-killer buzz and Stone drops him after he's served his purpose.

It's as if Stone anticipated being accused of making an Oliver Stone movie, of exploiting this sensitive material that we fiercely feel belongs to all of us. The script might have worked if it were more complex, an epic of all the survivors and their families, or, alternately, if it were more stripped-down. (And it wouldn't necessarily be offensive if it were broken up more imaginatively as the two men's minds inevitably wander.)

In fact, the best thing in the movie is a stretch in which burning matter starts raining down on the trapped officers; it heats the space up so much that the service revolver of one of their fallen comrades starts spontaneously firing. Jimeno screams because he's getting burned, but McLoughlin is so purely terrified he's screaming, too. This is the one moment when you feel that Stone has recreated what it must actually have been like to be down there--at the center of the débacle and yet almost entirely in the dark. (When Jimeno is pulled out on a stretcher we find out he didn't even realize that the towers had collapsed.) Cage, that most physical of talkity actors, and Pe�a play most of the movie with only their faces visible, covered with dust and lost in shadows. In those few horrifying minutes, Stone reduces the movie to sheer experience, and it's probably the most powerful film making of his career, because you don't have to discount it for his usual bombast and coarse expressionism.

Overall, however, World Trade Center is as square, and minimally satisfying, as a standard-grade World War II movie. In the most positive sense, Pe�a's baby-face reminds you of the precociously responsible boys and girls who saved the free world in the 1940s. In a more ironic sense, the brave wives remind you of phony-sententious home-front fare like Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Since You Went Away (1944), which were, of course, hugely popular in their day.

World Trade Center probably doesn't have enough action or humor to capture audiences as those two movies did. It does have sensational special effects, which are never meretriciously "thrilling," but Stone handles the action so poorly that at one point he gives the mistaken impression that one of the Port Authority officers has killed himself. Not to mention, in conventional romance-narrative terms it's a problem that the heroes are prostrated while Karnes, the effective hero, is only peripheral. If the events depicted hadn't actually happened and hadn't been part of an historic act of aggression, the narrative's peculiarities, as well as the movie's haphazard rhythms and bland emotionality, would be more apparent. Still, Stone's movie is bland enough to make people think it's a good thing, a healing experience. And since this seems to be the kind of thing many, probably most, American moviegoers appreciate, who knows, maybe it is.

Movie Review: The Devil Wears Prada: Apologies All Around

Alan Dale — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 10:08:14 EDT

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;

And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

--Matthew 4:8-10

SPOILER ALERT

Would The Devil Wears Prada be as popular with a title that more accurately described it, say, The Girl Who Was Just Too Nice to Work at a Fashion Magazine? Be forewarned: The movie promises more hell than it delivers.

Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), an earnest, frumpy Northwestern journalism major, gets a job as second assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine, the arbiter of taste in international fashion. Andy doesn't care about clothes or Runway, and is an apparently beastly size 6, but Miranda takes a chance on her because Andy is intelligent and the last two stick-thin drones were "disappointments." Adapted from Lauren Weisberger's fictional write-up of her months slaving for Anna Wintour at Vogue, the story isn't a novel but a romance of temptation, as the title suggests. Miranda may be the high priestess of high fashion, but with respect to Andy, author of "worthy" college-newspaper articles, she's Satan offering a splendorous but superficial world, the only world Miranda imagines anybody truly wants (but one in which betrayal is the norm).

The romance of temptation, in which the protagonist's soul undergoes a symbolic test, has been a durable genre, high and low, from the Book of Job through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Faust on down to The Devil's Advocate (1997). If, however, the heroine is going to be as immune to temptation as Andy is, like Job and Jesus before her, then the spiritual dimension better be staggering, as it is in Job and the Gospels, because the narrative will have no suspense.

Not only is the spiritual dimension far from important in The Devil Wears Prada, it's incoherent. Andy is such a good girl, so resourceful and determined, that she overcomes her antipathy to the job and starts dressing up and living the part of assistant. If she changes on the inside we don't see it, and yet the movie treats her like a cutthroat sell-out.

This is what we do see: Andy hands out thousands of dollars' worth of designer accessories and cosmetics to her friends over dinner and then when she gets a call from Miranda they play keep-away with her cell phone and are shocked when she calls them "assholes." Andy misses her boyfriend's birthday party only because Miranda orders her to work late. Afterwards, she passes up an opportunity to have a drink with the editor of New York, and possibly further her dream career as a journalist, in order to rush home and give b.f. a Magnolia Bakery cupcake with a candle in it. He goes to bed barely speaking to her. Later, a friend sees Andy receive an unsolicited peck on the cheek from some guy on the make and scolds her, saying she doesn't know the person Andy has become. These friends could function in the concept only if they represented allegorical virtues that Andy transgresses; failing that they come off as prigs. (And none of them speaks those magic words: "I'll pay your rent while you look for a worthier job."

At work, Andy is promoted over Emily (Emily Blunt), Miranda's bitchy first assistant, and is tapped to accompany the boss to Paris for fashion week. It's entirely a merit-based promotion, and yet Andy tries to turn it down because of how much the trip means to Emily, and still feels guilty after Miranda insists, though Emily is physically incapacitated at the time anyway. (Andy is also unfailingly, and admirably, pleasant to the wretched Emily.) The movie seems to concur when the other characters treat Andy as if she connived to get the trip.

So Andy starts out whining and ends up apologizing. She also, naturally, quits Runway, leaving Miranda in the lurch, which is actually the only thing she does in the movie for which she owes anybody an apology. She supposedly redeems herself with a job on a newspaper that covers things like labor disputes. (At which point Miranda acts not as tempter but as fairy godmother.)

The Devil Wears Prada is as much of a drag as All About Eve would be if the Eve character were as harmless and devoted to the star to whom she's a personal assistant as she claims to be. Oh, and if the dialogue didn't crackle. Much of the supposed wit here consists of "gay" one-liners at Andy's expense given to Emily and Runway's fashion editor Nigel (Stanley Tucci). Andy herself tells Nigel how tired they become--the scriptwriter should have listened to herself.

Because Andy is such a very good girl, The Devil Wears Prada is not structurally a work of irony, so Streep's showy, semi-satirical turn as the quirky demanding boss isn't set in a fitting context. Streep does give some memorable line readings, particularly the tiny bell tinkle in the way she dismisses people by saying, "That's all." Giving Miranda a quiet manner and voice is inspired; we have to refocus our antennae to pick up how withering a slight purse of the lips can be. Streep has enormous theatrical skill but in the past she has tried too hard in comedy. In She Devil (1989) and Death Becomes Her (1992), she wasn't lazy but didn't waste any subtlety on us, as if the very idea of Streep playing for laughs would slay us. She's calmer and much more economical here, as she is in A Prairie Home Companion, in which Robert Altman softens her even more by giving her less control over when she'll be heard in a scene. Together, these are the most singing of Streep's performances, and I don't think she's ever been more gorgeous.

Maybe the movie would have worked better for me if Miranda had been the lead role. She could be a lampoon character and still have more scope if the movie were more like SoapDish (1991), starring Sally Field as the soap opera headliner clinging to stardom, or The Belles of St. Trinians (1954), starring Alastair Sim in drag as the headmistress of a girl's school trying to make ends meet. (He also plays "her" own shady brother.) It's paltry to ask us to resent Miranda, who is a fictional boss, after all; that just hard wires the whining into the movie's structure.

Instead, the script wobbles between broad satire and "human" touches. For instance, it tries to give Miranda dimension by showing her without makeup sighing over her latest failed marriage and saying that the inevitable bad press is so unfair to her twin girls (who otherwise seem about as vulnerable as Thing 1 and Thing 2). If they wanted us to respond to Miranda as a realistic character, they would have done well to show us how much oil it takes to put a placid surface on those turbulent waters. Sadly, the single most interesting aspect of the plot--how Miranda manages to keep her feet during a personnel earthquake at Runway's parent company--isn't in the movie. And Hollywood not being as confident as it was when it made Funny Face (1957), featuring Kay Thompson in a take-off on Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, The Devil Wears Prada doesn't even show us how Miranda's aesthetic decisions shape style (as in the "Think Pink" number in the earlier movie).

Yes, there's a heart-of-darkness element to working for a powerful, high-profile boss in a glamour industry, precisely because a million girls would kill for the job, as Andy is repeatedly told. Any time underlings become fungible, and the person in power is not publicly accountable, the results aren't pleasant. But Swimming With Sharks (1995), starring Frank Whaley as the assistant to Hollywood talent agent Kevin Spacey, understands temptation romance in a way The Devil Wears Prada doesn't. In that movie, success is a bad outcome because it makes the assistant like the person he fears and loathes. Hathaway's Andy is made over on the outside only; she knows she's not like Miranda even when Miranda tells her she is. By contrast, Whaley undergoes a frightening transformation from a shiny-bright hopeful to a hotshot with a black hole for an aura talking big to his buddies. (Swimming With Sharks also counters the canard, mindlessly repeated by Andy in The Devil Wears Prada, that if a male boss did what Miranda does he would be praised rather than blamed. The movie is so dumb it doesn't realize that that would be no excuse even if it were true.)

And yet Anne Hathaway is surprisingly good as Andy, and actually carries this clumsily conceived wreck. She's not conventionally pretty, certainly not in the early scenes, but she glamorizes beautifully. I especially like the Rococo silhouette her sloping shoulders give her. Even better, Hathaway makes Andy recognizably the same girl throughout, dressed up or down--a bit gosling-eyed and gawky, but reasonably centered and down-to-earth. She's believably nice without being yucky and has a few wonderful moments of comic teasing involving a Marc Jacobs bag and then a high-end lacy bra.

The Devil Wears Prada is especially disappointing coming from director David Frankel whose first feature, Miami Rhapsody (1995) starring Sarah Jessica Parker, is arguably the finest American comedy with a sole female protagonist. I'm not sure how The Devil Wears Prada could be better without a radical overhaul, but perhaps its success will open doors for Frankel to do more distinctive work in the future.

Movie Review: John Hillcoat's The Proposition: The Frontier

Alan Dale — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 01:17:05 EDT

Perhaps because of the simplicity of the life depicted, movies about conflicts in modern frontier societies--what may generally be called "westerns"--have been hospitable to the simplest narrative structures, chivalric romance and melodrama. The problem is that the contrast of the rustic setting and the high artificiality of literary romance and theatrical melodrama creates a kitsch effect. For decades no category of American movies was more popular, or more predictable.

At the same time, the material reaches towards more suggestive handling. The warriors' feats of horse- and gunmanship, for instance, have a legendary aura that suggest heroic sagas, though ones being sung in the age of history-writing and photography. And to the extent that the story of the frontier is the story of a people spreading into new territory and bringing their way of life with them, westerns have a sense of epic as well. But this potential richness has only set fastidious moviegoers up for repeated disappointments.

Even among the most accomplished westerns, John Hillcoat's The Proposition, from a script by Australian rocker Nick Cave, is still something special, having both the direct muscularity of a ballad and the attentiveness to social detail of a novel. As much as any western I can think of, it believably recreates the rough, struggling society of an outpost cowtown--materially, emotionally, and morally.

In the barely settled Australia of the 1880s, the Burns brothers, three roughshod, boggy Irish bushrangers, have been terrorizing outlying homesteaders. Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mike (Richard Wilson) have broken off from the eldest, the primordially brutal Arthur (Danny Huston) and his confederates, who have recently murdered a settler and raped and murdered his pregnant wife. The movie begins in media res as Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), head of the local garrison, captures Charlie and Mike in a chaotic gunfight. Stanley then makes the proposition of the title: Mike will be hanged on Christmas day within the week unless Charlie tracks Arthur down in his mountain hideout and kills him. If Charlie does so, both he and Mike will be pardoned.

