Bowen’s Cinematic

A recent, characteristically excellent, appraisal by Christian Divine motivated me to take another look at Enter the Dragon, which I hadn’t seen in years; and this picture clarified for me my tendency to reject certain pictures that critics praise to the stratosphere each and every year. In the film, a teacher asks Bruce Lee, “The highest technique you hope to achieve?” Lee replies, without hesitation, “To have no technique.”

Certain filmmakers understand the expression; Jean Renior and Robert Altman did, Hsiao-hsien Hou and Olivier Assayas do, and, I’m thinking, based on Shotgun Stories, that Jeff Nichols just might also. Most American filmmakers, even the great ones, do not. Most American filmmakers, again, even the great ones, feel the need to revel in the highs of their virtuosity, sometimes at the expense of the effect of the film they are making. This issue of “technique” kept me from falling for Gus Van Sant’s more recent pictures, such as Elephant and Last Days. Paranoid Park is another of Van Sant’s ennui and confusion among the younger generation pictures; and, this time, I actually believed that was actually the filmmaker’s intention.

Elephant and Last Days are supposed to be about a Columbine-inspired tragedy and a Kurt Cobain stand-in, respectively, but the pictures were actually about Van Sant himself and his reaction to the commercial track his films had been taking before Gerry (which I’ve missed). Elephant and Last Days are effective on a surface level – their subjects are too loaded for them not to be, but there’s too much bleak-chic art-mindedness, too much “technique” to them. We come away from these pictures considering the artfulness of Van Sant’s long shots rather than feeling the horror he’s clearly intending, and we’re not even considering as much as we should be. Elephant and Last Days are the kind of movies that are almost always over-praised; that are so unyieldingly unpleasant that people assume they just must be about something that might be eluding them. Those pictures were about a talented filmmaker experimenting (admirably) but stumbling. Elephant and Last Days lacked the emotional surprise and shading of Van Sant’s best work (such as Drugstore Cowboy) – they were overbearing and pre-digested for us.

Van Sant’s brief commercial period isn’t as shameful as he may find it to be anyway. Good Will Hunting was a formula picture – a variation on the “one good teacher” movie, but Van Sant’s intuitive, low-key approach saved it – you didn’t feel as dumb as usual for swallowing the clichés. And the Psycho remake was probably the riskiest picture of Van Sant’s career – a noble experiment in directly channeling and connecting with a past master. (Connection could be the word that governs Van Sant’s work anyway.) The Psycho remake isn’t a good movie, or even a particularly watchable one, but it was a gambit that doesn’t require apology either. Finding Forrester is the one bald cash grab in the Van Sant canon; and it seemingly sent him scrambling back to rediscover something.

I think Van Sant may have rediscovered that something in Paranoid Park, a picture that successfully fuses the old and new phases of the filmmaker. This picture is manipulative too, and it has the stacked deck of a young adult novel (which it is, in fact, taken from) but the picture is also Van Sant’s most playful since To Die For (which, truthfully, is also uneven). There are the usual shortcuts, such as the protagonists’ parents that are either off-screen or blank or largely uncommunicative; but the picture surprises you when you think you’ve got it figured out.

Paranoid Park, using the same surface approach as Van Sant’s prior pictures (consciously long, static takes; deliberate non-dialogue), directly connects to its protagonist, Alex (Gabe Nevins), and achieves a disconcertingly pure empathy. This is one of those pictures that clarify the intent of its creator’s previous few films – where the others felt calculated, Paranoid Park feels effortless, human. The limitations in tone have become the short-comings in our protagonist’s perceptions – and while we knew that of the other pictures too, it never totally registered, we couldn’t ever quite engage with what Van Sant was doing. The difference? Van Sant allows spontaneity to creep in this time – we’re allowed a peek at what can be lost.

Paranoid Park won me over, about a third of the way in, when Van Sant shows Alex and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Jennifer (Taylor Momsen) trying on tuxedos and dresses. The scene isn’t overplayed, and, more crucial to Van Sant, it isn’t underplayed either. We watch as these two awkward confused kids, who’ve yet to have sex, but are considering it, tinker with being adults (this scene is, in effect, a pre-test to their deflowering). In this moment; and in moments between Alex and his girl-that’s-a-friend Macy (Lauren McKinney), Van Sant rediscovers his gift for scenes with discombobulating mood shifts and for seemingly instantly establishing interpersonal connections. And Van Sant even gives us a pause toward the end, between Alex and his father, that tells us more about Alex’s parents’ separation in a few seconds than most pictures pack in their entire running times.

