Movie Review: The White Ribbon (2009)

When the wealthy, landowning baron (Ulrich Tukur) of the tiny German town Eichwald rises in church to announce to the congregation that an evil person lives secretly amidst them, the accusation is both alarming and relieving. A dastardly prank has left the town doctor (Rainer Bock) severely injured, and an unknown offender has recently kidnapped the baron's young son (Fion Mutert), violently thrashed him to the point of bleeding, and left him hanging upside down and naked in a mill. To know that a person would be capable of such ill will is a horror, but to hope that a careful investigation might discover and eradicate the culprit, restoring the town to peace, is a relieving prospect.

Michael Haneke, however, is a filmmaker who creates mysteries. He does not solve them. His films require the viewer to draw the proper conclusions, and they often force the viewer to think twice about whether the questions he's asking--the suspense he's caught up in--are even the relevant questions. Is something greater at stake? Is something else going on? Anyone expecting a startling twist and a detailed revelation at the end of Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Band) will be disappointed, but those familiar with Haneke's "cinema of insistent questions" will walk away with a horrifying glimpse of pervasive, cyclical violence.

Set in 1913 on the eve of the First World War, The White Band plays out in a context of societal violence. A war-stained empire was primed to proudly, patriotically enter what would be the bloodiest conflict in human history. Their children would grow to become the generation of Nazis. Antisemitism had already threaded itself through the Protestant Christian culture, and all of the country's misfortunes could easily be thrust upon a scapegoated minority. This historical setting has little to do with the specifics of the parochial drama that unfolds in the film, but considering that the movie is Haneke's first feature film to not take place in contemporary times, this historical context is important to note.

Specifically, however, The White Band is a depiction of individual sins and their ability to expand into community, national, and global evils. The baron describes one sinful criminal and the community believes him. I, too, found myself suspecting the unlikeliest of suspects, a polite young school teacher (Christian Friedel) who is seen fishing in the river after the doctor's horse trips over a "nearly invisible, thin, but very strong wire" tied between two trees and who is seen whipping a horse immediately after the baron's son is discovered to have been thrashed. I think, given Haneke's precise style, these clues are intentional red herrings, and suspecting the mild mannered teacher (who is also the narrator) also conforms to the mystery movie convention of the perpetrator being the most unlikely suspect. An additional reason to suspect him is the reason that the community would likely suspect him if the film had taken place twenty or thirty years later: with his dark, curly hair, his wire frame glasses, and his intellectual misfit manner, he is rather very Jewish. That he remains innocent in a town where almost no one is and that he ultimately leaves the town never to return again is a statement against the vilification of Jews, proof that goodness can survive in a hostile environment and that using irrational means to create and rout out enemies is no way to solve the real problem of evil.

The baron may be willing to scapegoat, but each of the townspeople, with few exceptions, possess their share of sin. With sparse, meticulous scenes divided amongst a large, impressive ensemble cast, Haneke illustrates a pervasive ill will, terrors and hypocrisies that lash out in every direction. The doctor appears to be a kindly old widower, yet he sexually abuses his fourteen year old daughter Anna (Roxane Duran), who each day looks more and more like her mother. He maintains an illicit affair with his hardworking, supportive neighbor (Haneke regular Susanne Lothar), but then rejects her with humiliating, cruel insults after having sex with her over the sink. Who would set a trap to kill him and his horse? Perhaps a local villain, but more likely his own daughter, who watches the accident from the doorway and, unlike her younger brother Gustav (Thibault Sérié), does not seem grieved by the mishap. The trap would be an indirect way to retaliate against a powerful, dominating oppressor, a way to end her years of incestuous rape. Given her maturity, her inheritance, and the dependability of her neighbor, she would also not have much to lose and plenty to gain. This is, of course, only my theory.

The film details many indirect responses to abuses of authority. In an unequal, undemocratic relationship, the submissive party when wronged has few safe recourses to retaliation. Revenge is therefore either carried out anonymously, is self-inflicted, or is redirected to a third, less powerful party. When the baron's neglectful supervision of the workplace conditions on his farm leads to the death of an older woman, the woman's son avenges the death and the baron's minimal response to it by destroying the baron's cabbage patch, a symbolic act which means, "If you don't pay up, I'll cut your cabbage (money) for you." His action speaks words without him needing to speak up. When the pastor's oldest daughter Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus) is humiliated by her father in front of her classmates simply for having fun during recess, she silently slips into his office and impales his parakeet with a pair of scissors. "You take away my joy, I'll take away yours," the gesture symbolizes. Unprovable deeds of anonymous revenge are the most directly satisfying but also the most likely to be discovered.

Others direct violence against themselves because it gives them a sense of control, feeling, and action that harms no one else in the process. When the pastor's son Martin (Leonard Proxauf) is beaten and humiliated by his father for staying out late, he walks along a high, precarious bridge banister, tempting God to kill him. If he dies, his religious conviction tells him that he deserves his punishment; if he survives, then he knows that God has forgiven him. The panicked school teacher intercedes and exacts a promise from the boy that he will no longer punish himself with such dangerous existential crises. Later, the husband of the dead farmer woman hangs himself, his only escape after having lost his job during the controversy following his wife's death. The night before, one of the baron's barns (possibly the one his wife died in, though I'm not certain) burned to the ground. Did the old man burn the barn down and then kill himself in remorse? Or is the murderous, kidnapping villain also an arsonist? That mystery is never solved.

The baron is the most obvious source of corrupt power in the film. The cruel, incestuous doctor receives the most intimate examination. But the most squeamishness-inducing monster in the film is the pastor (Burghart Klaußner), who rules over a silent wife and a brood of creepy children. The pastor never ceases to remind his young children that they are mortal sinners, that they have failed him, and that they are destined for hellfire unless they change their terrible ways. When the children return home late one evening after spending the day supporting Anna, whose father just nearly died, the pastor reminds them of how disappointing they are, sends the entire family to bed without dinner, makes plans to beat them with a switch, and attaches the titular white ribbons to them to remind them that they once were pure despite their straying. It is soon after the canings that the baron's young son is kidnapped and thrashed. Did the overly disciplined children direct their vengeance against the spoiled, happy child? Did their inability to stand up against their oppressive father cause them to gang up on a small child?

The pastor sees his teenage son's sullenness as proof of masturbation, and after detailing the horrid fate that awaits him if he continues to abuse himself, the father begins to tie the boy's hands to his bed frame at night. Trust, free will, decision making, and privacy play no role in an authoritarian dictatorship. The rulers make the decisions, and everyone else obeys.

The most horrifying act of violence is one that happens late in the film. After the doctor dismisses his lover, she threatens to do something that will make him feel sorry but then quickly admits that he probably wouldn't care anyway. Soon afterward, her young Down Syndrome child (Eddy Grahl) is found blinded and beaten in the woods with an attached note: "The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation" (Num 14:18). A premonition from one of the pastor's daughters suggests that his kids may have something to do with this horrendous crime, yet it seems unlikely that the children would leave such a note. Assuming that no one would have any reason to punish the gentle child, one must assume from the note that the punishment is directed against his father. The father of the unmarried woman's child is never stated, but one can easily assume that the doctor, her long-term lover, is responsible. Is harming his son what she means by making him feel sorry? And is she right in assuming that he--who has a legitimate, healthy son and daughter--wouldn't care? Does she punish herself and her innocent son more than him in this misdirected path of revenge?