At first the proposition may strike you as barbaric. (Not to mention a miscalculation to the extent that primitive Irishmen are as little likely as any humans to kill their own brothers, especially as part of a bargain with an officer of the English crown; and in fact Charlie ends up riding back to town with Arthur to release Mike.) Seen another way, however, the proposition is a relatively modern and efficient approach to the problem. It's an executory plea deal, in essence--albeit an unorthodox and improper one--since Mike, sitting in jail, has no control over whether "his" end of the bargain will be kept. But it shrewdly puts Charlie at risk rather than Stanley's own men tracking the psychotic Arthur into the inhospitable wastes of the outback. Charlie, after all, knows his brother's ways better than the soldiers do, and if he's killed it will be at the hands of someone with whom he's collaborated in crime.

As modern as Stanley's approach may seem, however, it appears considerably less sensible when we see how the rest of the town responds to it. His own men, a hard-drinking, crusty lot, think it's a sign of Stanley's weakness. They gossip about him, and his comely young wife, and word of the deal leaks to the townspeople, who are disgusted that men they believe to have butchered several of their own may escape punishment. And when Eden Fletcher (David Wenham), Stanley's superior officer, gets wind of it, he insists that Mike be publicly flogged, though it must inevitably appear to Charlie that Stanley welshed on the deal and will thus put Stanley and his wife at risk of what Arthur did to the other couple.

Like George Stevens's Shane (1953), The Proposition dramatizes the violence paradoxically necessary to civilize the frontier. Shane, however, is told with deliberate artifice as a black hat/white hat allegory, and there's never any examination of what "civilization" entails. The characters are arrayed with Jack Palance, the cattle baron's evil gunslinger, at the dark end of the spectrum and at the light end both Van Heflin, the decent farmer incapable of adequate martial self-defense, and Alan Ladd, the avenging, unreal, white knight. (Not to mention improbable, considering Ladd's dissipated-playboy face. The casting of Ladd as Shane is comparable to casting Tony Bennett as Lohengrin.) Shane attempts to make a storybook virtue of the average western's moral schematism, and I believe some people enjoy it for that very reason: they see "classical" where I see stilted.

In The Proposition, by contrast, Arthur squats at the dark end (and Huston, playing the part with both comic brashness and a sense of hauntedness, makes him a moody, Celtic goblin), but there's no one at the opposite end. Rather, the characters are arrayed on a curve so that Fletcher, the highest representative of law, is uncomfortably close to Arthur, and the greatest interest is in the middle, where we find Stanley and his wife, emerging from the barbarism of their surroundings and their own urgings. As Cave has conceived the story, the frontier is internal as well as external.

The proposition is the premise of the movie, its hook, but not its focus, and if, like me, you see the picture because you'll see anything with Guy Pearce in it, you may be somewhat disappointed. It's not a Guy Pearce movie, but that isn't a bad thing here. Unusually for a western, the most intriguing character is a woman, Captain Stanley's wife Martha (Emily Watson), who, with her delicate tea service and imported Christmas ornaments, her upright posture under her parasol, suggests the attempt to impose civil order on unruly nature (i.e., a setting where the characters "probably shouldn't be," according to Cave).

Stanley is the kind of enforcement officer who believes he's taming the frontier so it will be safe for women and children, but that women should not even know what forces threaten them. Martha, however, very much wants to know what happened to her friend at the hands of the Burns gang, especially when the butcher's wife tells her to ask her husband why the townspeople are looking at her askance. Finally Martha positions herself to overhear the truth her husband has refused to impart to her. When a mob gathers outside the prison to demand Mike's flogging, Martha lends her voice to the call for corporal "justice." Stanley has to step aside and let Mike be brought out for his 100 lashes; by the 39th bloody stroke Martha has fainted, and shortly afterwards the townspeople, nauseated by the sight they've demanded, disperse.

With Stanley you see a rough-hewn but basically decent man reaching for a new solution to the eternal problem of antisocial maleness. (Note that he's decent in his terms, not ours. His attitude toward the aboriginal population has not been made palatable to us in an anachronistic way; he is believably the kind of man he would have been given the time and place.) In his dealings with the Burns brothers, you see competing forms of aggressive masculinity, those that threaten and those that defend civilization.

Meanwhile Martha, the woman who has always been sheltered as a necessary component of being considered "decent," is exposed, as if for the first time in human history, to the facts of how men maintain the social order that protects women from outrages like that suffered by her friend. But ignorance has not made Martha more sensitive. She doesn't inherently, allegorically represent civilization, as the sheriff's woman often does in westerns, trying to hold him back from doing what a man has to do (i.e., kill the bad guys) and that the audience is slavering for. Martha goes to the jail, like everyone else, to call for Mike to be whipped. But it's as if she went there crying for vengeance and returned home with the stirrings of a moral philosopher.

There's more narrative pull than that might suggest, however. Martha's anxious curiosity about her friend's fate has a fairy tale quality, something like the story of Bluebeard's wife. We know Martha will move even closer to this fate than words or imagination before the end of the movie, and with her huge, luminous eyes in her piquant pug's face, Watson makes Martha seem the victim of a dark enchantment (which is how some women feel about sexual violence, the Angela Carter of The Bloody Chamber, for instance) without making her seem like anything but a young frontier matron. There's a beautiful, rapt moment in which Martha, sitting in the tub and seen from behind, tells the Captain of a dream she had of the murdered child. Watson's hands are as expressive here as her eyes are throughout.

At the same time, Martha's developing attentiveness to the situation echoes ours, and she gives the story its grounding in the qualities of the novel. (The advance of modern society seems also to entail a transition from ballad, heroic saga, and epic to descriptive naturalism. The one major failing in this regard is Stanley's unpreparedness for Arthur's final attack.) Stanley's job thus isn't set solely in the polarized moral context of melodrama. It's seen politically as well by showing that the proposition fails, in the first instance, because Stanley commands insufficient respect among his men, and then because he has inadequate support from his superior officer.

This view is rounded out by the social context--how word of the proposition affects Martha with the townsfolk and how it infects the Stanleys' personal relationship. Martha starts out wide-eyed, i.e., "innocent" (though not incapable of inflicting harm, as the etymology suggests), and what she undergoes opens them wider, though in a different sense. It also serves as a bonding experience with her husband, as if, by the end, she can finally understand what he's been up against and where he's been coming from.

The Proposition also has a sweated-in novelistic sense of place. Shot during a sweltering Queensland summer, the overdressed, underwashed Victorian colonials are swarmed by flies. In the interview above, Cave said of the shoot, "Nobody could even open their mouth without a fly crawling into it," and Hillcoat added, "[W]e were sharing the secrets of how to cope with swallowing flies.... I kept saying 'flies are our friends,' trying to encourage them to be part of the story. Which they ended up being."

The movie does not, however, have the visionary quality of the most staggering westerns, Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) from Australia and Geoff Murphy's Utu (1983) from New Zealand, for instance, in which the romance of the outlaw is inflected with an epic-tragic sense that history is being irreparably blotted in the meeting of the pioneer and aboriginal cultures. Sam Peckinpah in the U.S. wasn't able to condense an historical outlook in a turbulent anecdote in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) to equal these movies (Pat Garrett's complex ambitions die along with the helpless, pathetic Mexican at the hands of the evil cattle baron's men), but in The Wild Bunch (1969) he certainly rode the romance of western masculinity to the end of the line.

There is, however, some sense of the tragic side of Australia's history in The Proposition when, for instance, Fletcher upbraids Stanley for having killed a black during a recent raid. He's upset because Stanley killed only the one and now the survivors will seek revenge; it would have been better to kill them all. And when Stanley, preparing for the attack by the Burns brothers, sends his native gardener away, the man stops at the gate and removes his European shoes before walking out into the wasteland. It's a lovely, poetic gesture delivered on the ambiguous borderline between the two cultures.

But these moments aren't central to the narrative. On the other hand, tragic exaltation verges on the hysterical, on the willfully florid and perverse, and The Proposition is none of these. Cave and Hillcoat see history as a process, the product of sallies that can't be perfectly judged beforehand. A decent attempt is not negligible because it miscarries. The emphasis is as much on Stanley's effort as he conceived of it, as on the baleful results.

The Proposition is perhaps most like Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962), which so methodically dispels the melodramatic view of frontiersmen on a collision course. Similarly, The Proposition depicts male brutality, both within and without the confines of the law, in a beautifully measured way that doesn't kill the intensity of the narrative--wild contrasts, ironic similarities, and all.

Movie Review: Paul Greengrass's United 93: Guts

Alan Dale — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 15:06:46 EDT

United 93

United 93 recreates the flight of the fourth plane on September 11, 2001, the one on which the passengers got word by cell phone of the attacks on the World Trade Center, figured out the hijackers were on a suicide mission, and attempted to retake control of the plane. The movie was clearly made to dramatize our fascination with the fate of the unsuspecting people on the plane, those resourceful anybodies whose actions, in this version, saved the U.S. Capitol--What would we have done in their place? Would we have had their nerve?

The English writer-director Paul Greengrass allows for this projection, but doesn't hype it. He divides the story into three movements: the air traffic controllers figuring out that something is up, though they don't know what; the jihadists' attack; and the passengers' and crew's counterattack. We always feel we're present because Greengrass and his cinematographer Barry Ackroyd shoot everything with handheld cameras, but at the same time this makes every situation feel roughly equivalent. The camerawork functions like an even coat of opaque paint.

The terrorists aren't fully characterized, but neither is anyone else. (The pilots and stewardesses are played by actual pilots and stewardesses, and among the actors playing passengers I recognized a few names but no faces.) Even the famous line with which the passengers launched their offensive--"Let's roll!"--isn't isolated and framed in the usual movie-ish way. Our immersion in the situation is total, which also means our perspective is less limited but also less intense than it would have been if we had actually been on board.

Of course we know from the start who the terrorists are and what they're up to, and so they affect us in a more conventionally suspenseful way. (When they delay making their move on the plane you may find yourself idiotically hoping that they won't.) Even when the terrorists and passengers appear in the same shot, waiting for the flight to be called, for instance, the terrorists seem to be in a different, more focused movie, while the passengers chat on their cell phones or peck at their laptops.

The scenes set among the air traffic controllers are altogether more interesting. The controllers are tool-edge sharp, picking up and deciphering the slightest hints over their headsets, and they're effective to the extent possible against a sneak attack. (The only snafu is the military response, but in the case of flight 93 what could the air force have accomplished that the passengers and crew didn't--downing the plane on uninhabited ground.) But it's a relief that Greengrass avoids turning the controllers' alertness into romance by focusing on heroes battling against the forces of evil and incomprehension. It's nice for a change that a major event is not being processed into the same old crud that our moviemakers have always passed off as historical filmmaking.

I do wish, however, that Greengrass had shaped the story more. The movie has structure only on the outside, not on the inside, which surely is a definition of "hollow." In this partial transcript of an April 2006 interview with Rush Limbaugh, Greengrass suggests an idea: "that group of ordinary men and women actually were the first amongst us to enter the post-9/11 world." But we don't know what these men and women were like before the hijacking so we don't see how they change. He also justifies making the movie so soon after the events by saying, "It's time we went together back to this experience, because we may find that we agree about more than we think at the moment." He's referring to the political divisions that have become so pronounced since September 11th and hoping we can become as "united" in our response as the people on flight 93 (not that we know what differences, if any, they overcame in the desperation of events). But again, nothing in the movie dramatizes this aspiration.

