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.

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.

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 Lion in Winter (1968)

‘THE LION IN WINTER’ is a ‘Titus Andronicus’ for the 20^th century—a chronicle of eloquence and depravity, of majesty debased through jealousy, made petty by hate, and left squirming like worms in the dirty despair of revenge. That these are no common folk—rather royalty plucked from history, played by actors of great stature—makes their tragedy all the more grating. Few immaculate idols endure in modern society, from politics to religion, and more clear-eyed assessments of history’s greatest figures often reveal them to be vice-riddled schemers, but the pedestaled prejudice of history remains, heightened by the centuries and raising such names as King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine to a nearly mythic plane. ‘The Lion In Winter’ preys upon these idealized forms, showing divine right monarchs and their children to be no better than any materialistic, vengeful celebrity family on reality TV today. Indeed, the cabal of King Henry is a far sight worse.

Yet a certain grandness endures, and that is why we watch. Henry’s castle may be squalid but it is a castle still; his children may bicker over their inheritance, but that inheritance is England. And instead of eye-rolling heiresses and chest-thumping media moguls, we behold Katharine Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, and Anthony Hopkins, no less magnificent for the venom they spit. These are titans making poetry out of curses, their eyes dead, lips curled, and hearts numbed but bleeding. Their mordant soliloquys are broken up into a semblance of dialogue, barreling along as if each line were fated, with discourse replaced with punishment. But not forever, thankfully. What begins as a masochistic history lesson eventually boils over into epic character drama that animates the film’s second half beyond the capacity of any textbook.

Peter O’Toole reprises his role as Henry II, previously played in 1964 against Richard Burton in ‘Becket’. In both films O’Toole is a magnificent shouter, consumed by his own ego, striving to be good at one turn without acknowledging his brutality at another. Yet in this latter picture his Henry is a haunted, haggard creature, swarmed by scavengers instead of dogged by a single worthy adversary. His high brow, manicured hands, and regal bearing from ‘Becket’ have been overtaken by a wiry-haired, creased veteran whose hooded eyes pierce through every artifice but his own. Though vital and full of vinegar, he totters about his castle with stiffening joints, and by the denouement that finds him and Eleanor huddled in their cellar, staring down invisible jungle eyes in the corners, he is a pallid ghoul. Hepburn, meanwhile, won the Oscar for her Eleanor—still elegant at 61 and deftly wielding her remaining guile even as it fades. She is a rose content to show her thorns, for they will last longer than any petal.

Eleanor and Henry argue fantastically, clashing against one another with magnificent sparks, but it is their son Richard (Anthony Hopkins) who is this film’s emotional anvil. He is cold, contemptuous, utilitarian in his perspective and rigid like an iron rod. Brittle like one, too. Impassive until his melting point, he then erupts into wild-eyed catharsis that is pitiful like a child’s. Aside from the biddable and rather drippy Alice (whom Henry loves but plays with as a pawn), Richard is the only character whose agony is not of his own doing. Hopkins’ natural gravitas also serves to balance his doltish brother John, a gape-mouthed bumbler who provides the film’s offhand comic relief. Geoffrey, the forgotten middle son, is the stolid fulcrum between them, rather diffidently addressed and an unresolved presence in the script and on screen. The lone outsider in this family affair is also the cast’s hidden gem: Philip II of France, played by Timothy Dalton with appropriately vernal majesty. With limited screen time he is an uncanny reflection of O’Toole’s own Henry II from ‘Becket’, right down to the noble cheekbones and roguishly thin beard.

The first half of the film is full of these characters’ tired expositions and the rattling off of stations and purposes to bring the audience up to speed: the hierarchy of sons, twisted treaties, et cetera. This slightly didactic process also makes us keenly aware of whose designs are trod upon by whom and whence came the seeds of malcontent germinating in every heart. Once the scheming settles into place, each carefully watered bed bursts into bloody blossoms.

