Reviews

I've rewatched a few Scorsese films lately, and without exception I think I enjoyed them more than I did first time round. I don't think I've always appreciated him enough. I've enjoyed the technique of course; enjoyed the energy and the impact and the tumbling intellect; I enjoyed "You talking to me?" and "I heard some things" and all that iconic stuff. But I think I was actually too young to appreciate the underlying complexity of the texts - Scorsese's extraordinary powers of analysis and organization. The ones I liked most - King Of Comedy, and The Color Of Money (which I haven't seen for a while but feel would still hold up as his most underrated work) - were in a way more accessibly sculptured, befitting their more austere thematic preoccupations and the mental landscapes of their protagonists.

Although Bringing Out The Dead is being regarded as a sort of contemporary revisit of Taxi Driver (the same writer, Paul Schrader; another troubled protagonist who works the night shift among the low life of New York City), it seems to echo The Color Of Money at least as much. In that film, Paul Newman was a former pool prodigy, far removed from his youthful vivacity, reduced to a smug wintry complacency. It was one of Scorsese's most sombre films, as precise yet in a way as abstract and self-contained as pool itself (near the start, Newman describes the essence of excellence at pool as "becoming someone...a student of human moves," but later realizes how such calculation stifles his art, such as it is). Some viewed Color Of Money as somewhat self-effacing (if not a hack studio job). Bringing Out The Dead has as haunted an air about it, but with a much more volatile - that is to say, typically Scorsese-esque edge.

The paramedic profession, as seen here, exists in an agonizing limbo - a frenzied witness to extreme pain and suffering, but lacking the relative power over life and death granted to the full-blown medics. A witness to too much horror, Cage (in his most wide-eyed, unnerving manner; a dream sequence relatively late on, where he imagines the dead emerging from the earth, reinforces the sense that he's almost vampirish in his gauntness) has become tortured by the notion of "spirits leaving the body and not wanting to be put back;" he now measures the city in ghosts per square foot. The film is crammed with religious and spiritual images and themes - from the somewhat ethereal lighting scheme, to the evangelical exuberance of one of his partners (Rhames), to an alleged virgin birth in one scene, to a near-crucifixion in another. At other times, the film often carries the sense of a world turned on its head, stripped of reason: Cage begs the chief to fire him, but the other won't comply, so Cage wearily keeps turning up for work; one disturbed patient will only climb into the ambulance as long as Cage assures him he'll be killed on reaching the hospital.

These devices seem far from subtle when I list them like that, and the film exhibits a rather narrow scope in its preoccupations and incidents. It keeps looping back to the same locations and characters; not just Arquette and her dying father, but to other patients encountered on successive nights. Compared to some other films, it has relatively little interest in evoking New York itself, confining itself to the narrow, sometimes almost disembodied territory of Cage's experience. But it doesn't seem overdone or didactic. And even though it builds, as did several of Scorsese's earlier movies, to a redemption-centered finale in which Cage alleviates at least some of his own suffering by tasting that power normally reserved to others, the tone as the film closes is distinctly restrained and muted.

If one insists on comparing it to Taxi Driver, then the earlier work has the greater bravado and panache - the Bernard Herrmann music and the operatic blood and the "You talking to me?" and all the rest adds up to almost too serendipitous a collection of highlights. It's possible to remember the film in fair detail while drawing a blank on what it was actually about. Schrader, in his film Light Sleeper, has already experimented with an older, more clear-sighted version of Taxi Driver, stripped of the almost romantic depiction of self-actualization and achievement. Bringing Out The Dead seems to be Scorsese's own reexploration of that territory. His technique is as fresh and spellbinding as ever - he uses the tools of cinema as comfortably as a steering wheel - but whereas Taxi Driver may have got away from him and become its own problematic myth, the new film is all his own.

Too much so for many viewers, for the film will not be a financial success. An uncharitable summary would be to say that the only difference between watching any given fifteen minutes of the movie and watching the whole thing is that the latter course takes eight times as long; that the film lacks passion and discovery and internal development. But Scorsese loves and reveres the great American directors (Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, etc.), and surely knows how many of those directors made films - at around his stage of life - which were regarded at the time merely as pale retreads of earlier and better works, but are now treasured as great mature, reflective masterpieces. Against that background, the relative failure of Bringing Out The Dead may all be part of a master plan. And if that's not so, if it's merely a failure and no more - well, after all he's done for us, I'd say he deserves a break.