By stepping back, and by finding non-actors that connect more than they ever have for him before (Nevins and McKinney are particularly haunting – the former recalling a less self-possessed Wiley Wiggins in Dazed and Confused), Van Sant achieves a stream-of-consciousness that’s unfettered by coffee-house ticks. And those ticks, when they appear, have true gravity, it doesn’t feel as if Van Sant is showing off. There’s a long take in a shower, an attempted purge of guilt, that might be the strongest scene in the movie; and there’s a tracking shot of Alex in a hallway in his high-school that conjures, perfectly, a state of zoning out. This picture has a death in it also, and it feels like the intrusion that was always intended in the prior pictures – it punctures Van Sant’s airy mood, and world. A character learns to live with a terrible accident in Paranoid Park, and it’s a testament to the effect of Van Sant’s film that you don’t know whether the character’s healing represents progress, or moral erosion, or simply – most terrifyingly – nothing.

★★★½

Warning: major plot points are discussed.

There are certain pictures, Taxi Driver comes to mind, and The Conversation, and, more recently, There Will Be Blood, that present worlds so dire and helpless it tickles you. These films are ahead of you too – they flip your feeling of capture into an eventual skewed, bleak joke. Christopher Nolan’s first Batman picture, Batman Begins, with its sack-headed boogeyman and intimations of post-9/11 displacement and paranoia, was a frolic compared to his follow-up, The Dark Knight. It’s not hard to see why it’s been called a masterpiece – the picture has a seductively unpleasant charge – and the novelty lies in the fact that you don’t have to go to the art-houses this time to get it. Batman Begins couldn’t be accused of subtlety, but it most certainly is compared to its sequel – this picture is bigger, bigger, more and more-an explosion of the powder-keg our Batman (Christian Bale) waltzed over in the first picture. By going against his ideology and killing Ducard (Liam Neeson) in the first film (which, regardless of his rationale, he most certainly did do), Batman has now proverbially summoned a diseased, equal reaction to his hypocritical action – the ghoulish terrorist The Joker (Heath Ledger). The Dark Knight, regrettably however, largely lacks those other head-trips’ sense of play.

The Dark Knight is one of the most intense entertainments I can remember seeing – but it’s not a masterpiece – it’s rather mechanical – and it feels studied and self-conscious – too interested in “transcending” the pulp-superhero ghetto. Christopher Nolan has indeed made a genre masterpiece about the futility and self-absorption of revenge – it was called Memento – and it got into our blood through the lean, confident purity of its action – and without the largely banal Soc 101 lecturing that’s abundant here. It’s brave and ambitious of Nolan to allow such naked, earnest, social pleading to inform his Batman film – but it also verges on the absurd. The Dark Knight’s exploration of people in the midst of chaos, and of responsibility and hypocrisy, exists, despite some critics’ and fans’ assertions, on purely pop terms. (Nolan, and his brother Jonathan, who co-wrote the screenplay, clearly have a thesis, and the characters are never once allowed to counter it-to surprise us.) I don’t use the word “pop” contemptuously; I love pop films more than any other kind – which is why, while watching The Dark Knight, I sometimes wished the characters would just shush.

Batman Begins cleared the sound-bite hurdle by giving most of them to the least appealing character, the City Hall crusader Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes); so we could give the picture the benefit of the doubt and assume it knew she was a naïve ninny. Here, Holmes has been mercifully replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and she gives the character a spark of manipulative, knowing sexuality; this young woman, teamed with the new, idealistic, photogenic D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), has obviously become a player. In an interrogation room with a man who handles all of Gotham’s criminal masterminds’ millions, Gyllenhaal sash-shays and smiles and nearly slithers – she knows she’s got the guy just where she wants him – and we know she knows next to actually nothing that counts. Dawes’ misplaced confidence – and the knowledge that the Joker could pop up anywhere-imbue the scene with real dread.