That moment occurs in the chambers of King Philip, where each of Henry’s sons hides from the next until they all are brought out by an unexpected visit from King Henry himself.  The sequence could easily have been a slapstick farce (or ‘Hamlet’ satire), and Philip’s wry observation that hiding is “what tapestries are for” implies the writers were aware of how dangerously they played catharsis against comedy. But the scene is crucial and ultimately well-handled, revealing Philip’s extraordinary position in this web of intrigue, catalyzing the explosion that consumes Henry’s family, and setting off an hour’s worth of increasingly dire consequences that leaves Eleanor at last wondering, “How did we come to this?” Regrettably, once that fallout begins Philip himself is quite abruptly cut out of the story with hardly an effort to reconcile him in the larger picture of the plot.

A second and considerably more damaging sudden shift is the film’s incongruously peppy coda. The king and his wife, newly emerged from their emotional nadir and the literal depths of the cellar, promenade arm in arm to see Eleanor back off to her prison up the river, chatting gaily, dropping some trite rhetoricals about living forever, and then laughing in that uncomfortably long way common to cinema of the 1960s. Even allowing for this the final impression is queerly misshapen, like a ‘happily ever after’ clipped from a fairy tale and glued onto a tragedy by a disconsolate young reader.

This contrast is a microcosm for the film entire, wherein every relationship is one of love and hate. Such ineffable and complex bonds do exist in life, of course, and likely were all the more charged in feudal times when life and death were so immediate. But sometimes ‘The Lion in Winter’ strives too mightily towards profound ambivalence, such as when Alice confesses to Eleanor, “All I want for Christmas is to see you suffer,” before promptly collapsing into the queen’s embrace, weeping. On the whole our credulity is stretched a little too far, and the emotional pendulum swings a little too precipitously for it to find a steady purchase on our heartstrings. So while ‘The Lion In Winter’ remains a memorable film and a worthy tour de force for several of its stars, it is more in homage to themselves than to their lords and ladies.

Lolita (1962)

“HOW DID THEY ever make a film of Lolita?” goes the tagline. A reasonable question, given that its narrator, Humbert Humbert, is narcissistic, mildly sociopathic, snootily cosmopolitan, showily overeducated, hopelessly European, and happens also to be an inveterate pedophile. Consider also that its year of release (1962) came a mere two years after ‘Psycho’ shocked the censors by depicting an adult couple of philanders in the same bedroom. Though the prurient details of ‘Lolita’s taboo relationship were never explicitly shown, the very fact that a pubescent girl and her 50-something lover stepfather might be the subject of a film showed that the primrose walls of the Production Code were tumbling swiftly indeed.

But a better question, and one perhaps more relevant in retrospect, is “How did they ever make a comedy of Lolita?” In contemporary cinema, themes of incest and pedophilia are increasingly addressed, but when are these modern films ever given a comic twist? That Kubrick and company approached the topic from such a wry perspective and with such a flip air of tra-la playfulness almost makes them complicit in Humbert’s lechery. Such a tack seems almost unfathomable today. Or maybe, as Polanski might have said of that time, ‘Everybody was doing it.’

The film does have its moments of drama, to be sure, but the best indicator of a picture’s tenor is often its music, and here ‘Lolita’ is unabashedly breezy. Returning consistently to a ditty of Dadaist simplicity, it makes childish mockery of Lolita’s torn veil of innocence and Humbert’s increasingly maudlin attempts to preserve her in his idealized private garden. Conversely, the book did also have its humorous side: Nabokov writes with such a joie-de-vivre and Humbert possesses such coruscating wit that it’s impossible not to enjoy ‘Lolita’ as a page-turner or even whimsical travelogue at times. Yet Humbert remains a deeply tragic character, and once that glib sheen of verbosity and ego is prized away we must confront the ragged threads of suburban desperation. Making a similar film would admittedly have been difficult; it’s hard to see how this jarring blend of drama and black comedy was any easier a sell.

At least, that is, before Peter Sellers arrived. His chameleonic brilliance takes charge of the film from its opening scene and guides the audience through a fraught emotional minefield. By revealing his bête noire at the opening, Kubrick inverts the representation of Quilty’s novelized form, which was hidden till the very end. Instead of that lurking paranoia, in the film we’re given full insight into a parade of absurdity that, while less haunting and sympathetic to Humbert, is the more natural play for the film’s comic tone and the best use of Sellers’s skills. Indeed, one can see how Sellers’s multiple characterizations and outsized impressions in ‘Lolita’ inspired a repeat in 1964’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’. Paralleling Roman Epicureanism (replete with accidental toga), disaffected contemporary celebrity, hokey aw-shucks everymen, and a walking Freudian punchline in turn, the farcical Sellers is the perfect antiphony to Mason’s cultured coolness.

