Bowen’s Cinematic

There’s a tendency in people to believe that most great movies are impenetrable, that they contain a series of elusive codes and symbols that need to be poured over and deciphered. The film buffs relish this of course, but this belief may turn the more casual filmgoer off, believing a supposed Great Movie to be more trouble than it’s worth. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is certainly such a movie. Many will try to figure it out, many will write well intentioned college papers, but the most confounding thing about Anderson’s new film may be how up front it actually is. The film is stripped down, blunt, brutal, as single minded in its pursuit as its protagonist, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis.)

There Will Be Blood may be, at just over 150 minutes, one of Anderson’s longest pictures, but it’s his leanest work since his debut, Hard Eight. There Will Be Blood isn’t Citizen Kane, it isn’t The Treasure of the Sierre Madre (which I said after reading the script six months ago), it’s a classically structured horror film: concerned with one very disturbed man, who over and over tries to reach out to the society he doesn’t understand, and over and over fails. Whether or not he ultimately breaks through the cocoon of his own dementia is the central conflict, the drive of the film, symbolized, if you must, by the continuing explosions of the substance of his trade, oil.

It would also be tempting to write that There Will Be Blood is about The Twin Evils of Our Country, as personified by Plainview and his conflict with an opportunistic young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). But, again, I don’t think the film is truly interested in this pursuit. Watch how the film opens, and watch how the film closes, it is stubbornly, resolutely, about Daniel Plainview, no more, no less. Listen to Plainview’s final words, they are meant to be taken literally. By the end of the picture, Plainview’s conflict has been decidedly resolved, and his final words reflect that. While we’re talking about what There Will Be Blood is most assuredly NOT, let’s take a moment to note what Plainview is not, and that’s a monster. I’m stunned by the lack of empathy that even perceptive writers have shown in regards to this character. Plainview does monstrous things over the course of the film, no doubt, but he is not a monster. Plainview reaches out to people at least three or four times over the course of the picture, but it’s in his way, his language.

The film bears a bit of resemblance, strangely, to Kubrick’s flawed The Shining. That film WAS about the evil of man, and that was its limitation and mild undoing. Anderson, always a humanist, keeps things personal, intimate. The Andersonian dialogue and homage rich visuals have been starkly pared down, but Anderson’s true overriding obsession remains: the distance between fathers and sons, and the usually uncrossable bridge that exists between the generations. The final scene between Plainview and his surrogate son, H.W. (Barry Del Sherman) seems to me to be the scene that has been powering ever film that Anderson has ever made. Anderson has dug deep within himself to create There Will Be Blood; it’s a relentless, obsessive film about the relentless, obsessive pursuit of unattainable things. There Will Be Blood has been compared to Malick and Kubrick, but it doesn’t have their chic aloof, this is a film that hits hard in a sickening, funny, primal way.

I’ve never seen anything like Daniel Day Lewis’s Plainview (the characters’ names certainly invite a little of that bong water analysis that I just decried). The Huston comparisons are apt, but Huston never had the monstrous need, a determination to purge all vulnerability, that Plainview exhibits here and that actually makes him more fit for organized religion than Sunday. Watch how Plainview sleeps, or how he twists away from crowds like a wounded insect. Watch Plainview’s one moment with one of the little Sunday girls. To call Plainview an outright monster would be to deny the tragedy of There Will Be Blood, and the film is most assuredly a tragedy.

Do you know why I love this movie? And Paul Thomas Anderson’s films in general for that matter? Because they fucking go for it. There Will Be Blood is brilliant, muscular filmmaking, and would be a great movie regardless of how it ended, but it’s the ending that moves the film into the realms of the biggies. Anderson, Lewis, and Dano (who’s just as strong going head to head with one of our great actors in one of his best performances) just plain fucking go for it in the final scene. The film is a tone poem, a huge boil waiting to be lanced, and my oh my how these men lance it. They push into total chaos, of true bugfuck madness, and push and push, and push risking laughter, risking ludicrousness. Anderson has a taste for symmetry and the final scene is everything that the ominous, slow build opening is not, the ending is what Plainview has needed all along, a punch line that recalls the end of Taxi Driver. At the end we’re led to believe that Plainview has obtained the clarity his last name implies, and it couldn’t matter less.