I wanted more moments like that one, where we grasp the paradox of everyone’s misdeeds through action (or gesture) over dialogue. There’s too much gooey moralizing – and what should be most ironic – Harvey Dent’s fall from grace – lacks immediacy and clarity. Nolan is clearly stranded between fidelity to the comic books and his own private interests, and they chafe one another more than most have acknowledged. Harvey Dent’s fate doesn’t jive with the “realistic” world that Nolan has devised; and his eventual devolution into something called Two-Face plays like an EC comic – its ghastliness is too trumped up. As Dent, Eckhart gives one of his smoothest, most authoritative, movie-star performances; as Two-Face he has nothing to play – and is stuck trying to breathe emotional air into a rushed-thrown-in-for-the-fans development that we don’t believe at all. The idea of Dent as a hypocrite who immediately folds is a strong one, but the pulpiness eats it up – but even the pulp isn’t given its due-Dent has a disappointingly after-the-fact exit.

The real problem with The Dark Knight’s thematic heavy–breathing is one that’s always inherent in the “paradox of the vigilante” movie – that we want to see the vigilante kick stuff up. The filmmakers want it too – and so the mourning over the violence that must occur is clearly fraudulent, and beating around the bush. We pretend that Batman’s fascism bothers us – but that’s exactly why we pay the ticket price – to see his fascism. Critics almost always go for this “have your cake and eat it too” approach – because most of them, if I was to bet, are too insecure to admit that they like action movies for the same reason we do; which is to satisfy the dirty urge to see asses get kicked. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven was applauded, but had the same issue – congratulating itself for deploring the violence it dealt out anyway. David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence was also applauded as a picture about this country’s obsession with violence, yet was, itself, probably the most cathartically satisfying violent movie that year.

You know your message has gone topsy-turvy when the vigilante up for examination barely registers, and the terrorist provoking his inner demons is far more impressive (though that’s partially intentional, I think, it’s sometimes tough here to tell the intentional from the unintentional). Christian Bale can be a very effective actor, and he’s particularly powerful in David Ayers’ underrated Harsh Times, and I love the principle of Bale’s style -which is that you’re supposed to come to him. But Bale has, for the moment, apparently exhausted his resources, or is stuck in characters too similar to one another. Bale’s Batman, or Bruce Wayne when he’s not battling madmen, is far too similar to his Patrick Bateman (a one letter difference is surprisingly apt). Batman is a non-entity, and Wayne comes off as so impersonal as to be faintly psychotic. We look at Wayne, and Dawes, and Dent, and we have no problem understanding why Dawes might favor Dent – as a human he’s touchingly capable of making square good faith hip again (which is why the bungling of his downfall is such a disappointment).

Watching The Dark Knight, I missed Michael Keaton – with his vulnerability, eccentricity and self-loathing – you understood why he put a bat-suit on, and why that would eventually unravel him; Tim Burton’s first Batman film doesn’t age well, but his unforced empathy with Wayne remains far more convincing than Nolan’s detached, observational strive for profundity. Keaton’s Wayne felt The Joker’s questioning (and mocking) of his authority – Bale just seems blindly self-entitled (again, partially intentional) and when Bale’s Wayne is meant to be conflicted, he voices it. Batman suffers quite a bit in this film, but you’d be hard pressed to know that judging by Bale’s performance. The Dark Knight is designed to challenge Batman, and to punish him for his ego – but Bale never gives us a sense of that happening in a primal way – we have to fall back on yet another soliloquy (delivered by either Bale or Morgan Freeman or Michael Caine, the latter two having become – regrettably – masters of the expositional bon mot.)

That’s the bad news. The good news is that I loved Unforgiven and A History of Violence anyway, despite the misdiagnosis of their power. We’ve been over this before; and you most likely know by now that rationalizing the enjoyment of a disreputable movie as something reputable irritates me. The Dark Knight is not really about us before or after 9/11, or before or after any other national catastrophe. The picture is about a very talented filmmaker trying to outdo Heat, and Dirty Harry, and The Killing, his own Batman Begins and many others. A major critic (Ansen?, Denby?) wrote that The Dark Knight is actually in love with chaos, and that couldn’t be more true. Nolan is trying to shake the summer movie out of its stasis and inform it with a sense of cleansing-for-keeps-full-blooded disaster.

