The Master (2012)

IT IS EERIE and discomfiting to have first viewed ‘The Master’ on the eve of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death. To have watched him fully embody the film’s title and seen his messianic command take shape and grow amongst his flock, even as it fractured at the foundations. To have been captivated, unblinking, by his rapport with Joaquin Phoenix—one ruddy, round, and relentless, the other wretched and wracked—in a connection ineffable and inexplicable to everyone but themselves. And above all to have thought, ‘This is a great talent. A gifted, grounded, and uniquely human performer. One who has grown alongside a director of equal merit, Paul Thomas Anderson, who recognizes and celebrates his gifts. What a rare prize it will be to watch them explore their potential together in the coming decades.’

And now all too rare. There is a temptation to lionize a body of work once its creator is gone, not least when he left his career at its zenith. But ‘The Master’ was a compelling and memorable mystery even before news of Hoffman’s death broke, and it remains so in the aftermath, due in part to Hoffman’s presence but not wholly. Fraught subtexts and unresolved threads are unavoidable in any film that (allegedly) depicts the origins of Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. And Anderson explores them like no one else.

Anderson’s earlier films were expansive ensemble works, starting with ‘Hard Eight’ ‘Boogie Nights’, and culminating in the epic ‘Magnolia’. More recently he has narrowed and intensified his focus, first in the clunky but compelling ‘Punch Drunk Love’ (2003) before stunning audiences with ‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007). The leading actors in those films could not have come from more different traditions. The first, Adam Sandler: a crass, lumpy, deliberately amateurish everyman with a dismissible mien but hidden wounds. The second, Daniel Day Lewis: noble bearing, hard-cut profile, vast presence, smoldering emotions, and Shakespearean gravitas.

Five years later (the longest quiet stretch of Anderson’s career), Hoffman stepped forward to bridge the gap as the eponymous Master, called Lancaster Dodd. His creased face carries all the scorn and poise and confidence of a prophet, but still there is a boyish simplicity to his smile and common cast to his features that cuts through all cinematic artifice. How could he possibly be pretending? Acting at all? How could we not believe him? And collared by his side is Freddie Quell (Phoenix), an irrepressible alcoholic and hedonic WWII vet with PTSD who serves as the audience’s inlet to the Master’s private crusade. Virgil leading a pitiful Dante. In this role Phoenix is everything Hoffman is not—hunched while the other walks erect, ambivalent while the other is resolute, aimless while the other speeds upon a motorcycle towards a distant point across desert flats, laughing and helmetless. Quell is a piece of prey rolling over on the altar of its predator.

Both actors’ performances are transformative, so perfectly dissimilar as to create a seamless whole. It is not explained to us how they meet nor do they seem to know themselves (for a time). It is a relationship that simply exists because it must, and it does so more deeply than any other on screen. Thomas’s direction exploits the dynamic through his characteristically long takes, probing close-ups (echoing Quell’s job as a portraitist in the years after the war), and with such a shallow depth of field that two characters hunched over a table become floating heads of perfect focus amidst a wide sky of muddled stars.

Anderson also changed cinematographers for the first time among his feature films, using Mihai Mălaimare, Jr. and shooting entirely on 65 mm. The resulting picture is startlingly precise, trenchant, and deeply beautiful, capturing both the pristine definition of nearly neon-blue Pacific waves as well as the warm, granulated semi-sepia cast of Quell’s department store family portraits.

This meticulous framing and imagery is equaled by lethally honed dialogue that the actors must have relished. Says Master upon meeting Quell: “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher. But above all, I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.” It’s stilted in a way, running up almost uncomfortably into stylized intimacy. But those long takes and the camera’s quiet comfort inject an irrepressible rawness and realism that is breathtaking in any context: a steadicam panning through a department store as two well-dressed men fight like wounded birds, or rattling through a dark and claustrophobic clapboard hallway before bursting into a fallow field and sprinting out towards dusk.

These intense passages focus predominantly on Quell, first in his lonely misery and then on the consequences of his thralldom to Master. This leaves the film’s other characters spinning slowly in small eddies of their own, peripheral to the central whirlpool that leads down into indefinite depths. Being so focused and yet so technically unresolved is one of ‘The Master’s challenges. Perhaps this a problem for some, but at least it is a deliberate one. Like Quell pacing doggedly from wall to window, ‘The Master’ is vividly committed to its course, even if that course never seems to land anywhere else than where it started—on a painfully bright beach and Quell alone with his woman made of sand.

This emptiness may leave some troubled, confused, or merely disinterested. And the film does indeed lack for a universal truth or central dogma to grasp like that so fervently espoused by its Master. But Anderson’s plots are rarely linear and clear in their intent. To experience them is enough. No prescribed lesson need be learned to feel as though something significant has occurred. Anderson, like his Master, shows us an open hand, clenches it so tightly as to make us believe he is holding onto everything, and then opens it again, revealing nothing. And we are kept taut, riveted by his commitment and inspired by his vividness, yet still afforded the slack to seize hold of our own passions, our own struggles, and then release them. Alas, as with Hoffman, some can never let go.

True Romance (1993)

IT COMES AS little surprise that Tony Scott’s ‘True Romance’ was originally part of a longer screenplay by Quentin Tarantino that also included ‘Natural Born Killers’. ‘True Romance’ predates Oliver Stone’s ‘Natural…’ as well as Tarantino’s own ‘Pulp Fiction’ by a year and in many ways is a template for both: run and gun vigilantism, sociopaths around every bend, retro chic meets modern gratuity, a star-studded ensemble, and even the dialogue. To a degree, that is—‘Pulp’s “Does he look like a bitch?” being much snappier than this film’s “Do I look like a beautiful blonde with big tits and an ass that tastes like French vanilla ice cream?” But where those later (and more celebrated, if not always greater) episodes hearken to an Elmore Leonard kind of debauched criminal underbelly, ‘True Romance’ attempts to position itself in more of the ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ mold, wherein two young loves have nothing to lose and by breaking the law somehow win our affection.