Pretty disappointing movie just cries out for a rewrite, for an extensive rethink of what would have been worth concentrating on in a scenario such as this. The "big picture" aspects of the scenario are mainly confined to Freeman's exposition-oriented dialogue, yet his scenes provide only the merest hint of the political and personal anguish that drives his decisions. Otherwise the movie's focused on a few inexplicably bland personal stories - it's impossible to know why Leoni and her estranged parents were considered to be worthy of such attention. Despite the gravity of the situation, the movie maintains a pretty evenly bland tone, with an extreme failure to register tension - the ultimate saving of the world is almost anticlimatic. By far the best moments are the special effects-generated impact of the first comet - which are awesome in fact - but even these are undercut by cutting away to Wood's mediocre personal drama, not to mention simply by being too short. And of course, there's little sense of the huge loss that's been incurred by mankind nor of events in the world beyond. Independence Day was not only far zippier but actually managed in its bubble-gum way to convey a better sense of a comprehensive portrait of the event.

Interesting movie has something of the rueful eccentricity of a Peckinpah movie, although it's told on a much more modest scale. The movie has a sense of transition, with expressions of wonderment at the new steam engine vehicles and even at the game of baseball - there's a sense of gun culture being pushed out and marginalized, although the town's crooked banker illustrates that the new age isn't going to be free of corruption. The structure also has an appealing oddity, illustrated by the band of pursuers on the train, monitored through the entire movie, only to turn up at the end after it's too late. Duvall is occasionally almost Apostle-like as Jesse James and Robertson gives one of his most flavoured performances as Cole Younger. The movie seems very much like a tentative first work and explores themes and ideas in a fundamentally very modest way, but the overall mood is quirky and distinctive and the trim ninety minutes running time makes it an appealing digression.

The movie now seems a bit less than its reputation - - not so much a thrilling intellectual work as a great instinctive composition in which the individual elements hold enormous, almost mythic fascination. Chief among these are the aphorisms about cinema, the use of Greek mythology to signify a kind of classic culture which then bounces off the tensions in the making of the movie (Lang's shots consist mainly of static tableau of statues etc., with the notable exception of a swimming nude); the "classically" statuesque Bardot; the constant splashes of color (the red couch and chairs; the red towel in which she surrounds herself; the red car in which she's killed; the frosty blue of Palance's house). The long domestic scenes have a complex yet compellingly raw, intuitively messy emotional trajectory - she turns against Piccoli perhaps because she thought he was calculatedly pushing her toward Palance, trying to use her as a medium of exchange; this antipathy comes despite her own overtures toward Palance - presumably signifying the confused headstrong nature of female sexuality and its potentially disastrous consequences.

One of Hitchcock's most thrilling examinations of psychosexual ambiguity, with the Grant-Bergman relationship veering from an initial meet-cute to genuine (beautifully conveyed) mutual delight to sadistic manipulation - he makes a whore of her and forces the fact again and again into her face, seldom giving an inch until the very end, where his change of heart has a largely tacked on feeling. We first see him from behind, quietly, predatorily watching at one of her drunken parties; they go for a drive and we see his hand poised to grab the wheel even as he pretends to submit himself to her drunken control over the car - it sets the tone, for Grant never relents on his desire to possess her, and reacts all too like a spurned lover to events, belittling her love even as she continually reasserts it; the callousness with which he distances himself from her after learning of her assignment is breathtaking. The main plot can hardly match the complexity of the central relationship, even though it's an excellently constructed yarn, with the fine set pieces of the party and the ultimate escape, which is essentially a battle between Rains and Grant for possession of the weakened Bergman - a finale which emphasizes how she's always been a prisoner, of her father's myth, of the male system, of her own emotions.

Highly entertaining movie, full of good dialogue and individual scenes, very effectively placed on the precipice of darkness and despair, the main problem being that it just sort of hangs there, not so much ending as just running out. The improvised, deeply discovered feel of the project certainly pays off - Chula (middle-aged marijuana grower) finds real nuance in her mid-life character, her agenda never openly stated; Ratner as a guy one step behind, frustrated and prone to moments of sexual grasping, is an equally challenging creation; Sivak's bankruptcy is a more conventional strand, but well conveyed by an attractive actress. Although Scholte's decline into desperate masochistic sex and his pathetic obsession with Chula may be the main plot motor, it's the most conventional, the most obviously "dirty" and the least rewarding aspect of the film. The movie is attractively shot in a dark-hued, claustrophobic manner, intimately in tune with its characters, only occasionally falling too easily into conventional alienation and disillusionment.