Without an organizing dramatic idea, the episodic back-and-forth between plane and tower helplessly makes United 93 resemble a much more conventional disaster movie, a restrained, less campily characterful version of Airport (1970), one charged with political emotion. For American audiences, however, that political emotion inevitably comes with the subject; it's not an attainment of the movie's. And though the three groups of characters are viewed somewhat differently, they're filmed in a unified style that gets a bit monotonous. Those soap opera dummies in Airport at least add a little variety, even to derision. United 93's version of the doomed flight finally isn't very different from the gray, panic-stricken version that runs in my head.

By comparison, the subject matter of Greengrass's hellaciously swift international spy thriller The Bourne Supremacy (2004) is entirely forgettable. Its generic paranoia about government intelligence ops doesn't relate to life as we know it in any way. Nonetheless, Greengrass presents it as urgent, which is laughabale, but at the same time the crappy plot enforces on him variations in handling and rhythm that he would do well to carry over into his more respectable work. (He also gained from working with skillful high-profile actors, particularly Joan Allen and Julia Stiles.)

Though far more discreetly handled, United 93 gives off the same feeling as a World War II picture involving civilians, Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), for instance, in which the non-combatant survivors of a torpedoed ship share a lifeboat with the captain of the U-boat that sank them. At the climax, the democratic civilians finally realize the Nazi is up to no good and do away with him with their bare hands. Lifeboat is cruder than United 93, in no small part because the situation has been faked to provide some low-down high-comic material for Tallulah Bankhead, which turns its ideological demonstration into something resembling entertainment. But the demonstration also makes Lifeboat more sententious, and by that same stroke less visceral, than United 93.

Sidebar: Lifeboat affords the best opportunity on film to see the Bankhead legend, apart from bits and pieces in such pictures as Faithless (1932), which does provide her with a classic exit line. Having been thrown out of a house party by the social climbing Mrs. Blainey, Bankhead's Carol, a fallen heiress, is stopped by the woman's husband, who tells her that his wife isn't "sore" at her, she's just afraid of the "high-class competition." Carol laughs dismissively at this--she can't entirely share the joke because he couldn't possibly know how far she's fallen--and, waving the handbag he's fattened with $1,000, says with self-consciously trampy gallantry as she departs, "Oh! Reassure her, Mr. Blainey, reassure her!"

Greengrass is a refined political artist, but United 93 goes pretty much entirely for gut reactions. He doesn't exploit them; he doesn't need to. I became aware of this when the passengers are planning their counterattack and one of them proposes to break the arm of the terrorist who appears to be holding the detonator of a bomb strapped around his waist. The passenger doesn't say it with relish, and Greengrass doesn't emphasize it particularly, but my response was, Yeah, break his fucking arm!

These throbbing of vengeance strike me as inevitable, even for civilized people. There's a point at which the only possible response to fascistic force is a greater counterforce, and such a counterforce requires an emotional thrust that can't be very fine-grained. I'm okay with the coarse emotion generated here, but I don't need a movie, or any ritual, to generate it for me. Greengrass's superior technical skill doesn't add much to the subject matter, as opposed to the experience in the theater, and it's not always that superior. In the one strand of allegory, for instance, a lone European passenger wants to appease the terrorists; when the Americans are about to act he tries to single himself out from them. This is reminiscent of the passenger in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) who hops off the stopped train waving a white flag; the fascists do to him what fascists do to appeasers. I believe the point is valid, in both cases, but nonetheless so crude in the performance as to appear silly.

Bloody Sunday

Greengrass's breakthrough feature Bloody Sunday (2002) uses a similar constant-present-tense technique to recreate another historic convergence of forces, on 30 January 1972 when British troops fired on unarmed Catholic civil-rights protestors in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 and setting off the bloodiest year of the "Troubles."

Greengrass and his cinematographer Ivan Strasburg shoot as if it were all happening before us, and the confusion of the leaders of the march, including Ivan Cooper, MP (James Nesbitt) and Bernadette Devlin (Mary Moulds), after the troops have replaced rubber bullets with lead and started picking people off is vividly realized. Because the cinematography lacks the usual finish and polish, you may feel an almost unmediated horror, as if the theater had dissolved and you were there, unprotected, in the street.

Perhaps because Bloody Sunday is so rooted in place, it feels even more teeming than United 93, in which all the relationships are transient. Greengrass shows us five elements: Cooper, a grassroots politician, and his organization working to keep the IRA and the unorganized, disgruntled youths from disrupting the peaceful protest; the British military leader who wants a muscular show of force that will function both as payback for past attacks on British soldiers and as a deterrent against future attacks; a local policeman who works with a sympathetic British officer to keep a check on this show of force; edgy, angry British soldiers who are spoiling for blood and who pressure a more restrained comrade to go along with them; and a young Catholic lad with a Protestant girlfriend who joins his rock-throwing mates and draws fire.

All the same, there's more of a point to Bloody Sunday than to United 93, which aims simply to depict for us our own fearful imaginings. And the point is pretty much unifaceted: at a press conference after the massacre, a shaken Cooper tells the British authorities that they have destroyed the non-violent movement and done more effective recruiting for the IRA than the IRA could ever have done on its own. Greengrass goes on to make clear that the British military planned the attack as a demonstration, planted nail bombs on a corpse, and consistently lied about their actions to Lord Widgery's Tribunal, which investigated the incident and published its Report in 1972. But though Greengrass is angry, he's not seething. His live-action visual technique and editing have a paradoxical sense of containment: "anything" could happen, provided it fits the plan.

It should also be said that the points Greengrass makes in Bloody Sunday are not controversial and so his treatment doesn't need to be polemical. (Compare, for instance, David McKittrick and David McVea's chapter "The End of Stormont, 1972-73," from Making Sense of the Troubles (2000): "What happened on that day was to drive even more men and youths into paramilitary groups.") Even though there may be reason to despair of the situation in Northern Ireland, as this 21 August 2005 New Republic article by Ron DePasquale suggests, that's a different question from what happened in Derry three decades ago. (A second commission of inquiry was established in 1998, though it seems not to have published its findings yet.) By temperament Greengrass seeks to form consensus not to rouse the rabble; I don't believe he intended to make an incendiary point, as Gillo Pontecorvo did with The Battle of Algiers (1966), and as he might have done had he made Bloody Sunday 30 years earlier. (Or even 20 years earlier, at the time of the 1981 Hunger Strike in which Bobby Sands and nine other male prisoners died.)

Greengrass's thesis and approach may not be polemical or controversial but they are melodramatic, because he doesn't examine the Irish hooliganism (or the IRA terrorism, which since the 1960s killed about 1,800 people, including 650 civilians) as he does the British military bellicosity. This is so, even though Ivan Cooper is the movie's hero because he espouses the non-violent methods of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Greengrass, who made a British TV movie about the 15 August 1998 "Real" IRA bombing in Omagh, has never expressed anything but dismay over political violence.

From an impartial overview, however, the Northern Irish boys throwing brickbats and rocks at the British soldiers must bear some of the responsibility for the outcome that Cooper, because of the unjustified and unprincipled use of lethal force by the British, places squarely on the British. And the British are the only ones who lie about the events. In United 93 Greengrass doesn't suggest that the Islamofascist terrorists have a "side" in the conflict; he comes close to suggesting as much with respect to the IRA (though not nearly as much as Steven Spielberg does with the Palestinian terrorists in the mindless Munich). But having a valid grievance does not justify all responses, even if it explains them.

In addition, Greengrass's handling is melodramatic because we're privy to all the relevant information beforehand. Part of "being there" is not hearing or seeing everything squarely, but Greengrass keeps us informed of everything we need to know--even if only with glimpses of action and snatches of conversation--to be able to agree with him, but no more.

Yet oddly Greengrass doesn't focus his melodrama emotionally. In this interview with IndieLondon, Greengrass says that his early background was with the Granada Television news program World in Action and that seems to be his grounding in filmmaking. But I've seen greater characterization in documentaries; in Bloody Sunday (as in United 93) everyone remains equally removed from us, so that although we recognize conceptually that bad acts have occurred they don't have the kind of wallop you'd expect from a movie.

Bloody Sunday demonstrates an historical thesis formulated in retrospect, which fits oddly with Greengrass's continuous-present technique. It would thus be a mistake not to separate Greengrass's naturalistic technique from his content. The technique is supposed to be immediate, as if the crew weren't there. My boyfriend and I experienced a moment of confusion that I thought was telling: in one long shot he pointed out that people had come out to watch from the balconies of an apartment building in the background. I thought he meant that they were extras directed to watch the "violence"; he actually meant they were locals who lived in the building and who had come out to watch the filming. Greengrass works in such a way that this ambiguity helps him, if anything. If you can't distinguish his players from "real" people, then he's succeeded. But for all that, Bloody Sunday is blandly tendentious in a way United 93 is not.

I believe Greengrass is thoroughly acquainted with the facts in Bloody Sunday but I still felt starved if not for information then for an analytical model. On the other hand, this puts Bloody Sunday in the league of Costa-Gavras's Z (1969), another streamlined jolt of then-recent political history. Z has a more varied style than Bloody Sunday, but there's nothing casual about it. Its view of history is locked and loaded and aimed point blank at your face. By contrast, Bloody Sunday includes one brief sequence of impressive offhand mastery, in which Ivan Cooper and his girlfriend try to carry on a tense personal discussion at headquarters while constantly getting interrupted by other people and phone calls. (And remember, Costa-Gavras had no qualms about making one of his villains a psychotic homo.)

Greengrass finds his groove in the middle of turbulence, but he needs to hop out before his groove becomes a rut. His work in Bloody Sunday and United 93 is impressive but finally too flashy and pointed, and yet unstructured, to have the tragic dimension they sorely need. In the scenes dealing with the air traffic controllers in United 93 you become aware of how large the skies are when the terrorists turn off the airplanes' transponders and the big birds disappear from the radar. (It takes the controllers a while to realize that the missing American Airlines flight 11 must have gone into the smoking hole in the World Trade Center's north tower.) In United 93 the action takes place in the skies, but that's all the action going on in them. There's certainly no mystery on the other side of them. The events are no more freed from the flow of historic time for contemplation, or sorrow, or consolation than in an action movie. There's just shock, relived, like a nightmare duped onto a replayable cartridge.

Movie Review: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, The Prisoner, Guilty Of Treason: Interrorgation

Alan Dale — Thu, 4 May 2006 00:44:28 EDT

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005): When She's Right, She's Right

In Munich in 1943 the members of a secret student organization called the White Rose meet in a studio to produce their sixth anti-Nazi leaflet, informing the benighted German populace about the defeat at Stalingrad and the inevitable Allied victory and calling for resistance to the fascist regime. These noble subversives stuff leaflets into envelopes for an anonymous mass mailing, but when they run out of envelopes Hans Scholl (Fabian Hinrichs) rashly announces he's going to distribute the remaining sheets at the university (where the group has also painted slogans on the walls). Another member pleads with him not to, it's too dangerous, but Hans's sister Sophie (Julia Jentsch) says she'll carry the briefcase and help him.

Hans and Sophie work fast and efficiently, laying the leaflets out in neat piles by the classroom doors. As they're about the leave, undetected, Sophie tells Hans there are more leaflets in the case, so they go back up to the top floor and set the last ones out. As the bell rings Sophie can't resist pushing one stack off a balustrade into the atrium. Before Hans and Sophie reach the bottom of the staircase, they're stopped by a patriotic janitor who saw them on the top floor and quickly taken in for interrogation by the Gestapo.