A fine idea, but it doesn’t quite work. Despite being founded on a wholly unironic ‘true romance’, the film spends very little time establishing this connection between Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) beyond their whirlwind first date, which turns out to have been a birthday present setup with a half-hearted prostitute. Thus we have virtually nothing invested in the couple before the guns come out and they’re on the lam with a half-mil in cola. Aside from hazy scruples what the two have most in common is their desperate need for love and to escape. He idolizes her sweetness, she his coolness, and neither seems interested in looking deeper than the façade each has built for the other.

In a typical action flick this is to be expected. And judged on those grounds, ‘True Romance’ is quite a trip, essentially consisting of a series of showdowns that become progressively more physical: Clarence vs. Drexl (Gary Oldman); Christopher Walken vs. Dennis Hopper (their characters being merely excuses for the two actors to meet); Alabama vs. Tony Soprano Virgil (James Gandolfini); everybody else vs. everyone who’s left. Given the waning gravitas of the actors involved, this transition is well-chosen. In the first clash, Gary Oldman is electric as a white Jamaican drug dealer, his face crisscrossed with scars, his teeth mottled, one eye milky. Slater holds his own, but only because of some ballsy dialogue—Oldman is the gale that picks up Slater’s ember and fans it into flame. The next meeting, a 10-minute sit-down between Walken and Hopper, is the film’s raison d’être—a perfectly hypnotizing exchange between two masters for whom a tightening around the eyes or faint nod communicates far more than the orgiastic gunfire and eruption of down pillows in the film’s climax. In that earlier scene, Jeffrey Kimball’s camerawork wisely slows down, favoring wider angles, fewer cuts, and more static shots. The dramatic drop lighting and passive observers in the background impart a theatrical quality that is far removed from the rest of the film, where tight, provocative angles and quick cuts are common. On a related note, Alabama’s battle with Virgil is also quite affecting, but mostly for its bestial shock value—choreography trumping content.

And that is ‘True Romance’ in brief. Some flashy affectations to a depth beyond its stature that ultimately diminish its actual nature. If Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino would cease protesting (pretending?) that violence is secondary to the film’s “bittersweet” core, the little romance that exists here would feel more true.

TL;DR: Deeper than ‘Natural Born Killers’, but how much is that really saying?

Casino (1995)

‘CASINO’ IN BRIEF: 90 minutes spent on a labyrinthine (and even somewhat nuanced) buildup of a far-ranging criminal empire followed by 90 minutes of personal disasters. Altogether that makes three hours of bad things happening to people we don’t like. It’s a kitchen-sink approach to filmmaking, with ‘Sunset Boulevard’-style plot arc and narration; not one but two (wait, make it three) characters with voiceovers; freeze frames; slow-motion; dimmers and highlights; subtitles; and a virtually omnipresent pop music bed that dictated the audience’s moods at every turn. Only when characters were completely in collapse, shouting too loudly to appreciate Scorsese’s topical song selection, does the music stop. Like oases, those open spaces beneath the dialogue are welcome moments of respite no matter the scene (e.g. whichever drug-fueled tirade Sharon Stone might be unleashing on a long-suffering Robert De Niro).

If it weren’t so constantly self-congratulatory, ‘Casino’ might be enjoyable without caveat, as it is fundamentally sound as both a gangster film and a rise-and-fall memoir. But Scorsese simply has too much fun with his own have-it-both-ways take on Italian mobsters—Romantic and brutalized—so a story that would have been stretched at two hours somehow sprawls into three. Most of Scorcese’s big pictures handle themes akin to ‘Casino’s, but none spends as much time setting up a payoff that is hardly rewarding. ‘The Departed’ is the only film for which he has won an Oscar for Best Director, perhaps because it broke out of this expository rut and allowed its characters to define themselves through their interactions instead of the aggrandizing, rather detached monologues used here (and in ‘Goodfellas’).

This also occurs just by simply existing, instead of grandstanding, as we see in ‘Casino’s finest frame, which is also its last: a decidedly curmudgeonly De Niro, approaching his dotage, sits recollecting all that he’s endured and stares out at us like a dying portrait. And we all, at last, can exhale.

Insomnia (1997)

BEFORE STIEG LARSSON (or more ironically, his death) introduced the world to Lisbeth Salander, Scandinavian crime drama had already developed a durable and distinctive model spanning cinema, television, and text. Its plots explored the tacit tension between progressive societies and provincial prejudice, half-hearted protagonists with misanthropic streaks, and a melancholic pallor unique to the lands of the midnight sun. Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ books and their filmed adaptations have become the most recognized of these stories, but their very fame also decouples them from the unheroic anonymity the genre prefers. A better illustration might be Erik Skjoldbjærg’s ‘Insomnia’ from 1997, which follows Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård), a disgraced Swedish detective, to a remote Norwegian town north of the Arctic Circle to solve the murder of a teenage girl. It’s an unremarkable premise, assuredly among the oldest in crime fiction. But if one cliché may allow another, ‘the devil is in the details’ and in ‘Insomnia’ they are sinister indeed.

