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.

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.

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’.

Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) – 1945

WHAT MORE TO SAY about this, one of film’s most complete pictures? Much, but little that has not been said before. ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’ is justly one of cinema’s most feted works, almost invariably appearing in the single digits of any French ‘Best-of’ list and surely competing with Renoir’s ‘La Règle du Jeu’ as one of the country’s most influential films. A three-hour epic set in 19th century Paris, ‘Children of Paradise’ establishes its foundation in actual historical personages of the theater district, ‘The Boulevard of Crime’, and there erects a monument to the stage itself and those unique souls who occupy it.

Vested with such rich characters, ‘Children of Paradise’ can absorb the glamor and sprawl of an American epic like ‘Gone With the Wind’ and inject it with political nuance, personal subtexts, and farsighted observations on human life that exceed all its contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. It is the segue between Romantic opera and the French Nouvelle Vague. The dire clashes of its archetypes take place on extraordinarily crafted sets, beneath precisely positioned spotlights, and with a budget unmatched to that time in French cinema. Too, the script abounds with intertwining metaphors—both spoken and visual— and a stable of self-referential catchphrases recur with extreme precision. But the film also bleeds brightly for the aspiring artiste, slips slyly through crowded city streets, and deploys a trenchant cynicism that belies its exaggerated staging. It breathes with liveliness and naked honesty, captured never so well as on the painted face of Baptiste the mime. His outcast suffering is not far different from that endured by the starry-eyed Michel in Godard’s ‘Breathless’, despite that director’s attempt to reject this film and its era as too mannered.

Although all performers here turn in iconic performances, Jean-Louis Barrault is the genius linchpin upon which everything turns. His face is uniquely proportioned and deeply expressive, matching a willowy frame that he contorts on stage like a ballet-dancing jester. His comedy always seems tinged with melancholy, as if he is too delicate to survive in this world, ground down between the ramrod nobility of the Comte Édouard and the nihilist subversion of the crook Lacenaire.

‘Children of Paradise’ also contains outward-looking subtexts that perhaps later eras of French cinema have tended to overlook in favor of passionate but self-absorbed character studies. Yes, the romance and sentimentality of relationships are at the heart of ‘Children of Paradise’, but not to the utter exclusion of other themes. Under the yoke of Nazi occupation, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert were obliged to couch their social commentary in the ‘simpler’ terms of historical costume drama and love triangles. To make a film of this stature in boom times would be achievement enough; to do it at a time of political censure, widespread hunger, and the omnipresent shadow of war makes ‘Children of Paradise’ all the more astonishing. Carné ‘s recollection of the production—prop food disappearing from tables, extras belonging to the Resistance being duped and abducted by Gestapo officers from the set—puts into perspective all modern directors’ complaints of pushy producers or tetchy stars. And so ‘Children of Paradise’, appropriately enough, is a testament to creation both upon the screen and outside of it. Woe that such enormity would frame its genesis, but joy that such passion saw it through.

Lincoln (2012)

IN THE OPENING SCENE of ‘Lincoln’, two black soldiers stand upright in the misting night and recount their unit’s extermination of a confederate contingency. Their recitation it to President Lincoln, who is playfully hidden while the story unfolds. Once revealed, he is bathed in a preternatural and seemingly sourceless golden light, listening with a munificent smile. Their conversation turns to the ongoing debate over rights for black soldiers—they fight and die as privates and corporals, but wages are docked to pay for their uniforms, and what of becoming lieutenants or colonels?—which Lincoln handles with equal serenity. Slightly mollified, these soldiers and others repair to their units, reciting his Gettysburg Address. The camera sits, Lincoln reposes, and Daniel Day-Lewis waits for the cut.

This is ‘Lincoln’ in a microcosm: a Christ-like Lincoln massaging one textbook bullet point after another, constantly framed and lit so meticulously as to hardly appear part of the same picture as his fellow actors (which may very well have been the case), while egregious lens flares and color treatments shout to clarify each change of scenery. Dramatic pools of light converge perfectly on half of a senator’s face as he pivots on his X. A row of plotting politicians deliver canned opinions in sequence as the camera pans to reveal them. Harrumphing House Representatives ‘rabble rabble’ as faithfully as a chorus of Trey Parkers & Matt Stones. Conflicts unfold in stagey blocking to remind us, ‘Hey, this is serious’. In short, ‘Lincoln’ is overproduced to the point where it is no longer enveloping film, but rather a high-budget History Channel special.