As town doctor, the man caresses and cares for the boy who may be his son as the tortured mother looks on. In a following scene she hastily commandeers a bicycle from the school teacher, claiming that she has discovered evidence of the perpetrator who has committed all of the crimes and she must rush to the police station immediately to tell what she knows. With her son evidently locked up inside, she disappears and is never seen again. When the townspeople gain access to her abandoned house, they find no trace of the boy. After harming him, has she put him out of his misery with a mercy killing? Did guilt over her horrible, senseless crime force her to flee the city and her old life?

The doctor and his family also disappear abruptly the same day. This is treated as a mystery of the highest order, and the narrator describes an unlikely story of the doctor and his lover fleeing together, having successfully pulled off all the capers. Why might the doctor have actually left with his daughter and son? Could it be that he had impregnated his own daughter and needed to escape discovery and shame? Did the neighbor kill them and bury them in the yard? Did he kill his daughter giving her an abortion? (A haunting midnight scene about "ear piercing" suggests the possibility of late night abortions.)

Haneke leaves many unanswered questions at the end of The White Ribbon, but the likeliest scenario points not to one evil influence but a sphere of conflicting, misdirected evils. The school teacher announces his belief that the pastor's children are likely responsible for the crimes only to be denounced by the pastor, who--despite constantly berating and punishing his children for their ungodly behavior--thinks it impossible that pure children could be responsible for monstrosities. The children are likely responsible for some of the crimes, but the town has no small share of monsters. Even minor characters in small, tangential scenes reveal seething threads of jealousy, sexual infidelity, abuse, and contempt.

The baroness (Ursina Lardi) moves to Italy with her son after the boy is injured a second time by jealous peers. She explains to her husband that she can no longer live in a society ruled by hypocrisy, hatred, and oppression. Would she really find solace in Italy, or are these vices a worldwide epidemic? The film does not answer this question.

The movie does, however, provide brief glimpses of hope. The schoolteacher and his nursemaid girlfriend Eva (Leonie Benesch)--both outsiders to the town--provide a pure, progressive, compassionate love story to contrast the ugliness surrounding them, though innocents such as them were likely the first to be victimized in the Holocaust or crushed under fascism. The doctor's wide-eyed son, who has just discovered death, remains innocent, though age will likely corrupt him one day, and one of the pastor's young sons, who raises a wounded bird and then gives the bird to his father in sympathy when his parakeet is murdered by Klara, is capable of selfless acts. One of Haneke's most admirable skills is in rounding out even the most despicable of his villains: the pastor's face as he receives the gift from his son is one of heartfelt redemption and sadness. The pastor may be a cruel and manipulative autocrat, but even he mourns the death of a joyful bird.

Stunningly captured in deeply saturated black and white, The White Band's cinematography by Christian Berger evokes the tiny postcard paintings of forests, carriages, and snow-frosted church steeples found on the wallpapered walls of old people's parlors. The photography paints a horrifying tale with beautiful, stark images. Attention to detail is superb; the film authentically feels a century old. The nuanced acting, buried in ambiguities in secret passions, is superb throughout; even the many young child actors possess genuineness. The White Ribbon is one of Michael Haneke's greatest films, a mystery that reveals itself to be a horror film once one realizes that the mystery is not much of a mystery at all. Evil is not carried out by elusive masterminds. Evil is everywhere, breeding like a virus and burning like a fever.

The White Ribbon
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Burghart Klaußner, Rainer Bock, Christian Friedel)
9/10

Movie Review: The Gold Rush (1925)

The proper way to eat a shoe.

The easiest type of movie review to write is one about an awful disaster of a film. Writing such a review taps into the insult comic within us all, and it usually consists of quoting laughable dialogue, pointing out absurd plot consistencies, stringing together insulting hyperbole, and deriding any offensive content.

Next on the scale of easiness is the review about a beloved gem, either a recent film or an obscure older film that the reviewer has seen and loved. The reviewer can still take a sense of ownership over such a film because it has not yet been dissected and devoured. Reviewing such a film is like writing a travelogue about previously unexplored terrain; the reviewer, a trailblazer, feels as though what he says can be treated as authoritative gospel because it's never been said before, and this praise isn't hard to put words to because the reviewer desperately wants to share his new-found love, to figure out what has so moved him.

Somewhat harder is the review of a supposed masterpiece that the reviewer didn't like. These reviews fall into two categories. The critic can either stand firm in resolving that the film is horrible, expressing bafflement that the idiotic masses would be gullible enough to buy into it, or he can throw his hands in the air, earnestly wishing to know what went over his head, what other people saw that he couldn't see, what his own problem is that he's unable to recognize a masterpiece.

But the hardest review of all to write is the review of a classic masterpiece that the critic knows is a masterpiece. What hasn't been said before? How many television documentaries, film studies classes, countdown lists, and scholarly books have already explored every facet of such a film. The critic's words, if he doesn't have some fresh new insight into the film, are repetitive, obvious, and irrelevant.

Charlie Chaplin's iconic comedy The Gold Rush came out eighty-five years ago, and yes, it's hilarious; yes, it's well acted; yes, it's memorable and touching and important and a masterpiece. What can I add to the critical material about this movie?

Perhaps it's best to keep it short and stick to the moments in the film that meant the most to me.

There's a classic scene in this film where Charlie Chaplin boils and eats his own shoe. Chaplin is the Lone Prospector, a silly little tramp braving the elements of the nineteenth century Klondike in search of gold. Caught in a terrible snowstorm, he holes up in an isolated cabin with a wanted criminal named Black Larsen (Tom Murray) and a burly fortune hunter named Big Jim (Mack Swain). When Larsen leaves in search of food, the two prospectors wait and wait, slowly starving. When all the food and the candles and everything else edible is eaten and their stomachs can take it no longer--to the point that Big Jim begins hallucinating that the little tramp is a giant, succulent chicken--the Lone Prospector throws his leather shoe in a pot with snow and boils it for dinner.

This is a very old joke by now, and it was even an old joke and a cliche when the film was made in 1925. What makes it hilarious, though, is how Chaplin goes about eating the shoe. With the shoe on a dinner plate, using a fork and knife, salt and pepper, he carefully removes the shoelaces, cuts apart the heel from the top, removes the cobbler nails and sucks on them, and piles the discarded nails, like bones, on a small dish. He eats the shoe with grace and precision, with nary a hint of desperation. He picks it apart as though it were a fish or a steak, as though there were a traditional method for eating a shoe, with customary rituals and procedures. He follows all the rules of etiquette for the eating of shoes.

The scene was shot using licorice and sugar candy designed to look like a boot. Chaplin, a perfectionist and a diabetic, supposedly shot the scene more than sixty times. By the time he had perfected it, he had suffered from insulin shock and needed to be rushed to the hospital. His suffering paid off, though, the scene is one of the most memorable comedic movie moments of all time.

What also moves me about The Gold Rush is the sad romance between the Lone Prospector and Georgia (Georgia Hale), a beautiful dancer who knows she is beautiful and uses the prospector's shy affections to her own advantage, giving him false hope and making him false promises so that she can make her rivals jealous, make her friends laugh, and make herself feel better. The prospector's childlike persistence in loving her and his naive willingness to be duped make the scenes in which he is humiliated especially sad. Here is a good man with a pure heart who hasn't yet realized that love can be cruel.