The movie follows Sophie's interrogation by Robert Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held), a ferrety zealot, and at first her well-practiced alibis seem to be working. Unfortunately, however, the Scholls are just about to be released when Mohr receives fairly unambiguous evidence taken from their apartment. When Sophie sees that Hans has signed a confession, she admits her part (claiming more responsibility than she bore in order to shield others) and begins a debate with Mohr about the despicable, murderous Third Reich.

Sophie is an impressive liar and then an impressive debater, and Jentsch is impressive as both. Mohr may not be affected by Sophie's Protestant spirituality or her German liberalism, but we are. (Trained as a children's nurse, Sophie movingly describes to him how mentally handicapped children were killed and went singing to their deaths; Mohr says that such people are unworthy to live.) Mohr does admire Sophie's courage, discipline, and industry and urges her to submit to ideological reprogramming so that he may let her live. She refuses, of course, and after a brief show trial is guillotined along with Hans and a third member of the White Rose. (She is not tortured or physically mistreated in any way; her discussions with Mohr are surprisingly civilized perversions of justice.)

The movie, directed by Marc Rothemund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer sticks to the facts and moreover tries to keep away from movieish hype. Yes, the distribution of the leaflets and the timing of Sophie's near release are a little fakey, and Held's acting is too intent. (The way he removes the damning evidence from a satchel one item at a time is badly staged--it starts to look like a magic act.) But the moviemakers give most of the running time over to the verbal confrontations between Sophie and Mohr and that's unusual in itself. What is not so unusual is the content of their back-and-forth.

The White Rose is legendary in Germany, a cynosure of disinterested political righteousness despite personal cost, all the more heroic because the members were almost all students in their twenties. To function as a tribute to the Scholls and their comrades, the movie has to present Sophie's ideas pure. No one in the audience for this movie could possibly disagree with anything she says, and Jentsch says it better than we could imagine saying it in the circumstances. If you want to hear the sensible, humane argument against Nazism spoken with ardent fluency directly under the monster's glaring eyes, then this is the movie for you.

As a matter of drama, however, Mohr's replies don't speak to what Sophie has said. On the one hand he repeats G�bbels's slogans, and on the other he simply says that he himself is personally better off under the Third Reich than he was before. It's dramatic only because we know Sophie's head is at stake, not because the two of them are meaningfully engaged in a philosophical debate.

There is a subject here, but the movie doesn't notice it. I kept thinking that if I were the guy in the studio who had begged Hans not to distribute leaflets at the university, I would be really angry, right up to the moment I was beheaded as a result of my friend's reckless idealism. This subject may slip by us because people now valorize student movements too blindly to see their shortcomings. It's hard to believe, for instance, that seasoned activists would have thought, as Hans did, that an uprising on the part of his fellow university students was imminent. And even if it had been, what could it have accomplished in the Nazi terror state?

I respect Sophie's decision to confess defiantly and her refusal to submit to re-education. (The way she later antagonizes her appointed defense counsel, a party faithful, by contrast, seems like pointless bravura.) But her ideas themselves don't demand this self-sacrifice, as a Nazi's would. However much of a legend she now is, the war was being won by the Allied forces, with or without Sophie and Hans's efforts. It's thus possible to say that Sophie had the right to live at the cost of a compromise that was meaningless because compelled. Perhaps the duty as well as the right: surely she would have been more valuable politically alive.

The movie's depiction of Sophie is worshipful and by that same token dimensionless. These brave kids acted impulsively on their ideals and lost their lives, taking with them all their comrades and their organization as well. Sophie and Hans are martyrs and while they're heroic they're not heroes you'd be wise to emulate. They embody the adolescent faith that any political action is better than none, and the movie couldn't treat them more glowingly if their actions had been effective. Hans and Sophie's heedlessness can be excused mainly by the fact that their cause--an internal student coup against the Nazi state--was so hopeless, a political reality they were too fervent even to perceive.

The fact that the movie gives us Sophie as a legend, with a halo, means that it's less nuanced and even less intelligent a treatment of student activism than Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich, a pornographic travesty of leftist personality-cult terror cells. Sophie Scholl is certainly less fun. And yet there's a lot irony could do to open up the story of these industrious but quixotic kids who think they're going to leaflet and graffiti Hitler off his throne. The moviemakers don't even get anything out of the way both the Gestapo and the tribunal kvetch about the Scholls' ingratitude--The Reich magnanimously sent them to the wonderful university and this is how they repay it! (The enforcers of the civilian terror state nag and holler like exasperated parents.)

Instead, Rothemund and Breinersdorfer's approach is utterly earnest, and the latest example of soft-headed sentimentality about Communism, as well. The warm-hearted, maternal political prisoner put in her cell to keep Sophie from committing suicide says she and her activist brother became party members because Communists always stick together. Amusing, when Sophie is about to be condemned in a show trial as brutal but less hallucinatory than those staged by Stalin, in which committed party members were convicted of crimes they had not committed.

The Prisoner (1955): Devictus vincit

The perversion of justice in Communist countries is the subject of two movies about J�zsef Cardinal Mindszenty, the Roman Catholic Prince Primate of Hungary who was arrested by the Hungarian Communist government in 1948 because of his staunch, public opposition to the expropriation of church lands and the nationalization of church schools (and because he was a natural figurehead of the democratic Smallholders Party). Mindszenty was beaten and drugged into signing a false confession (he had the foresight to write a note repudiating any confession, even one bearing an authentic signature, in anticipation of his arrest), convicted in a show trial featuring forged documentary evidence, and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the abortive 1956 revolution, freedom fighters liberated him from prison and the new government exonerated him. The Soviet tanks arrived four days later, however, and the Cardinal sought asylum in the American Embassy. He was allowed to stay but refused to leave the country unless he was rehabilitated. He lived in the Embassy until 1971 when the Vatican finally convinced him to leave (he settled in Vienna). When the Communist government granted him a pardon, he refused it.

Peter Glenville's The Prisoner (1955), a fictionalized version of Mindszenty's interrogation and trial (made before the events of 1956, as Pauline Kael noted in her 12 December 1970 New Yorker review of Costa-Gavras's The Confession), features an unnamed Cardinal (Alec Guinness), a national hero of the anti-fascist resistance, and an unnamed Interrogator (Jack Hawkins), a (presumably former) aristocrat who brings his considerable intellectual sophistication to bear on the brutal work of getting the proud, strong-minded prelate to confess to invented crimes against the unnamed Stalinist state.

Guinness's Cardinal is as erect as a chessman, aloof, caustic, and battle-hardened. He was imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo without breaking and does not imagine the Interrogator can do worse or get more out of him. (Mindszenty had not only been imprisoned by the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross party in 1944--for refusing to permit a Mass to be said in celebration of the deportation of Hungarian Jews--he had been held by the Hungarian Communist government in 1919 as well. He was a lifelong lightning rod for totalitarian despotism.) The Interrogator's experience fighting the Nazis was less harrowing than the Cardinal's, and in addition the Cardinal is confident of his moral edge--he refers to the Nazis as the Interrogator's "predecessors." (The Hungarian Communist secret police, the AVO, did, in fact, use the same HQ as the Arrow Cross party, the notorious 60 Andr�ssy Street in Budapest, now a museum called The House of Terror.)

In a variation on Mindszenty's note, the Cardinal says as he's being arrested that any confession will be a lie or the result of human weakness. Cardinal Mindszenty was truncheoned and stupefied with drugs, but The Prisoner's choice of "human weakness" is judicious, as a dramatic rather than a historical matter. The Interrogator wants a "clean" confession that will seem uncoerced. Why he would care seems to fly in the face of Stalinist judicial history, but then Mindszenty said in his 1974 Memoirs that the physical abuse was stopped two days before his first appearance in court so that he would be physically capable of playing his part in the show trial. In any event, the Interrogator believes he can't get the Cardinal to confess by merely inflicting physical pain. The Cardinal must want to abase himself publicly, and getting him to involves not just psychological torture (sleep deprivation, etc.) but getting to know the great man intimately enough to crack his pride.

Pride turns out not to be the Cardinal's strength, after all, but his weakness. It's a cover for his shame over his beginnings as the son of a fishwife, a schoolboy who was ridiculed for the way he smelled. The Interrogator has the Cardinal's mother sedated and laid on a gurney before her son. At first the Cardinal thinks she's been killed; when he realizes she's alive the Interrogator tells him that she'll be sent to a research hospital, where she will be ill, unless he confesses. The Cardinal doesn't know that his mother has already been put in the hospital and the Interrogator doesn't suspect that the Cardinal, who grew up listening to her cavorting with lovers in the next room, doesn't love his mother. But once the Cardinal tells him so, the Interrogator immediately makes use of that. (This is peculiarly far from Mindszenty's story. He called his mother to him as soon as he realized he would be arrested in 1948 and "she declared she would go the way of the cross in the footsteps of the Mater dolorosa." He later said his mother was "the light of the sun" for him during his "semi-imprisonment" in the American Embassy.)

The Interrogator then wears the Cardinal down for a number of months with exhaustion and isolation until he's dying to talk; when they reconvene, the Interrogator gets the Cardinal to psychologize about his decision to enter the church. The priest, hysterically self-reflective at this point, loses his sense of vocation and sees his entire career as a vainglorious sham that he'd be grateful to dispense with. Sex isn't the Cardinal's weakness--this niche-carving of a prelate can't be tempted onto lower ground, only higher. The Interrogator offers him purgation by ruining his "false" reputation: the Cardinal must avow in open court, for instance, that he betrayed the resistance to the Nazis for money. That isn't the kind of fake the Cardinal now feels himself to be, but the Interrogator convinces him that it's better to be despised as the wrong kind of fake than to remain in possession of "stolen" honor.

Screenwriter Bridget Boland, adapting her own play, injects into the story the irony that the Cardinal's participation in the desecration of his reputation becomes sincere. His being broken may even be seen as a genuine religious experience, and, as the Interrogator notes, the Cardinal is a stronger man afterwards. (In his trials Mindszenty kept with him a picture of Christ crowned with thorns inscribed, Devictus vincit--Defeated, he is victorious. And in prison he thanked the Lord that He had found him worthy to share shame with his savior.)

In the Cardinal's first exchanges with his Interrogator and his Jailer, Guinness stylizes his performance with stately-slow reactions. His eyes and eyelids move heavily, as if with the weight of moral contempt, and the Cardinal seems too fastidious to be caught out by the Stalinists' coarse machinations. (He's merely amused when they challenge him with their first crudely forged documents and altered recordings; he points out the flaws with the ease of Christ among the doctors.) But Guinness keeps us aware of the morphing outlines of the Cardinal's character as the man genuinely responds to cynical manipulation and your feelings about his experience end up being much less resolved than you'd expect from an unabashedly anti-Stalinist movie.

This irony gives The Prisoner what Sophie Scholl lacks--a dramatic motif shaping the face-off between the prisoner and the totalitarian interrogator. The two men actually defeat each other. The Cardinal, a national hero thought to be unbreakable, confirms his confession in open court and is sentenced to death. There's something worse than death, however: a last-minute reprieve and release, which means that the Cardinal has to re-enter a society in which he has lost his standing, his power to do good. The Interrogator, for his part, has had to get so close to the Cardinal to find his weak spot that he actually feels compassion for the man, which puts an end to his career as a torturer.

In addition, there's the structural irony arising from the fact that it is the fanatical, impersonally ruthless Interrogator, rather than the Cardinal, who has a quest. That quest, i.e., to destroy the Cardinal before a deadline set by the military, gives the movie its suspense and a focus for our reactions. We're in the disheartening position of hoping the Interrogator will fail, though we know he won't. It's an inverted melodrama, ending with the triumph of a false accusation and the unjust public shaming of an innocent heroic figure.