It’s known that Lincoln did have a rare presence, and the film takes pains to demonstrate it in action: rapturously attended anecdotes (by most), any number of moving soliloquys delivered over swelling John Williams themes while the camera slowly zooms in, etc. A better, more earnest investment of his character would have been to expand upon such scenes as his lonely dictation to the telegram officer, where the few men assembled share camera space together and are (for once) bathed in the same (still oversaturated) light. Lincoln succinctly ties a recollection of Euclidian geometry to self-evident truths of equality, makes his moral stand against bringing Confederate delegates to Washington, and leaves an eternal impression upon two young men. It’s one of the most muted scenes of Lincoln’s unique mind at work, and also the most enduring.

A doughty cast and conscientious costuming make up a lot of territory lost by Spielberg’s heavy hand and Tony Kushner’s bulky script. The words are correct and on occasion magnificent (usually when delivered by the perfectly cantankerous Tommy Lee Jones, or by Day-Lewis himself in passing exchanges), but the longer any character is given to speak, the more burdened and drawn-out everything becomes. Most unduly saddled is Sally Field, an otherwise sanguine counterpoint to Lincoln, whose scenes are overstuffed with portentous monologues and harried breakdowns.

Despite all this, ‘Lincoln’ is far from a drag to endure. To the contrary, the pacing of the film is almost seamless; nearly 150 minutes ease by without thought, and a compelling balance between Lincoln’s personal and professional lives is very soundly struck. But the minutiae are again shoddy. Often, pertinent questions are posed to abrupt cuts, leaving characters no time to reflect on or squirm beneath them, for Spielberg and Kahn (his editor shadow) had bigger fish to fry elsewhere. A revealing subplot with Lincoln’s son Robert—the only thing aside from the 13^th Amendment that can truly rouse him—is hamstrung towards the end, leaving Joseph Gordon-Levitt to fill in backgrounds alongside General Grant.

This film is well-timed for American in 2012, consumed by partisanship and defined by doomsayers while a once-heralded Illinois president strives to heal great wounds. But in drawing such parallels and perhaps taking comfort from them gives too much leeway to ‘Lincoln’, the film. The product is didactic and manufactured, though its tools are exemplary. One wonders what audiences and critics outside of America—and not drenched in the halcyon glow of its pride—might think of it. ‘Lincoln’ does well to remind us of a critical era in American history, and reportedly acquits itself with most of the (important) facts. If only it had been more graceful with the fiction.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

AT SOME JUNCTURE, most war films recall General Sherman’s observation that “war is hell.” Saying the phrase aloud is unnecessary—redundant, even. The images alone are enough to remind audiences of war’s atrocity. But many war films also take for granted their soldiers’ lives before the war, and often those lives left to be led once the credits roll. The fear of death, the will to survive, and the desire of soldiers to return to ‘everyday life’ is all assumed. And often with fair cause, given that many such pictures take place in a bombed-out, greyscale world of diseased trenches, skeletal cities, and (to American eyes) unwelcoming foreign fields.

Leave it to Terrence Malick, though, to take nothing for granted, and to remind us that neither should we. In ‘The Thin Red Line’, we do eventually suffer through battle and pain, but first we are broken of the customary expectations that render that suffering rote and remote. Instead, we are brought slowly to life on a nameless Pacific island where we see the world anew through the eyes of the serially AWOL Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel): whispering through the tall island grass, gazing up from the ground at the sunshine cutting through the palm leaves, swimming in the transparent ocean, and staring long into a tribeswoman’s smiling eyes. Malick lingers in these moments, many of which have no direct bearing on the Battle of Guadalcanal, around which the film is technically based. But if we joined the men of C company, 25^th Infantry just as they hustled out of their bunks, into their landing craft, and onto the South Pacific shores, then what would their experience mean to us? Little. And would the loss of their lives cause us to reflect on how we spend our own? Not likely.

