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Make no mistake: this is an unflinchingly grim film, and I’m still not sure it’s a good one. But it’s certainly compelling and wrenching to watch.
The Machinist is perhaps best know for the grueling physical transformation Christian Bale underwent to take on the part of Trevor Reznik, the chronically insomniac and obviously troubled lead character. From the first close-up, it’s brutally obvious that there’s no trickery at play here: Trevor’s cadaverous skull wavers unsteadily on the fragile stem of his throat. He’s not just skeletal but snake-like, all sinew and skin and horribly visible bone. Trim little gamine Jennifer Jason Leigh (as Stevie, friendly neighborhood call girl) looks positively lush next to him.
The harsh lighting emphasizes his dreadful emaciation early on, while it still has the power to shock. More shocking still, perhaps, is how quickly we grow accustomed to it. (Bale’s wasted frame, unsettling though it is to see, is not the most gruesome or triggering sight in this bleak, gray world. As the title suggests, Trevor works in a machine shop, and you know what that means. Uh-oh.)
But paradoxically, the realism of Bale’s emaciation, the brutal fact of it, kept pulling me out of the film… and more than that, it spurred me to question: is this movie worth the suffering Bale inflicted upon himself? Is this a piece of art worthy of that deprivation and damage, that self-immolating level of artistic and physical devotion? I suppose only Christian Bale is entitled to make that judgment, but from my place in the audience, I think that Bale’s sacrifice suggests a disproportionate, maybe even a penitential, commitment to craft… or maybe just a misplaced sense of the project’s artistic value.
That’s not to say it’s a bad film — not at all. The Machinist is a well-crafted, uneasy psychological thriller with a deeply unsettling tone. Bale brings his usual intensity and restrained energy to this role, and he manages a remarkable trick: in his scenes with amiable waitress/possible love interest Marie (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), Trevor’s seemingly relaxed, suave banter is loaded with nervy, murky significance for the audience. Like director Brad Anderson’s gritty no-budget thriller Session 9, The Machinist is suffused with an eerie, uneasy sense of looking through another person’s eyes, suffering their anxieties, afflicted by their blind spots.
[This review is cross-posted to The VideoReport.]
In the mood for a Hitchcock classic? Treat yourself to Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite Hitchcock movie. It’s at right angles to most of Hitch’s later work: no elegant blonde heroine, no ritzy locales for the audience to “ooooooh” over, no patina of glamour buffing the suspense to a high gloss, just a bright screen of mundane comforts barely covering up a cesspool of human horrors.
In this B&W 1943 thriller, young Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Theresa Wright) is at loose ends, waiting around her doddering parents’ sprawling Victorian home, waiting waiting waiting for anything to lend some excitement to her life. Struck by inspiration, she decides to invite her dashing Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) to come liven up their dull lives. Through coincidence or telepathy, the very same day, Uncle Charlie telegraphs the Newtons to invite himself for a nice long stay.
Shadow of a Doubt pulls a tidy trick, passing itself off as a pleasant portrait of sunny small-town life, then shading every corner into darkness. Cotten masters his role with aplomb: Uncle Charlie is a mercurial fellow, at turns avuncular, charming, distant, smarmy, and glacial, and Cotten makes him devastatingly believable.
This seemingly innocuous film plumbs the depths of psychology and stirs up some hints of emotional connection between young Charlie and Uncle Charlie that may make you squirm. To give yourself goosebumps, watch the film all the way through, then review two scenes: Uncle Charlie’s monologue at the dinner table, and young Charlie’s introductory ramble. The parallels are harrowing.
Perhaps more unsettling, the supposed sanctuary of family life is itself called into question: even before Uncle Charlie brings his corruption into Santa Rose, two of the sweetest and most ineffectual characters incessantly spin hypothetical murderous plots, a harmless little hobby to pass the time. Shadow of a Doubt is a delicious, decadent tangle of contrasts: it’s emotional and cerebral, it’s cozy and comforting, it’s chilling and repugnant. It’s a masterpiece.