What's great about the love story is that his persistent faith in love forces her, if only temporarily, to see the ugliness within herself. She, too, though perhaps only for a moment, remembers that love can be something more than a game. Her transformation is visible, believable, and touching. Of course, her decision to be with him is also coupled with the fact that by the film's end he has become a millionaire. Their love may not be blessed with a happy ending in the years to come, but it is undeniable that the flames of love blaze at the film's end.

Charlie Chaplin is said to have wished that The Gold Rush would be what he was remembered for. With the film as his second highest rated movie on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of great films (it's #32, with City Lights at #25), he may have got his wish.

The Gold Rush (1925)
d/w: Charlie Chaplin
(Charlie Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain)
9/10

Movie Review: Intolerance (1916)

Intolerance has a reputation as being D.W. Griffith's apology for the racist content of The Birth of a Nation, a mea culpa for promoting intolerant ideas and a condemnation of the horrors to which racist ideas lead. I don't know very much about D.W. Griffith or his feelings in the year between the release of this two landmark films, but I think this reputation is largely mistaken. The poorly-titled Intolerance has nothing to do with racism, and except for a few Ethiopians in a battle scene, black people do not even exist in this film. (Nor white people pretending to be black people!)

Intolerance is not an attack on racism but an expose on "intolerance," which according to Merriam-Webster is a concept meaning, "the state of being unable or unwilling to endure." There's a rather large gap between loving or embracing something and "tolerating" it. I don't love standing in a long line on a hot day, but I tolerate it because sometimes I have no other choice. I don't enjoy paying my credit card bills, but I tolerate doing so because otherwise I'll be penalized. I'm not happy that libertarians or arch-conservatives exist, but I tolerate their freedom to think whatever absurdities they want. Because what's the other option? Genocide? Violent outbursts? Lawlessness? Concentration camps? Most sensible people (though certainly not all, I'm afraid) have a pretty good understanding that these reactions aren't sound reactions. Intolerance, I suppose, is aimed at an audience whose natural reaction would be to violently annihilate whomever they disagree with (which happens throughout the film), a rather small demographic of which I am fortunate to not be a member. In all other instances, he's simply preaching to the choir.

Should the North have tolerated slavery? Was the Civil War an unnecessarily bloody act of intolerance? Should we tolerate D.W. Griffith's desire to create a bestselling, historically-inaccurate blockbuster epic that insists segregation is essential? Are people who strike these films being intolerant? Yes, I suppose so.

Intolerance, more accurately and artfully subtitled Love's Struggle Through the Ages, is a three hour and seventeen minute presentation of four thematically linked but otherwise unrelated stories: a Babylonian tale about the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE, a story of the crucifixion of Christ in 27 CE, a depiction of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre by Roman Catholics against Protestant Huguenots in France in 1572, and a modern tale about Americans in 1914 encounter temperance movements, mobsters, and injustice. The inspiration for the film began with only this final story before expanding to include the Babylonian tale, originally conceived to be a separate film. The French and Judean subplots were a later development, a fact made obvious by their limited screen time and underdevelopment. (I haven't actually calculated, but I imagine the French scenes occupy only about twenty or twenty-five minutes of screen time; the scenes about Jesus amount to only a handful of brief scenes and shots.)

The modern story is about a girl-woman who, following the death of her protective father, marries a reformed mobster and has a baby, only to have her life devastated by the intrusions of nosy prohibitionists, a gangland boss, and his jealous, murderous wife. This story--the original story--has the least to do with "intolerance." If you consider that this extremely grandiose film--the most expensive and largest of its time--was released only eighteen months after The Birth of a Nation, the supposition that the latter film is a complete reversal in sentiment and a meaningful, thoughtful apology for the former wears very thin.

And yet, unlike The Birth of a Nation, which is mostly just praised for its technical and narrative innovations and not for its actual thematic content, Intolerance is also exalted for the depth of meaning and earnest emotion that it supposedly contains. To me, the story is just as shoddy, inaccurate, and naive as the earlier film, though the presentation is certainly breathtaking and beautiful, even almost a century later.

D.W. Griffith had the resources to physically build a separate universe. What would be manufactured today using computers and trickery was actually set before the camera. Vast Babylonian walls and idols. Hundreds if not thousands of extras in exotic period dress. Elaborate recreations of ancient religious rites. D.W. Griffith, the only filmmaker of any real renown at the time, needn't have spared any expense at fulfilling his dream, and he clearly didn't. It's stunning to see the output of someone who was the undisputed god of his industry at the time, someone who could make happen whatever he wanted to happen. He wanted one of his actresses to have eyelashes so long that they would brush her cheeks, so he and one of his makeup artists invented false eyelashes. He needed to film an execution scene, so he in collaboration with the department of corrections built an exact replica of a modern gallows. He had the money to hire as many extras as he needed. It's difficult to imagine any filmmaker today being so free of hurdles, and the results are jaw-dropping.

The editing is also amazing, as the four stories cut back and forth, cleverly building upon each other's emotions and energy. As vengeful prohibitionists raid bars and gambling halls, the film recounts Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine. As a man is sentenced to death, we see struggling to carry his own cross. As a woman races to alert Babylon that they are about to be destroyed by the Persians, a young woman races to intercept a train carrying to governor so that she can beg him for a pardon for her condemned husband. This frantic, energetic, multilayered editing had never been done before, though Eisenstein soon perfected it and now even the simplest television commercials exploit these techniques. The cinematography by G.W. Bitzer is also brilliant, as in the depiction of modern capital punishment, which despite being a violent killing is brightly-lit, sterile, cold, mechanical, and precise. A red-filtered shot of Jesus, far in the background, impossible to be rescued, hanging atop his cross on Calvary as frantic silhouettes mourn in the foreground, their arms writing in the air, is one of the most disturbing and beautiful shots I've ever seen. The extravagant costumes, the make-up, the realistic sets--all are top-notch. Even the special effects are rather shocking and effective, as in one scene when a burly warrior decapitates another on the battlefield.

Perhaps the first stunning mise-en-scène in cinematic history, couple with the most skillful editing of its time. From the unavoidable agony of Christ's crucifixion...

...to the routine, bureaucratic execution of the young husband.

The acting is mostly convincing, though only Mae Marsh as the young bride in the modern story is especially remarkable. Her odd childishness and naivete, on a crash course with a brutal reality check, is genuine and memorable only because of how consistently strange it is.



It's the story, though, so slapdash and ill-informed, that is this otherwise brilliant film's downfall. Consider the historical gaps. Griffith depicts Babylonia as an exotic utopia obsessed with romance and in awe of Ishtar, its goddess of love. Enter the Persians, led by the brutal, war-mongering, intolerant Cyrus the Great, who, according to Griffith, wipes this civilization off the face of the earth. Did Griffith know anything about history? The Babylonians were oppressive conquerors who, as seen in the Hebrew Bible, attempted to eradicate the Israelites of Judea by destroying their temple, outlawing their religious practices, and killing, enslaving, or relocating many of their people. Ishtar was as much a goddess of war as of love (and agriculture, as well), and her religious rites involved sacred prostitution, not romance. Cyrus the Great, far from being an intolerant war-mongerer, was extremely tolerant of the people in his dominion, respecting their religions, traditions, and laws and administering a highly organized government with an impeccable human rights record. The Hebrew Bible treats Cyrus as a vessel of God's will, ranking him almost amongst the prophets and the saints in terms of his importance. Without Cyrus, Judaism would have perhaps been erased. Without Cyrus, the subplot involving Jesus may have never happened.