On screen, many of these soldiers fulfill the expected roles within a cinematic regiment: the wide-eyed rookie to the cynical veteran, apoplectic brass to the displaced farmboys. As the aspiring Lt. Colonel Gordon Tall in charge of the attack, the explosive Nick Nolte is an especially strong catalyst for action; with his bulging neck veins and fingers spiking up sweat-soaked hair, he snaps our woozy eyes back into focus on several occasions. Sometimes that focus is on the action at hand and the brutish simplicity of armed combat in close quarters. Other times, it is on the confounding contradictions of war—how a world built of such wonder and men made as brothers, by whatever hand, can collapse in on itself with a senseless destructive momentum.

But this is not just for knowing these men and regretting their losses that this film was made. That is an end too narrow for Malick, who sees the world in a wavering water reed. ‘The Thin Red Line’ is as much a celebration of life as it is a chronicle of death, and shooting it in the vivid Pacific is just alien enough to jolt ‘first-world’ audiences out of their rut and back to an almost childlike state of wonder. And through the hushed voiceover reflections of various soldiers, we may learn again why life is worth living. These reflections are a metaphysical poetry, lending depth to the laconic interactions between the men on screen like an editor’s footnotes. Even Lt. Col. Tall, harsh and ravenous, is given a sensitive depth by one such entry, validating the manic force with which he pursues that hill and then the next, men and water be damned.

Eventually taking on the stature of rhetorical soliloquys, these outward musings cross over into the self-indulgence of art cinema (“Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth”), and our attention doe sometimes wander over the film’s nearly three-hour length. Too, as effectively as Malick tantalizes the initial approach to the central battle, he meanders a little off-pace through the film’s second half and we are left somewhat disoriented. Especially patchy is Witt’s denouement, which seems a little limp and obligatory after the gently beatific mysticism that he carried so deftly throughout the rest of the film.

But every fragment of this existential portrait is painstakingly earned. Some may find the film to be too steeped in its own drama, but Malick is no pretender and will countenance no shortcuts. ‘The Thin Red Line’ is a dense brew, as draining as it is revitalizing, worth drinking from deeply. And then again—for no such second draught of life exists.

The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällen) – (1960)

A PLOT COULD HARDLY be more suitable for Bergman’s attention than that of ‘The Virgin Spring’. Drawn from an ancient folk lay, the film was rewritten for the screen by Ulla Isaksson—one of the rare times Bergman himself did not compose the script. Although the plot itself is relatively simple, the layers of conflict are many; hardly any character seems at peace with his self or her surroundings. Religion, class, family, sex, and Bergman’s usual existentialist crisis are all threads vigorously tugged, signed, tinged, and tangled.

It’s a challenge to choose a single protagonist, too. Our first focus, the virginal Karin (Birgitta Petersson) is self-absorbed and arrogant, but not without compassion. The film opens with Karin’s foster sister, the dusky Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), and periodically follows the latter on tangential explorations, but our prime mover remains Karin. And then suddenly she dies and our point of view must shift. In the film’s second half, it is split between two conflicting entities: the three highwaymen who raped and murdered Karin, and her bereaved family led by the taciturn father, Töre (Max von Sydow), and his zealous wife, Märeta (Birgitta Valberg). Even the highwaymen have internal strife, as the youngest among them seems to regret the actions of his older companions and cannot come to grips with what he witnessed them perpetrate, much less after joining the Last Supper-like dinner table of the girl’s family. Despite his gnawing hunger, he would rather spit out their broth and knock the bowl about the table than complete the ritual of breaking bread and receiving the implicit protection afforded to such guests.

Indeed, ‘The Virgin Spring’ is never at peace. From its opening scene—night and day, fire and cold, Odin and Christ, sister and sister, the sullied and the pure—to its last—the reconciliation of Karin’s family with her half-buried body, presumably her immortal soul, each other as enablers, and ultimately their newly-received God—‘The Virgin Spring’ offers no release. The actual spring that erupts from near Karin’s head inspires a wave of devotion from all present (Ingeri seeks to cleanse herself in its flow and Töre takes it as a sign from God and swears an oath to build a church to honor God and make up for his own sins of retribution) but the obtuse eye of Sven Nykvist’s camera refuses to let us interpret this all at face value. Instead, looking at characters’ isolated faces or their removed backs as they experience their revelation, we get the sense that a profound grief lingers, and doubt that they are trying to scrub away at the source of their woe. Yet not succeeding.