Divorced of the gobblety-gook and seen in pure pop terms, The Dark Knight is a fascinating grab bag of the extraordinarily effective and the still sort of mixed up. There are moments in the film that deliver in ways rare to the contemporary mainstream film, and one of the best scenes is the blunt, jarringly immediate opening heist, which details the robbing of a major mob bank by a gang of clown-faced psychos who have been ordered to dispatch with one another as they complete their rounds. This robbery, which has a terrific punch-line, reminds us that Christopher Nolan excels in intimate, unfettered action sequences. I defended the somewhat maligned action of Batman Begins, because the disorientation was called for – we were supposed to witness Batman’s emergence through his victim’s eyes. Batman has already been established by The Dark Knight though, and the film is clearly meant as a wide-reaching epic, so the aims of the action have changed; and certain pivotal sequences (an attempted highway kidnapping, the convoluted climax) are nearly impossible to follow. Nolan, on the large scale, has not licked the action sequence – spatial information is garbled and, while the scenes still deliver in tense shards of information, we come away wishing we were privy to more.

Luckily Nolan has built more intimacy into this picture than he did in Batman Begins, so the filmmaker of Memento and Insomnia and the opening of this picture is allowed more room to play. There’s a terrifying moment between Rachel and The Joker at a fundraiser – where he taunts her with the sort of pop-psychology that the film otherwise regrettably buys into. The Joker turns “Why So Serious?” into a scathing, seething, sexually potent rebel yell, and I thought of a similar, more pornographic encounter between Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart. And there’s an image, with the Joker walking away (dressed as a nurse) from a hospital as it explodes, that has the sickening pull of a nightmare. And there’s one action scene, a stand-off between Batman on the Bat-pod (which has a great entrance) and The Joker in a tractor-trailer that authentically thrills because, the passions of the characters (well, The Joker) are allowed to trump the pyrotechnics.

Heath Ledger, as Batman’s phantom id and avenging angel, is an element of The Dark Knight that comes together just as you hope. Ledger gives a brilliant meta-performance, the sort that actually seems to be satirizing the pomposity of other portions of the movie. Did Nolan know that? I’m sure he did, and he probably knew that Ledger was also going to walk away with the picture. Ledger, in his best performances, had a trick – he goes way, way out (over the top doesn’t suffice), and gives you plenty of bits that define most audiences’ idea of what acting is (and is tailor made for Oscars) but, he enriches it by going way, way in at the same time and in equal measure. Ledger, in his more famous roles, essentially gives two performances at once – and that wobbly shifting between inner and outer, maximum and minimum, packs a major wallop; his performances have something more minimal and fragile, something that lingers once the more obvious fireworks fade.

As The Joker, Ledger shambles and adopts this hurly-burly walk that’s ridiculous and eerie; and he chews his cheeks and hunches over, and Ledger, as both actor and character, dares you to call him on his hyperbole. The Joker sucks on his words, and speaks in a rasp that could be taken as a little fey, if you could ever forget the boiling rage that fuels it. The Joker embodies the idea of being too mad to speak – he’s so bowled over by inner dementia, and disappointment and restless intelligence that his voice is numbed, inverted; with the exception of the laugh, which explodes unpredictably, and temporarily lances his chattering tension. This Ledger performance has some Brando and some Paul Muni of Scarface in it; but it’s also entirely its own thing – deranged, lost-boy vaudeville that lends Nolan’s platitudes sting. Ledger’s Joker is obviously psychopathic, and the film doesn’t sentimentalize that (though the violence is too muted), but the Joker is also the one character in the picture who’s undeniably, unapologetically, in touch with his inner song. Ledger even, occasionally, brings something out in Bale, most notably in an interrogation scene (that’s probably meant to play as a more vicious version of the Pacino-DeNiro café scene in Heat) of surprising helter-skelter insanity. And there’s The Joker’s haunting exit – dangling upside down – twirling-twirling-twirling into nothingness.

People call The Dark Knight a masterpiece because they love its conviction in itself, its intensity, its all-over-the-placeness, and because Ledger’s performance is so flamboyant and mesmerizing, and because they need a word to pinpoint how much fun they had being so spooked in the theatre. There is a word for that sort of movie: cool. The Dark Knight is a very cool movie, a movie that, despite its unevenness, I enjoyed quite a bit. I look forward to returning to it, just as I look forward to the few summer movies each year that really scratch my genre-movie-nerd itch. But we need to stop calling a spade a shovel-WALL-E is not a profound exploration of Earth’s impending ecological problems, it’s a simple love story that delivers beautifully – with the Earth stuff as a McGuffin. The Dark Knight only superficially explores our current anxiety (though there are plenty of doubles and symbols and opportunities for people to make a mountain out of a molehill)-it’s fun, occasionally exhilarating, nonsense by a gifted director who has, and this important, produced stronger work. Why do we always have to rationalize our pleasures?