If you’ve heard only one thing about writer-director Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 cult film Possession, it is almost certainly one of these two: either A) it features a rather untidy scene of Isabelle Adjani flipping out in a subway underpass, or B) it is completely banana-cakes insane. Both of these are understatements.
Possession is often labeled a cult horror film, and it qualifies on both fronts, but it’s also something weirder, something odder, something more self-aggrandizing than just cult or horror… something that might best be summed up as existential nutjobbery, or maybe domestic drama as eschatological disaster.
In the first few scenes, Mark (Sam Neill) returns from a long business trip to his home in cold-war-era Berlin and to his family. But his wife Anna (Adjani at her most luminous) isn’t sure she wants him to stay… and isn’t sure she wants him to leave… and that’s the most certainty we’ll see from either of them for the next two hours.
We know, as Anna might not, that Mark is some sort of shady governmental agent, that he wants to quit, that he’s being shadowed and that their home is under surveillance. Mark’s work means that a pall of nuclear-holocaust anxiety hangs over the first act of the film, but our writer-director downplays it until, rather suddenly and with a jarring comic note, he cashes in on it in the last act.
Though Mark and Anna insist repeatedly on the necessity of maintaining normalcy for their only-occasionally-appearing young son, Bob, both parents disintegrate almost immediately. Indeed, it happens at such a frantic pace as to be almost entirely uncinematic in its nature; it’s hard to develop empathy for characters who start out screaming and never stop, or to be anxious about their state of mind when they both go insane in the film’s first act.
The story itself is pretty coherent, surprisingly enough, if completely mad; Zulawski himself cheerfully recounts his elevator pitch for Possession: “it’s about a woman who [redacted] with an octopus.” And, uh, it is, if by “octopus,” he meant some tentacled… thing… that is either a mind-controlling monster, a gestating doppelganger, or a lump of abstract guilt and fury made carnal. Or all three.
But even this uneasy coherence develops despite the best efforts of Neill and Adjani as Mark and Anna. I can’t blame either actor; they are swinging for the fences in these roles, reeling around in an unremitting wallow of screaming marital discord, spitting blood and keening with agony and smashing cartons of yogurt again walls and trashing their homes and WHAT THE HECK. They’re clearly doing everything in their power — and I do mean everything — to present a harrowing portrait of a marriage in turmoil.
No, it’s the director who should be taken to task: he simply eschews moderation, ignoring the narrative and aesthetic forms that allow us to engage thoughtfully with a work: how quiet allows tension to develop, how calm lows allow us to see fervid highs and vice versa, how repetition robs even the most shocking displays of their power. Possession consists almost exclusively of climactic scenes, highly pitched scenes, vivid disorienting scenes that would be staggering if they were set against a backdrop of daily life, or if they capped a slowly climbing rise in activity.
Instead, these scenes spit out like the rambling of a madman, no punctuation or pause or respite. The whole movie passes like a fever dream, howling its fury and anxiety… up until the last few minutes, which are quieter. Here, the film’s most haunting moments unspool in relative calm, with no blood or beatings or tentacle-thingies, with none of the hysterically overwrought agony of the previous two hours, just the simple pleading of a child and an unforgettable sound in the background. It’s almost worth seeing for those few minutes. Almost.
Allow me to leave you with one last word: BANANACAKES.
[This review is cross-posted to The VideoReport.]
When “Twin Peaks” was first broadcast, my friend S (who didn’t have a TV in her tiny rented room) used to come over to my big, often-empty house on a rambling village road to watch the show with me. We would make popcorn or, one happy night, cherry pie and coffee, and gasp with delight and horror as we watched.
We were, what, 19, 20? Just the right age to be totally enveloped in that baroque, silly, scary world, to feel fellowship with Laura and Audrey and Donna and even thick-headed James, too sappy to be a Brando and too soft to be James Dean.
Every week, S would get so spooked that she’d put off walking home in the dark by herself for as long as she could, until — every week — suddenly it was midnight, and now the streets would be even darker and completely deserted.