Not too mention that without Jesus the subplot involving Catholics massacring Huguenots would have never happened either, but that's a completely different can of worms.

And what are we to make of the modern story--more about injustice than intolerance--which claims that prohibition and its dangerous trappings are the result of insecure old women who can no longer get laid, who jealously channel their sexual frustrations against beautiful, young people? What does it say about this treatise on intolerance that the motivation behind its major plot is rooted in sexism and ageism?

Intolerance is a strange film--undeniably artistic, but with obvious shortcomings. I don't consider it the masterpiece that others do, but it clearly paved the way for other masterpieces, and that's got to be worth something.

Intolerance (1916)
d: D.W. Griffith w: D.W. Griffith, Hettie Grey Baker, Tod Browning, et al
(Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Constance Talmadge, Alfred Paget)
TSPDT?: #54
8/10

Movie Review: The Birth of a Nation (1915)

There's something uncanny about seeing black people--in fact played by white people--holding their hands protectively over a ballot box while sad, defeated white people--also played by white people--walk away uncounted. In the reversal of The Birth of a Nation's denouement, when armed Klansmen on horseback prevent these same black people from exiting their homes on election day and making it to the polling centers, we at least have the sense that we're finally seeing a true approximation of history. What's scary is that we're supposed to be cheering at this return to "the way things should be" or "the way things always have been."

The Birth of a Nation is a frightened and frightening, unapologetic, and inaccurate defense of slavery, racism, and segregation, coupled with a heartfelt condemnation of war, which ironically was one of the only things that helped put an end to slavery in the United States. They say history is written by the victors, yet D.W. Griffith had the technical ingenuity and cinematic ambition to write his own grandiose account of history before the victors could. It's a scary and difficult thing to admit that you were wrong, even after defeat. Much easier is proving that you were right all along and that you should've won. The Birth of a Nation depicts Southern plantation owners as quaint, peaceful people with modest ambitions who participate in slavery because it fittingly supports the moral order of the cosmos: civilized white people making the important decisions while supporting the impulsive, primitive black people who wouldn't even know how to support themselves without white structure. In the Civil War itself, the Southern generals are courageous, fair, and heroic, and they only lose due to the dastardly tactics of the North. Reconstruction puts animals in charge of men, and the insistence that racism is a false doctrine encourages animals to try to rape ladies. How much better everything would be if those power-hungry, foolish Northerners would've just minded their own business!

When Barack Obama was running for the presidency and was likely to win, my 87-year-old Georgian grandfather asked me to alleviate his fears about a black man being in charge of the white people, to assure him that the black man, when the reins were finally changed, wouldn't retaliate with all the oppression and violence that had been inflicted on his kind in the past two centuries. Underlying this fear wasn't the belief that black people were savage animals but that they were too savagely human, that they would take their revenge when finally given the chance, that an eye would at long last be taken for an eye, and my grandfather had never expected to lose an eye and certainly didn't want to lose one now. It's frightening to see that some of the same fear of reprisal and unwillingness to apologize that inspired a 95-year-old movie still exists today.

It's common practice to praise D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation for its technical innovation and cinematic milestones rather than its naive, propagandistic message and blatant racism. I'm not in the habit of judging artistic merit by its historical importance, however--not unless it still manages to awe after history has passed. The Birth of a Nation horrifies but does not awe. Characterization is simple, the story is naive, the title card writing is immature, and the film stretches on much too long. Some scenes are genuinely executed in a heartfelt, touching manner--such as the grizzled hospital orderly in the background who snatches quick, loving looks at a pretty, young visitor while pretending to be disinterested, or the young, war-torn yet optimistic sister who fashions a primitive ballgown out of raw cotton in order to make her brother feel happy and at home upon his return from war, a "ballgown" which only emphasizes their fallen position yet still manages to crack a smile across his tortured face. Such scenes exist in frequent numbers in the over three hours of The Birth of a Nation, yet they are overshadowed by the racist proclamations that consistently steal the show. Should I be impressed that a scene in which "black" politicians who have taken over the senate floor and turned it into a pigsty cheer in exaltation while passing a law that allows them to have sex with white women actually inspires in me the disgust that Griffith intended? No, because that nauseating discomfort is ironic, inspired more by the surreal blackface and the ridiculous, racist historical inaccuracy than anything Griffith actually intended. I find it funny that Griffith had to hire white people in order to make his black villains truly revolting.

That blackface helps the viewer to see The Birth of a Nation for what it really is, an epic fantasy with no basis in reality.

The Birth of a Nation is #133 on the TSPDT? list of the greatest films of all time. This gives The Birth of a Nation the distinction of being the highest rated movie based solely on its innovative use of jump cuts and close-ups.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)
d: D.W. Griffith w: D.W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods
(Lillian Gish, Mae Walsh, Henry Walthall, Ralph Lewis, George Siegmann)
TSPDT?: #133
5/10

Movie Review: To Be or Not to Be (1942)

Inglourious Basterds got its kicks out of rewriting history, attempting to give viewers the cathartic release that reality denied them: Hitler burning, sooner rather than later, in a well-plotted holocaust of his own. In truth, however, the war went on much too long, Hitler exacted a wide-spread and long-lasting influence, and his death like so many others came at his own hand, excusing him from justice and revenge. Tarantino's mission may be well-intentioned, but because it bears no semblance to history and because it doesn't have any practical application to current events, the triumphant release the film's finale may release in us is at best fleeting. I say "us" meaning twentysomething, non-Jewish, American kids who have in no way been directly affected by Adolph Hitler's atrocities in Europe since I think that's the target audience of the film. I have yet to read any responses to the film from people who actually survived the death camps over sixty years ago.

Recently I came across Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be, a film which I assume exerted some influence over the writing of Tarantino's last picture. Both involve resistance groups staging attacks against occupying Nazis while Hitler enjoys a visit to the local theater. Both involve our valiant yet buffoonish heroes sporting silly disguises while improvising taut dialogues with somewhat more clever enemies. Both comfortably assume that the Nazis will be outwitted by the end. The difference between To Be or Not to Be and Inglourious Basterds, though, is that the former film was made at a time when history was actually being written rather than rewritten. In 1942, Hitler's men actually were in Poland, actors and Jews and unhappy Poles actually were being oppressed and killed, the uprising was in effect and could use support of any kind, and the final outcome was still several years to come. In a historical context, To Be or Not to Be really had "something at stake," a crucial element of storytelling according to any writing workshop instructor. That Lubitsch swore by an Allied victory with such certainty was a move of uplifting patriotism.

But even aside from its context, the film is incredible--suspenseful, hilarious, and moving in equal parts. The movie begins with a stage actor portraying Hitler (Tom Dugan) effetely heiling himself after being "Heil Hitler"ed by so many of his men. It's a perfectly-delivered bit of improvisation from the bit actor, but it's roundly attacked by his director Dobosh (Charles Halton), who wants no humor in a serious film about such a grave subject. When Lubitsch's film was released, it too was apparently attacked for making light of the War, but Dobosh and the contemporary audiences seem not to realize the intense power that humor can have in providing a stark contrast to more serious moments. Adding humor to a film emphasizes just how bleak the moments without humor--the non-humor--are. With just one tone, the whole film risks slipping into melodrama.