★★★½

Aspiring filmmakers looking to make their mark in pictures that strive for naturalism, that appear to be “found”, but that also pack the cumulative force and catharsis of great popular fiction-already have two wonderful examples in 2008 so far. The first picture was Shotgun Stories. The second is Chop Shop. Chop Shop was co-written, edited and directed by Ramin Bahrani (of Man Push Cart, unseen by me, but that will be remedied) and he, like Shotgun Stories’ filmmaker Jeff Nichols, is startlingly young (born in 1975) to be making such a graceful-wounded picture. I was slow to catch Chop Shop, because I assumed it to be yet another predictable, one-tone portrayal of sufferers on the fringe of the American dream; yet another picture that encourages a good cry so we can feel better, get a good meal, go to sleep, and forget the entire thing the next day. We’ve already had one such picture this year (The Visitor) that we’ve already talked about. And I’m sure another will get awards attention this winter, they always do.

Chop Shop transcends its potentially self-congratulatory roots with patient, authentic feeling, and with an impressive, imaginative leap of curiosity. The picture opens on Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), an early adolescent, waiting on the street-side, among other Latino men of varying ages, for work. Alejandro, or Ale, is thin, wiry, young, but is perceived by the man in charge as being unable to do whatever it is the other men are to be doing that day. That doesn’t quite deter Ale; he jumps in the back of the truck, only to be discovered again a few moments later. Ale is turned down yet again, but the older man, sympathizing, gives him some money for breakfast. Ale, a young man of many occupations, returns to his primary day job-the garage/junkyard that informs the picture’s title.

Ale jumps right out at us. He’s handsome, and his eyes are big and alive with intelligence and confidence; and with matter-of-fact obligation to find the next in-the next opportunity or place or meal or assignment. (His parents have clearly been a non-entity for some time.) That matter-of-factness is the key to both Ale and the film’s fascination. Bahrani accepts Ale’s perception of his predicament without editorializing, and he resists that tired urge (that ruins Paul Haggis’ movies) to establish his characters with numbing dialogue. Ale sees his life as an adventure, and this is allowed by Bahrani to remain tough and unsentimental. Ale’s optimism and instinct are, rightfully, acknowledged to be several semi-contradictory adjectives at once: heroic, delusional and dangerous. Ale’s entire life, in Ale’s terms, is just another thing that has to be gotten around with whatever works. But even that phrasing implies willy-nilly self-pity, which Ale lacks. Ale is quite obviously a survivor, and he has the swagger of a natural showman beyond his years. Even more importantly, Ale’s life hasn’t, at this point, compromised his decency: a test of that decency being, of course, the driving force of Chop Shop.

Ale’s sister Isamar (Isamar Gonzales) soon appears, after a few pleading conversations on the phone with Ale. Based on Ale’s side of those conversations, I expected a younger sister (Ale clearly sees himself as the elder) but Isamar is a few years older and turns out to be just as startling a presence as Ale. Isamar is clearly going to be trouble for a number of reasons-she’s a beautiful not-quite-woman, and, like most not-quite-women, she doesn’t have a full grasp of her effect on her surroundings (particularly men) yet. Moving in with Ale above the garage, we’re braced for something to go down between Ale, Isamar, and the various other older guys working in the garage.

Chop Shop never quite comes to the head you expect, but there are warning signs-an unchecked, never quite elaborated upon, tension between the siblings. Isamar occasionally disappears with friends with whom Ale rightfully disapproves, and she has money that her job at a lunch truck can’t quite explain. Ale watches as Isamar hangs her underwear in a visible place in the garage late at night-partially worried, perhaps partially curious. The sexual dawn that is about to, or just has, happened for these characters is handled with remarkable restraint here by Bahrani, who manages to avoid portraying day-to-day life in banal “that one summer everything changed” terms. The characters of Chop Shop are ever-slightly, constantly changing: influencing one another, repelling one another, embracing one another, etc. There’s a scene late in the picture, after Ale has suffered a major setback, where he tells Isamar that she should still be at work, despite having gotten off an hour before. (He’s telling her to go suck more dick.) Ale’s implication would be awful enough-but it was Isamar’s reaction that moved me-a look of slight befuddlement (she doesn’t know he knows) that Bahrani cuts away from faster than we expect. The hurt that Isamar registers a moment later is left off-screen for someone, or maybe no one, else to see.