Another alteration more ill-advised is the cutting to Humbert’s frequent asides to the reader, here pared down to a scant handful of voiceovers that nudge the story occasionally without revealing his character’s complex history. Lacking that insight, we come to empathize with him for his natural charm as an adult, as well as by perceiving Lolita increasingly as his daughter while overlooking what happens in those motels once the lights (and camera) switch off. Nabokov had a harder sell in the book: an explicitly perverse mind and its sordid past made into our hero, however defective. As it happens, Nabokov was credited as the screenwriter for this film, but his version was evidently not much utilized. Kubrick, for whatever reason, preferred to focus less on Humbert’s more erudite qualities and more on his piteous fall into jealously and weakness.

And in this regard Mason is astounding—one of the few ever able to embody polished, high-society urbanity just as naturally as wide-eyed, bestial mania. When a late-night phone call from his specter, Quilty, awakes him in a rented bungalow where he has fallen ill while Lolita is hospitalized, the swollen, bug-eyed, hoary face that emerges from those blankets is that of a deranged caveman, not a professor of French literature. His age for this film was also perfect. Entering his 50s, he was still a virile, attractive, and confident man, but one could also see the jowls beginning to sag, the crows’ feet deepening about his eyes, and a faint weariness about his proud shoulders that lent him the credence to sob his loss away in Lolita’s shabby home while she watched, married, pregnant, aloof. Sue Lyon, meanwhile, plays Lolita with all the natural ease of a beautiful girl who knows it and wields that beauty well, but still is dulcet in youth and not jaded into a malicious or petty adulthood. That task is left to her mother, Charlotte, the third corner of this triangle. Played by a perfectly grasping Shelly Winters, Charlotte’s insecurities push an already delicate balance of power past its breaking point, propelling the story out of its long preamble. Her character’s departure is rather abrupt in the novel—Nabokov is merciless—and similarly swift in the film, though Charlotte’s trimmed role and an overall lighter tone undercut the episode’s severity. Much of ‘Lolita’ moves in this way, in fact: rich ingredients poised to excel, but undermined a little here and a little there by its own machinations until its falls for good from the top shelf of Kubrick’s works.

Strange as it seems, then, it’s the script that ultimately makes ‘Lolita’ less than a masterpiece. What else might it be? With a visionary director, exceptional cast, competent editing, and no question of production value, few major elements are left to blame beside the script. Perhaps ‘blame’ is a harsh word to use: ‘Lolita’ is still a salacious delight, cagily experimental, prickly with controversy, and utterly unapologetic. But whereas the book augmented these qualities them with singular perspective and prose that laughed even as it bled, Kubrick’s filmed adaptation seems to gloss over the deepest depths. Perhaps, then, this is how they made a comedy of ‘Lolita’—by ignoring the primal impetus of the beast they’ve caged and are poking for a lark.

The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)

IT IS 1976 IN AMERICA. Gerald Ford is in the White House but will lose his seat to Jimmy Carter in November. Soon muscle cars and disco are soon on the way out, Apple Inc. and hip-hop are on the way in, and science-fiction moviegoers choose from (i.e. must endure) the likes of ‘Embryo’, ‘Futureworld’, and ‘Logan’s Run’. In almost one year to the day, ‘Star Wars’ will arrive and transform the genre virtually overnight, followed shortly by ‘Close Encounters…’ A more adult revolution, ‘Alien’, is three years out. But that new day has not yet dawned, and thus hokey jumpsuits and cockamamie pulp plots are still the modus operandi for most. But not for all.

In the summer of this year, perhaps some inquisitive few manage to escape Logan’s carrousel and discover a new beacon in this twilight of an era: ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, the cinematic adaptation of Walter Tevis’s 1962 novel. Obliquely transformational in its own right, the film was directed by Nicolas Roeg (‘Walkabout’) and starred an iconoclastic young Englishman named David Bowie, who’d just scored his first major hit in the States with ‘Fame’. He is the eponymous man, called Thomas Jerome Newton, whose goal is to save his own drought-ridden planet through alien technology that will make him fabulously wealthy on Earth. The details are hazy, really, but it’s clear that the first several steps of his scheme are rather quickly effected before shadowy government figures confound his efforts, leaving him Earthbound, despairing, and riddled with human vices. It’s an unmitigated tragedy, but like its leading man quixotic, aloof, and thus difficult to empathize with as we might a traditional tale of rags to riches to rags. Belonging neither to the pre- or post-Star Wars world, it rather echoes the Earth-crashing themes of the 50s, psychedelic splendor of the 60s, and even presages the existential gloom that would develop in the 80s.