The film is shot without much glamor, professionally albeit with an apparently limited budget and on-location. The cinematography has a washed-out, documentarian feel starkly enhanced by the super-8 styling of its startling opening sequence. Soon after meeting Engström we feel as though we’re behind the scenes of an episode of ‘Cops’ to intimate and explicit for public broadcast.When the detective arrives to town it is beset by fog and dusky despite the midnight sunlight. He has little knowledge of his new colleagues, the case at hand, or the land itself; the fog seems to shrouds many paths into the future and provides no hints of which to take. Then, in a moment of forgivable confusion, he makes a terrible mistake and his world starts fading into white. Not black. Rather, a perpetual light that slowly sinks him into isolated chambers lacking continuity with the world beyond. Standing in an apartment and looking towards the window, all we see is a blinding brightness that refuses to give way. Engström is locked inside an open cage, in sleepless purgatory. And then ‘Insomnia’ truly begins.

The role is perfect for Skarsgård: looming, weary, soft-spoken, yet at times brutally forceful, we believe both his temerity and his ambivalence. In the land of the midnight sun he is a perpetual shadow. His relationships with other characters are quite vaguely sketched, but absolutely meticulous blocking gives the attentive viewer all he needs to know. In groups of two or three, characters subtly orbit through three-quarters shot to reflect the constantly changing power dynamics. Sometimes they enter the frame at an unexpected angle or at a strange interval, as if the film was jump-cut and we blinked a second too long. Or, like Engström, we fell prey to a sleepless exhaustion. The dialogue, meanwhile, is straightforward and largely procedural—only by watching the visual cues (how the camera disguises a face, how a character meets or avoids another’s eyes) can we fully appreciate the forces at play. For Engström is not one to betray his intentions, not least after he has become complicit in the very case he’s investigating.

In this sense it is hard to classify this film as a character study, since it does not sufficiently explore or reveal Engström’s character. At the beginning we get hints of his background—disgrace in Sweden, virtual banishment to the boondocks—and at the end his future remains unclear. A minimalist score by Biosphere, largely ambient/electronic, also gives us precious few cues. It is not the director’s intent, nor that of his co-screenwriter Nikolaj Frobenius, for us to reflect on Engström as an archetype or dissect him as a specimen. But neither is he a cipher, simply channeling his environment without coloring it. To the contrary, his flaws and failures directly cause everything in ‘Insomnia’ aside from the murder that began it. The story simply exists.

Only once the film is through do we realize what a tightrope it has walked, between gratuity and obfuscation, obsession and apathy, unavoidable concrete evidence and pure fabrication. And though Engström’s life is weary, callous, unsympathetic, and locked in a downward spiral, the viewer does not feel belabored or tortured by the viewing. Skjoldbjærg is not concerned with shock and awe, nor is his main character a long-suffering masochist whose soul-wrenching distress is visited upon his audience with mordant glee (looking at you, Darren Aronofksy). Neither are we left cold by the proceedings—we feel alarm and dismay, some revulsion and exhaustion all—but there remains a foundation of sobriety and somberness that allows us to engage the narrative as it if were a vivid police report and not an abusive rite of passage. The film ends with a long cut of Engström riding away in the back of a car, caught but not captured, with his deadened eyes looking almost directly into the camera as if to ask, ‘who are you to judge?’

A 2002 remake by Christopher Nolan starred Al Pacino and Robin Williams. (Amidst decades of ebullient joy, in that one year Williams unleashed a lifetime of villainy in ‘Death to Smoochy’ and ‘One Hour Photo’ besides.) Predictably, it spent too much of its energies on the mind games of its characters and too little on the environment that birthed them. The difference is critical: people end, places don’t. And this is the sober center of the Scandinavian model, where the petty lunacy of man plays out across indifferent landscapes. Our greed may mar their surfaces over the years, but their influence on us is far more final. Their indefinite expanse defies the closure human stories crave, and they outlast us. Sleepless.

Wild at Heart (1990)

DAVID LYNCH is a director of meticulous consideration and invention. The kind of director who will ‘build’ dust bunnies and install them himself beneath a radiator on-set even though the camera never looks below knee-level. He may not always (ever?) explain himself to the audience, but at his best we get the sense that each bizarre idiosyncrasy or hokey tangent has some essential purpose. Superfluity itself becomes an essential component of his milieu, as in ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘Blue Velvet’, or ‘Mulholland Drive’.

But this approach doesn’t always work. Sometimes an entire film will become superfluous, recognizably kin to Lynch’s other films but nothing more than a burst of sound and fury. ‘Wild at Heart’ is one such. (‘Lost Highway’ another.) Based on a novel by Barry Gifford, the film follows an Elvis-loving outlaw, Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage), and his young girlfriend Lula Fortune (a young and willowy Laura Dern) on a parole-breaking trek through the South. Along the way they are dogged by increasingly outré hitmen (including a repulsively perfect Willem Dafoe) but still find time for plenty of high-kick dancing and motel room sex. The fundamental plot is rather salacious and could have been developed as a mystery or thriller, but Lynch focuses much more on the characters and their quirks. The trouble is that none of them resonates especially well, and thus we end up with neither compelling intrigue nor drama.

And yet there is an awful appeal to the picture, extruded and perversely insistent. Nicholas Cage has a habit of appearing in such films and this is one of his ‘peak’ performances. It’s easy to ridicule his impossible earnestness, like an agitated child overcome with conviction, but few actors could commit to this role as completely. Sailor may be guilty of manslaughter, but he also loves ‘dancing’ to thrash metal, idolizing Elvis, and wearing a snakeskin jacket that “represents a symbol of [his] individuality and [his] belief in personal freedom.” So he and Lula drive on, pushing down the dull and maculate dirt showing through their gilt fantasy (and the audience’s tolerance for the gauche) until the nightmares catch up. Cage’s character may be a farce, but so, too, is the film—like a Cormac McCarthy novel retold by Elmore Leonard and played by circus characters. And Cage is as hard-charging a ringleader as Lynch was likely to find. The great German director (and future Lynch collaborator) Werner Herzog, describes Cage as “always formidable.” And this is true. He also says there is no such thing as “the OK Nic Cage”, which is maybe less true. The point remains that in ‘Wild At Heart’s fairy tale denouement—Cage standing atop the hood of a gridlocked car, singing ‘Love Me Tender’ with a prosthetic broken nose—he is unquestionably Sailor Ripley. And vice versa.