★★★★

Anyone who writes about movies in any way has, at one time or another, probably had an imaginary review tucked away before they even see the film in question. Maybe parallel reviews, one a rave, one a pan, one a bit of both, and then they see the film and match the result to the most appropriate of the two or three phantom templates. I walked into Todd Haynes’ sorta Bob Dylan exploration, I’m Not There, with the idea that I would probably write a polite little three or three and half star thing where I mention the beautiful craftsmanship, the brave performances (Cate Blanchett has gotten all the attention, but all of the Dylans are extraordinary in their own way) and leave it at that, having seen the film primarily for the fact that I want my Best of to be as complete as possible.

I’m Not There demolishes this attitude. The film demolishes everything really: the biographical format, past and present tense, the nature of identity, etc, etc. The film recalls Natural Born Killers in that it’s a total explosion of form. I’m Not There is thrilling, obsessive id, a film that needed to be made by its creator. The film is defiantly, confidently art house, but it lends the term credibility again. The film isn’t so much about the unknowability of Bob Dylan, as it is about unknowability period, how personality is defined more by atmosphere than we’d ever care to admit.

I’m Not There also simply makes the music movie thrilling again. The music explodes out of the film in torrents of inexpressible need and exhilaration. The film had me, about fifteen minutes in, as we see Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) play “Tombstone Blues” with a bunch of old bluesman on a porch somewhere in the legendary, ultra photogenic South. This is what other music films, in their cloying obligation to be all things to all PG people, have usually missed: the pure, intangible, salty necessity to play music with strangers somewhere in a place you barely recognize.

The film manages something else: it questions the mystique of Dylan, the self-important lack of self-importance, and totally buys into it at the same time. I’m Not There could almost be said to be structured as a chase film, with Dylan, in his various personifications, on the continued run from people who wish to explain and contextualize him. Reporters, lovers, anyone. I’ll confess: I think the Dylan of the 1960s and 1970s, is, obvious brilliance notwithstanding, an insufferably pretentious ass. The music rocks and works just like everyone says it does, but the cryptic double speak of Dylan’s interviews has always driven me a little batshit. The film, in its loyalty to this aspect of Dylan, becomes tedious for portions of the second half; we’re drunk on Haynes’ extraordinary skill and hung-over on Dylan’s poetry in equal measure. The film is exhausting and I was about to write it off as a stunt that’s not quite the sum of its intentionally desperate parts.

Then all of the strands, the Woody Guthrie, the Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), the Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), the Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), the de facto narrator Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) reach an existential crescendo of despair that overwhelmed me. The title track kicks in and the scope of Haynes’ intentions crystallizes in one of the more emotionally cathartic and shattering things to be seen in a film of 2007. This what is what David Lynch achieved in Mulholland Dr. and didn’t quite bring off in his even more ambitious but troubled Inland Empire: a gut punch of primal need, a portrait of a person or persons so lost in themselves that they are incapable of any connection with another human being. The characters’ devotion to their craft is the connection and possible salvation, and the film is honest in refusing to hint at whether this may or may not be enough. That is the hauntingly elusive answer of I’m Not There.

The film needs to be seen several times to be properly digested. It’s dense and live wire. Unhinged, reckless and extraordinary. I’m Not There may even be a movie that I see and hate the next time I see it, but I will always be grateful to Haynes for the experience I initially had. For all its indulgences and warts, I’m Not There is one of the ultimate artist films, one the ultimate chaos of the 1960s-1970s films and one of the ultimate time travel Fellini pictures all rolled into one big, bursting, unwieldy package. In short, Haynes has made one of the absolutely unmissable movies of the year.