Boland's is a talky, histrionic approach to a subject of enormous moment, but by focusing on the way the Cardinal and Interrogator outwit each other, the containment of the piece within an implied proscenium feels somewhat justified. And Mindszenty's trial was a staged spectacle. (Mindszenty, too, had a sense of theater: when the Arrow Cross arrested him in 1944, he dressed in his full episcopal robes and followed the police cars on foot, accompanied by sixteen theological students and their three instructors. This procession drew throngs who kneeled at the side of the road and asked for his blessing.) Boland also gives the exchanges a certain amount of wit, not all of it on the side of the mordant Cardinal. The Interrogator, too, has his high comic moments, such as when he affably says to his prisoner, "Stop thinking of me as the inquisitor," as if the two of them were equals engaged in an arbitration.

Glenville's direction is less justifiable--it's stagy without giving you the impression he'd be a great director for the stage, either. For one thing, he has a very odd sense of casting. Hawkins looks less like an aristocrat and more like a peasant than Guinness, who has the elongated refinement of El Greco's Portrait of a Cardinal. The casting is thus nearly as dylsexic as in Glenville's Becket (1964), in which fleshy Richard Burton plays the saint and airy Peter O'Toole the lusty, intemperate monarch. The actors here also have to overcome the use of the camera to capture the clever stage blocking. In the worked-up compositions their gestures become too prominent: Guinness's hands when he recalls Nazi torture or his own suicide attempt, for instance. After an interesting opening during Mass, Glenville's visual sense is too often obvious (e.g., a shot from slightly above as the Interrogator moves a chess piece from one square to another that fades to a shot from above as the Cardinal steps from one flagstone to another) and even laughable (e.g., when the camera sneaks up behind the Interrogator who is doodling a spider's web).

Wilfrid Lawson also has a juicy role as the Cardinal's Jailer, an ordinary man whose attitude regarding what goes on in the prison ("A job's a job") is repugnantly adaptable. Maybe too juicy--Lawson come across as even more deliberate than Hawkins playing the master of entrapment. Both actors stretch their syllables out, though Lawson does it in the service of a musically obscene proletarian joviality, which, if highly theatrical, is at least memorable. For his part, Hawkins does fit one's image of an upper-level apparatchik torturer and his mannered delivery gives him an "aristocratic" way with the dialogue. And Guinness's conspicuous etcher's technique--the acid is applied with a light hand but cuts deeply--seems right for a man who has attained his eminence.

Nothing holds the supremely resourceful star back. What Guinness does with his eyes alone, the way they alternately blaze and ash over, look enameled with serenity and then bug with emotional terror, provides a seminar on acting. And that's just from the neck up. When the Cardinal reaches his breaking point, Guinness sinks to his knees, desperate to be cleansed of sin. Glenville looks on from a long shot, but it registers; Guinness's embodiment of the disintegrating Cardinal is so imaginative that it works at any distance. (He throws himself into the role physically the way Laurence Olivier later did as a very North African Othello.)

Guilty of Treason (1950): Heil Hitler! Heil Stalin!

The Prisoner takes its anti-Communism for granted and doesn't go into the political situation Mindszenty was caught up in, much less the ideas that motivated him--the historical importance of Catholicism to the Hungarian nation. Surprisingly, there was a Hollywood movie about Mindszenty made shortly after his trial that is much more invested in his cause: Guilty of Treason, a cheapie produced independently by Jack Wrather and Robert Golden and released by Eagle-Lion Films.

The script is based on the book As We See Russia by members of the Overseas Press Club of America, but it also resembles the script for Hitler's Children (1943), a crude, earnest wartime propaganda piece written by the same screenwriter, Emmet Lavery. Lavery makes a similarly sensational case against the Soviet-backed Communist government in Hungary but not (entirely) out of tired reflexes. Rather, it's his main point: the Stalinists consciously use the personnel and techniques of their defeated arch-enemies, the Nazis.

As one character points out, Vilmos Olti, the president of the Budapest People's Court that tried Mindszenty, was a former Arrow Cross party man. (Olti consequently had to show a special ferocity in the case. This is the converse of the situation in Sophie Scholl, in which the head justice is a Communist seeking redemption with the Nazis.) And in Guilty of Treason the only Hungarians besides party members who support the Communists are former members of the Arrow Cross (who adapted to Stalinism presumably because any kind of totalitarianism gave scope to their taste for violent domination). Their signature is "Heil Hitler! Heil Stalin!"

Mindszenty is not at the center of Guilty of Treason, however. The fictional hero is Tom Kelly (Paul Kelly), a tough-talking journalist reporting on the descent of the Iron Curtain. In November 1948, Kelly, figuring Hungary will be the next hot spot, leaves Moscow for Budapest. (It didn't require clairvoyance to know something was up in Hungary: as Pope Pius XII is reputed to have said to Mindszenty (in one version) when he elevated him to Cardinal in 1946 along with 31 others (including Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York), "Among the 32 you will be the first to suffer the martyrdom whose symbol this red color is.")

Kelly is a hard-boiled newspaperman in the mode of a cynical Bogart tough guy, except that he starts out with the political engagement Bogart comes around to only at the end of Casablanca (1942) and To Have and Have Not (1944). He knows that the Soviets have come to Hungary to terrorize the opposition into submission, and he knows that they'll want to destroy Cardinal Mindszenty. And he says as much directly to Colonel Melnikov (Richard Derr), a true-believing Soviet officer cracking down on dissent in Budapest from 60 Andr�ssy. (Kelly, speaking in detective-fiction vernacular, goads Melnikov by saying he wants to see the "fix," the "frame-up" of the Cardinal.) Kelly then seeks Mindszenty out to hear what he has to say, and when his acquaintances start getting hurt and disappearing as a result, he wants to know what happened to them. As an investigative reporter Kelly thus also functions as a Bogart private eye.

In other words, while the movie is devoted to Mindszenty's cause, it's shaped by the low instinct that his cause needs to be popularized. So it focuses on Kelly, and on Stephanie (Bonita Granville), a music teacher who loves Melnikov just a bit less than she loves Hungarian liberty. This leads to some loony mixtures of romance and politics, the choicest being when the Politburo's man in Budapest, Commissar Belov (Roland Winters), walks into Melnikov's office and finds Stephanie in his arms, during a brief pause in her attempt to get him to start an anti-Communist underground with her. Without hesitating Melnikov turns her in. This perfidy is hard to respond to because the betrayal of a lover can't make Communist police-state tactics any worse than they are in themselves. Such a climax is camp, the cliffhanger on a Radio Free America daytime soap opera.

Stephanie is similar to Granville's role in Hitler's Children and Derr, a jaw-clencher, plays Melnikov in the same robotic manner as Tim Holt plays the Hitler Jugend opposite her (and, even more amusingly, as the 13-year-old Skip Homeier plays the devious grade-school fascist in Tomorrow, the World! (1944)). The point of having an ideologically committed character like Melnikov say nothing outside the scope of his ideological commitment (he tends not to use contractions, either) is to emphasize how the ideology dehumanizes its adherents. Instead it exposes the writer's, and generally the actors', inadequacy. (What any actor could do with dialogue like this I don't know: Melnikov: "I'm sure if he saw you, Stalin himself would insist upon kissing the bride." Stephanie: "Darling, you're wonderful!")

Guilty of Treason is a B-movie, budget and soul, and yet its political judgments are grounded in an accurate journalistic evaluation of a deplorable reality. At the core of its inauthentic recreation of Budapest in turmoil is an awareness of the plain sordidness of the events, conveyed with the most brutal force in the scenes of Stephanie's torture, which are the least ennobling--and least eroticized--ever filmed in Hollywood. They more than make up for the dopey love story that leads up to them.

In addition, as Mindszenty Charles Bickford (who looks exactly like what the Cardinal was--a man of the earth and of the people who worked it) is given dialogue adapted from the Cardinal's writings and speeches, which lends the actor an unusual amount of dignity. Bickford isn't wise in a folksy, Hollywood manner because the Cardinal's words are not ecumenical. They're too specific for generalized man-for-all-seasons reverence, and the issue was too hot and glamorless. (One advantage of treating it as a contemporary news story rather than an historical pageant, like the martyrdom of Thomas More, for instance, which allows for courtly pomp and finery.) During his interrogations, Bickford stands tall in the blinding spotlight and gives his gravelly voice to direct statement of the Cardinal's positions.

In The Prisoner, the fact that the Cardinal is not explicitly named as Mindszenty frees Guinness to create a character, a man who has refined the earth in himself. (Though the differences between Mindszenty's experience and Guinness's as the Cardinal did make Mindszenty deeply skeptical of the movie. In the Preface to his Memoirs he noted acerbically, "[T]he interrogation is conducted along the well-mannered lines of good society. The prisoner is even addressed as 'Your Eminence.' The mere fact that the guard so much as speaks to the prisoner must seem astonishing to anyone who has been interrogated by Hungarian Communists.") The Prisoner doesn't state its anti-Stalinism explicitly, so Guinness's Cardinal can speak for himself rather than for "us."

Guilty of Treason has Bickford speak for Mindszenty, and, in the subplot involving Stephanie's insistence on playing Hungarian music in the state-run school, it dramatizes the nationalism in which he believed. Plus, the granitic Bickford is monumental to the sight in a way the more decorative, though infinitely more talented, Guinness is not. But if Guilty of Treason preserves Mindszenty as a public figure, it also pushes him to the side of the story. His martyrdom somehow becomes Stephanie's story, with Kelly stating "our" reaction to it the way Joel McCrea broadcasts "our" reaction to the international threat of fascism after it's been dramatized for us in Foreign Correspondent (1940).

Finally, Guilty of Treason has certain similarities to George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005). Both are about crusading journalists who cover the story of a public figure at the center of a Cold War political storm, and both public figures speak in their own, historic words. Both movies incorporate a pair of young lovers threatened by the political gear-grinding around them (as does The Prisoner). And each movie begins and ends with the hero's admonitory speech to a gathering of journalists.

Unlike Good Night, and Good Luck., Guilty of Treason is not a sleekly crafted or deftly acted work. But Clooney's movie isn't any less cornily heroic as romance than Guilty of Treason, which does not end with the victory of its grizzled knight. Moreover, Clooney's use of McCarthy as a metaphoric bogeyman to shame current journalists and artists is embarrassingly facile, and, as Jack Shafer's 5 October 2005 Slate.com article attests, Good Night, and Good Luck. isn't as much as journalistically accurate. Much of Lavery's script for Guilty of Treason was scraped off the bottom of the barrel, but at the same time the movie offers a snapshot of genuine historic outrage and that's something you can't laugh off.

Movie Review: Lajos Koltai's Fateless: Death and the Children

Alan Dale — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:23:27 EST

The Nazi genocide of the European Jews overwhelms the mind with subjects for contemplation, none of which is well suited for narrative fiction. Stories about individuals in the extermination camps may be inevitably moving, and may also lessen the anonymity of the murdered millions, but such stories are nonetheless inadequate for dramatizing the larger issues because of the randomness with which death and survival were determined in the camps. In a sense this randomness becomes the only "story," one that does away with the significance of character to narrative. And so a movie that focuses on a single camp victim, or even on a group of them, feels wrong if our minds have expanded to the enormity of the situation; it's somehow shriveling, and falsely comforting, to be asked to hope that any singled-out individual will survive.