So, every week, I walked S home after midnight, down long winding roads lined with old trees creaking in the breeze, few streetlights, and deep pockets of shadow looming everywhere. We’d chatter in a subdued way, mocking our ridiculous fear even as we drove it off with titters of laughter.
And every week, I would leave S at her brightly lit doorstep, take a deep breath as if I could breathe in that bright light and carry it with me into the night… and then I would step into the dark to start walking home.
Alone.
More than any of the spooky motifs, the sudden twists, the dreamy vignettes, or the in-jokes, I remember those walks home in the dark, where the mundane landscape of my youth suddenly loomed so menacingly, where the perfectly normal things of daytime became imbued with mystery and danger. It seems to me that’s what “Twin Peaks” is all about.
*This entry is cross-posted from MetaChat.
Shutter Island just might be the best B-movie I’ve ever seen. It’s a potboiler, a pulp tale. That’s not a slam at Scorsese’s film. On the contrary, I suspect that’s exactly what he was aiming at with this lurid, overblown 1950s-set psychological thriller, and he manages to make it both wryly genre-savvy and completely thrilling — even to someone who knows its secrets.
[The first half of this review is spoiler-free. I've placed a bolded note where spoilers begin below.]
The film opens with Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) en route to Shutter Island, an isolated island asylum for the criminally insane, to investigate the seemingly impossible disappearance of a female patient. Head psychiatrist Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley) treats the scowling agents to a lecture on his philosophy of compassionate, comforting treatment for even the most dangerous patients. His claims of compassion notwithstanding, Dr. Cawley is an oddly ambiguous, potentially sinister character, with his big knowing eyes and his capriciously high-handed treatment of the marshals.
We know almost immediately that Daniels carries dreadful memories with him to the island: Teddy brusquely tells his new partner that his wife died in an apartment fire. As the film progresses, we learn, too, that Daniels, a WWII veteran, was a liberator of Dachau, and images from the camp haunt his sleep.
Some negative reviews have focused on the plotline, which seems to me to be missing the point. The beauty of Shutter Island is the storytelling, not the story. The almost perfunctory twists and turns of the plot are thrown into deep shadow by the long, lavish, genre-loving narrative process.
The very first exterior shot — the green-screen shot of Teddy and Chuck on the ferry with endless ocean in the background — establishes this film as a homage to the suspense tales of yesteryear. It’s a more technologically advanced version of the jumping, jarring backdrops Hitchcock used in his driving scenes — almost naturalistic, but not quite.
Throughout the film, Scorsese pays homage to sources higher and lower than Hitch, making Shutter Island a chaotic pastiche of influences, including classic psychiatric thrillers Spellbound and Vertigo, psychiatric melodramas like The Snake Pit, Cold War paranoia ranging from The Manchurian Candidate to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the rich tradition of modern horror from Samuel Fuller to David Lynch.
And “chaotic” is the word to take to heart here. Scorsese masterfully builds up a fractured, fragmented narrative, filling it with blinking inconsistencies that vanish before we can consciously view them. The whole film seethes with chaos and turmoil: an almost parodically craggy landscape, a storm that builds to a devastating climax, great wafts of smoke, the varied and vivid torments of the island’s inmates, lighting that goes waaaay past contrast and into chiarascuro, and a towering soundscape of a score. When bright clear calm finally does descend over the island, it’s anything but comforting.
From this point on, you’ll find [spoilers]:
Read the rest of this entry »
Picking up a gift for an upcoming baby shower, The Fella and I spent an hour wandering the aisles of the local megastore (where the expectant parents registered), alternately cooing at tiny socks and cursing the shop’s Byzantine organizational system. [Author's note: I just wrote and cut, wrote and cut, wrote and cut some descriptions of the difficulties posed by just trying to buy the specified goddamned adorable towels and socks. You can well imagine.]
As we walked up and down and all around the aisles, I had ample time to notice the wafting fragrance of Fresh New Baby throughout the store, which I assumed came from some of the baby-care goods: salves and powders and unguents. Absently, I noted that the scent came in waves: sometimes subtle, sometimes strong, sometimes unpleasantly potent.