So when a Jewish actor, having seen Warsaw destroyed, his play censored, and his neighbors killed, quotes the spat-upon Jewish Shylock of The Merchant of Venice to his friend ("If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"), the moment comes across as raw and sincere rather than laughable and trite. We've already roared at Shakespeare and bad acting; we needn't laugh at a man's expression of grief, outrage, and confusion.

To Be or Not to Be is a fine film, well acted by Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Stanley Ridges, and Sig Ruman, wittily directed, fast-paced, and sharply written by Edwin Justus Mayer. A story of intrigue and disguise, it combines a standard love triangle with a thrilling tale of political uprising and assassination. The revenge of a spurned and humiliated lover surrenders to revenge against an occupying invader, and the inflated arrogance of the cuckold proves the most valuable weapon against the arrogance of the enemy leaders. Twists in one plot influence events in the other, and the audience is left always guessing what tricks will be needed for the next narrow escape and--more importantly--always hoping that the narrow escape will be successful. The characters are broad and silly yet always convincing, and in the course of the film their fortunes earned a place close to my heart.

To Be or Not to Be was dismissed in its own time and is largely forgotten today, but it's a terrific comedy and an important installment in World War II cinema. It ranks #72 on the TSPDT? list.

To Be or Not to Be
d: Ernst Lubitsch w: Edwin Justus Mayer
(Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Stanley Ridges)
10/10

Four great films about WWII that feature neither Jews nor American soldiers, and one not-so-great WWII film that features Jewish-American soldiers

(As always: spoilers....)

At the end of Elem Klimov's 1985 war epic Иди и смотри (Come and See), teenage freedom warrior Florya finally fires the rifle he scavenged off of a dead soldier buried in the sand in the first scene. He's seen his share of Nazi atrocities in his travels through Belarus, from the slaughter of his townspeople to the burning of his old, harmless father to the wholesale incineration of an entire community. He has transformed from a bright-eyed and goofy-grinned boy, eager to do his patriotic duty and boldly fight for the national cause, to a withered husk of a human being, his clothes dusty, his eyes glassy, his face ashen, a permanent, wrinkled frown carved into his horror-stricken face.

The war is not over at the end of the film, but the Belarusians have won a small but important victory over the Nazi invaders, who consider Eastern Europeans beneath the level of human dignity, incapable of rehabilitation and undeserving of mercy, fit only to die quickly. As Florya and his comrades regroup and move on to bigger battles, Florya passes a puddle with a portrait of the Fuhrer lying abandoned in it. He opens unceasing fire right into Hitler's face, a cathartic moment, and the film ends with newsreel footage of the war and history in rewind. Florya takes out his aggression--violent yet harmless--on the idea of the ruthless dictator, on all the atrocities of history, and on war itself, and finally we see Hitler's baby picture, swathed in a nightie, no mustache, no swastikas, and we are reminded that even Adolph was once an innocent child like Florya.

His energy and ammunition spent, Florya rejoins the good fight. He's been through hell on earth, but he has somehow remained pure.

Throughout most of human civilization, war was a topic to be treated with dignity and honor. War turned boys into men, tested mettle, and bestowed honor. War protected ideals, chivalry, and nobility. War offered either great rewards--riches, land, political power, cultural victory, slaves--or an honorable death, to courageously lose one's brief life defending something greater than oneself. Despite the violence and tragedies of The Iliad, Homer offers no criticism of war itself. The Roman poet Horace wrote some time around 20 BC:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit inbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo.

"How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country:
Death pursues the man who flees,
spares not the hamstrings or cowardly backs
Of battle-shy youths."

From Biblical wars to the Crusades to Lancelot and his fellow knights, never was war seen as anything other than a sometimes-tragic means of achieving grand goals. The titular character of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, the invincible Roman general, finds peace only on the battlefield, and when he refuses to put his wounds on public display in order to win a political victory, audiences for perhaps the first time met a living casualty of warfare, for war had changed Coriolanus, making him beastly, short-tempered, and arrogant, and he could no longer exist comfortably in a society at peace. Centuries ahead of his time, Shakespeare may have been the first artist to realize that war was not just a temporary condition but a damaging illness that left its mark even on the survivors.

By the American Civil War others like Stephen Crane with his Red Badge of Courage were beginning to promote a new war genre that was more critical and realistic, and after the modern horrors of trenches, gassings, and machine guns in the First World War, anti-war art became as prominent as pro-war propaganda, from Erich Maria Remarque's brutal All Quiet on the Western Front to the horrifying expressionist paintings of Otto Dix to Wilfred Owen's reworking of Horace's ode:

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Pro-war film continued through World War II. Among the Allied films starring the likes of Erroll Flynn, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne was a series of seven documentary films entitled Why We Fight, commissioned by the United States government and directed by the lovable Frank Capra. The first of the series won the very first Academy Award for Documentary Feature, and none of the films did anything to discourage enlisted men, to challenge the concept of war, or to humanize the enemy.

On the Axis side was director Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebbels, with his doublespeak professional title "Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda," who churned out narrative and documentary films that highlighted the beauty and unstoppable courage of the Aryan race and culture while illustrating the many flaws of inferior Semitic and anti-socialist villains. Among these films was, of course, Triumph des Willens (The Triumph of the Will), considered a masterpiece of editing and innovative cinematic techniques.

All of the outright and empty-headed propaganda coupled with the many deaths and horrors of World War II eventually took their toll on audiences, though, and in the latter half of the twentieth century, anti-war films became much more common. The year 1957 saw the releases of both Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and David Lean's The Bridge on the Rive Kwai. The grisly, full-color, live photojournalism of the Vietnam War was the final nail in the coffin for the glorification of war, and now very few realistic war films exist that don't in some way illustrate that we are all members of one human race, that war destroys us all, ruins families, endangers society, and forces men to become monsters.

At least not until now with the release of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which features at its heart a movie theater, Joseph Goebbels, and a soldier-turned-actor. Beyond espionage killings, there is very little combat in this war film--the bulk of the battle footage is depicted within the film's film-within-a-film, a propaganda piece directed by Goebbels entitled Nation's Pride, starring a young, somewhat handsome Nazi sniper (Daniel Brühl) who survived three days in a clock tower behind enemy lines and in that time killed hundreds of enemy combatants and won the city for the Axis. The once humble young man is now doing his best to put his lethal past behind him and enjoy his new celebrity as a war hero and film star. The clips of the film, as watched by a packed theater of Nazi elites--among them Adolph Hitler--, reveal something that is hardly humanistic or well-rounded. The sniper shoots one nameless Allied victim, then another, then another. A victim loses his head. The sniper says something patriotic and reloads. A victim falls from a window. The audience in the film laughs and rejoices. The real audience is reminded that such glorification once existed.

And then the climax of Inglourious Basterds comes, nameless Nazis are killed by Jewish heroes, and the final scene of Come and See is reenacted, only this time it's not a framed portrait of Hitler but the real deal and there are no baby photos to distract us. Tarantino has placed us in an uncomfortable position--he wants us, with our cultural relativism and our sensitivities, to relish in the glorification of war. He wants us to rejoice that Nazis are being slaughtered. It's not too much to ask for--at this point, "Nazi" is synonymous with unsympathetic--but to someone (like me) who's prone to overthinking things and who has a penchant for compassion, it's a difficult moment.