Thus the film can be a jarring experience to anyone with conventional expectations, told as it is through abrupt intercuts with little connectivity between them and languid actors who slur through their blocking as if doused in glycerin. We have little concept of how and when we get where we are, and each new awakening seems like it takes forever-no-time at all. Better to give up guessing and just experience it like a dream, or perhaps an epic-length music video only half-sung.

Whatever the point of his escapades, the unique presence of ‘The Man…’ himself is reason enough to stay till the end. Though still new to the States in 1976, Bowie was already quite invested in science-fiction as a lifestyle, having sung of space oddities and spiders from Mars, etc., as early as ‘69. This was his first feature film, though, and his extraordinarily photogenic frame had not yet translated into a great rapport with a kinetic camera. Some of this might just be chemical, though, since his aquiline nose was dispatching heroic quantities of cocaine during the filming. While deeply compelling as a figure and a presence, he sometimes seems to float through the film as if he’s lost attention or motivation. On the one hand, his languorous movements and eldritch complexion make him look quite convincing as something fallen from the sky. Alternately, a more lucid leading man might have helped pull the film’s narrative together a little more instead of leaving it slouched across the editor’s desk, a little drooly.

Another dissociating element of the film’s production—this one more tactile in its effects—is the treatment of passing time. We’re given to understand that the film follows Thomas Newton through decades of life from a precipitous landing through a meteoric rise to fame and an eventual imprisonment at the hands of government forces preoccupied with optics, highly reminiscent of Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, released five years earlier in 1971. (Both films are based on books released in the 60s: ’62 for Anthony Burgess’s ‘Clockwork’, ’63 for Tevis’s ‘Man’.) Yet for all the events that transpire, Roeg and company make precious little effort to advance the state of society at large, so the strongest indicator that any of what’s on screen extends beyond a single bad acid trip is the increasing weight of years that sag the faces of the supporting cast while Bowie remains upright, eternal, fragile, and pure. Around him, his ‘handler’ Nathan Bryce (a randy Rip Torn) and sometimes beaux Mary-Lou (Candy Clark) become puffy from drink and advancing middle age. They are an iris of action trapped between Bowie, the shining central pupil, and the hazy whites of their universe, bloodshot and static and dry.

And then the plot. Given all the government muddling and the timeframe of the film’s release, there are undoubtedly political points to be made. Yet they are given too little context to resonate with depth, so instead of reflecting on ‘the man’ or any serious parallels to geopolitics, we’re instead left grappling with the vibrant imagery of ‘Alien Orgasm’ (a real chapter title on the DVD). Perhaps the film was more intended to reflect Bowie’s own sense of distance from his peers and his newfound ‘Fame’ in the contradictory grandeur of the United States, but this was certainly not the original thrust of Tevis’s book. Roeg, for his part, revels in this kind of wordless wonder wandering that prefers to see instead to say. In these senses, then, ‘The Man…’ is their perfect vehicle, and it might just be best not to look underneath the hood after all these years.

So ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ chose an auspicious time to take his plunge, poised between epochs, circumspect in the shadow of the Death Star until more concerted, latter-day audiences sought him out anew. Frankly rather clumsy with its functional details, the film remains intensely memorable for its visuals: creative, dissociative, but intensely reflective of its era—Andy Warhol must have approved of Newton’s kaleidoscope of TV screens. And maybe those alien eyes can divine meaning in the layers of this film with the utmost ease. But for most humans it will leave a stranger impression—for good and ill—of an abstract power that skates across the horizon line, pregnant with power that cannot be fully explained, and may never have existed at all.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

LIKE MOST FINCHER PICTURES, this English-language adaptation of ‘Män som hatar kvinnor’ is an intellectual, composed, and dark (literally and figuratively) gauntlet of buried revelations, brooding emptiness, and periodic explosions of articulated violence. In all these respects it mirrors the Swedish-language original, directed by the Danish Niels Opleve, which is shorter by just 8 minutes. It is clear that Fincher was attentive to the original film, referencing its qualities in his commentary, but he is equally dedicated to presenting his own interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s grim novel and equally separate in focusing on his own cast instead of constantly referencing the novel or the first film. Indeed, it is difficult to say something original about a character who has already been broadly and famously explored twice within the past decade, but Fincher’s angle on the tale and the competency of his cast make this version worth experiencing.