The Holocaust, a crime of historic proportions, is simply greater than any heroic ordeal out of conventional romance--it calls for a new approach to character and narrative. Narrative moviemakers, however, aren't interested in abandoning the significance of personality, no matter the subject. Typical of the road not taken (or even perceived) is the scene in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) in which Helen Hirsch, the brutalized Jewish houseslave of the Płasz�w work camp commandant, gives a tearful speech about the arbitrariness of individual fate in the camps. Spielberg, ironically missing his own point, focuses on this individual's "dramatic" speech about the insignificance of the individual, and goes in for familiar, explicit emotionalism. (Schindler soothes her, cannily guessing why her tormentor will not kill her.)

Furthermore, because the Nazis attempted to exterminate an entire people there's an epic dimension to any account of the Holocaust, but this dimension exists in maximal tension with the concept of epic, which classically is the story of a people's ascendancy. (As in the Exodus story; the Aeneid is the quintessential literary example.) The Holocaust is an epic of appalling victimization on a staggering, industrial scale, and though some Jews may have felt they were being punished for their sins (an attitude that at least maintains the rationality in creation), I believe the more dominant feeling is horror at the vulnerability of such a large, diverse, and far-flung group.

What's missing from the Holocaust epic is the possibility of effective group action--no heroes arose from among the Jews to lead them to ultimate, military victory. (Taking the Holocaust as separate from the astonishing martial prowess of the state of Israel.) The heroes were the American and Russian armies, while the internees they liberated had been reduced to skeletons with haunted eye sockets (they seemed literally to have turned into symbols). The Holocaust can't even be seen as an ironic epic, something like the Jonestown mass suicide in which the members of the group, drawn together by whatever desperation and credulity, victimized themselves (and their children, of course). Heroism did survive in the Nazi camps to the extent of the tiny sacrifices that one internee made for another, but such heroism had no meaningful effect on the shape of the larger drama.

Lajos Koltai's Fateless

Fateless, a Hungarian picture directed by the cinematographer Lajos Koltai and based on 2002 Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész's adaptation of his 1975 work of autobiographical fiction, is the first movie I've seen that grasps the problem that the Holocaust presents for narrative artists. Kertész based the book on his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944 and 1945 and the movie starts out conventionally enough focusing on Gyuri K�ves (Marcell Nagy), a Budapest teenager who is the son of a prosperous merchant about to be transported to a forced labor camp. We see the father's last night in the well appointed apartment with his loving family and concerned neighbors; we hear the gossip about the state of the war and what's really happening to transportees, and some attempts to incorporate events into a Jewish understanding of existence. And at the margins we get an idea of Gyuri's sexual experimentation with a Jewish girl upstairs, who is considerably more rattled than he is by the Nazi racial laws. Gyuri is sensitive but a typical teenaged boy at the same time--the girl may seem hysterical but Gyuri's responses are a bit behind events. While still living at home he displays the middle-class adolescent moodiness typical of boys in ordinary times.

After his father is transported Gyuri leaves school to begin work in a factory with other Jewish boys. On his way to work the first day, however, a rogue Budapest policeman takes all the boys assigned to the factory off every bus that passes and holds them captive to await further orders. The policeman is frighteningly literal-minded about his duty, and perhaps mad, both of which make him an appropriate messenger to the other side: all the boys, and a few men as well, are sent off to KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is where the movie really gets interesting.

Although we follow Gyuri from beginning to end, it is, in fact, the disintegration of the storytelling, mirroring the boy's own disintegration, that makes Fateless so distinctive. Having had to wear a yellow star in the streets of Budapest, Gyuri has already lost a sense of control over his destiny. But as he begins to starve in the camp and to lose his sense of propriety and his self-control, the movie, while still following him, begins to feel depersonalized. There's a hint of what's coming in a shot of some of the boys sitting in the shadow of the Birkenau crematoria and talking about another boy who failed the initial selection. The smokestacks and the louring sky make the crime against the Jews merge with the bad weather--it's an image of something amiss in nature and the boys are mere brushstrokes on the bigger picture. Later there's an amazing moment when Gyuri watches a Nazi guard eat and mimes the guard's chewing and swallowing, the closest he can come to a satisfying meal. This bit echoes the earlier dinner scene on his father's last night home when Gyuri was too upset to eat the food on his plate. Not only has adolescent petulance been starved out of him in the camp, but he's dissolving in some more fundamental way.

Then when the internees are forced to stand in formation on the parade ground for hours on end, Koltai leaps free of Gyuri and the movie rises to another plane altogether. We're not sure why the men have been mustered, or why they're made to stand, or even how long. (A lack of information goes hand in hand with a lack of control.) As the men weaken and start to sway with exhaustion, Koltai pushes representation to the point of abstraction. He takes the camera down the lines of striped pajamas, some of which begin to undulate like waterweeds, then above and behind as the patterns of movement become more pronounced. The depersonalization becomes so extreme that it's as beautiful as it is wounding. It's the beauty in fact that makes you aware of the depersonalization because you know that what you're looking at isn't beautiful to your understanding. It's the single most daring visual passage from any movie set in a Nazi extermination camp and one that gets at the very heart of the annihilation by degrees suffered by the prisoners.

Bandi Citrom (�ron Dimény), a fellow Jew from Budapest some years older than Gyuri, does take the boy under his wing, inculcating a certain discipline to keep the conditions from wearing him down. But as Gyuri's time in the camps goes on, Koltai doesn't keep us apprised of what happens to the other characters, or even of which camp we're in, or how much time has passed. So when Bandi notices that Gyuri is limping, discovers the boy's grossly swollen knee, and takes him to what passes in the camp for an infirmary, Koltai has already prepared us to see the elements of Gyuri's story as disjunctive pieces. We never see Bandi again, or discover what happened to him (so we have no idea whether his discipline was effective). And because the healthcare system in the camp is so ambiguous, we, like Gyuri, can't be sure whether he's being loaded onto a cart to be nursed or incinerated. At one point a man throws the boy over his shoulder and we see the world from Gyuri's delirious perspective--upside down--as he passes mound after mound of living? dead? bodies. Using visual and rhythmic means, Koltai has already made conventional dramatic shaping disappear; now even the present moment is indecipherable--bare perception without the possibility of cognition, much less structure.

Koltai never struck me as a great cinematographer on Istv�n Szab�'s films (Mephisto (1981), Meeting Venus (1991), Being Julia (2004)), but as a director he is a great cinematographer. (The credit goes to Gyula Pados.) And he doesn't overdo the visuals, so when the astounding sequences come they have full presence and weight. They have such sensory impact, and are conceptually so right, in fact, that it's something of a letdown when Gyuri is liberated and the more conventional narrative returns (along with the too-literary summary of his experience that Kertész has given Gyuri to speak). The traditional life "story" must return, of course, because the Nazi extermination camps were the exception to normal existence. More importantly, the depersonalization of the camps happened to individuals, albeit en masse, so it makes sense to have personality return afterwards, like blood flowing back to a numb limb. What sets Fateless apart is that the depersonalization matters to us not solely because it's happening to the character the moviemakers have invented and made us care about. At the same time, however, the movie doesn't feel remote, like an acted-out generalization about the camp experience. We're not being milked for emotion or detached from the character's suffering. No depiction of the extermination camp experience of an individual has ever been so large; it verges on the ecstatic.

In all these ways Fateless avoids the romantic mistakes of Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002; click here for my review) in which the filmmakers expect us to be swept away by the travails of their exceptional Jewish hero, who escapes from a forced-work detail and goes into hiding in a vacant apartment, only to be trapped there after his protector stops bringing supplies. What many critics considered the high point--when the famished concert pianist moves his fingers precisely but soundlessly over a keyboard, trying to hang on to what made his pre-War life meaningful--I found downright tacky. The fact that a victim of the Nazis is a great pianist doesn't make his suffering meaningfully worse or different. And the Holocaust doesn't need poetic heightening, any more than it needed the gaudy melodramatic heightening of the mother forced to choose which of her two children would go straight to the gas chamber in Sophie's Choice (1982).

Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful

These are all reasons why I skipped Life Is Beautiful (1997)--I don't want to be asked to admire the specialness of someone's Holocaust experience. I watched the movie recently, however, and I have to say, if you're going to get the Holocaust wrong, this is the way to do it.

Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish-Italian waiter in the late 1930s who is a romantic clown. A classic slapstick protagonist to the extent of constantly getting into scrapes, Guido has the gift of turning every hitch in his experience to advantage. Mishaps aren't humiliating to Guido, as they were to the perpetual adolescents played by Harold Lloyd, because Benigni attributes the physical resourcefulness of the silent slapstick actors to Guido himself. This gives the character a buoyancy that allows him to make life a never-ending acrobatic stunt in which he just keeps shifting and persisting--and talking--until he lands on his feet. Benigni is not a great physical performer but he is peskily winning, and no slapstick star of feature films since Raymond Griffith has had less of a penchant for sad-clown masochism, which is key to his pulling off this Holocaust comedy.

As a director Benigni thinks of setting in terms of potential gags, involving bicycles, house keys, hats, eggs, steering wheels, i.e., standard slapstick props, and he runs the gags together with a craftsmanlike fluency not seen since the silent days (with the exception of Jacques Tati). At the same time, as a star Benigni has the winsomeness of the perpetual juveniles Lloyd and Keaton but also some of Chaplin's least sentimental qualities. In a scene in which Guido talks a patron who entered the restaurant after the kitchen was closed into ordering a meal that's already been prepared, for instance, he shows the aplomb of the guttersnipe Chaplin seizing opportunity; at other times he is sparky with Chaplin's effrontery in refusing to take bureaucratic or police power seriously. In addition, Benigni has a motormouth on him that gives him some of Jerry Lewis's sheer force. All the influences come together in a scruffy, unsinkable goofball who can believably win the beautiful, wealthy, gentile schoolteacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) from her pompous-bureaucrat fiancé. Guido calls Dora "principessa" and summons all the alertness, brass, and luck at his command to make her realize how magical she appears through his eyes. Guido himself is not much to look at but you can see why Dora can't resist him.

Life Is Beautiful draws on the entire history of slapstick moviemaking, but the subject matter keeps it from feeling quaintly nostalgic. Guido meets Dora when Italian anti-Semitism is more in the way of a shame than a crime, and thus relatively easy to mock. In one sequence, for instance, Guido shows up at Dora's school wearing an inspector's sash he snatched at the restaurant specifically so he could see her again, only to discover the "inspector" is scheduled to give a speech on Aryan racial superiority. Guido charms Dora by travestying the stupidity of the notion. Later, when thugs paint Guido's uncle's horse green and write anti-Semitic threats on it, Guido rides the defaced animal like a steed into Dora's engagement party and spirits her away.

The film then jumps ahead a few years when Guido and Dora are married and have a tiny, big-eyed son Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini), and when the situation is considerably worse--Jews are banned from "Aryan" shops and Guido's bookshop is marked as a Jewish business. Next, father and son are deported to a concentration camp, and to protect Giosué Guido tells him that it's all a game--whoever wins the most points gets a brand new tank. Not a toy, but a real tank. The fantasticness of Benigni's handling of the concentration camp is the movie's real distinction. The conditions we see are not realistically dehumanizing; the barracks look comfortless but not filthy and the internees have not reached the point of turning on each other. Even the slave labor is stylized: Guido and the other men spend their days lugging anvils up to a gigantic cauldron, a motif that gives slapstick a dimension of ironic mythopoeia. At the same time, Guido's buoyancy considerably lightens the unavoidable pathos. Benigni makes the game take over the atmosphere of the concentration camp; not even murderous fascist racism can get Guido down.