But for all this awkward compulsion, ‘Wild at Heart’ is not a good picture. Its bizarreness and gratuity lack the balancing charisma and beauty found in ‘Blue Velvet’, for example. Both films feature a deranged, lipstick-smearing antagonist—Crazy Frank in ‘Blue Velvet’, Lula’s mother, Marietta Fortune, here in ‘Wild at Heart’—but only the former instills anything like dread. The latter is just a sideshow, a paranoid caricature of femininity like Nadine in ‘Twin Peaks’.

Lynch seems to be most comfortable while working from original material, whereas ‘Wild At Heart’ and the frightfully imbalanced (albeit fascinating) ‘Dune’ are both novel adaptations. As his own master, Lynch can make us feel the beating of a dark and deep pulse without having to tap and exhaust it. He is less adept at finding the veins in others, however enthusiastically he may attempt it, because his own sources are so far removed from the norm. And thus ‘Wild at Heart’ feels more like an outsized romance from an art school portfolio, stabbing with wild ambition and never striking the heart.

Magnolia (1999)

FEW DIRECTORS CONTROL the medium of film so completely, inhabit it so naturally, and utilize it so freely as Paul Thomas Anderson. Another Anderson, Wes, also has an arresting eye for symmetry, theatrical framing, and a ‘just so’ sort of staging, but his characters are almost invariably extruded stylizations. Paul Thomas’s could actually be real people Many also point out P.T.’s allusions to director Robert Altman or sometimes Lumet’s ‘Network’ (which the director even screened for his ‘Magnolia’ crew), and the references are undeniable. Homage is different from derivation, though, and for all his acknowledgement of precedent, Anderson’s films still breathe an air all their own.

To sum up ‘Magnolia’, his second release for a major studio (after 1997’s breakout ‘Boogie Nights’), is simple: a semi-connected series of vignettes exploring the lonely existences of late-20^th century Californians. But as with all great ensemble pieces and works of this scale, that description encompasses everything and nothing at once. In this case, not seeing the forest for the trees might actually be a useful tool for reflection—at least as a place to start.

First and easiest to note is the superb photography. ‘Magnolia’ is rife with the poised framing, economy of motion in close-up, and masterful long tracking shots that are a signature of Anderson and his cinematographer Robert Elswit. But equally laudable is the editing by Dylan Tichenor—patient and more patient still. Tichenor often is involved with films (Anderson’s and others’) that give actors their time and the audiences their space: see also ‘Doubt’ and especially ‘The Assassination of Jesse James’. Yet while his long average cut might be considered old-school, the choice of subject and perspective is provocatively modern. Nearly all communication in the film occurs intimately between two individuals, often via the conventional over the shoulder close-up, but the cuts rarely occur when they ‘should’. Entire monologues are portrayed with the camera looking at the listening party, showing only the speaker’s gesticulations in the corner of the frame from time to time until the listener becomes the speaker and our positions shift. The tactic rejects the leading attitude of most Hollywood films—which constantly snap us to attention with one garish cue after another—in favor of an organic and absorbing pace that makes time irrelevant. ‘Magnolia’s three hours pass more efficiently and swiftly than many films half its length.

And what subjects we have to look upon. Every character deserves a page, from the deep humanism of a hospice-worker (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) to a men’s self-help celebrity (Tom Cruise) oozing damaged machismo. The actors generally hold up their end of the bargain, too. No pairing is more perfectly natural than William H. Macy as Donnie Smith, a frumpy everyman as an adult despite childhood celebrity as the Quiz Kid on TV. (Poor Donnies—Hollywood loves to demean them.) As the film progresses Macy slides his character into a lyrical, tragic existentialism and then a pitiful, wry conclusion on par with anything he’s done for the Coen Brothers. This transformation is cued at a sports bar when Donnie emerges from his booth and the camera follows in a slow-motion pan across the room—soon to be his stage of self-discovery and abasement. The revelation is aided by a remarkable tête-à-tête with Henry Gibson, white-haired, debonair in a velvet blazer who waves bills coyly at a hunk bartender. Macy slouches into the barstool beside him and the two casually slip into an exchange that is half a conversation, half a shared soliloquy on life and love. The utter lack of pretension in its presentation is essential and disarming.

On the other end of the spectrum, perfectly grounded and uniquely forthright, is John C. Reilly—tender, earnest, and vulnerable behind a thin veil of ego that accompanies his policeman’s badge. His sudden and absolute fall for the coke-addict Claudia Gator seems forced at first, but in reassessing the mission statement monologues he practices in his cruiser, waiting for ‘Cops’ to come calling, we can deduce that he has also been waiting for someone like Claudia for a long time. What at first seems like naïveté is actually a deep and unshakeable faith in himself, his God, and humanity. Donnie Smith, bloody-mouthed and teary-eyed, says to him words they both feel, “I have a lot of love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.”

As the hospice ward of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Robards delivers a capstone performance: terminally-ill and confined to his bed, his illness seems as much to stem from the guilt of abandoning his family decades past than any physical malady. Yet this would be the last film he ever made.

All of Anderson’s actors show a commitment and singular focus that belies ‘Magnolia’s sprawling structure. In business management gurus talk about getting employees to ‘buy in’ to a corporate culture, and Anderson clearly has such unanimous support. Perhaps ‘Magnolia’s greatest success is that, despite all odds, its many fragments submit to Anderson’s guidance and becomes one story—not nine. But it’s also a story that makes its deepest marks when we’re actually watching it and not later, caught up in our own introspection. ‘Magnolia’s characters, isolated though they may be in their separate vignettes, rely upon and relate to one another in such a way that the audience feels less a participant in the progress than a patient observer.