Grandly exciting thriller in an old-fashioned unemotive style. De Niro has never thrown away his mannerisms so completely - he and Reno build a relationship here of mutual trust built on shared experience and articulated through actions, the essence of which they expertly convey in minimalist fashion. The soundtrack seemed muffled to both of us - maybe it was the theater - but the forward propulsion is so powerful that it didn't matter. It's as if Frankenheimer cast out all the c**p that often weighs down the genre, and just took a clean, stylish line toward the material - there are numerous extremely fluid and imaginative moments, even if some transitions just consist of a "contact" who knows where to find people, and thus sets them on to the next step. The car chases are obvious highlights - one through the incredibly narrow streets of a small town through Nice, another through Paris itself, each squeezes full impact out of the scenery while hiding all traces of artifice - the mechanics of the chase have seldom been conveyed so fluently.

An eloquent, excellently controlled movie, that seems aware of and comfortable with the range of sports movie cliches, and doesn't really try to transcend them, but rather works within them with a closer focus both on the heart of the performer and on the motivation of the coach who pushes him: the intuition of one and the methodicality of the other synthesize into a framework within which Pre's great courage and stamina might have achieved greatness - without that synthesis, his enormous passion might merely have caused him to misdiagnose himself and throw everything away (like after his loss at Munich when he takes a job in a bar and drifts). The movie seems less distinctive when it tackles the secondary strands of girlfriend and his activism (against the politics of the Athletics Association), but the evocation of the events themselves is great and Pre's charisma is well captured. Towne works in a familiar smooth contemporary style, although Crudup is so naturalistic and wired up that he almost breaks loose. And Sutherland invests his usual wintery distance with real depth of feeling - there's a genuine excitement in the dialogue between the two, a mutual testing of the limits.

Ultimately, the movie seems to lack ambition - coming close to the kind of cliched French movie that's ridiculed for consisting mainly of a lot of musing in attractive settings, but that ultimately fails to deliver anything new (apart maybe from the slightly Gothic setting of the old house overlooking the cemetery) or insightful. The structure involves a dead sister whose birthday is celebrated on Beart's own (and who shares the same name); one surviving sister who is self-servingly promiscuous and another who verges on being a recluse (but who had a child at sixteen, entailing that perhaps her passion was spent thereafter, leaving only the possibility of an early death) and the teenage daughter whose outlook is forged by a synthesis of these two role models - there are plenty of vague ideas there about influences and parallels and transference (Beart having stolen perhaps not only the dead girl's life but also much of Bonnaire's, and that of the teacher who kills himself near the start after she rejects him, and bits and pieces of her lovers') but it never coalesces into anything worthwhile. The would-be brooding elegant restrained tone serves only to keep it at arm's length.

This is a neat little movie with a lot of energy and control - it's not overly flashy or gimmicky and doesn't indulge in excessive Tarantino-aping; the Field character is truly sleazy, but the movie keeps everything within plausible limits of degradation and loss of control, so that his pull on London is easy to understand without losing moral perspective. It's a two-hander at heart, but through various secondary characters - especially Field's Gramps, a hopeless drug addict - it manages to carve out a plausible broader social base (even if you wonder how the guys ever manage to get through any of their shifts intact). Some of the specific exposition is tedious, or overly familiar and dutiful, or just marginally amusing, but the meat of it lies simply in colourful incident, and in that regard it has real panache and sense of character.

Surely the most mature of the trilogy; it's certainly the most elliptical and stylistically audacious. At the start, Cybulski is a laidback, coldly cynical assassin who lolls on his back in a field waiting to carry out his latest hit; suffering a crisis of confidence in light of his awakening love for a woman, he flirts with desertion before resigning himself to the demands of his position. His personal journey speaks eloquently to the national trauma, and he's just the most prominent in a complex collection of transition figures, caught on the official last night of the war, now looking forward but not yet able to escape the ravages of war and the attendant moral and psychological confusion, not yet free of potential victimhood (like the mayor's assistant who on learning of his boss' promotion drinks excessively in celebration of his own presumed advancement, but in his disruptive drunkenness kills off what future he had). The ending, intercutting a personal tragedy with the dancers doing the elegant polannaise in the streaming light of dawn, like disembodied Felliniesque figures, perfectly encapsulates the film's mix of toughness and allusiveness.