★★★★

The opening of Steve Buscemi’s Interview is as curt and direct as the film’s protagonists pretend to be. Pierre (Buscemi), a fallen political journalist, whines to his damaged brother about a puff piece he’s being forced to do on the new star de jour, Katya (Sienna Miller). Katya practices her lines for an amusingly awful gig on a Dawson’s Creek wannabe with her co-star. Katya remembers, an hour after the fact, that she’s to meet a journalist to promote her new, to quote Pierre, “slasher film”. Pierre and Katya meet at the restaurant, disastrously, and leave separately a few moments later. Then something happens, and Katya and Pierre find themselves killing a few bottles of wine and bourbon and scotch together in Katya’s absurdly glamorous loft, and the interview proper begins.

Buscemi, remaking a film by director Theo van Gogh, has made a film in which two very fractured, insecure people meet and proceed, for the next eighty minutes and change, to personify everything that the other fears that society actually thinks of them. Pierre plays on Katya’s need to be seen as something other than sexy tabloid fodder, and Katya continually rubs in that, regardless of her importance in the grand scheme, she’s more important to most people than Pierre’s political grandstanding.

Pierre is sharper and more manipulative than Katya intially grasps, and Katya is even more aware of her every gesture, the stretch of the back, the purr of a seemingly insignificant detail, than even Pierre initially thinks. Katya appears to be the most cliched of movie stars, she wears her entitlement like she’s embarrassed about it, but, of course, she’s not. This second element, the actual expectation of the privilege, is not the hidden thing she’s fakes or conceals. The hidden thing is that there is NO hidden thing. Katya isn’t an onion, she’s an everlasting gobbstopper, one flavor morphs into another and then morphs back into the first flavor again. It’s all true, and all false.

Interview isn’t a bitter, misogynist fantasy though, Pierre’s hypocrisy and hall of mirrors evasion is just as apparent, and possibly more insidious, because he has the shield of self-righteousness. Pierre is the one we instinctively root for (unless you’re a movie star yourself, and if you are and reading this I’d love a blurb) and he plays his unattractiveness, his honed intelligence and indignity, the exact same way Katya plays the opposite qualities. Put these two in the same room together and you have a metaphor for about ninety percent of what is wrong with this country. These two are channeling the simmering hatred and frustrations of an entire country but we can’t help but really wonder if they’ll fuck.

Look, I know all this sounds like a college thesis wank, and that, to a certain extent, is impossible to escape. Buscemi and Miller, onscreen together nearly the entire time, are the reason to see the film. They breathe life into the platitudes I just described, and turn every nightmarish verbal reversal into something vicious, erotic, dazzling. Miller has been the almost Next Big Thing for a few years now, and it’s sad that it finally happened in a film five people (including me) saw. She’s brilliant, one of the best performances of either gender in the entire year. Her Katya may very well be one of the definitive portraits of the Actress. Miller has always been a beautiful woman, but she seems for the first time to be in total command of her appearance. She, like the character, continues to bamboozle us, to play our assumptions of the Actress against us. Her voice is even different here, huskier than you expect, hungrier, but that just may be another of Her Things, an instrument of distraction, but maybe the fact that you expect it to be a distraction is the actual distraction.

Buscemi is just as good, but not as surprising, as he’s been providing definitive portraits of the self-loathing loser for the better part of twenty years. The surprise with Buscemi may lie in his directorial performance here, and I say that as someone who loved his debut, Trees Lounge. Buscemi, as well as anyone I can recall, trumps the limitations of the one set chamber play, and really makes the thing sing. The film never feels static or stagy; it’s electric, humming with the characters’ desires. This may have been what James Toback was after in his silly, laughably self-absorbed Two Girls and Guy.

Interview doesn’t go wrong until the end, where it mistakenly provides a Victor to cap off the night’s proceedings. There are a couple of reversals before the end that work just fine, but I didn’t believe the final few minutes, they’re too cathartic. We shouldn’t be let off the hook so easily; we should leave the theatre bewildered.