Rather than pulling a Cameron (i.e. equating bigger with better and exaggeration with homage), Fincher’s film instead shines in its subtleties. Daniel Craig leads the pack here, bringing numerous clever nuances to the journalist Mikael Blomkvist without resorting to clichéd ticks or idiosyncrasies. Craig still looks and sometimes moves like Bond—his trim wardrobe and occasional underwear scenes doesn’t do anything to disguise an athlete’s figure—but he hangs his glasses askance on his face and licks pens in the frigid air like a journalist; hesitates and half-frowns like a divorcee; and stares just a bit like a real Swede. Set against him, Rooney Mara looks sufficiently wan and waifish as Lisbeth Salander and brings a credible fire to the role as well as commendable commitment to its humbling demands. But she is a relative automaton compared to Noomi Rapace’s porcelain firebrand in the original film, and one struggles to see how we’d sympathize with her in a sequel film when her character becomes even more truculent. Meanwhile, in limited time and less space Christopher Plummer is winsome as Henrik Vanger, family patriarch, beaming and calculating in equal turns. As his son Martin, Stellan Skarsgård is regrettably telegraphed as the villain from his very first close-up (an open-armed rictus meant to be a welcome, though in context a veritable invitation to discovery), but he commands such a swing of momentum that we remain riveted throughout his reveal. In the novel, Larsson’s spin on this was admittedly a little clunky, not quite giving Martin the time to stretch his black wings in his hour of discovery, and Fincher’s film does not deviate overmuch from that formula. But as he notes again in the commentary, Skarsgård is ‘so comfortable in his own skin’ that we can be shaken by a passage so simple as him decanting a bottle of wine through several intercut shots, even if none focused specifically on his hands.

Still, it’s hard to appreciate these morsels due to the film’s aggressive pace, cascading through the plot with the mechanical efficiency of its titular character bent on memorizing a dossier. And though Fincher does not “sex up” the film overmuch, as was half-seriously hypothesized when reviewing the original film, ‘The Girl…’ nonetheless has a glitzy sheen that caters more to Hollywood’s slightly stale take on cool-kid rebellion (i.e. Trent Reznor still speaking for the afflicted underclass in an industrial rock remake of ‘Immigrant Song’) than to an progressive yet insular society’s cancerous cognitive dissonance (i.e. Larsson’s view of Sweden). Finally, and most succinctly if perhaps a mite unfairly, Fincher’s version cost $90 million—Oplev’s $13 million. Is Fincher’s six times the film? Hardly—in fact, the lesser. Like its tattooed antihero, the undersized original punches far above its weight.

Argo (2012)

PUT SUCCINCTLY BY A FELLOW VIEWER, ‘Argo’ is truth made into a fairy tale. And this is a shame, for there was already plenty of real wonder worth telling in this whole affair. But Hollywood rarely settles for that. Ben Affleck and company instead sprang for the inevitable souped-up climax (police cars chasing down a plane?) and untoward focus on Ben Affleck’s utterly unsubstantiated redemption story: a motel room sloucher separated from his family goes out into the world, does manly things, and returns revitalized to a wife we first meet in the film’s final minutes, waiting plaintively behind the white bars of her window frame. She welcomes him tenderly: performance anxiety, begone! All this in addition to the fact that the White Affleck played a Hispanic character—a Hollywood switcheroo unlikely to have been reversed.