Anderson declared to his crew on the first day of shooting that they “should unashamedly try to make a great movie.” And in some ways they have. But in reaching so far ‘Magnolia’ also occasionally stretches into stagy self-absorption . The sheer quantity of teary confrontations and pivotal life moments intercut over a waxing violin threnody (not to mention the spontaneous song its characters suddenly begin to sing, mostly alone, staring out into the vastness emptiness of their lives) stretches and then mockingly twangs the band of credulity in our attentive faces.

But then stunningly, startlingly, and in a complete reversal of tenor: the frogs. To place such a jarring and patently bizarre twist in a film’s delicate denouement shows Anderson’s greatest confidence in himself, his story, his actors, and his sense of humor. The last is particularly crucial, as it (partially) disarms criticism of ‘Magnolia’ as too aloof, didactic, or a purely narcissistic Hollywood drama.

Moreover, there are subplots left unfinished and characters hinted at but never introduced. Anderson is content to leave these ends loose and let them fray. Some were tucked into place by earlier and longer rough cuts of the film, but their absence here is part of the queer fabric of life, where patches go missing and some corners don’t quite align. This authentic touch rewards our close attention but not obsessive analysis. There are mysteries here, as in life, that no cleverness could stitch together into a seamless array of pat endings and feedback loops of vaguely reassuring closure. No, ‘Magnolia’ is not ‘Crash’. This is just something that happens.

Rebecca (1940)

THOUGH FAR FROM Alfred Hitchcock’s first film (or even his fifteenth), ‘Rebecca’ is likely the most crucial turning point in the director’s august career. He had previously directed financially successful films in Britain, some of which are still celebrated today (e.g. ‘The 39 Steps’), but it was ‘Rebecca’ that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 19490 and launched his American career.

Compared with his pulse-pounding 50s output (‘Psycho’, ‘Vertigo’, ‘North by Northwest’), some viewers may find ‘Rebecca’ to be rather prim. Indeed, it is a decidedly British tale, migrating from a Monte Carlo hotel patronized by old money and their paid companions to a ludicrously overstaffed estate in southern England called Manderly. It is the home of one Maxim de Winter, a high-society type who abjures such middle-class trifles as children, chores, or a salaried profession; we enter it alongside his new wife, Mrs. De Winter the second (whose maiden name is never given), an ordinary girl woefully out of place amidst silk-gloved servants. Her status as a commoner is accentuated further by the appearance of a pin-striped and monstrously-lapelled in-law named Favell (George Sanders, preeminent among English archetypes in all of cinematic history), whose role is modest but pivotal.

A view of ‘Rebecca’ as blue-blooded and old-fashioned does not err. It is a film of retrospection, both in the literal plot as well as its presentation, harking to such ghostly precedents as ‘Topper’ (1936) in light-hearted moments and Henry James’ novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898) as it darkens. Yet such scenarios as these, so strictly meted out and miserly in ‘action’, were essential in developing Hitchcock’s signature style and knack for claustrophobia. To wit: implied tension is more excruciating than explicit acts; what happens off-screen is more terrible than what we can actually see; and our imagination is the greatest and darkest villain of all.

Consider the trajectory between ‘Rebecca’ and 1946’s ‘Notorious’, a highly topical film about hunting escaped Nazis a year after VE-Day and heavily weighted by sexual tension. These surface-level themes are wholly absent from ‘Rebecca’, where the young Mrs. De Winter is treated like a child and the outside world is utterly inconsequential. Yet in tracing the line back from ‘Notorious’ we can see how the blueprints match up: a plot with minimal physical conflict centered around a female protagonist, imprisoned in her own house and molested by specters of the past that stretch out suffocating fingers. That same dread is palpably clear in ‘Rebecca’. Absent of flashing kitchen knives or close shaves with crop dusters it reveals more clearly the foundation of Hitchcock’s enduring monument.

We never actually meet Rebecca in the film, but it doesn’t take long to learn that she is the deceased first wife of Mr. De Winter. And though we never so much as see her face, her wardrobe, embroidered handkerchief, precisely positioned toiletry, and her funereally aloof housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, ensure that Rebecca is present in every frame. Rebecca is the breath that whispers in and out of Manderly’s vaulted ribs and Mrs. Danvers her avatar, haunting the new Mrs. De Winters through the halls like a morbid Virgil. Another allusion is stronger still: up a long approach and perched upon the hilltop, Manderly resembles the sepulchral castle of Graf Orlock—the Nosferatu—the Victorian embodiment of repressed sexuality. In ‘Rebecca’ our monster is the imprisoning precedent of aristocracy, and it preys upon Mrs. De Winter mercilessly.

As Mrs. De Winter, Joan Fontaine has a guileless optimism that suits the role—young, naïve, but clever and sweet in a down-to-earth way that was enough to sweep Maxim out of his despair, for a time. Alas, this unaffected spirit also leaves her quite overmatched by the debonair Olivier, a natural fit for Maxim. He would be a playboy if he cared to, rather flip for all his good culture, possessing a fabulous wealth towards which he is breezily indifferent yet naturally in command. In his late 30s at the time, he projects a playboy’s vivacity but has enough gravitas to make us believe his fretful brow and weary eyes. The bond between Olivier and Fontaine never quite settles, though, and the psychological burden of Rebecca eventually becomes too much for Fontaine to bear. Her left eyebrow arches most delicately, her head shakes almost imperceptibly, and a shadow of a smile tugs at one corner of her mouth, disbelieving but striving for appeal like a tentative pet. It’s a camera-ready look that wins us early but is too shallow to keep us long.