My first response was: he hasn't earned it! The Nazis are just nameless and faceless caricatures! He doesn't give us any hope of possibly understanding them. But that's a dangerous thought. They're Nazi elites; they did countless horrible things, some of the worst things in history. What's there to understand? And besides, two of the most well-developed, nuanced, and complex characters in the film--the sniper and a detective Hans Landa (played by an Oscar-worthy Christoph Waltz in one of this year's best performances so far)--are Nazis. If anything, it's the Allies and Jews who are one-dimensional. With the revenge tragedy (in which the avenging hero loses his own life and sanity in his endless, escalating, cycling quest for revenge) dating back thousands of years and the anti-war theme firmly established, can a viewer in the year 2009 abandon those ideals and simply admit that sometimes reckless, bloody, unmerciful violence is a good thing?

I haven't been able to answer that yet. It's been three days and I still can't decide if I absolutely hated Inglourious Basterds or somehow secretly loved it. My boyfriend despised it but isn't quite sure why. I've read reviews by people claiming it's phenomenal, mature, bold, and exciting but who provide little explanation as to why it's all those things. On the one hand, the film is the very definition of "self-indulgence." Tarantino has become a parody of himself, of self-referential pastiche, of post-modernism. The soundtrack is anachronistic, with most of the music taken from the Ennio Morricone scores of Spanish and Italian Westerns from the 1960s and 1970s, with orchestral tracks lifted from 1980s horror flicks, with a prominently featured David Bowie song and one memorable motif that Tarantino already used in Kill Bill. It's a constant reminder that we're not watching anything that actually existed in 1944. In one scene a hepcat Samuel L. Jackson, sounding like he's stepped out of the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon, narrates some exposition about nitrate film while archival footage plays, once again reminding us that this is all fake. Scenes drag on for much too long. Michael Myers makes an unnecessary appearance with a bad British accent and a veiny, alcoholic's nose.

There's a concept of good fiction being a sustained, dreamlike illusion, where we forget that we're reading or watching something, where we forget that we're passively receiving some fictional, carefully arranged information and surrender ourselves to the world, its structure, its time, and its rules. We forget ourselves and our world. Our surrender is seamless. Tarantino says, to hell with that.

At the same time, some of the scenes are quite suspenseful, the dialogue quite clever, the characters quite memorable. There are genuine surprises and laughs. Hans Landa, the famed "Jew Hunter" who fluently speaks German, English, French, and Italian (and possibly many other languages) and never allows a subtle detail to slip from his grasp, is a fantastic character ranging from an intelligent conversationalist to a charming flatterer to a boyish jokester to a ruthless killer in sharp and spontaneous instants. He's a delightful character--both frightening and admirable; if he were on our side we'd give him a TV series and root for him every week.

Someone has suggested that one of the film's themes is the loss of personal peace, that the film creates a world where tension is constant and unyielding, where secrets are always being exchanged and withheld and where lives are always at stake. This is true, and the best scenes in Inglourious Basterds are the ones that most effectively achieve this suspense, but for non-stop anxiety in Vichy France I point to Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 masterpiece L'armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), a spine-tingling, nail-biting, foot-shaking, edge-of-the-seat thriller about undercover resistance fighters trying to win back their country.

In Melville's war-haunted France, one's never sure who's on one's side. Anyone could be carrying death, and trust is a rare commodity. After a suicidal escape from a concentration camp, the political criminal Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) ducks into a barber shop for cover. With the sirens blaring outside, Gerbier conceals his escaped convict status by casually requesting a trim and a shave. In a deliberately paced and nerve-racking scene, we stress over whether the barber might slit his throat with the straight razor. Instead he saves his life and gives him a free coat to conceal himself.

At one point two brothers (played by Jean-Pierre Cassel and Paul Meurisse) attempt to have a normal conversation. Cassel's character has just joined Gerbier's resistance and completed his first mission, but he doesn't mention this nor anything else about his involvement in the war. Instead they chat rather lifelessly about rations, the weather, the past, and food. Afterward he reflects on his educated brother's pathetic, helpless role in the new occupied France, alone and useless, wasting away. Only later does he learn that his brother is actually a high-ranking member of the Resistance, who likewise was concealing his dangerous private activities and probably thinking the same thoughts of his younger brother.

The incredible Simone Signoret plays Mathilde, a dedicated mother and housewife who engages in life-threatening espionage in her free time. She keeps the two different worlds completely separate--for her comrades to know her family's identity would threaten her family's well-being, and for her family to know of her secret involvement in the Resistance would endanger her comrades and their success. In a world where compassion is a costly affliction--where close friends can turn on you, where impostors and rats must be brutally silenced, where the lives of your friends and families can be used as a threat against you, and where too much emotional involvement can destroy your clarity, will-power, and determination--Mathilde makes a dangerous gamble by living both lives simultaneously.

In a chilling scene, the three spies, disguised as Nazi soldiers, learn that their comrade and friend--who they have come to rescue--has been tortured beyond relief and is close to death. No matter how shocked, saddened, and outraged they must be by this information, they must conceal it all, guarding their disguises as disinterested Nazi soldiers or else endangering their own lives.

In Melville's war, victory, logic, swift-acting, and determination cannot coexist with love, friendship, and compassion. Though the successful end of the war may reintroduce these most human of elements to society, they cannot continue while the war wages.

Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta,(Open City) is another film (from 1945) about resistance fighters who must conceal their most important desires and thoughts while pretending to lead normal lives in fascist Italy. A central figure in the underground movement is Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi), a Catholic priest whose role of authority allows him certain freedoms to help the resistance (such as being out past curfew) and whose religious convictions assure him that the fight for freedom and equality is the most Christian path. His actions are dangerous, and he loses all sense of normality--even whistling a pop tune becomes a charged action--but the film lacks the suspense and emotional depth of other films, and most of the scenes are never quite as engaging as they should be. Maybe it's because I watched a dubbed instead of a subtitled version--the unsynchronized sound and the strangeness of the American voices speaking in bad Italian accents was distracting and took away from the otherwise realistic filming of the movie. I discount the film now, but reserve a firm opinion until I see it as it was originally made.

I want to circle back from occupied France and fascist Italy to the final (often forgotten) frontier of World War II: Eastern Europe. Nazi fighting in Belarus and Russia was ruthless. Whereas Nazis thought of Jews and non-Aryan Westerners as profoundly evil people, they thought of Eastern Europeans as less than human, an unsalvageable, populous race of dim-witted and dangerous beasts who needed to be exterminated before they could cause too much trouble. Germans killed Eastern Europeans quickly and in large numbers, murdering women, children, and old people and destroying entire cities at once. No prisoners. No occupation. The Russian army required all the help it could muster, and so child partisans were a common occurrence, hence Florya in Come and See and the twelve-year-old Ivan of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1957 Ива́ново де́тство, (Ivan's Childhood).

Played by Nikolai Burlyayev, a skinny, blond boy, Ivan is a tiny scout who acts and speaks like an adult and expects to be treated like one. Ivan became an orphan when Nazis murdered his mother and sister. He would have been killed himself except that he was hidden at the bottom of a well when the attack occurred--not because he was seeking refuge from the war but because he was caught in a moment of childlike wonderment, transfixed by the reflection of the sun underneath the well's water. Many flashbacks fill Ivan's Childhood, showing us a tan, smiling, giggling, exuberant twelve-year-old boy. In a beautiful scene, a joyous Ivan, bursting with love and life, rides with his sister on an apple cart during a rainstorm. In the present narrative, however, Ivan does not smile. His innocence has died with his family, left at the bottom of that well. Now he does his duty, makes his advances, and is prepared to die for the freedom of his country. He is deeply offended when superior officers patronize him, and he proves himself to be more mature, serious, and experienced than a soldier who is at least ten years his senior.