The film is also notable as the first real collaboration between Bergman and Nykvist, which became one of cinema’s most important and enduring partnerships. Nykvist deepened Bergman’s point of view, presented framings that were more naturally compelling than the sometimes-stagy work of Bergman’s earliest years, and approached the human form with a completely candid eye, allowing Bergman and his actors to explore their most intimate depths without obstruction.

But that dynamic had not entirely blossomed in ‘The Virgin Spring’, and it seems one of the few early Bergman films, for all its conflicting complexity, to lay a bit flat once it is through. Yes, the conflicts are many and often unresolved, but they are also rather didactic. ‘The Virgin Spring’ is a morality play, written fairly straight (if quite brutally) on paper, filmed more ambiguously, and viewed almost inconsequentially. Compared to the more empathetic struggles of his breakthrough 50s oeuvre, ‘The Virgin Spring’ feels more like an exercise in pathos than an exploration of it. An experiment more than an expression. However, its transitional role is critical in Bergman’s history, not least for his collaboration with Nykvist, but also marking shift in tone. Bergman often explored themes of family life and crises of faith throughout his career, but with ‘The Virgin Spring’ he began to be more subtle—ironic, given how plainly stated every theme and everything is in this film. From here, his films were less often a blazing emblem, and more the disquieting lump in one’s throat that never quite subsides. If they did, we might find that we missed them.

Becket (1964)

PETER O’TOOLE AND RICHARD BURTON, two of Britain’s premier thespians of the mid-20^th century, are each other’s perfect foil and ‘Becket’ their ideal vehicle. O’Toole as Norman king Henry II: debonair, worldly, so slender as to appear fragile, his smirk, penetrating blue eyes, and a wayward lock of blonde hair belying the crown upon his head. Burton his Saxon servant: earthy, no show-stopping beauty but solidly shaped, cagey, and a leveling gaze that brooks neither foes nor fatuous friends. They are men of ambition and opportunity, respectively—complementary yet distinct objectives that remain compatible only so long as Becket’s opportunities are derived solely from Henry’s ambition. Henry is covetous and blind—he gives of his heart, but not of his hand—and Becket survives as his lapdog only so long as he has no honor of his own to lose. It begins as a fruitful relationship, but also one doomed from the first.

To watch this dissolution is to love and despise Henry at once. Facing the stern, stubborn Becket, who defies his King as well as our sympathy, we cannot help but feel sorry for the tortured monarch, even as his temper and whimsy give Becket just cause for every one of his rebellions. By today’s standards, perhaps O’Toole oversells his part (even clutching his ostensibly broken heart at one point and collapsing to the floor) but as he oft reminds us, “[he] is the king!” and seems convinced that the grandeur of his office only befits a man with such deep emotions as he. Although his physical form leaves no great impression in those towering castle chambers, he dominates them all the same with his spry movements, booming proclamations, and fiery fits of anger directed at anyone close enough to affect him—and yet not be Becket. His diatribes against his wife and family are particularly scathing and as bleakly humorous as they are tragic. One such, to his wife: “Your body, madam, was a desert that duty forced me to wander in alone.”

In comparison, Becket is an impenetrable stone. He serves his master when it serves him, when it allows him to survive, and to ascend in stature. When standing alone he gazes off into the distance (as only Burton can do) and feels not a thing. We see no pleasure that he derives in this, merely a survival instinct with brief flashes of decency. Yet never intimacy. And when Becket finally does find his honor, or rather, that of God, it seems almost as much an escape as it does a discovery; he assumes the mantle of religion, and thus God’s honor becomes his own, relieving him of his own consciousness, his own joys, losses, or aspirations. He is God’s man, for God is greatest. This transition, although sensible for Becket’s character (at least as presented in the film, which O’Toole readily acknowledges as apocryphal history in his commentary), is not communicated too efficiently to the audience. The transition of Becket’s allegiance from Henry to God is a little too abrupt, particularly given how doggedly Becket adheres to his newfound principles in the film’s latter half. However, there is no questioning Burton’s decision once it is made, only director Peter Glenville’s depiction of it. In any event, Becket never looks completely natural in his glorious raiment, and this is completely reasonable—he is an up-jumped Saxon deacon who never sought the office, after all, and who ‘wenched his way’ across London. It is difficult to reconcile his character’s physical disparity with an absolute spiritual devotion, but Burton achieves it naturally.