Manufactured conflicts and a number of minor fabrications are, of course, often appropriate in cinema for the sake of a good story. And ‘Argo’ is altogether a lean, well-paced zeitgeist drama that commands our attention, especially considering how sedentary its major characters tend to be. But some of this momentum is cheaply earned, often via hasty editing that is uncomfortable with silence. A number of its confident and effective tracking shots could have lingered longer, tacitly telling us much about characters, but with a few exceptions (the man hanging from the crane, seen askance through a receding car window), they are sacrificed in favor of the next scene’s exposition. Too, these cuts are often ushered in by a token bit of contemporary music, making the rest of the film’s uneasy relationship with music beds all the more obvious.

Ben Affleck acquits himself decently in the central role, but ‘Argo’s best actors were saddled with almost peanut gallery parts—these being the fictional old lion of Hollywood (Alan Arkin) and real-life makeup artist/CIA cohort John Chambers (John Goodman). They verge nearly on ‘Grumpy Old Men’ territory, puttering about LA with cynical airs and plenty of wry one-liners to give perspective on the plot. Goodman’s are best but mostly peripheral, leaving the film’s heavy lifting to be done by character sketches (the Houseguests, competent but often glossed over) and Affleck himself, who is no strongman. It seems as though some actors were chosen more for their resemblance to their real-life counterparts, aided by on-point costume design, than for their actual acting skills.

 

And what of the Canadian ambassador’s housekeeper, Sahar, whose valiant resistance in the face of sedition and treason charges is neither witnessed nor acknowledged by anyone else in the film? They may never have learned of it, in fact, but the entire subplot is too unexploited. For all the time Sahar and the six diplomats spend in that house together, they do not exchange a single line of dialogue and are virtually never in the same room. Instead of conjuring external spooks and scowling government agents from stereotype, the equally fictional but far more nuanced Sahar could have given ‘Argo’ more durable heft. To play upon another stereotype, one imagines a Japanese director might have scrapped the entire nail-biting finale—an escape from Mos Eisley, far from the first Star Wars reference—and spent the entire film exploring the increasingly fraying relations within the ambassador’s villa.

And those references. Beyond Star Wars ‘Argo’ also hearkens back to ‘Munich’, minus the scope and patience, and ‘The Debt’, minus its kinetic character power. Naturally, ‘Star Wars’ remains the deliberate and primary touchstone, as befits the subject matter, though the references end up less tongue-in-cheek and more jingoistic upon reflection. For instance, when the Americans are detained at the airport for questioning—intercut skillfully with the child sweatshop labor (another distortion) reconstructing their dossiers from shredded documents—team-member Skeptical Spectacles swoops in with a saves-the-day speech in Farsi, redeeming himself from a previously timorous and naysaying role. It’s a direct C-3PO to the Ewoks allusion that is more than just condescending once one thinks past the cute homage and realizes the Iranians are being recast as semi-simpleton Care Bears from the Dark Ages.

The actual ‘Houseguests’ pose with President Carter.

But quibbling over real history in Hollywood is ever a losing battle. The irascible John Chambers would surely tell us as much and call us naïve in some pithy and weirdly graphic simile (this script has several). But it’s difficult to shake the impression that ‘Argo’s premise was more engaging than its product, and that its handful of whippersnapper lines are dulled by an overall regression to the mean. ‘Argo’ may have been “the best bad idea [they had],” and it did the job—but its trickery still falls some distance from being actually ‘good’.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

HAVE WE SEEN A BETTER DIRECTOR for dialogue than Sidney Lumet? Not for pithy one-liners or noir-style ratatat, but rather the realistic, extemporaneous flow of human interaction. The kind of patter that makes us forget that these lines have been spoken before, rehearsed, memorized, regurgitated. To watch actors in a Lumet film is to watch them discover each other and themselves, maybe not for the first time, but always anew. ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (along with the watershed ‘Network’ that came the year after) positively radiates this realism, achieving a nearly documentarian dynamic between actors who bicker, wave guns, huddle together, and sweat profusely through a single late summer night. This eschewal of stylization is especially remarkable for two reasons: firstly, that 90% of the film transpires on an impromptu stage: a held-up bank, spotlighted by police vehicles, transfixed by media cameras, and thronged by a public audience eager to be the comic relief in this drama. Secondly, that ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ is a true story, and films so inspired are often far too self-aware to look anything but stylized.

