It’s hard
to find time to blog while editing, so I haven’t posted in a while. But during the holiday break from my current
project I got a chance to watch films that were vying for Academy Award
nominations. And now that the nominees have
been announced, it’s a good time to write.
Here, then, are a handful of random thoughts and opinions:
As always, there are movies that should be
in the Oscar race but for some reason aren’t.
QUARTET, Dustin Hoffman’s directing debut, is high on that list. It’s a tale of rekindled love, set in a home
for retired musicians. Filled with humor
but equally long on pathos, it features stunning performances by Tom Courtney,
Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Sheridan Smith and Michael Gambon. Each of these fine thespians might well have
been considered in the Academy’s Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories.
Woody Allen’s TO ROME WITH LOVE may not be
as fully realized or fulfilling as last year’s PARIS I LOVE YOU, but it’s a
thing of beauty. Darius Khondji’s
cinematography is as suited to romanticizing Rome as Gordon Willis’s was to
heightened passion in MANHATTAN. Woody’s
jokes (about exchange rates, parental neurosis, inside straights, Ambien with
scotch chasers and, of course, mortality) are as sharp as ever. Performances are uniformly exceptional, all
worthy of Oscar nominations. The Roberto
Benigni chapters about our culture’s obsession with celebrity are deeply incisive
without ever failing to entertain. And
Woody’s reworking of Fellini’s THE WHITE SHEIK in one of the film's subplots is
so fresh that many fans of the esteemed Italian auteur didn’t even know that’s
what they were watching.
Walter Salles’ adaptation of Jack
Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD is commendable, oddly, because it doesn’t suck. It’s easy to screw up a period film,
misinterpret a literary touchstone or in some way fall short of fans’
expectations on this kind of project. But
Salles avoids the pitfalls. A Charlie
Parker-based soundtrack, seasoned with Dizzy Gillespie, sets the pace for this
adrenaline and amphetamine-driven “mad-to-live” story. ON THE ROAD is further infused with bebop
energy by its editor (Francois Gedigier), who, boldly, as though playing at
Massey Hall, never “lets scenes breathe.”
And screenwriter Jose Rivera does an estimable job of balancing faithfulness
to the novel with natural colloquial speech.
Where the film falls short is in its male
casting. Except for Viggo Mortensen (as
Old Bull Lee/William Burroughs), the actors reduce characters defined in the
novel by their divinity and wildness to mere mortals inspired by an oddball. One recalls, while watching a just-okay portrayal
of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassidy, that Kerouac’s first choice for the role was
Marlon Brando.
But ON THE ROAD’s somewhat flawed acting seems
brilliant compared to the laughably inept performances (of melodramatic
and clunky dialogue) in ZERO DARK THIRTY. Obviously, I haven’t imbibed the same
pro-Katherine Bigelow Kool-Aid as many others whose opinions I respect. Sitting down to watch her film, I expected something
at least well-written and directed, albeit with a pernicious pro-torture message and a
hostile attitude toward due process of law.
But this crude propaganda piece is so bad I’d almost believe some of the
tastemakers who embraced it were paid to do so. One key dramatic moment made me laugh out
loud: A CIA bureaucrat berates his subordinates
for being ineffective. “What are you
going to do about it?” the man roars. Then he pauses, bangs on a table and yells, “Bring me someone to kill!” For real!
I’m violating an unspoken rule of this
blog – be positive about films and filmmakers – not just because ZERO DARK THIRTY supports torture and illegal
assassination (even Adolph Eichmann, after all, was given a 14 week open trial
in Jerusalem), but because the movie is poorly made. While decrying the racism of BIRTH OF A NATION one may, nonetheless, appreciate D.W. Griffith’s filmmaking genius. Viewers revolted by the fascist ideology
of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL might still recognize Leni Riefenstahl’s directorial
skill. But Kathryn Bigelow’s film, though well-edited, seems otherwise to have been made by simple-minded amateurs using trite episodic television tricks. Even its musical score sounds like a porno
track.
Such tripe is, at best, D-level freshman
film class stuff. And we’re not in a freshman film class. This is Oscar season! So Mark Boal’s laughable, insipid screenplay
is competing with the work of such masterful writers as Tony Kushner, David O.
Russell and Quentin Tarantino, not to mention un-nominated scenarists such as
Tom Stoppard and Woody Allen. Does anyone
really think that Boal’s hackwork belongs in the same category as the output of
those scribes? That it measures up to
scripts by Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD), Wes
Anderson and Roman Coppola (MOONRISE KINGDOM) or Michael Haneke (AMOUR)?
Brooks Barnes writes in The New York Times,
“The brutal (torture) scenes (in ZERO DARK THIRTY) are presented with no
obvious political tilt, creating a cinematic Rorschach test in which different
viewers see what they want to see.” This viewer sees that characters Bigelow paints as heroes acquire information by torturing their captives, in
violation of U.S. and international law. Those “heroes” use this information to
assassinate their target without due process. Thus
ZERO DARK THIRTY has an obvious
“political tilt” – toward a benign view of torture and contempt for
well-established legal conventions. It
is, as they say, “somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.”
Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino was unfairly
overlooked in the Academy’s Best Director category, probably because of inane
political objections to DJANGO UNCHAINED.