Very cliched, flat drama shows all its stagy origins while making you wonder how it ever hung together as a theatrical piece - nothing is subtle or implied; it all sits out in the open, almost instantly superficial and unnuanced (despite the ambiguity surrounding the ultimate truth of the case), and shot in a flat way that does nothing to elevate it. Carides' performance is hard to read, which in part is deliberate but in this context ultimately leaves you out in limbo; LaPaglia's role is largely reactive; Barrett is just awful (although awful in a way so common in Australian movies that it may - shudder the thought - be quite realistic) as the father, and the movie's echoes of Oleanna (in the issue of who's telling the truth, the overall staginess, and in the feeling that she may be crazy or unreasonable) are unhelpful in that they expose the unelevated language and general clunkiness of this version, to its considerable detriment. The film certainly doesn't contribute anything to the cinema of sexual politics (unless it be the modest benefit of an "Australian perspective").

Rather unusual movie in the context of recent Hollywood, which with a just slightly harder edge and less sympathetic soft-edged casting than Ryan and Broderick could have achieved a delicious nastiness. The scenes of the two of them wallowing in their voyeurism with the slightly hazy images of the camera obscura forming a giant backdrop are an occasionally superb portrayal of unabashed spying and scopophilia. The descent of Karyo from stylish, self-confident restauranteur to an unemployed disaster encased in plaster, desperate for someone to scratch his back, is surprisingly unsentimental and clear-eyed. Even the obligatory happy ending doesn't dilute the pervasive grimness as much as it might have done. The film has a gritty, often intriguing visual look, helped along by Ryan's odd off-kilter wardrobe - it stops short of truly hard-hitting commentary and is sometimes too sentimental or prone to knockabout comedy at the cost of pursuing its central possibilities, but it's distinctive at least.

Happiness, says the narrator at the end, is not a lark. And the film believes it, even though as he speaks the glimpses of children playing with kites and daintily placed chairs on the beach (echoing those set out earlier by Gabin in the back of his cart for the visiting prostitutes) continue to evoke the swirling compositional grace and elegance which mark the film's every moment. Far more unpredictable and radical than most portmanteau films, the highlight is the second story, which at first seems to be about a group of men who get together one night when the local brothel is closed, then follows the whores' trip to the country (with a delightful interlude on the train as they share the compartment with an old peasant couple and a randy salesman); then returns to the brothel - Ophuls' highly liberal camera ultimately pans deliriously around the windows from the outside as the place fills with dance, spilling celebration and delight. The many surprises of that story perfectly evoke the enormous span of human emotional experience; it touches on so many dreams of escape whereas the other two episodes, both much shorter and darker, remind us of the occasional price of such dreams.

Pretty poor collection of fragments, especially given the amazing cast, with each episode merely going through flat on-again off-again kinds of moves. Quaid's spinning a series of lying stories in bars has the most twisted potential (never fulfilled); Jolie has the most joie de vivre and lifts her segments despite Phillippe's utterly anaemic counterplaying; Connery and Rowlands have to cope with a particularly banal series of arguments about a dalliance of his 25 years ago. The premise is that talking about love is like dancing about architecture, and yet not: communication is exalted, and the strands all have to get past some unburdening or facing of weakness - Anderson needs the courage to take a chance; Quaid and Stowe have to start talking to each other. The movie has little visual distinction - the occasional shots of LA transitioning from day to night (it pretty much all happens at night until the light-drenched happy ending) aren't very evocative of anything, and it just ends up seeming like a series of mostly low-energy acting classes in blandly pretty locations.

Set mostly at the seedy end of the music hall world, the film has a pristine quality that's as unreal as Chaplin's own performance: his room always seems like a stage set, and the drama that unfolds there between Bloom and he is more a vision of mutual redemption than a depiction of it. The flashbacks to his heyday are similarly shot in a cavernous, icy vacuum, soaked in loneliness - confirmed by the reverse shot to rows of empty seats; when he shows the audience during the ultimate triumphant benefit, their (insincere and forced) clapping is as soulless and distant as the earlier silence (even so, he grasps the illusion as his last best hope). A couple of brief disembodied scenes of Chaplin, and later the two of them, moving along the river bank, staring ahead, embody the pervasive sense of dislocation. In this context, Chaplin's endless inspirational monologues and homilies can plausibly be taken as a knowing self-delusion, an almost pathological insistence on an underlying meaning of transforming, redemptive power, even as his own life so completely fails to yield it - the character's name (Calvero) bleeds religious pain every time it's uttered. Keaton's brief appearance is more emblematic of true loss and pain, but the film has little choice but to reject such realism, and keeps his involvement to a minimum.