The Holocaust is inherently sobering and Benigni's frolicsome approach, while not meant to assault our sensitivity to it, can't sit comfortably on what we know about the camps. At one point a German guard asks for an internee to translate as he rattles off the camp rules. Guido volunteers, not because he speaks German (he doesn't), but because he doesn't want Giosué to find out that the game isn't for real. So Guido "translates" the German's speech by relating to his bewildered fellow prisoners the rules of the game he's made up for his son. This madcap spree of verbal slapstick, an act of desperation to rival Chaplin's café song at the end of Modern Times (1936), is inappropriate given the setting but even funnier for that very reason. My jaw hit the floor but that didn't stop me from laughing. There's a fine line between bad taste and comic audacity; what Benigni gets from treading that line, until it disappears, is to create a fable of paternal love that survives the camps.

Benigni will not give in to fascist humorlessness (in a way that put me in mind of Charles W. Chesnutt's use of the comic tall-tale form to write about a runaway slave in his story "The Passing of Grandison"). As the time in the camp progresses and Giosué by chance escapes the massacre of all the other children and has to hide, the movie gets even wackier. At one point Guido is skulking around the prison yard in drag (Benigni makes about as convincing a woman as Marty Feldman would have) and dodging a guard-tower spotlight like a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Benigni's defiance of fascism is truly crazy, and the mismatch of tone and setting reaches a level of derangement that has surprising power because it's also gentler than the spittly razzing of Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) and the Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer's Face (1942).

The benign-hearted fantasy of Life Is Beautiful is justified by the fact that the narrator is the grown-up Giosué, who retells his parents' story with a comic-romantic propensity inherited from Guido. Life Is Beautiful reflects a baby's memory of his heroic buffoon of a father, a man who, as he's being hauled away by his brutal captors, lampoons their wooden-soldier goose-step to amuse his son, who he knows is looking on from hiding. Watching the movie you can't separate the defiance from the tenderness from the low comic impulsiveness. Slapstick is not a sign of the indignity of physical existence to Benigni; I can't think of another comedian who has dramatized the view that life is beautiful not despite slapstick but because of it, certainly not in the context of fascist genocide. When, in the final act of comic shaping, you see Giosué riding that real tank, you know that his father, though gone, has permanently made life a harlequinade for him.

Benigni's elemental narrative sense, and the overlighted Candyland visuals, keep the movie out of the Pantheon of experimental slapstick masterpieces (e.g., Kote Mikaberidze's My Grandmother (1929), Luis Bu�uel and Salvador Dal�'s Un Chien andalou (1929) and L'�ge d'or (1930), Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933), Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan (1951), Louis Malle's Zazie dans le métro (1963)). But it's the most adventurous piece of slapstick made by an open audience-pleaser since Jerry Lewis's The Bellboy (1960) and The Ladies Man (1961). And Benigni does with the Nazi setting what Chaplin didn't dare in The Great Dictator--he lets the liberating nonsense triumph (one of the main ways in which Miracle in Milan rises above The Great Dictator and even Modern Times). If the fantasy in Life Is Beautiful were a little gutsier, more authoritative, and angrier, it would be positively Aristophanic. As it is, it's mad enough to make virtues of qualities that in any other work would be defects.

Frank Beyer's Naked Among Wolves

Naked Among Wolves (1963), by the East German director Frank Beyer, is also about a child secretly kept alive in a concentration camp, and its depiction of camp life is more realistic than in Life Is Beautiful to a certain extent. In the early scene in which a Polish prisoner staggers into Buchenwald carrying a suitcase in which the child is hidden, for instance, the man's hurried but uncoordinated gait expressionistically tells you what the camps do to the physical man. In that one moment the movie suggestively borders on zombie-movie grotesquerie.

Naked Among Wolves falsifies the experience in another way, however. The heroes (including a 32-year-old Armin Mueller-Stahl) are Communists who are planning armed resistance within the camp; they are so noble, however, they endanger their uprising by protecting the Polish-Jewish child. The SS finds out about the boy and use the men's concern for him, and a shrewd combination of physical and psychological torture, to uncover the underground organization. What's lacking is any sense of the dehumanization in Fateless (or in Elie Wiesel's Night, in which a son beats his father to death for a crust of bread). In Naked Among Wolves the men cuddle and feed the child like doting uncles, and it becomes a point of pride to them that they won't choose between protecting him and the uprising. They'll not only outwit and defeat the Nazis, they'll set them an example as well.

The prisoners in Life Is Beautiful at least had their daily task of schlepping anvils. In Naked Among Wolves the prisoners have extraordinary amounts of free time, which they spend engaging in (seemingly well-fed) ethical debates about their situation (as in Arthur Miller's 1980 TV adaptation of Fania Fénelon's Playing for Time). Altogether the movie has the faults that Serge Daney noted in the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust: "extras looking too fat, acting performances, generic humanism, action and melodramatic scenes," except that the humanism is specifically Communist. The take-away is that struggling is superior to brooding--i.e., right-thinking political action is better than words--but of course we're told so in explicit dialogue. Even when a character is left alone in prison while his cellmate is interrogated, we get a stream of words in voice over. (This character reduces to vocables the same endless standing on the parade ground that is so indelibly visualized in Fateless.)

The hidden child in turn becomes unreal, a symbolic means of demonstrating the unconquerable morality and fortitude of the Communists, who, one character tells us, will inevitably take over after the fall of the Third Reich ("What else is there?"). Both sides know the Americans' arrival is only days away and the movie is conceived in terms of the gamesmanship between the prisoners, who delay obeying orders in the hopes of unnerving their captors, and the Nazis, who either want to kill all witnesses or else go easy on them so they'll testify to their leniency when the U.S. Army has taken charge. The head of the camp is worried because he's heard the Allied foreign ministers have agreed to try war criminals. He says, "Maybe I'll be lucky and skim by. Maybe I'll grow a full beard. Maybe I'll be a forester in Bavaria." Then he leans back in his chair and sighs, "But if they get me. I'll always be the commandant at Buchenwald to them," as if to say, Life is so unjust! Only the authoritarian sobriety of the Communist state that made the movie can explain why this line isn't intended to get a laugh. The prisoners for their part have an energy and clear-headedness that doesn't match my experience of hunger, let alone starvation and exposure. Naked Among Wolves, an epic of Soviet-bloc, Remember-the-Alamo! heroism, is as phony as the war was long.

Gillo Pontecorvo's Kap�

Gillo Pontecorvo's Kap� (1960) manages to combine a startling depiction of the dehumanization of the camps with a similarly unsatisfying Communist romance. Susan Strasberg plays �dith, a French-Jewish 14-year-old sent to Auschwitz with her parents. Put in a grange with the other children of the transport to await death the next morning, �dith sneaks back into the barracks where a sympathetic doctor gives her the identity and clothes of a gentile criminal named Nicole who has just died. �dith thus exchanges her yellow star for a black triangle, and generally better prospects. (At dawn "Nicole" watches as the other children, and the older folk, including her parents, are herded naked to the gas chambers.)

Nicole is sent to a work camp in Poland where conditions are marginally better, though she is among the most visibly traumatized of the prisoners. At first it seems that she can't be degraded; when another woman spills her soup, Nicole shares hers. Thér�se (Emmanuelle Riva) sees this and thinks she and Nicole are two "nice girls" united against their common fate. Before long, however, Nicole steals a potato Thér�se got in exchange for a shirt, and then later accepts an offer to become a prostitute for the SS guards who promise her more food. This is one of the events that will lead Thér�se, now the camp's lone nice girl, to throw herself onto the electrified fence. (The filming of Thér�se's suicide in turn led to Jacques Rivette's famous denunciation of the movie, and to Serge Daney's intriguing, if extravagantly "French," work of "cinema-biography" entitled "The Tracking Shot in Kap�".)

As Nicole, �dith becomes so inured to her situation that she lounges in the SS barracks chatting with a maimed officer. She is deadened enough, in fact, that she accepts promotion to Kap�, the prisoner in charge of truncheoning the other women in her barracks into line. You know this isn't a Hollywood movie by the way the teenaged ingénue grabs at the chance to barter sex for food. And with the exception of Riva, the other women in the barracks don't seem like actresses; not only are they believably tough in a way no American actress is, even in working-class roles, but the violence with which the actors playing the SS handle them is shocking.

Strasberg isn't quite right for the role for this very reason--in such a realistically brutal environment she's not scrappy enough to be anyone's choice for Kap�. Unfortunately, however, the soulfulness that made her convincing as a piano-playing teenaged French Jewess makes her right for the turn the story takes at the end, when Russian POWs are brought into the camp and Nicole and Sasha (Laurent Terzieff), a Red Army soldier, fall in love. The movie loses all credibility after Nicole spitefully gets Sasha punished to show him she's in charge. (He's forced to stand through the night facing the fence; if he falls forward he'll be electrocuted, if he steps backward he'll be shot.) Sasha comes through this ordeal without rancor toward Nicole; rather, he loves her, and his heroic strength is enough to revive her humanity. (How many young couples, I wonder, had their first dates in Nazi work camps?)

The movie thus reformulates itself in a drearily familiar heroic register. The Russians are mounting an escape and Nicole plans to go with Sasha to Russia. When she asks him what his parents will think of her--she's told him she's really Jewish, and then there's the SS concubinage and all--he says he'll never breathe a word and that they'll love her. So we are in KZ Hollywood, after all, and it gets worse, when it turns out that Nicole is the only person who can shut off the juice to the fence but when she does so an alarm will sound and she'll inevitably be killed. Sasha has promised the other Russians not to tell her but he breaks down just before zero hour. Nicole is so heartbroken that she wants to die anyway, so what the heck.

Although Pontecorvo left the Communist Party after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, the movie ends up dramatizing a Communist bromide--as a comrade says to Sasha, sometimes it's right for one to die to save many. Yes, but generally that one is a volunteer, and there's certainly no heroism where she isn't. Kap� degenerates into a gross amalgam of trite romance heroics and unconvincing left-wing rhetoric. When the same Russian hears the artillery of the approaching Red Army, he muses, "What will it feel like to be free again, to do whatever we want?" How would a young Russian in the 1940s know what it felt like to be free in the first place? (That's as loony as imagining a cultivated French Jewess finding contentment as a Stalinist war bride.) The leftism merges with the sort of bland popular-front platitudes we know from the likes of Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller, when Sasha says to Nicole, for instance, "Sometimes things happen that we have no control over. We want love and happiness for everyone but we're forced to kill and hate."

Pontecorvo is not the visionary firebrand of The Battle of Algiers (1966) here. He cares about the subject passionately--as a Jew, and as a Communist leader in the Italian Resistance (click here for a short biography)--but he turns it into pap. There are even scenes that fail in direct comparison with Life Is Beautiful, e.g., a translation scene, but played for tears; Nicole evading a camp spotlight, but played for suspense. And somehow Pontecorvo gets the brutality but misses the irrationality. Daney never saw Kap� but he got it right when he wrote, "Pontecorvo neither trembles nor does he feel fear; the concentration camps revolt him purely on an ideological level." (In the work camp one of the women explains to another how low morale has sunk by saying that some of the political prisoners, who we're told make up 50% of the camp, have betrayed "the cause.") Pontecorvo knows how bad it could be for the body but not the being. He later showed himself a master of the medium but Kap� isn't even close to what Lajos Koltai accomplishes in Fateless.

