Reviews

Hey, wake up IMDb reviewers. Hiller Brood, the security firm that is half the focus of The East, is based on Booz Allen, the Chicago firm that is the largest private spy company in the world and that supplied Edward Snowden with his felicitous job at the NSA. Business Week's site has a good summary article on their business model.

Also: every review I've read seems to think the female lead's terrorist love interest, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is the group's leader, despite the only slightly subtle dig at that expectation the movie provides, when the infiltrator calls him the leader and gets surprised looks, after which the Ellen Page character is shown to exercise the most influence. (Hey, they're anarchists, no leaders, duh!)

Don't know why some reviewers think the movie doesn't take a stand on the issue at its core: the morality of retaliation against corporate wrongdoing. The terrorists (and infiltrator) are young, good-looking and thoroughly moral, while their corporate enemies are ugly, brutish and thoroughly unpleasant, tho they have, of course, the law, and all its apparatus, firmly on their side.

I just saw two of Schröeter's films (admittedly much earlier, by about a decade, when his career, such as it was, was just beginning). The first was some unnamed cheap piece of boring fluff where he uses mildly artistic backdrops to pretend his (mostly undressed, the only virtue of the film) characters are on a world tour, and der Bomberpilot—translation available—in which three female (and only occasionally nude) friends go from entertaining Hitler on stage to boring hundreds, on stage and in this film, in a self-indulgent plot-less (sorry, the IMDb editor refuses to print that as one word, so I had to add a hyphen) semi-musical—without any musicality—European and American—sense a theme here?—romp nearly as pointless as the previous film. No pilot of any kind, nor any war planes, make an appearance, though a 707 plays a brief supporting role.

With that, and also, like Shane Anderson previously on this page, being a massive Bachmann fan and awed Malina admirer, and having read the reviews here and the scant criticism available on German sites (that should tell you something), I feel no loss in having decided not to even bother seeing it at all tonight, tho it was being shown, with subtitles (my German is good enough for reading, not good enough for plays and movies), a mere 9 blocks from my house. I suggest you do the same.

I can vouch for Anderson's terse yet comprehensive summation without having seen what even ten years into Schröeter's career can only be, in his incapable hands, another travesty, despite having secured the estimable Huppert. As to commenter JustApt's insight into the 'animal' anagram of the title, it's useful to know that there are NO German cognates for animal, the German word for which is 'Tier'.

Contains a classic confrontation when Lucas drops his loaded (but uncocked) rifle in front of the schoolhouse, and the teacher orders him "never to bring a dangerous weapon near this schoolhouse again" because he's not responsible with it. The teacher escalates the battle by declaring that the reason Mark isn't getting his homework done is that his father likes conversation too much, and orders Mark to stay indefinitely after school so he can supervise his homework. Mark can't take the insult to his father and runs out of the classroom. He hides in an old mineshaft (was there any part of the West without an abandoned mine in walking distance?), and Lucas and the teacher are forced to combine forces to save him when he's caught in a collapse. In the process, the value of studying the Greeks is affirmed. Won't spoil it by telling you how.

I had a devil of a time convincing my movie friend to go to see this jewel, because he was sure it was a documentary. It is not. The movie doesn't tell THE history of violence. The title is a wryly understated play on the characterization in pseudo-psychiatric evaluations that explains why people who outwardly seem to be relatively functional members of society nonetheless commit heinous crimes: "the subject has a history of violence" (the way you'd use it in a sentence like "Cronenberg has a history of making his audiences uncomfortable").

It's as if violence were an addictive habit that the weak-willed can't quite get a handle on. While your average discontented male manages to suppress the desire to take out his everyday frustrations directly on their objects, in some, the characterization implies, the impulse is too strong, or the ability to suppress too weak, and their lives (and police records) are dotted with outbreaks of fistfights and mayhem.

And indeed the men in this movie all have such histories, or create them before our eyes. Yet in each case the relationship to violence is distinctly different. Two characters are inured to it and almost comically blasé; one has by dint of extreme effort weaned himself from that sort of indifference; and one is pushed to violence despite his heroic efforts to avoid it.

So the stereotype is wrong. (Isn't it by now itself something of a stereotype that stereotypes are wrong?) Except for the psychopathic, our relationship to violence isn't inherent and expressed by how often we resort to it, but rather is mediated by how much of it presents itself in our lives and how we end up dealing with it. And inasmuch as it provides an outlet for suppressed anger, it's cathartic and, as Cronenberg enjoys illustrating, can as a byproduct lead to the exploration of uncharted waters for women as well. (Okay, I enjoyed that scene too.)

Cronenberg isn't out to make us squirm with irresolvable moral dilemmas. Except for the psychopaths' victims (who appear briefly and with a minimum of on-screen mutilation), the victims in this movie all have it coming big time. If we're made to feel uncomfortable, it's because the payback is simultaneously sweet and gory, and it's hard to reconcile totally contradictory gut-level reactions. One thing is abundantly clear: if you're going to make a movie where your central character meets up with a whole bunch of violence, he better be exquisitely trained and have a preternatural feel for it, or the comedic aspects of the experience just won't come across well.

I think that people who refer to Hitchcock in attempting to identify a movie's style are stealing a lazy beat from movie industry copywriters, who desperately want readers to think the movie will produce the same kind of satisfaction that Hitchcock himself could generate. Well that's not how it actually works. There are Hitchcock homagers, hard to do and a respectable bunch (in that they acknowledge their debt--Stanley Donen, Brian DePalma), Hitchcock wannabees (too numerous to mention), and Hitchcock. Saying that a director has produced a Hitchcock-like movie is like saying a playwright has produced a Shakespeare-like play. Just resist the temptation.

What Hitchcock had going for him is everything Dream Lover lacks. Hitchcock portrayed ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The question he asked himself and his viewers was (when he was at his best), what would you do? Would you consider an offer to safely bump off your difficult spouse? Would you turn in an appealing but obviously disturbed impostor, or instead try to figure out on your own what the real story is? Would you save your country or your loved ones? Could you (forgive and) love someone who prostituted herself for her country? (Well, this last one was rhetorical: of course the answer's yes if the prostitute is Ingrid Bergman.)

What the writer/director presents us with here is: what changes would you go through if you had so little ability to connect to other human beings that you have no clue that the person you married just wanted all along to rip you off and destroy you? I'm being generous here; the film actually fails to thoroughly set Spader up as an emotional cripple, though it takes a feeble stab at it. Kazan Jr. isn't imitating Hitchcock here, but rather Don Segal (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and without any compensating anti-McCarthyist political subtext. When you leave a good Hitchcock movie, you think, "That could have been me." When you leave Dream Lover, you think, "eight bucks, and they said it was Hitchcock-like!

p.s. For the commenter who was impressed by the movie's "paranoia is a heightened state of awareness" line: that's the signature statement of the Scottish (anti-)pyschiatrist R.D. Laing from the '70s. Great guy.