Thus the film’s finale—a showy inquest, an increasingly dispossessed Maxim, and the suddenly scheming cousin Favell (that’d be George Sanders)—undercuts the creeping psychology of the earlier acts, where Olivier and Fontaine strove to establish some kind of chemistry undistracted by outside elements. The more actors on screen and the higher the stakes, the less convincing the central couple becomes. Only the implicit presence of Rebecca herself can bring them together in the end, despite all her specter did to destroy them.

‘Rebecca’ the film makes it through this rocky patch, albeit a bit worse for the wear, pushed on by Hitchcock’s macabre energies and pulled by an unsung secondary cast. The most choice of these is the De Winters’ accountant, Frank Crawley, played with a hangdog stoicism by Reginald Denny. He is a legitimizing and sturdy center amidst a melodramatic sweep of big personalities and bigger set-pieces, granting everyday audiences a perspective from which to watch the dreadful strains of their noble betters. But not yet to internalize those fears and take them home.

The Killing (1956)

THOUGH INEXTRICABLY BOUND to the 1950s in its setting and culture (from cut-and-paste wise-guys to coarse stereotypes of gender relation), Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Killing’ thrives today as a forceful and relevant limb of the director’s great body of work. Self-described as Kubrick’s first ‘mature’ film, it is still sufficiently early for many of his iconic techniques to appear in their adolescence—strong enough to stand alone but not yet made rigid and stylized by years of repetition. Most of all ‘The Killing’ is memorable for its progressive structure, disregarding traditional linear timelines and instead leaping back and forth to show disparate characters’ roles in the racetrack heist that defines the plot. Two cameras might be used to film a single sequence, but each focuses on a separate subject and only reveals its footage to us piecemeal, intercut backwards and forwards to keep aces hidden in plain sight until the most opportune moment. It’s a demanding technique that still challenging and fresh in the modern era, used in crime dramas (‘Oceans 11’, ‘Memento’, ‘Heist’, etc.) and comedy alike (‘Arrested Development’).

But not all of ‘The Killing’ is innovation. Considerable plot and character inspiration seems to be taken from Jules Dassin’s ‘Night and the City’ (1950) most obviously in how Kubrick’s Maurice is a reflection of Dassin’s Gregorius—an aging, bald wrestler with a philosophical streak who plays the tough frontline role in the machinations of our lanky blonde protagonist (in this case Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay). The stretch isn’t far: as a young photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick was on-set for some of the filming of Dassin’s ‘The Naked City’, made in 1948. Moreover, ‘The Killing’ doesn’t take great pains to explore each character’s motivations to crime, generally sufficing with a few brief but heavily instructive sketches: an ailing wife, angelic and bedridden; a shady cop’s debt to a loan shark; a man’s financial and physical inadequacy in marriage, etc. But in using such familiar cookie-cut blocks as his foundation, Kubrick has more time to tweak and tease them into new shapes in media res. This keeps the pace snappy and running time lean at 85 minutes—the shortest of Kubrick’s adult career and literally half the length of several later works (e.g. ‘Spartacus‘, only four years later).

Starting with boilerplate characters also affords Kubrick the easy opportunity to skewer stereotypes and pit them against one another in an early trio of trenchant role reversals: the stalwartly masculine Johnny Clay planning ‘one last score’ while enduring the sycophantic outpourings of his girlfriend, Fay (truly); second, the diminutive and doe-eyed George groveling before Sherry, his dismissive, scornful, and substantially taller wife; third, Sherry cuckolding George with tough hood Val, who brushes off her jealously and plays her for profit as ruthlessly as she does George. The juxtaposition of these episodes is fraught with social criticism, but Kubrick leaves the particulars implicit for to the audience to parse—‘The Killing’ has a job to do and no time to spare.

Despite a stilted depiction of women (a recurring criticism of Kubrick),‘The Killing’ does not much subscribe to the damsel in distress motif of many noir pictures. Sherry is treated with swift brutality that the camera does not exploit: she is knocked unconscious off-screen and unceremoniously dispatched by her half-deranged husband with a single bullet to the midriff. She has a brief moment for a speech before collapsing, yes, but the initial gunshot occurs before the camera cuts to her, echoing the off-screen violence she endured earlier in the film. When we do see her final moments, the camera sits static and somewhat distant on George’s side of the room, almost indifferent to her passing. Instead of pitying her, the audience might mordantly recall the couple’s first conversation in the film—on stomach pains.

The other element of ‘The Killing’ most likely to date it is the narration—a clipped and humorless newsman kind of dictation that sets scenes for us with a timekeeper’s precision. But the tactic is still admissible for how subtly it underscores the setting of the film and actually entrenches us in its environment. Firstly, the focus on time and the relative position of actors against one another parallels that of a racetrack radio announcer; second, it suggests a recitation of a police report, stitching together a story culled from confession. The narration thus becomes a great instance of cinematic foreshadowing, stretching across all of the film’s length without ever technically suggesting the outcome.

Kubrick, not yet 30 when ‘The Killing’ was released, weaves these many threads with assurance and aplomb. His riveting focus—prolonged, static shots of faces in chiaroscuro; long tracking takes—is prominent throughout the picture, though still more unaffected here than in many later works. The performances from its ensemble cast are equally natural—even Timothy Carey, one of Hollywood’s greatest fringe characters, is reined into a rictus of normalcy. Thus the actual story of ‘The Killing’ is afforded center stage, abetted by Kubrick’s direction but not obscured by his presence and vision. It’s a film that reveals nearly all of Kubrick’s notable talents without showing them off. Certainly, film scholars have plenty to pore over here, from the non-linear plotline to the distinctive blocking techniques used for its different characters, but ‘The Killing’ remains a racing crime film at heart. Speeding unerringly towards that checkered flag, the sudden, shell-shocked despondence of its ending becomes all the more wrenching.