In a subplot, this older--but still quite childish--officer falls in love with a young nurse. It's an impossible romance; they can't possibly achieve any lasting happiness given their circumstances. The scenes illustrate how maybe we're all too young for war, regardless of our age. Only once we've either lost all hope or experienced war first-hand can we truly be old enough to handle its ravages.

Ivan's Childhood is a leisurely paced, expressionist film about the perils of growing up. The mournful, nostalgic film need not be seen as just a war film, but as a solemn reflection on the loss of childhood beauty and happiness. Even without war, we sometimes lose sight of the joys of the sun reflected in a pool of water, of a drenching rainstorm, of a ripe apple, of a run down the beach, of a beautiful piece of music. Vadim Yusov's cinematography is incredible, and even in scenes of despair it reminds us that beauty abounds.

Come and See, made almost three decades after Ivan's Childhood and building upon a very similar plot and themes, is a superior film, often referred to as the most realistic and powerful war film of all time. It subtly references the previous movie--at one point Florya stares at a star at the bottom of a well--while introducing us to some of the most disturbing images of war atrocity: charred, talking corpses; distantly seen piles of corpses; slaughtered livestock; Nazi heartlessness. The title of the film comes from a verse of Revelations, and while the film maintains a level of complete realism, it manages to achieve the most startling depiction of the Apocalypse ever captured on film. Even the eating of lobster is given a horrifying, nauseating charge.

Klimov's film, with cinematography by Alexei Rodionov, is perhaps the most important World War II film of the ones I've just discussed, somehow managing to remind us of both the need for retaliation, the horrible unjustness of Nazi occupation, the high cost of war, the occasional necessity of war, and the fact that even Hitler was once an infant.

Come and See (1985)
d: Elem Klimov w: Ales Admovich, Elem Klimov
(Aleksei Kravchenko)
10/10
TSPDT?: #312

Inglourious Basterds (2009)
d/w: Quentin Tarantino
(Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Daniel Brühl)
5/10

Army of Shadows (1969)
d/w: Jean-Pierre Melville
(Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse)
9/10
TSPDT?: #490

Open City (1945)
d: Roberto Rossellini w: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini
(Aldo Fabrizi, Marcello Pagliero)
4/10
TSPDT?: #98

Ivan's Childhood (1962)
d: Andrei Tarkovsky w: Vladimir Bogomolov
(Nikolay Burlyayev)
8/10
TSPDT?: #591

Movie Review: LA Confidential (1997)

I watched LA Confidential the other night, but I'll keep this review short because even though it ranks #471 on TSPDT?, I find the film largely unimportant and as dismissible as I perceived it ten years ago.

A plot-heavy neo-noir set within the innerworkings of the police department of 1950s Hollywood, director Curtis Hanson's 1997 film follows the hunt for a young, clean-cut, unpopular lieutenant detective (Guy Pearce) to uncover the true motive and killer(s) behind a shooting spree at an all-night diner. In his quest for real justice, the by-the-rules detective involves a rouge bully cop (Russell Crowe), a schmoozy cop-for-hire of a popular television show (Kevin Spacey), a corrupt police chief willing to go above the law in order to protect it (James Cromwell), a glamorous prostitute who looks exactly like a famous Hollywood starlet (Kim Basinger), a suave millionaire with criminal and legit dealings (David Strathairn), and a seedy tabloid muckraker and profiteer (Danny DeVito).

Of this all-star cast, only Strathairn and Bassinger come across as halfway believable in a film that's altogether too shiny to be any sort of reality. Pearce, Spacey, and Crowe never seem like people who actually spend their days carrying badges and guns, wearing uniforms, and doing police work. They exist only within the boundaries of the screen, manifesting straightforward psychological make-ups: Pearce's character watched his father be killed by a man who got away, so now he's eternally following the true, virtuous principles of justice and legality, trying to capture all those who think they can get away with it; Spacey's character can be bought and sold for the right price and is more attracted to glamour and money than any ideals, but he still maintains some shred of decency; Crowe's character helplessly watched his father beat his mother to death, so now nothing can stand in the way between his brute force and men who think they can abuse women. Every character has a motivational, psychoanalytical homunculus living inside of him, clearly dictating every action he performs so that his symbolism can be conveyed to the audience in as few quiet scenes of lucid introspective narration as possible. And except for one deviant moment where Crowe's Woman Protector actually slaps the woman he loves, the characters never get deeper than that.

Case in point: James Cromwell's police chief is a blatant ripoff of Orson Welles's Hank Quinlan from Touch of Evil. They are both men willing to break the law in order to uphold it. Quinlan, though, was a mess of realistic contradictions. He did terrible things but also noble things. He was disgusting but courageous. His track record for serving justice was incredible, even though he was a criminal. Quinlan had only a "touch of evil;" Cromwell's character is nothing but, and the results are not nearly as thought-provoking.

LA Confidential has a decent, somewhat intriguing plot full of relatively predictable revelations and twists. The set design is nice, and the soundtrack is enjoyable. There isn't much deeper to the film than a bunch of shiny surface, though, and every theme it tries to convey--the relativism of ethics, the dangers of fame and money, sons living in the shadows of their fathers--has been accomplished with much greater success and mastery in other films. LA Confidential is an ensemble film in which the sum is mediocre and each of the parts adds up to almost nothing, and I'm not sure why it has received all the attention it has from critics, fans, and the Academy.

LA Confidential
d: Curtis Hanson w: Brian Helgeland, Curtis Hanson
(Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell)
6/10
TSPDT? #471

Movie Review: The Engima of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Werner Herzog's commitment to historical accuracy in The Engima of Kaspar Hauser, the true story of a half-wild foundling who in May 26, 1828, was discovered on the streets of Nuremberg carrying an unusual origin story, only illustrates how far-fetched Kaspar's claims were, elucidating the theories that he was a professional swindler and method actor. Kaspar, raised in a tiny, hay-strewn room for seventeen years, having never seen another human nor anything beyond his cellar walls before being dumped in Nuremberg by his mysterious caretaker, acquires language and culture with extraordinary rapidity, is more civil and intelligent than many of the citizens he eventually meets (making this film quite similar to Lynch's The Elephant Man), and behaves calmly, patiently, and insightfully, whereas almost every other documented case of actual feral children has resulted in severe mental trauma, extreme retardation, behavioral and emotional issues, and early death. Having passed the window of opportunity for enculturation, most feral children never gain basic human social skills. Kaspar, however, writes a journal, plays piano, and enlightens those around him before mysteriously being murdered.

To see Herzog treat Kaspar's story as an actual instance of long-term seclusion and not an elaborate hoax is a bit difficult to swallow at first, but the story eventually allows for scenes of meaningful commentary on society, culture, logic, and independence--scenes which justify the film's spot at #524 on the TSPDT? list.