That moment is typical of Bahrani’s approach here. The picture could give way to the obvious at any time (and truthfully, we still have a strong idea where we’re headed here) but Bahrani knows just when to nip a scene to avoid the blatant-the picture has an electric sense of life and mystery that never patronizes. Bahrani even knows, and this is a problem for many (particularly young) filmmakers, how to cut each scene so that that spontaneous, ahead-of-your-expectations-editing doesn’t upstage the characters. Chop Shop is one of those pictures where everything, for reasons you can’t quite crystallize, goes right. This is first youth picture I’ve seen in I-don’t-know-how-many-years that approaches the cleansing empathy of Steven Soderbergh’s ridiculously under-seen King of the Hill, which itself recalled The 400 Blows. Chop Shop’s ending, a brush away of birds that scoops us out of Ale and Isamar’s world with their fate left up to them, strikes a final, beautifully uncertain note similar to the ending of Truffaut’s film. We come away with a sense, without feeling dumb for sensing it, that Ale will always find the back of a truck to leap into. Or maybe Ale won’t; but we do know-for certain-that he and Isamar, for a few moments, saw the birds pecking at the seed on the asphalt.

★★★½

My Blueberry Nights, the first Wong Kar-Wai picture to be set in the United States, has been greeted with general indifference-inspiring some to mount a passionate defense of the film as an overlooked achievement. As with many pictures triggering these sorts of varying reactions, Wong’s newest falls somewhere in between. My Blueberry Nights is one of those pictures that most won’t be able to settle into, and that inability may cause its fans to overrate it in understandable retaliation. But this sort of over-reaching, the kind that greets many talented filmmakers’ troubled pictures, actually does the films in question a disservice: further convincing the people not in on it that the fans are hopelessly deluding themselves-and that these people are perhaps talking themselves into the picture’s greatness before they’ve even seen it.

My Blueberry Nights is a daydream even by the standards of its creator. The picture channels, and sustains, that inner melancholic fantasy you entertain when you sit down at a strange bar alone-that possibility, that hope, that you’ll find someone or encounter someone, or get into some sort of adventure, that will shake out those cobwebs of doubt that spin in our heads on a daily basis. My Blueberry Nights is a romantic rhapsody of why we go to bars in the first place, and why we go to movies. With only a few exceptions, the picture is set entirely in bars and cafés, and Wong is clearly drunk on American iconography-the flamboyance and weirdness isn’t plastic or calculated, but powered by a deep, intense movie love. This is why people love Wong Kar-Wai’s pictures. Wong’s films, at their best and even their not-so-best, tap into, and get away with, primal yearnings that normally sink into the maudlin. It takes a daredevil, a magician and a mad talent to pull off what seems to come naturally to Wong; like David Lynch, he is absolutely impossible to imitate without falling splat on your face. Wong’s films are true cinematic fingerprints-for better and worse.

My Blueberry Nights opens with an intoxicating immediacy and lack of clarity. Elizabeth (the singer Norah Jones) walks into Jeremy’s (Jude Law) café one night looking for a lover who left her. Elizabeth is distracted, mysterious, carried away with everything that isn’t in front of her-poetry, her vanished man, and some sort of road trip she is to take (a long way to the other side of the sidewalk). Jeremy is disconcertingly open and kind-explaining to Elizabeth the keys that rest in a bowl on the bar and the pie that always remains as his shift reaches its end. Elizabeth and Jeremy have clearly connected in the most star-struck movie way we can imagine, but Elizabeth longs for the trip that will cleanse her of that now past man.

It’s all as moony as it sounds (starting with the title metaphor) and purposefully searching in a freshman girl’s sort of way (the picture is, when the style has been pruned away, like a novel aimed at young women). Wong succeeds as well as he does through pure, reckless commitment: one smirk and the balloon would pop. Wong seduces us with his usual slow, surreal, dazed visual mastery; and with ellipses that take us from one emotional high to the next with little in the way of standard connective tissue. Throughout her cross-country journey, which includes Memphis and Las Vegas, Elizabeth encounters a number of other lost souls; most memorably David Strathairn as an alcoholic policeman who misses his unfaithful wife (Rachel Weisz). As with everyone else in the movie, Strathairn is asked to play a type, but he imbues that type with something grounded and convincingly bewildered and wannabe numb-he’s the one character hounded by a past hurt that’s just a little more than a vapor-the only character that seems to have graduated from that college lit course from which everyone else in the movie is quoting.