The Fountain (2006)

RACHEL WEISZ AND Hugh Jackman are actors of two dramatically different molds: the former subtle, sensual, sweet; the latter sturdy, stern, a little surly. In many contexts they might grate against one another or come off as gruffly fraternal, like siblings who never got on as children but are working things out as adults. In Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Fountain’, however, the pair has a powerful chemistry that resonates across time and space—literally. Spanning past, present, and future with characteristically sweeping ambition, Aronofsky frames Jackman and Weisz as recurring embodiments of the same eternal principles. Their interwoven narratives allow for complex characters to be rendered from three heavily-lined strokes: Tomas, a fiery-eyed conquistador questing for queen and country; Tommy, a brilliant brain surgeon tortured by his inability to cure his wife’s terminal cancer; and Tom, a sci-fi futureman speeding through space, striving to mask guilt and sorrow with a broadly Eastern spirituality. If nothing else, this film (along with ‘The Prestige’) shows that Jackman can heft the weight of a serious role with an approach reminiscent of Hemingway: above the surface a weathered scrap of ice—beneath it, a vastness that strains and sometimes cracks from its own weight.

As Isabel, beatific queen of Spain, Weisz is crowned with an eldritch golden glow and is idolized by both the camera and Tomas more as a fixture than a figure. This third of the film brings to life the contents of the novel being written by Izzi, Weisz’s modern-day character, which gives the film its name. Loosely aligned with the Spanish conquest of the Mayans, this section is sometimes hokey in its melodrama and the easiest narrative to regard with skepticism. Yet its tactile wonder and kinetic characters (conquerors’ swords speak louder than surgeons’ scalpels) are a useful visual counterpoint to the nearly greyscale drudgery of the modern storyline.

In our own chill world, Izzi radiates life like a dying star. Late in the film Tommy comes to visit her at the hospital, where she delivers her unfinished novel into his hands saying that he will know how to write the last chapter when it is time. The metaphor is glaringly clear, but each of the film’s heavily loaded props is validated by deeply earnest performances from both actors. When they embrace, the camera cuts from one face to another: his wan and white, hers ruddy and flushed with contentment. Acceptance. Happiness. Completeness. As if she were the one speeding towards vitality and he on death’s descent.

Inspired in part by ‘The Matrix’ as well as cancer diagnoses within Aronofsky’s own family, ‘The Fountain’ reflects a weird dichotomy: on the one hand an open love letter to sci-fi, on the other an intensely personal emotional trauma. It is unashamedly introspective, arguably maudlin, and altogether a little overwrought. All are common tropes of Aronofsky that polarize his audiences, but ‘The Fountain’ brims with such creativity, conviction, and at times even grace that we are caught up in its current. Our jaded indifference towards actors acting is washed away, obliging us to reflect—however briefly—on our own inescapable ends. More than a film, ‘The Fountain’ is a meditation. And as much as it is an affirmation of life, it is also a bitter rejection of Western monotheism and its grim fear of mortality. Christianity is non-existent in the latter two storylines, and in the first is the exclusive domain of perverse caricatures—corrupt torturers with blood-splattered maps and covetous politics. It’s a regrettably reductive attitude towards the faith, but admittedly an accurate reflection of the disillusionment of many nonreligious Westerners born into a Judeo-Christian heritage that seems warped by centuries of materialism.

“Death is a disease.” “Death is the road to awe.” The linear and finite abut the circular and eternal in ‘The Fountain’s defining dilemma. Trying to articulate such themes often lapses into anodyne axioms and sentimental lecturing: ‘live each day as if it’s your last’, ‘be happy with what you have to be happy with’, etc. But in this case Aronofsky’s sometimes crippling obsession with personal chronicles becomes his greatest asset. ‘The Fountain’ is not concerned with preaching to its audience, but rather exorcizing its own demons: recognizing them, defining them, delineating them, and beginning to cut the hate and pain away from the lifesblood. Like tumors.

In almost every setting the film’s look is luxurious to the point of excess—especially in the past and future narratives—yet it retains an elegance and timeless quality that Aronofsky achieved by eschewing CGI effects almost completely. To achieve his stellar backdrops, in an appropriately Zen kind of twist the director looked down instead of up: the infinity of stars and sprawling nebulae we see in the future narrative are actually microscopic chemical reactions, photographed in macro and expanded to fill the sky and Tom’s awestruck eyes. The effect is seamless, consuming, searingly memorable, and unlikely to be diminished by age. Equally reverent is the score by Clint Mansell—circular, like the film, constantly returning to the same few themes with quiet persistence. It achieves a sprawling majesty at times, but performed by the Kronos Quartet and Mogwai it also has an intimacy that occurs more naturally between chosen band members than hired orchestral hands.

As most Aronofsky’s films tend to do, ‘The Fountain’ addresses the human condition in gory detail. Many have criticized its grandiose proclamations about themes far beyond comprehension and dismissed it as overreaching folly. Admittedly, it is easy to take potshots at anyone who seeks to scale such heights. But for all its wild turns, ‘The Fountain’ comes to rest upon an immeasurable strength: peace amidst all this turmoil, permanence in transience, and the power of release. Surely this effort is nobler than to wallow in fleshly sorrows that eternity renders utterly moot.

Wag the Dog (1997)

CONSUMED WITHOUT REFLECTION, ‘Wag the Dog’ is a tongue-in-cheek political satire titillating enough to indulge in as an inside scoop yet cynical enough for audiences to preserve their sense of aloofness from ‘broken’ and ‘corrupt’ Washington. Its airy presumption and tone of a behind-the-scenes exposé aims to placate its audience even as it confirms their worst suspicions about politicians’ unscrupulous lust for power. If we’re all in on the joke then why not let it play itself out? But considered from a step back, ‘Wag the Dog’ is deeply mordant and perfectly symptomatic of all the ills it strives to expose, like a mirror against a reflecting pool. It’s a story easy to enjoy but hard to appreciate.