And then I looked up.
The megastore has large vents for air circulation. The vents pump air through the warehouse-sized space.
And anytime we stood under a vent, the baby smell became very strong indeed — oppressively so, even. As we moved away from a vent, the scent diminished, then began to grow again as we approached another ceiling vent.
I’ve done a little cursory online searching with no corroborating result, but I’m reasonably sure that my conclusion is correct: the baby megastore pumps the air full of artificial baby smell.
If any readers have occasion to visit their local baby megastore, I’d love some independent verification on this.
We buy a roll of paper towels every few months, whichever roll is cheapest and, though I know it pains the manufacturers and designers, with no attention to the prints — oh, I’m sorry: the “eclectic little ‘story-based’ vignettes that spell the end of any messy tale.”
But while wiping up spilled butter, I just noticed the motto adorning the paper towel in my hand: “You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.”
I cannot be the only person who immediately reads this as advice on disposing of the body.
Vividly textured, richly ambiguous, and darkly comic, Delicatessen opens in a ramshackle tenement hazily located in a French town in some unspecified dystopian future. Food is scarce, yet the butcher shop occupying the building’s first floor never seems to feel the pinch too badly.
I think you see where this is going… but the new tenant does not. His name is Louison (played by oddly charming rubber-faced actor Dominique Pinon), he’s a former circus performer, and he delights the neighborhood children with his clowning antics, which are cartoonishly impressive. Indeed, all of Delicatessen has a cartoonish quality that meshes weirdly but successfully with its grubby, dark setting and its gruesome premise.
This is the first feature film of co-directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who also co-directed the great City of Lost Children. Jeunet is now perhaps best known as the director of Amélie, and it’s easy to see Amélie as the indirect descendant of the grotesqueries of Delicatessen. Both films immerse themselves in a whimsically embroidered narrative built around the laborious quirks of its characters, and does so with an aplomb that magically weaves a potentially overwrought, incoherent mess into a beautifully balanced composition of humor, compassion, sorrow, and wonder.
This week, I’ll be posting thumbnail reviews* of movies (scary or not) that revolve around Halloween, starting with Donnie Darko.
It’s October, 1988, and Donnie Darko is counting down the days until Halloween. Why? The movie unravels that mystery, sort of, but the journey to that half-answer is tortuous, intriguing, and disturbing on several levels.
Despite writer-director Richard Kelly’s intent, for many viewers, the story ends up as a meta-mystery: is Donnie receiving supernatural messages about a doomsday event, or is he slipping dangerously out of touch with reality? Is this a film about extra-natural events, about a young man’s existential crisis, or about a descent into madness? Either way, the film is tragic, complexly compassionate, and sweetly elegiac, with a sorrowful empathy not only for Donnie’s plight, but also for supporting characters which a lesser film would treat as two-dimensional villains or clueless chumps.
Jake Gyllenhall, starring as Donnie, is an inspired piece of casting. He’s completely believable as a clever but troubled teenager. Gyllenhaal’s Donnie is vaguely threatening, a complicated mess of confusion and yearning, hulking around in a man-sized body. He manages to meld seemingly opposing characteristics in every moment of film. He’s gloomy and dark, but with bright bursts of cheer and charm breaking across his face like sun breaking through stormclouds, and even displays moments of delightful childlike innocence.
This is Kelly’s first film, and its scope and scale are almost impossibly ambitious; without Gyllenhaal’s talent and ability to underplay, you could cut that “almost” and leave it at “impossible.” (Though both DVD versions are fine, I prefer the original theatrical release; the director’s cut is 20 minutes longer, with a more cluttered narrative and less Echo and The Bunnymen.)
*My Halloween week reviews are also posted at The Fella’s site in Video Report 219.
Why Sex With Robots is Always Wrong: The Impending Demise of the Human Species. In other words, DON’T DATE ROBOTS.
The second link, but oddly enough not the first, is brought to you by the Space Pope!
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