Strathairn’s un-anesthetized longing also brings something out in Norah Jones. Jones wouldn’t appear to be much of actress, and she doesn’t have a strong presence, but the latter is intentional, and she is used cannily by Wong. Jones wisely holds back, and lets everyone else in the movie, and in the theatres, come to her. We see why all the characters take to her so-projecting little, she’s allowed to be whatever they want-the ideal bartender. Jones is a beautiful woman, but in a soft way that encourages that male fantasy of being saved by a beautiful young woman. You see in Jones an ideal, un-forced embodiment of the prototypical female romantic lead. Jones and Strathairn mesh well, they feed on one another’s blank spots-and this lends the picture an element of give and take, of spontaneous release from the lovelorn huffing and puffing. Weisz’s performance is a mistake though, some sort of Southern caricature that’s too broad and mechanical for the empathetic, magical balance that Strathairn and Jones strike up. But Wong is too generous to even totally squander Rachel Weisz, her final moment, a paying of a debt, registers.

The chief appeals of My Blueberry Nights, its modesty, slightness and good temper, eventually irritate. The episode in Vegas near the end, featuring Natalie Portman as a gambler with daddy issues; is tedious and too familiar (Portman’s performance is also every bit as off as Weisz’s) and you begin to resent the film’s airiness, it’s refusal to amount to much of anything. Wong’s prior films could be spacey and were generally unconcerned with traditional narrative propulsion too, but they were driven by a rawer, lived-in something-they have a discord this film sorely needs. 2046, the pseudo-sequel to In the Mood for Love, is considered to be somewhat inferior to that first film, but that’s a misconception. 2046 is more ambitious and daring, and takes off from a jarring change in the Tony Leung Chiu Wai character in between films. This film has no such surprises; Wong’s preoccupation with American archetypes may have distracted him too much. My Blueberry Nights is off-and-on enchanting and memorable, it is some sort of accomplishment after all, but, by the end, we’re left with a desire we hope never to face in our deepest romantic reveries: we want out.

★★★

It’s a common claim that the American movies made since the 1970s ended have yet to equal that generation’s pictures’ power and unrest and exhilarating defection from conventional form. That statement might err a tad on the broad, but I’m willing to accept the general notion; as well as the complaint that the last few generations of filmmakers have been too much the movie brats-more interested in tipping the hat to past movies than forging a new trail. Many of our best filmmakers today are guilty of this too-there’s too much self-consciousness, too much concern over being considered a great filmmaker. Every frame of most of the critically acclaimed films these days seems designed to telegraph its own brilliance to the audience (I think this was friend and occasional contributor Travis’s issue with No Country for Old Men.) Zodiac, a wonderful movie from last year, still has this insistence: a loaded-I’ve-seen-every-Kubrick-and-Pakula-movie-ever-made-fifty-times-film-geek-fever. That fever worked for Zodiac. It helped unravel Fincher’s Fight Club and Panic Room.

Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories is one of the most phenomenal debut films I can immediately recall, and its success derives as much from what Nichols doesn’t do as what he does. (The restraint here, particularly for someone twenty-nine years old, is extraordinary.) There’s no affectation here, no overbearing critic-proof checklist of influences (a friend remarked that soon all critics will have to do is catalogue the old movies to which the new movies allude). Shotgun Stories is a confident picture; a picture so pared down and intuitive that it’s destined itself to under-evaluation. Some people, people used to the anti-violence movies that deliver more porny-come-on bloodshed than the supposedly pro-violence movies (the anti-violence action picture has become the most hypocritical, self-pandering subgenre in American movies) may watch Shotgun Stories, half-bored, and come away thinking they haven’t gotten their money’s worth.