Pushed forward by David Mamet’s manic dialogue—parched dry humor buried several layers deep in blasé politicking—‘Wag the Dog’ quickly sketches out our premise: in the midst of a president’s reelection campaign he is accused of sexual misconduct towards a teenager girl, and calls in Conrad Brean, an unheralded but exquisitely capable spin doctor played by Robert De Niro, to set things aright. ‘Aright’ in this case means concocting a false war on terror in Albania to distract from the allegations back home until the election is won. Naturally. Brought in to manage his charade is Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), and together they orchestrate fake newsreels and promulgate concocted mantras (e.g. “there is no B3 bomber”) until the lie spreads wide enough to become truth.

Cinematographer Richard Robinson catalogues this progress from private to public chambers with ease, passing between the omniscient observer and more in situ framing that is appropriate for a movie about perception, cameras, and not-quite-fourth-wall-breaking subject matter. The range is wide, from washed out fisheyes stationed in upper corners of rooms like surveillance, journalistic pans at press conferences, or the hokey zooms used in campaign commercials constantly derided as ‘amateurism’ throughout the film. Caught up in its own narrative, ‘Wag the Dog’ at times plays itself so straight that the patriotic chorus singing to Willie Nelson’s conductor’s baton legitimately seems like an anthem pulled from a Special Televised Event in the wake of a national tragedy.

Helping somewhat to balance this smarting irony is the charismatic pairing of De Niro and Hoffman, each a powerful force but ably sharing of the spotlight. Director Barry Levinson gives them plenty of toys with which to play, from a swathe of recognizable cameos (Denis Leary, Willie Nelson, etc.) to coy costumes. In their idiosyncratic garb they resemble pontificating modern wizards—a double-breasted trenchcoat for the slogan-slinging Fad King, paisley scarves for Motss, frumpily rolled-up blue jeans, New England-style blazer, and a crumpled hat for Mr. Fix-It himself, Brean. The wardrobe choices give us easy cues to distinguish the behind-the-scenes Brean from the camera-ready glitz of Motss, but there is more at work here. Brean’s outfit is a costume of its own akin to Columbo or Inspector Clousou (who himself had a very similar hat), and though may not care about his appearance like the Hollywood types, it’s coded that he is no less astute and relevant an agent of fortune. This is made even more clear when he appears alongside Motss in Washington, both wearing overcoats, orange-tone scarves, and red neckties—just in each case Brean’s is the budget, unobtrusive pattern. Every soldier has his uniform to wear in the service of his country.

Thus employed they conspire up in their ivory redoubt, the environs without reflecting a coruscating alchemy—flashing lights poolside at Motss’ regal estate “bigger than the White House”, cameras looking up through the pool as if the players above were great titans in Olympus, pulling the strings of mortal lives with casual abandon. And then later, as the story collapses around them in a private jet back to Washington, accompanied by a delirious and paranoid schizophrenic they thought was a malleable war hero stand-in. “This is nothing,” Motss assures his cohorts. And to his credit, he delivers even unto death. William H. Macy, who appears briefly as a CIA agent, says that Mamet can spin off half a page of Shakespearian poetic dialogue, “like Titus Andronicus.” And it is perfectly true that Mamet has no reservations about ruthlessly disposing of characters, audience predilections be damned.

Macy’s own presence, though, is a strangely indulgent tangent that positions the CIA as antagonists of the president and briefly, quite briefly (our suspension of disbelief would tolerate nothing longer) as truth-seekers in a morass of obfuscation. The positioning doesn’t quite come through, and the quickly co-opted Macy ultimately serves as an opportunity for Brean to explain his worldview almost directly to the camera. And it is this:

Governments are self-perpetuating forces, concerned with their own immediate survival and legacy more than any lasting real benefit to their word. Much as the military generals in the Cold War used the threat of Mutually-Assured-Destruction as their raison d’etre, so have politics and media put themselves into similarly compromising states today. MAD becomes Mutually-Assured-Survival, each branch propping up the other with rotten timber. Thus the clattering footsteps of officials descending into the bowels of an unnamed ‘war room’ in Washington are now civilians, not generals, though their global machinations and utilitarian sense of sacrifice is the same. Meanwhile, above ground in the public arena, for all the moral outrage that might legitimately circle such a sex scandal, no actual conversation is had over the president’s policies, economic stewardship, etc. It’s almost as if the scandal the fixers don’t want their opponents to talk about is precisely the scandal the audience ends up focusing on, never thinking to inquire whether the president is any good at his actual job. And ‘Wag the Dog’ is one such scandalous misdirection—a made-up firework of a story that keeps eyes and minds away from more literal concerns in the tangible world.

And this is the trouble. What’s seen on television is received and believed, regardless of whether the media midwifes birthed it or saw it borne of others, once the fever begins to spread. Amidst the highly skeptical environment of modern news media and increasingly common revelations of electioneering, gerrymandering, wartime-profiteering, and shameless self-preservation, ‘Wag the Dog’s cheekily macabre tenor now almost seems in poor taste. It is too true to be funny. And instead of documenting such breaches as these in disgust, ‘Wag the Dog’ is content to mirror and mock them with a cynical shrug and a whistle on the way to the bank. Yes, this is its prerogative as a movie—as entertainment—and there is nothing wrong with accepting it on just such terms. Unfortunately, too many of its viewers will do nothing more than shake their heads and ‘Ain’t it the truth.’ Maybe it is. But it needn’t be.