‘Becket’ is a historical epic of sorts, and thus its 2 ½ hour running time are not out of sorts. However, the history merely serves as the arena for what is ultimately a personal drama, a story of unrequited love that takes place at the top of the world. And so the film probably could have been shortened by at least 15 minutes without cutting a single scene, but the need is debatable; the long, wordless establishing shots from one epic vista to another and the and copious time spent observing ecclesiastical procedures are both essential to establishing the scale of this tragedy across time, class, race, oceans, and religion, that is helpful in balancing the theatricality of its presentation. This is reinforced by a patient direction, which allowed the actors to play out their scenes in full in front of a generally sedentary camera. And this is perfectly acceptable, given the scope of the sets involved and the gravitas of the two leading mean, who have no need for exaggerated camera swoops to give their actions credence. But this also gave the editing a slightly stilted feel, as it tried to cut together different angles and situations from scenes that may have been shot in their entirety, and thus diverged from one another more than the usual one step or pregnant pause here or there. The hitches are not constantly intrusive, though during long dialogue scenes (and there is plenty of exposition between these two men) it becomes a slight distraction. Too, when the film broadens its focus to include the French King across the narrow channel, the spectral Pope in Rome, or Becket’s cabal of noblemen, ‘Becket’ loses some of its timeless, Shakespearean sheen and seems much more a product of its era: grand in ambition, slightly hammy, and inconsistently cast between monumental lead presences and hardly-acting amateurs.

Fortunately, the film picks up once again towards its conclusion; once Henry has condemned Becket, the shackles he made for himself constrict ever tighter, and bitter irony turns to cutting despair. And after everything, in a passing moment of wrenching tenderness, Henry kneels at Becket’s tomb and cups his living hand around the Archbishop’s marble ones. And we nearly can believe that they are friends once more.

Quills (2000)

THOUGH IT IS STILL a salacious diversion, returning to ‘Quills’ in adulthood strips away the mantle of profound drama adolescence had bestowed upon it. But this may well be deliberate, for in many ways ‘Quills’ is like one of the Marquis’ own stories: pointedly melodramatic, sensational to a fault, and so indulgent as to be fantasy without consequence. Its characters are universally corruptible, every motive can be reduced down to sexual depravity, and the all the core conflicts are shams, for their endings are telegraphed from virtually every character’s first scene. Altogether, it smacks of a licentious dream, vivid and evocative while it lasts but just as easily put aside once it has passed.

Still, sometimes a truly garish script is necessary to draw out the total commitment of an actor, and here ‘Quills’ has not lost a whit. Mastery comes in subtle facial cues and deliberate pauses, but so, too, in the thriving, writhing sadism of Geoffrey Rush, who holds nothing back in his portrayal of the Marquis. Yes, any actor can strip naked—indeed, most humans do every day—but what separates Rush from exhibitionism is in how he makes this depraved weevil of a man sympathetic. Despite his remorseless manipulation and torment of the Abbe (a young and slightly precious Joaquin Phoenix), we come to believe in his compulsion, his mania, and to pity him. Which he would undoubtedly detest.

The Abbe would seem to be the Marquis’ foil at first, but this role is more thoroughly fulfilled by the menacing Michael Caine, a perfectly deplorable doctor whose zeal for punishment is equaled only by his complete lack of self-accountability. The menace between the two is rare and electric. Completing the picture (as well as giving the audience one character we can identify with) is Kate Winslet’s scullery maid, Madeline. She is charismatic without being coy, stubborn without being ostentatious, and her earthy tête–à–tête with the Marquis help ground the film’s more exaggerated, nightmarish cavorting.