The people who get on the picture’s wavelength may walk away a little dazed, amazed by what they’ve been missing from most movies (as I did). Shotgun Stories captures a festering self-rage born of failure and disappointment and impotence; and never compromises it for one of its ninety minutes. (This may be a true 9/11 picture-if Hal Ashby had been around to make one.) Shotgun Stories has a bit of the distinctly Southern slow-burn intensity of Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade-only with the Sam Shepard gothic turned way down. The Hayes boys, like Karl Childers, or Daniel Plainview or Travis Bickle, turn towards violence as a potential lancing of their boils, but Nichols takes it one step further-he doesn’t get us off. Those other pictures build and build and build-and eventually work themselves up to some startling catharsis. The violence here, almost all of which is entirely off-screen, is awkward, conventionally disappointing, and carrying a brilliant side-effect: this refusal to purge takes us straight into the Hayes’ heads without pyrotechnics as a relief or distraction or convenient object of distance-we’re right by the Hayes’ and plugged into their itchy, disjointed restlessness (watch how Nichols uses the entire screen and how he gets you to dread every oncoming car). This is a rare, mature, infinitely more terrifying variety of suspense.

Shotgun Stories takes off from its leading man, Michael Shannon, that strange charismatic presence who’s probably best known for his turn opposite Ashley Judd in William Friedkin’s effective Bug. Shannon also nearly, briefly, stole all the other actors’ thunder in last year’s Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. It was obvious from Bug that Shannon was talented, but I’m not sure I was ready for his Son Hayes, at least not this soon in his emerging film career. Shannon’s discipline shaded a potential one dimensional wacky in Bug, but here he reaches a newer plane of dialed-down ache. Shannon is one of those actors, who can, and it’s nearly impossible to quantify, show you their thought process; he invites you in, as Kael used to say about certain actors. Shannon is handsome in an unconventional-alien way, and he has a way of appearing to be a found object regardless of the context of the film at hand.

Shannon is playing, on paper, a Hollywood favorite-the tortured man of few words with daddy and machismo issues. But it feels, and this is the mark of a major actor, totally new as you’re watching it. This probably has something to do with the picture’s surprising sense of humor. It’s not a humor of superiority, as many pictures set in the South have a habit of indulging in, but a humor of blitzed-bruised humanity. Son and his brothers, Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon), sit on a deserted street corner and one says “this sure is a dead town.” One of the others says it’s like they own it. Another says if he owned it he’d sell it. You laugh at this-but it’s a snowball of a laugh-a little something that gathers weight and force. All of the actors are effective and eerily appropriate for their roles, but it’s Shannon’s Son that unifies the picture. There’s a surprising intelligence and wounded romanticism floating around in Son-both of which remain largely squandered (which is where the rage springs from). As you gather all of this you find yourself authentically, against your instincts, liking Son. (If we wish to continue to belabor the 1970s references, Shannon would appear to be, in one person, both sides of the Al Pacino-John Cazale team-up that occurred in The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and Dog Day Afternoon. Shannon has Pacino’s disconcerting capacity for ruthlessness and Cazale’s baby-faced vulnerability.)

That snowball, as snowballs are wont to do, continues rolling off course-this is one of those pictures of appalling inevitability. Shotgun Stories, after several vignettes that establish, without hammering, the Hayes’ unspoken, barely-understood-even-by-them misery, finds its proper start at the Hayes’ father’s funeral. The Hayes’ mother tells them he’s died. (I won’t ruin how she tells them, or what time she tells them the funeral is to take place.) And the brothers appear at the funeral to voice what they see as a proper accounting of the father who left them and started an entirely new family-four other young men who also share the Hayes name. What happens at the funeral (it has a shocking gravity-particularly because of Nichols’ and Shannon’s refusal to overplay) rekindles an old hatred between the two Hayes broods.

I don’t want to say too much more. Shotgun Stories is a picture that you need to see devoid of my going over every scene, but the ending (no specifics, at least at this point) must be mentioned. The picture, after clearly setting us up for another fatalistic showdown-again undermines us. Boy, the doughier, least ambitious Hayes, makes a choice at the climax-a leap of faith and love and lasting courage, that punctures the nihilism we brace ourselves (and even partially hope) for. Boy, bucking the tide of man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do perversion that dominates more than just a small town’s way of thinking, makes a leap that leads to a final image of pathetic regret laced with a wee bit of hope. Boy embraces a kinder, truer, male obligation-a plea for a right to lay down the gun or sword or missile; a right to expect something more than has ever before been available. Shotgun Stories also clarified why I think I loved WALL-E so much; after so many we’re-going-to-hell films, it’s braver to point not to the wreckage, but to what should, but probably won’t ever, lay beyond it.

★★★★