Played by the odd-looking Bruno S., who was 41 at the time, Kaspar Hauser is the image of loneliness, confusion, and non-conformity. He has spent all his life passing minute after minute with no stimulation other than his--we assume--thoughts. Prior to leaving his cellar, he doesn't even have dreams (what images and situations would the dreams consist of? we can't imagine anything completely outside our own realm of experience... his dreams would be inseparable from the reality of sitting in the room). One would expect the world of wonders that greets him upon his release to be either frightening or exciting. Women and flowers and sunsets and architecture. Any Hollywood movie would show a chaotic blend of emotional ups-and-downs accompanying these discoveries (remember the awful At First Sight with Val Kilmer?); instead, Kaspar is disillusioned without even knowing it. The bigger his world becomes, the smaller it seems. Observing a tower, he remarks that it must be smaller than the room to which he was confined, which could be seen above him, below him, and all around him whereas he need only turn around to stop seeing the tower. A friend and mentor attempts to explain the flaws in his reasoning, but his disappointment is persistent. People are howling wolves to him, flowers are pointless, and the only happiness he has is the discovery of his own imagination. Inspired by reading, he can soon picture worlds beyond his own, worlds infinitely more peaceful and beautiful, worlds able to be controlled and subdued because they exist only in his dreams. His only comfort, he says, is in sleep.

Added to his disillusionment is the general disappointing value of human society: simpering nobility, cruel strangers, boring families, kowtowing bureaucrats, and pretentious intellectuals. A professor tests his development by guiding him through a logic experiment involving an encounter with a stranger at the crossroads between the Town of Liars and the Town of Truthtellers. Asking only one question, how could you know what town the stranger comes from? "I would ask him if he is a tree frog," Kaspar explains, eliciting the outrage of the tester, who dismisses the answer as being devoid of logic and completely unacceptable, instead offering a correct answer involving double negatives that makes no literal sense whatsoever.

There are plenty of similar scenes, including two in which Kaspar is showcased at both a circus sideshow and an elitist's fete (both of them very much the same), all of them adding up to a general desire for the viewer to retreat like Kaspar to a quiet room and never have to talk to another person again. The culmination comes after his mysterious murder, when the scientists and politicians who have pondered him for two years finally get to perform an autopsy. The protagonist's wet, gray brain is brought before the camera and cut in half, and the learned men discuss the size of his cerebellum and the swelling of his liver as if the cursory examination of his dead body could say far more about the unusual man than his insightful, iconoclastic words ever could.

But before that, on his death bed, he retreats to his imagination, telling those gathered around him the beginning of a story the end of which he cannot recall. Grainy footage shows us Berbers in the Sahara Desert, lost for miles, wandering in circles, consulting their compasses and scientific instruments to no avail. Finally they see an oasis in the distance that their science confirms, but the oldest and wisest among them bends to the sand, tastes the earth, and tells them they're full of shit. Their eyes have deceived them; their goal is in another direction. And it is. It's a beautiful story placing individual intuition and earthly awareness above science and collective corroboration. Which is exactly what Kaspar Hauser realizes in his two years among the humans: it's a hard and loud and stupid world, and sometimes you just need to retreat with your personal beliefs and insanities into a blessed isolation. Come to think of it--judging from Grizzly Man and Rescue Dawn--that might just be what all of Herzog's movies are about.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
d/w: Werner Herzog
(Bruno S.)
7/10
TSPDT? #524

I have a feeling this isn't written very well. Blame it on my tiredness.

Movie Review: Milk (2008)

A couple of months ago, I expressed an optimistic excitement for the Harvey Milk biopic that recently came out. Having now seen the movie, I thought I'd clarify my disappointment.

Milk isn't a terrible movie--it's not even a bad movie--but it's nowhere near the level of gay masterpiece I hoped it would be. It's a conventional, unambiguous rallying cry with no real impact.

Gus Van Sant has done some very original, highly stylized, downright weird films in the past decade. My Own Private Idaho was Shakespeare's world populated by gay prostitutes, with still life sex scenes and split screens and over-the-top dialogue; Psycho was a more surreal (and more scandalous) shot-for-shot replay of the Hitchcock original; Elephant was a hyper-realistic photograph of teenage violence starring no-name high school actors; and so on. His most conventional film was Good Will Hunting, but that at least was moving and had momentum, as well as a terrific soundtrack. Milk is just plain standard. Each character--though based on real people--can be summed up in a simple sentence, such as Emile Hirsch's Cleve Jones, the tenacious queer who... well, I don't even need a full sentence. That's about it.

Sean Penn is convincing and sweet as the 40-year-old New York insurance man who realizes how boring his life is and decides to head west and make an impact. He seems to settle on a life of gay political activism simply because it's the most convenient; the attention, the theatrics, and the social bonding seem almost as important--if not more so--than the actual revolution.

Which is an interesting idea, but not one that the movie really allows you to dwell on. Milk, with its fast-paced biopic structure (here's one important event... then here's another one a year later... then a close friend dies... and then there's a small triumph... and then...) and its attention to political activism, wants to be a cry for equality, not a complex, ambiguous character study. Harvey is reduced to the role of hero, champion, martyr. You're not allowed to be skeptical of his background, his relationships, his motivation, his manipulative methods. You know he's the good guy because he's on the side of equality--the ends justify the means and all that--and so you have to root for him, and that's that.

But I don't enjoy that. I like rooting for villains. I like feeling sorry for the assholes. I like believing, even for just one turbulent moment, that what the psycho killer is saying makes perfect sense. And I can't stand a flawless hero. I can't stand being forced to side with someone.

And as for Harvey Milk as portrayed in this film--well, he just wasn't that inspirational. Look, I'm queer and I'm liberal and all of that. It's a subject that's very close to me. Plus, I'm a sucker for inspiration, and I cry several times a year in movie theaters. But his speeches and his rallies never made me feel anything other than mildly interested on an intellectual level. The bad direction is part of that--the cinematography choices were dreadful, with very little camerawork standing out as exceptional. With each march and protest, a still camera looks head-on at the faces of the few stars as they march forward. Why? If we're supposed to be immersed in the riot, to feel like we're a part of it, why would be facing the rioters? Why would we be so still? Why not throw the camera into the action, shakily following behind the other marchers? But there's none of that.

Maybe Van Sant was trying to prove that gay people are just as normal and boring as straight people, that their inspirational biopics can be just as color-by-numbers and boring as straight biopics. But who wants to see that? Harvey was loud--"My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you!"--Harvey was theatrical. The gay movement at that time loved to shout out loud. So why such a stifling story?

There's only one aspect of the film that's interesting, and that's the relationship between Harvey Milk and Dan White (Josh Brolin, in a fine performance), the straight-laced police officer and political rival. Their awkward dance is compelling--Dan "the man" tries to please and work with, however distantly, his minority colleague, while Harvey desires only to destroy the competitor who represents everything he detests and opposes. Dan keeps promises that Harvey breaks. Dan drunkenly stumbles in the shadows of his fading conservative beliefs--beliefs he doesn't even necessarily understand or trust anymore--while Harvey milks up the limelight. It's a sad and scary battle of wits, and one that paints a dark, political tinge on the otherwise spotless Harvey, but the theme is confined to a few short scenes and left largely unexplored.

As a movie focusing strictly on Dan vs. Harvey, this could have been a good film, but by expanding this into an eight-year-long historical examination of how great San Francisco is and how wonderful and downtrodden gay people always are, the movie strays into the realm of simple, sweeping statements. I'm disappointed by how much critical acclaim this film is getting; aside from Penn and Brolin it's rather lackluster.

Milk
d: Gus Van Sant w: Dustin Lance Black
(Sean Penn, Josh Brolin)
6/10