I’m going to go on record, though, and say that film and theatre students most assuredly should NOT see Interview. Buscemi and Miller make this sort of battle of the sexes as really about something else thing look too easy, it could inspire too many dangerously banal imitators. Scratch that, I’ll risk it. All film and theatre students should see Interview, if only for the chance it inspires at least one of them to make another like it.

★★★½

Or, a gifted director finally crystallizes the pet obsession of his fifteen year filmography and no one gives a shit. Ang Lee, the director of Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (no one mentions Hulk, though thematically it fits, which may have been the problem) has with, Lust, Caution returned to China with a story of espionage and passion that bares more than a passing resemblance, like several other recent thrillers, to Hitchcock’s Notorious. How refreshing it is then that a director actually EXPANDS on the Master’s thriller, and delivers a sharp, ripe film of devastating poignance.

We immediately know we’re in a more urgent Ang Lee movie as the camera sweeps over four ladies in the midst of a game of mahjong. The camera is quick and desperate, trying to keep up with the waves of unspoken things that hang in the room. A gentleman enters soon after, and the pregnant tension increases exponentially. You may accuse Lust, Caution of many things, but you won’t find it lacking in pregnant tension.

Which I think has been the problem for some people. You either get into these long slow burns, moments that are extended until the breaking point and then extended a few moments longer, or you don’t. When a director is this in his mojo, and has as much control over his medium as Lee does here, I say go for it. The film’s look, the sound, the mood, everything is lush and elegant.

And the story itself couldn’t be older. We open in Shangai 1944 on a beautiful young woman, Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang), a student who falls in with a mysterious political figure whom she’s meant to expose so that an amateur team of would be revolutionaries can assassinate him. That figure is Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), who is supposedly torturing information out of the resistance to Japan’s occupation of China. We flash back to the young girl, and to how she was recruited into the effort, and how she conspired to meet Mr. Yee.

The film is a remarkable work of empathy. Lee seduces us into buying into Chi’s view point. We see Shanghai as she would, a sensual place of mystery and danger. We also see Mr. Yee as she would, a charismatic, older shadow who promises (primarily sexual) experiences that have eluded her up to this point. The first hour or so is foreplay. We build. Build. Build. Mr. Yee takes Chi to a tailor to help him with a new suit. That becomes dinner. She invites him in for tea (where her party awaits to kill him) he looks her over…and declines. This is the ripe sexual danger of the old school thrillers, and Lee, at times a bit too cautious for his own good, is in peak form here. He plays with you, and…

…Chi’s little girl bubble bursts in a shocking, vicious anti-climax. Yee finally consumates both of their desires, and his brutish way with her will stick with you. Yee is reasserting his masculinity, the ground he feels he’s losing with Chi, but he’s also not sure of her. He suspects something, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that he, especially that first time, is trying to fuck her to death. And she, of course, finds that she likes it. Watch how Yee is with her after that first time, and how he turns an offering of a coat into a thinly veiled proclamation of whoredom. The other trysts, which earned the film an NC-17, are even more powerful. These two want each other so bad, are so confused with yearning and duplicity and all of the other things that are closing in on them from outside, that they want to fuck THROUGH one another, to find some new cleansing communication that can perhaps be a signal of escape.

Of course, Chi’s loyalties become confused. But do Yee’s? This is where Lee has saved his final black joke, taking it further than Hitchcock ever dared, painting Lee’s most convincing portait of society as toxic suppresser of our hidden values. Leung, a long time star and collaborator of Kar Wai Wong’s, is at his career best here. Mysterious. Pained. Animal. And just plain fucking movie star cool. Wei Tang, in her first picture, is even better in a more ambitious, demanding part. Something tells me that time will be kind to Lust, Caution and that a critical re-evaluation will take place. This movie is too accomplished and forceful.

★★★★