As for the setting itself, the environments are convincingly rendered—detailed enough to be immersive, but not so obsessive or gratuitous in their depiction as to preen. And if the excesses of the story make it easy to dismiss as folly, the imagery is still highly memorable. There are the peak passages, of course: the count capering upon a table in his white coattails blood-smeared with glorious smut; his proud nakedness in an empty cell, facing us while the black-cloaked Abbe looks away. But also the small: the Abbe lurching from his chambers in pursuit of Madeline, only to recoil as another’s face turn towards him; an upward angle of the heavily garbed doctor crouched in his coach like a spider, smirking as only Michael Caine can. If the theater of ‘Quills’ threatens to overwhelm itself at times, these moments redeem it. And, then, if ‘Quill’s is indeed like an erotic dream, existing for its own colorful pleasure, high art be damned, then it is a complete coup.

Dead Man (1995)

AN ENGROSSING TALE well told, but still less than the sum of its parts. On paper it is genius: a black-and-white spirit quest led by Jonny Depp, a Cleveland account named William Blake, featuring cameos from Crispin Glover, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Henriksen, Alfred Molina, William Hurt, Billy Bob Thorton, Iggy Pop, and Robert Mitchum (at this point an aged and hoary lion), with a soundtrack composed and performed by Neil Young on solo guitar. But the result is largely fruitless and achieves little more than wandering from beginning to end without getting stuck in an impassable bog.

The entire film occurs through a procession of fades, with each vignette functioning almost like a visual poem, creating an atmosphere that tells a story altogether instead of a direct progress from points A through Z. Given that most of it takes place from Blake’s perspective, this kind of dreamy miasma is often effective, but its impact begins to flag after the umpteenth episode begins with Depp blearily opening his eyes and struggling to ascertain his surroundings. Young’s score, meanwhile, is as immediately recognizable as the film, consisting almost exclusively of him, an electric guitar, some delay, and a (presumably) small tube amp driven to its limit. It begins boldly, drawing memorable themes out of a largely ambient framework, but like the film itself eventually begins to circle in on itself, treading over its goodwill.

To be sure, that road is interesting enough to keep one’s attention throughout. William Blake runs afoul of a frontiersman over his paramour and is the only one to escape alive. Out in the woods, wounded and slightly delirious, he meets a Native American who calls himself Nobody and mistakes this Blake for the British Christian mystic-cum-poet. Nobody doesn’t really do much to heal Blake, claiming that it is impossible, and then benevolently ushers him across land, rock, river, and sea, into oblivion. The arc is a classical one: the name Nobody invokes the Odyssey, of course, but his role is closer to that of Virgil in Dante’s ‘Inferno’, albeit much less well-informed. Other passages in the film—the lethal encounter with the three campers, for instance—are reminiscent of the lighthearted but trenchant interludes found in Shakespeare. The medium and methodology of the film are distinctly 90s art-house, and its empty conclusion presaged the do-nothing existentialism of the new millennium. It is a hodgepodge, and a patient one for as much ground as it intends to cover, but for all its self-assurance can’t plumb any real depths. At least not insofar as a standalone tale. In that regard it actually functions better as a comedy. Depp’s halfhearted protests against all the mayhem around him, the bounty hunters’ destructive banter, and various quietly absurd scenarios are all neatly juggled.

‘Dead Man’ really becomes relevant when put into context—how does the Western genre remain relevant in a post-John Wayne world, where moviegoers are skeptical of black vs. white hat moralizing and the whizz-bang of cowboys an injuns has lost out to space combat and cyberkinetic apocalypses? So despite its ambivalent content, the narrative boldness of ‘Dead Man’ almost certainly played an essential part in reshaping modern westerns. The glorious ‘The Proposition’, for instance, seems to use ‘Dead Man’ as a plot template, whereas the Coen Brothers’ ‘True Grit’ or even ‘The Assassination of Jesse James…’ owe much of their atmosphere of frontier mythology to ‘Dead Man’. In this film, all conventions are turned inside out and lumped back together again in a new creation. It may not function as the old one did, but is it not something new to look upon?