Movie Review: Syriana and Munich: Fuel for "Thought"

Alan Dale — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 00:25:32 EST

***Spoiler alert: proceed with caution.***

Stephen Gaghan's Syriana

In Syriana writer-director Stephen Gaghan contrives a situation in which the machinations of the CIA, a couple of American oil companies, the U.S. Department of Justice, and a large American corporate law firm culminate in the assassination of a fictional Persian Gulf state prince. The prince is working with an idealistic American energy analyst located in Switzerland to democratize the principality's oil industry in the teeth of his decadent brother who is, unfortunately, heir to the throne. Gaghan doesn't explain why any arm of the U.S. government would want to take out a native champion of democracy in the region. (The implicit premise must be that everything the government now says it's doing there is a lie.) Nor does he explain why oil companies wouldn't prefer democratic ownership of the oil in Arab hands. This 18 March 2003 Cato Institute article does offer such an explanation, but the point isn't what makes sense outside the movie's framework, but what makes sense inside it. And Gaghan doesn't explain much of anything in Syriana, yet the movie gives you the impression that, although you may not be able to follow the complicated plotting, it has explained everything to do with politics and the oil business in the Middle East. (There's a relatively clear synopsis of the various storylines at the film's official website, but I don't think it will change your experience of the movie, even if you read it first.) The storytelling in Syriana is as murky as in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), except that there's more at stake here, e.g., the audience's belief in the good faith of the American government. I'm pretty sure Gaghan himself wouldn't want to be convicted on an equally veiled and disorganized presentation of "evidence." His movie is "weighty" yet vaporous, like a metal in a volatilized state--a big sun-blotting cloud of what Hollywood calls "ideas."

All the same, Gaghan brings an enormous amount of narrative energy to the project. His script has enough characters and cross-purposes for a modern-day King Lear (it even has royalty), but he seems unaware of how remote and uninvolving they remain. Syriana is what King Lear would be if it were a checklist of the dangers attending succession in Nth-century England and not a poetic tragedy. Syriana certainly is not tragic: both the noble prince and the CIA agent played by George Clooney, who senses what's afoot and tries, ineffectually, to stop it, are victims rather than tragic heroes. And Gaghan's mood is far from the hallmark speculativeness of tragedy; he's entirely too sure he knows what makes things turn out badly in this world. Exactly how the good guys are victimized remains so obscure, however, that the movie can't even function as melodrama, though that's the order of Gaghan's political thinking--i.e., there are big-and-I-mean-big, source-of-all-evil villains among us and the good guys can't do anything against their missiles.

If Gaghan had developed character for its own sake and not relied so heavily on his belief that he knows what's really going on around the shrinking globe, Syriana could have been heady, maybe even devastating. Part of the problem is that he intercuts among his roughed-out episodes in a surprisingly tasteful manner. Syriana is incendiary only by implication; the experience of sitting through it is actually lulling. It's the suavest of the political movies getting attention this awards season, but by the same stroke the least plugged-in to the audience. Gaghan piles one storyline on another but is only interested in suggesting where they trend, working like a (cynical) editorialist who has made up a few examples to support his views. As a result, the movie isn't convincing as journalism, exalting as tragedy, stirring as romance, or exciting as melodrama. This is the same problem that made Gaghan's script for Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000) a non-starter. Both movies convey a couple hours' worth of gaudy, made-up bad news with bland objectivity; unfortunately for Syriana, Gaghan lacks Soderbergh's crisp talent as an editor.

The deadest spot of Syriana is the storyline involving the Pakistani boy working in the Arab oilfield who is laid off and becomes a terrorist. Gaghan treats his descent naturalistically, step by step, but so affectlessly that the movie gains nothing from having the episode acted out rather than merely cited as a statistic. It isn't just poetry that's missing, or moviemaking panache, but depth of conjecture. Hollywood movies about young Germans who became Nazis--The Mortal Storm (1940), Hitler's Children (1943), Tomorrow, the World! (1944), and later Swing Kids (1993)--are ludicrously overwrought, but Gaghan's birth-of-a-terrorist anecdote in Syriana doesn't make much of a case for the underwrought approach. These anti-Nazi movies at least endow their deluded followers with moral agency: they choose to become saber-toothed sheep. For all the superficial naturalism, Gaghan treats the Pakistani boy anonymously, as one among millions prey to larger forces. He never gets inside what drives boys in that culture and of that class to make this decision. It's weird: Gaghan tries to get to us by showing the bad things that happen to individuals, but in his political scheme, as in his narrative approach, individuals don't matter. But his movie doesn't have enough force to convey an epic vision, either. Syriana is a very busy, and very confident, movie, and yet it feels fatally underimagined.

Steven Spielberg's Munich

How much you admire Steven Spielberg's Munich seems to be a function of whether you approach it as an action picture broadened to address a complex geopolitical situation, or as a complex geopolitical situation sized down to the dimensions of an action picture. If you approach it in the former way, then you may see it as "intelligent" and "sensitive." If you approach it in the latter way, you may not see it at all. The claim I don't think anyone can sustain on the movie's behalf is that the action-picture conventions, which Spielberg uses as a matter of course, in themselves bring out the nuances of the situation. Quite the contrary.

Munich is about a group of top-secret assassins recruited by the Israeli government to track down and eliminate the men behind the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich summer Olympics. The Black September Organization, a Palestinian terrorist group, claims responsibility for the massacre but after the dust has settled the surviving murderers and masterminds are scattered about Europe and the Middle East. The movie follows just one Israeli hit squad out of a number, who act to retaliate for Munich but also both to prevent and discourage further outrages. Avner (Eric Bana), the photogenic leader of the movie's team, gets their instructions from Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), a Mossad handler who teases Avner about the imposed official secrecy of the operation that requires him to withhold the information Avner most wants--i.e., that they're targeting the men actually responsible for Munich. Avner never gets that assurance and the strain of what he's doing finally destroys his sense of righteous mission.

The movie quickly establishes a rhythm: each assassination requires Avner's team to solve technical problems involving the target's location and lifestyle, and each success is followed by increasing tension among the team and doubt on Avner's part about what they're doing. Spielberg clearly thinks the assassins' subsequent questioning of their activities deepens his action-picture methods; to my mind, the relationship between Spielberg's methods and that questioning is far less productive. First of all, the way in which Spielberg varies the hits (travelogue settings, nail-biting hitches) suggests that he's primarily hoping to hold our interest with the (inevitably glamorous) suspense mechanics. And because the assassinations are conceived and shot as entertainment we never get a sense of what it's actually like to be a government assassin, to be, in essence, a lethal civil servant. In other words, Munich entirely overlooks what might well be the central subject to a documentarian. (The movie doesn't even make clear why Avner's team sometimes employs elaborate, risky techniques, such as planting a bomb in a man's home phone rather than just shooting him on the street, like the man before and one after, which lends a discordant note of slapstick to the movie.) Spielberg goes into each assassination doing what he does best--engineer excitement by manipulating perspective and timing. So when the assassins encounter impediments, we root for them in a way all too familiar from countless movies built around merely private, rather than quasi-judicial, acts of mayhem. Consequently, the brow-scrunching and ethical debates don't grow out of the assassinations, they merely follow them, and are not only inadequate but irrelevant.

This being a Spielberg movie, the most effective talking point is considered a statement by a terrorist that all the Palestinians want is a home. Well, for goodness' sake, everybody wants a home. No reasonable person thinks that even the most unregenerate of terrorists is subhuman by nature. The debate is over moral decisions: the question is not, Why did he act? but, Why did he act violently without warning against civilians? (And any explanation of this particular situation that leaves out anti-Semitism, as Munich does, is going to be short of the mark.) In addition, part of what disconcerts the assassins is having to kill one man who translates poetry and another who has a beautiful, mannerly daughter. These points are similarly irrelevant, however, because when a terrorist murders civilians without warning, he is not acting as a poet or as a father. It's not a revelation that there are other aspects of his life that contrast jarringly with his actions as a terrorist, but it's solely his actions as a terrorist that have brought the Israeli death-squad to his door. The terrorists might have chosen other means but did not, and their deaths are the consequences of that choice.

Because 90-odd years of feature filmmaking have produced no precedents, it seems safe to say that an analysis of whether violent political reprisal for political violence is morally justified is not something a fictional movie can handle well. But even if this were a promising subject for a movie, nothing in Spielberg's résumé suggests he's the man for the job--the subject is too inherently wordy. As Spielberg has shot the script by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner the action and the subsequent discussions are in completely different modes and cancel each other out. This wouldn't be the case if he had shot the assassinations more objectively, in the problem-solving manner, say, of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), the most cerebral, least fakey of all World War II POW escape movies. This would also be appropriate for the movie's non-epic emphasis on personal reactions to political actions. Spielberg doesn't even seem to be searching for a new way of addressing the large-scale subject of political violence, either by following an individual character, as in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit soldat (1960), or by following mass action, as in Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers (1966). Pontecorvo does romanticize the epic upsurge that the Algerian terrorists hope to ignite but he doesn't sentimentalize the individual actors as Spielberg does. And Pontecorvo, even more passionately than Godard, feels the subject merits a new approach (though a different one from Godard's). Spielberg goes out on a limb stylistically in one sequence, showing Avner deliriously fucking his wife in sweaty slow motion while ruminating about the murder of the athletes, but what the director accomplishes by that is merely to fatten the annals of camp.

Spielberg isn't enough of a mind to innovate in the service of a political topic. He wanted to make an entertaining movie about the Israeli response to Munich that would also challenge the audience, but doesn't understand that his way of working poses structural impediments to the second prong of that intention. His way of working would be far more suited to a plot involving a personal act of revenge, which, unlike the issue of political reprisal, is entirely suited to the personal scope, and non-discursive approach, of action movies. Action movies tend to be romances built around the heroes' determined, successful acts of retributive violence, which are always morally justified or he wouldn't be the hero. (Even where the action heroes are criminals, as in John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) and Quentin Tarantino's two Kill Bill movies (2003/04), they are justified to the extent they have been betrayed.) Spielberg appears to think that if a character says he has conflicting feelings about what he's doing then a second layer has been laid down and the work is as a result naturalistically complex. The visual-kinetic excitement he generates when filming the assassinations, however, ensures that the movie remains in the realm of romance, though it lacks fully developed allegorical differences among the characters which might at least have expanded the discussion symbolically in a way fitting for romance.

Spielberg wants credit for the kind of complexity that could come only from a naturalistic approach to Avner's mission and consequent breakdown, and seems to believe further that this one man's reactions can lay open the significance of the entire mission. What he's made instead is simply the tale of a knight who begins to question whether the wizard at whose behest he acts (i.e., Ephraim) is an emissary of light or of darkness. This narrative trope has spectacular impact in Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible (1996), in the sequence in which Tom Cruise figures out that his leader is, in fact, the bad guy. DePalma has Cruise saying one thing to Jon Voight while picturing another to himself, and the technique is revelatory and dizzying at the same time. It's nonsense, of course, but I'm not sure my brain has ever whirred faster at the movies. Christopher Nolan's Batman Returns (2005) uses the same trope, though with leaden heavy-handedness. (It begins with the superhero's spiritual trek into a mountain sanctuary as if in homage to Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge.) All the same, Nolan understands that this trope is, in essence, as artificial and exclamatory as a movie-poster tagline ("His mentor was the Enemy!").

In Munich the question of whether Ephraim is a force of good or evil can't be established objectively but only by Avner's coming to a decision that he's too upset and unnerved to reach. This makes the trope more complex only in a technical sense because the movie doesn't present reasoned arguments for either position, just movieish emotionalism. Despite Spielberg's pop handling of his subject, however, you can't just relax and enjoy the movie as heroic romance because past a certain point you figure out that the more you enjoy the action set-piece assassinations the guiltier you'll feel afterwards. Munich is serious, adult filmmaking at its most nugatory, and America will never produce political movies of any depth if we reward work of this caliber.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.