Spike Lee has stated, without seeing the film, that it “insults his
ancestors.” Yet it’s impossible to watch this amazing antebellum western and
conclude that Tarantino finds slavery to have been anything but horrific. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, slave-owner Calvin
Candie, is villainous. Overseers,
traders in human flesh and enabling house slaves are also shown to be
reprehensible. The movie’s heroes – a liberated
African-American bondsman and his German benefactor – (legally) kill those who
own and live off the forced labor of other human beings. The freeman (the eponymous Django) rescues
his wife from Candie-land and they ride off into the sunset to live happily
ever after.
Why, then, is Spike Lee so upset? I believe his unwarranted and unseemly rage
is directed at precisely what makes DJANGO UNCHAINED a remarkable motion
picture: The film tackles a big subject with
a style uncontained by the conventions of made-for-television or mainstream Hollywood
movies. In his best work, Quentin Tarantino
stretches the boundaries of genres that fascinate him. Here, the autodidactic film scholar/auteur
explodes the “spaghetti western.” And
from his opening frame, when the theme song from Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 DJANGO
kicks in to underscore blood-red Caelian-type titles, viewers know they may
never see westerns the same way.
Unlike most “oaters,” as they were once called,
Tarantino’s takes place before the
Civil War. Civilization is being brought
to the antebellum South, not to the frontier, as in most of the genre's films. And its apostle isn’t an Eastern lawman or returning
Civil War veteran, he’s an urbane European dentist. His name:
Dr. King… Schultz.
Ironically,
in light of objections by Mr. Lee and others, DJANGO UNCHAINED may
be the most non-racist western ever made, and the most overtly anti-racist, because it takes on the
very institution of slavery and those who benefited from it. John Ford’s highly esteemed THE SEARCHERS is
also about bigotry. But it’s a personal story. Its central character is a former Confederate
officer named Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), whose virulent hatred of Native
Americans is finally melted, to an extent, by the love of his niece. In other words, Ford views his protagonist as
flawed and, finally, redeemed. Tarantino’s
heroes, on the other hand, oppose slavery and the inhuman ideology upon which
it was built from the outset of his story.
What does link DJANGO UNCHAINED and THE
SEARCHERS, then -- aside from the fact that Tarantino pays homage to his
esteemed predecessor by composing a “doorway onto the world” shot straight out
of the 1956 western -- is that both attack race prejudice in ways that make
some viewers so uncomfortable they see the works themselves as racist. And arguably, Ford’s classic does harbor unenlightened views of race
even though Ethan Edwards’ prejudice is seen as a profound imperfection.
DJANGO UNCHAINED, though, is not an unenlightened film. It is willfully misperceived as such simply because
its characters use the “n” word, as the media call it, ad nauseum. The pernicious house slave does it, as do
plantation owners and overseers. But the
“good guy,” Dr. Schultz, never does. And
Django does so solely when tricking racists into thinking he’s “one of them.” Only the most uncritical and insensitive
viewer (or in the case of Spike Lee, non-viewer) could miss this.
But Quentin Tarantino’s film ruffles
feathers for another reason. As only the most sophisticated motion pictures can, it mixes genres – western, spaghetti western and slave
liberation drama. While doing so, its writer/director states, implicitly but boldly, that
one needn’t be African-American to explore African-American themes.
In similar fashion, forty-five years ago,
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron ran afoul of black critics when
he wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner.
His work was derided in a collection of essays called William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Some objected to the author’s depiction of
the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion as moody and sexually disordered; most simply
thought it was wrong for a white author to address the subject at all. But there were dissenters from the pack. Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin appreciated
the novel for its literary merit, and historian Eugene D. Genovese defended
Styron’s right to create a fictional version of the historical Turner.
Obviously a glutton for punishment, Styron
stuck his jaw out for Jewish critics
to whack, twelve years later, when Sophie’s
Choice was published. His tale of a Catholic concentration camp
survivor who falls in love with a paranoid schizophrenic Jewish American shocked
those who’d convinced themselves that gentiles couldn’t write about the
Holocaust and that all Nazi victims depicted in American literature had to be
Jews. In a missive to his daughter Suzanna, which appears in the recently
published Collected Letters of William
Styron, the novelist writes: “A
foolish ass of a Yale professor named Harold Bloom told me that the word was
out that Sophie was violently
anti-Semitic and would be dealt with accordingly… Can it really be that the furor over Nat Turner is going to be duplicated?”
So it would appear that Quentin Tarantino
is in lofty company. Like William Styron,
he has dared to tread where white men are suspect. What’s more, he’s dared to make DJANGO UNCHAINED
brilliantly and relentlessly entertaining.
That kind of accomplishment seems to anger jealous filmmakers even as it
delights audiences.
………………..
As a film cutter, I must make an unrelated
comment about Tarantino’s film. It’s the
director’s first outing without his longtime editor, Sally Menke, who passed
away last year. It can’t have been easy
for him to make the picture without her.
But he can be proud of how well cut it is, as I think Sally would be on
his behalf.
……………..
One final (random) remark: Congratulations to this year’s Oscar nominees
and to all my colleagues vying for A.C.E. Eddie Awards.