It's an astonishingly minor film, content to withhold even the satisfaction of generic closure; the randomness of the title, with its implication of turbulence and drama, is the very thing that's missing from the film, which is carefully composed, meticulously played by two very restrained actors, accompanied by discreetly elegant jazz. The main idea seems to be about doubling and echoing - their twin interest in what happened and the pain of the loss and the absence pulls them together such that they're not sure what's a truly experienced emotion and what merely arises as a matter of structure and proximity at a time of crisis; Ford's job as an internal affairs officer, both pursuing and goading a dirty cop, ought to be further elaboration on this, as should be the theme of projection and image-making (as in her political campaign). But it never really gels - the melodramatic structure doesn't facilitate things when it's as stifling and solemn as it is here - what should have been a quivering pain becomes merely turgid.

Suggests that Burns' initial promise has almost completely dissipated - this movie has barely a single line that rings true, and no wit whatsoever; the characters emote in dreadful cliches. Burns hasn't progressed at all as a writer or director: the movie is awful at generating a sense of place - the town remains an enigma despite his supposed roots there (take the bar scene one crowded night as the camera moves over various people gossiping and bitching - it has no pizzazz; it's flat and feels studio-bound and sterile). Beautiful Girls comes to mind as a more authentic evocation of this kind of blue-collar environment. Thematically too the film has no worthwhile ideas, and numerous plot lines remain unresolved - presumably because the movie was never really interested in all the little things it threw in to generate a sense of buzz and emotional breadth (like the friend who makes a pass at Jovi during the night he's out searching for Holly). The finale makes a mountain out of a decision that barely amounts to a molehill.

Cavalier dispenses with two of the cinema's most seductive tools: the human face, and conventional narrative. It's a film about (very loosely) a relationship, told entirely through voice-overs by the two participants, spoken over largely static images (of household objects, animals, parts of the body, rooms, landscapes etc.). At times an emotional direction emerges (an articulation of love, loss, frustration), then it retreats. At times the film seems to be about its own making; at others it seems merely to drift. It defeated my patience. For much of the time, it might as well be basing its art on the idea that a ton of bricks thrown up into the air would land in the shape of a house. You smell coherence, but suspect it's just a pattern in the clouds. Like a poem, it'd need multiple viewings (and being 75 minutes long helps in that respect anyway). But that's not how most of us watch movies. It's not necessarily that we want an easy fix, but we want the movie to breathe on screen, not just in our imaginations. Cavalier's film is deeply passive: it reduces cinema to a static, almost feeble medium. La Rencontre is several degrees of deprivation too many.

The film would be inherently fascinating even if it were no good, but there's actually a lot here of genuine interest. The repeated questions about why the directors make cinema and whether it's "mortal" receive predictably lame responses, but the glimpses of them at work, punctuated with their 50 second films, is mesmerizing. Many of them turn the project into a commentary on cinema in some form - Boorman films Neil Jordan at work, with the actors looking quizzically into the camera (a common device here, also used by Angelopoulos and Costa-Gavras); Lelouch has a sort of reverse version of the Vertigo kiss, designed with great panache. in which a historic parade of cameras observes the spiraling lovers; some, like Rivette, just take varied people and let them play (he's very engaging, seen protesting that the film is too short). Lynch's segment is magnificently skillful and striking, with a potted narrative of police, a 50's style family, and a bunch of space aliens holding a captive woman - it's almost as effective as the whole of Lost Highway and utterly distinctive. In all, it's a tumbling parade of cinematic images that evokes love, passion and breadth, whether the directors take a playful approach (a majority) or aim for greater seriousness (as in Handke's filming of a potted TV news bulletin).

Far from successful movie makes some distinctly weird artistic choices, right up to the last scene The rather adventurous underlying structure (Hanna's emotional confusion and attempt to forge a workable life and career, while poised between a politically and ideologically adventurous mix of men) needs a far more dynamic, less portentous telling than is employed here. The movie is mostly tedious and arbitrary and seems like a very odd way of approaching the undoubtedly important underlying issues. Clayburgh isn't a very exciting presence, and the men around her just float in and out - the forging of oppositions and conflicts leads us not to a heightened appreciation of the broader politics but just to melodramatic excess (for example, D.A. Byrne opposes her in court with particular enmity, but later - despite little apparent chemistry - she has a child with him even though their differences remain largely unreconciled : you just stare blankly at all this...)