We must also acknowledge the flexibility of screenwriter Frank Pierson, who collaborated with Lumet to tape actors’ improve sessions based on his original dialogue and then rewrite scenes to incorporate their spontaneous language, creating a feedback loop that invigorates the written word while also cleaving closer to the actors’ own identities. Contrastingly, the look of the picture is highly particular, reflecting the televised nature of this crisis as it played out on a national stage. Thus the smooth editing and camerawork that retain the elegance and deliberate flow often missing from documentary-style dramas such as ‘The French Connection’. In that film, director William Friedkin didn’t even block out the scenes with his cameramen, forcing them to improvise as they tracked action they’d never been allowed to rehearse. Quite opposite from that on-location cinema verite is Lumet’s picture, occupied almost completely by one meticulously controlled set and explored through Victor Kemper’s long-tracking camera. As night falls and the robbers become hostages themselves, the camera begins to penetrate the walls that separate the factions within the bank, placing the audience in the center of their tableaus as if we were an overlooked hostage crouched beneath a desk.

Even as events in the bank are floodlit from the outdoors in a surreal glow, the actors on screen exist communally in one claustrophobic space that defies planar separation—hostages right, bank robbers left. But once outside, the dynamic is completely reversed, as we watch the action unfold from diametrically opposed perspectives. Over Sonny’s shoulder, we peer out at a hundred pointed gun barrels, as many camera lenses, and the imploring bluster of Detective Moretti (Charles Durning, always authentic). From the other side of the street, we join the media fixed upon Sonny as he paces back and forth against the whitewashed backdrop of the bank, gesticulating wildly by his lonesome, shouting ‘Attica!’, and discovering his passionate desire to be seen, heard, and even to be caught.

Thus Sonny becomes our antihero, played inimitably by Al Pacino in perhaps his last major role before becoming something of a self-caricature. Here, he is typically explosive, confrontational, and passionate, but also vulnerable and deeply conflicted. He manages to seem younger than in either of the ‘Godfather’ pictures made earlier in the 70s and sheds all the gravitas of Michael Corleone in the process. It is a complete—and rather pitiful—transformation that dominates the film in a way quite opposite to Pacino’s habit.

As the crumpled secrets of Sonny’s life are laid out before the camera, the film’s second half could easily have dipped into farce (or satire, more accurately). It does teeter on the brink once, unnecessarily, when we meet Sonny’s clinging wife (mother of his children), and then again, quite necessarily, upon encountering his other wife, Leon, the semi-lucid male psych patient awaiting a sex change. Sonny claims to love both but can understand neither, much less treat them well. In fact, it is towards the characters he knows least that he becomes most polite. Yes, we might say he is caretaker of Sal (John Cazale), his half-Lenny co-conspirator, but Sonny becomes implicit in Sal’s death and thus is rather a poor friend in the end. Yet when it came to throwing hostages’ bodies out the door, we never really believed he’d do it; the Sonny that allows every teller access to the bathroom, orders them food, and releases ailing hostages is much more genuine. We might laugh at the irony when early on, wielding a rifle half his size, he professes to be Catholic and thus not inclined to hurt anyone, but his conduct, however bizarrely, does not much belie his claim.

Sonny’s brief encounter with his mother, nagging and sentimental, is an unfortunate pastiche that does the film its prime injustice. The pressures Sonny feels from the outside world are made much more tangible, and he more empathetic, through the extraordinary phone conversation he shares with Leon. Intercut by necessity, this sequence still manages an intimacy and dancing delicacy rare even between characters face to face, much less those in a more familiar heterosexual context. Both men are shot quite tightly, closed in on themselves (a hand clasping shut a bathrobe; an arm slung over the forehead), and though they are but a street apart, unmoving, we feel the chasm yawning ever wider between them.

In a film that opens with two faces we recognize from gangster stardom and heavy weapons brandished wildly, only two triggers are pulled. And in a film consumed by one man’s crumbling existence and inevitable failure, a great deal of humor can be found. ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ is not an action flick, nor only a drama, nor any other single style of film. It is life, which is action and inaction, failure and triumph, drama and comedy, all spun together inextricably. Most directors choose one or two of these passions, finding it too great a challenge to encapsulate the complete human condition in two hours. Lumet succeeds. But he succeeds not in encapsulation, which by necessity confines and encloses; rather, he highlights, leaving the context there for us to fill in as we will—as unconsciously, as naturally, as we do in life.