Bowen’s Cinematic

Milk is another biopic; with gay struggle as the MacGuffin – it could just as easily have concerned a man’s grappling with any number of other barriers or signposts of doubt: drugs, homelessness, a physical affliction, pop music, drag-racing, hop-scotching. Most bios are forgettable hackwork, but Milk is more schizophrenic – burned through with director Gus Van Sant’s pop and art affectations, his little bits of self-consciousness (framing through inanimate objects, pointedly disconnected medium shots) meant to transcend thin pop psychology and lazy rationalizations. Milk, an earnest plea for equal rights – denies gay men and women’s humanity as rigorously as the right-wing demons the film protests, only in a more insidious, typically condescending way.

To be fair, the picture’s clichés are probably more firmly rooted in the biography formula than skittishness with the subject matter. Milk opens promisingly, with Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), ashamed, disconnected, lost, but charismatic, picking a young man up in a subway station. The scene is visually too showy (Van Sant shoots too close, congratulating himself, for allowing a character casual sex) but there’s a promise of common sense, a vital current amongst the usual; but Van Sant squanders that – the young man, Scott (James Franco) is the great love of Milk’s life. Once that relationship ends later on (neatly of course, with virtually no detail) Milk starts something with the volatile Jack (Diego Luna), only to commit to him for the rest of the latter’s life. This is Susie Homemaker-Frank Capra sex and affection, cleaned up for the masses, complete with the usual over-expository, plastic love dialogue that underlines that Milk is never too gray, never too impure, and that his lovers don’t quite understand his drive – his will to be something more than just another man who lays down for the injustices of the world. Milk, the first openly gay politician, is also evidently the first politician to successfully dodge all fringe benefits of the position.

I like my humans human, not flattened of all contradiction or compromise in the service of ensuring that I accept one potentially hard to grasp aspect of their personality. This is a common danger of bios in general – we elevate anyone who did anything to the level of casual god – ignoring context, ignoring intentional/unintentional factors that drove these people, as well as providing little in the way of suggestion as to what the outcome of this person’s influence may have, in the grand picture, actually been. This is a curious short cut for so-called inspirational films; it tells us, indirectly, that normal people can’t do anything – to change this country we must be indistractable, rigorous and exploding with fevered platitude – we must be ciphers that life happens to. Milk, like the recent string of feel-good musician movies, shortchanges how the characters’ demons and uncertainties informed their ultimate achievements – how the flint produced fire. The beginning of this picture, which finds Milk and Scott fighting their way into Castro Street’s merchant union, should have been the most revealing portion – an insider’s tour of the handshakes and the deals – our hero’s learning of the name of the game; and there is some of that, but Milk, yet another character allowed to summarize his death in un-revealing voice-over (it’s a bridge, a device, nothing more, and it’s pointless) just glides over it in a few passages of narration, his righteousness never questioned or examined.

The middle third of the picture, in which Harvey is elected to office and tastes the fruits of being a player, is promising. But Van Sant is unclear and indecisive, and hypocrisy reveals itself in conflicting uses of an important line of dialogue. An early opponent, who’s clearly going to win, explains to Milk that his plan is a downer – he’s reveling in what he’s against while omitting what he’s for. You have to sell hope, the in-the-thick-of-it politician tells him; and so Milk, rightfully likening politics early on to a circus, sells hope, as, yes, a philosophy but also with the understanding that it’s a means to an end – a political tool. Yet, at film’s end, the line is repeated with irony removed, in case we leave the theatre with the impression this world’s too big and disappointing and nasty and unresolved. Bracing scenes of Milk manipulating his eventual killer Dan White (Josh Brolin) are negated for the sake of trumped up “inspiration”. Van Sant follows his subject’s suit: hope sells, in terms of politics, as well as Oscars and reviews and box office.

It’s time we ask whether Van Sant’s a brave, experimental filmmaker, or a talented director who tries things on and tosses them off just as quickly as fashion statements in a (successful) bid to maintain reputation and relevance (and I’m beginning to suspect Steven Soderbergh of the same). Van Sant has his obsessions (sexual identity crisis, death, youth, youth grappling with death, death grappling with youth,) but he’s shaky with mood – he either commits too much (Elephant, Last Days) or not enough (To Die For). Van Sant’s unformed, loaded, vague images can be taken as astute leaps of empathy in his youth pictures – we assume he’s channeling the rolling, tortured psyches of his characters. But clarity is needed in Milk – moods, tones, and ideas are sampled: satirical, inspirational, with requisite stock footage, rock music, blasts of opera and Christ imagery inserted at the optimal moments for audience massage. White’s frustration and madness is the most vivid portion of the film, because it’s the element of the picture most recognizably Van Sant, he has a comfort, a confidence, with madness – and he’s not as concerned with having us identify with White, because White doesn’t stand for progress – White’s an oppressor, so he’s, unintentionally ironically, allowed more force than anyone else in the film. Brolin isn’t tethered to symbolism the way Penn, Franco, Luna and Emile Hirsch (what a cast) are, or the way that he himself was tethered to caricature in the considerably worse W. – White’s disturbingly unprocessed.

Much has been made of Sean Penn’s lightening up for this role, but that’s just his mannerism de jour, his conceit that he grabs and maintains for the entire movie with little variation. I’m worried about what’s considered great acting these days – undiscerning audiences will accept anything, and so-called discerning audiences will accept anything that unwaveringly, usually unpleasantly, hits the same note for an entire film. Penn is every bit as talented as he’s made out to be, but he’s buckling under that stone he’s forcing himself to carry for every movie now –he would do well to understand that not every role must atone for all mankind’s sins. (Recently, Penn’s more reliable work has been behind the camera.) Watch Penn in the underrated David Fincher movie The Game; he was loose and authoritative and terrifying in that picture – and poignant – his defeat and doubt and hatred were simmering underneath, waiting for people to find them. I’ve prescribed a variation of this exercise to many actors, but Penn’s riskiest, most liberating, move nowadays would be a starring role in a romantic comedy directed by the Farrelly brothers.

Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has a knack for the non-sequitur that slips unexpectedly into existential despair. Kaufman’s work howls with confusion, with death obsessions, and with pleas for understandings between the sexes – with a resigned acknowledgement that we’re all, to one degree or another, too enslaved to our own perceptions –trapped in our own heads – to ever entirely empathize with another human being, particularly one for which we have a sexual hunger.

Kaufman has directed his newest picture, Synecdoche, New York, and it falls prey to that Masterpiece bug that just about every major film artist catches from time to time. This bug plays on filmmakers’ inferiority complexes, their belief that they’re working in the most ghetto of art forms, popular entertainment that any Joe can consume between work and Subway. The filmmakers, distrustful of their playful, accomplished, far more subtle, pop instincts, punish themselves, and us, for enjoying their prior work. These directors have a peculiar approach to manufacturing masterpieces – they promote the subtext of their prior work to the status of text, and, in case we still don’t quite get it, force their major characters to take turns sounding their Big Idea, which is always the Same Idea, aloud, over and over and over. Repetition, unpleasantness and obviousness are somehow, by these gifted men, mistaken for brilliance. And a portion of the critics, probably as insecure as the filmmakers, and generally far more gullible than the general public believes, go along – because they like pictures that do their work for them; and that congratulate them for sitting through the pictures all the way to the end.

Synecdoche is a puzzle picture, like the other Kaufman films, but the structure is flabby, a series of meta-nesting dolls that don’t quite cohere in that predictable faux-“ambiguous” art way. The film is a wannabe masterpiece about the creator of a wannabe masterpiece who stages a massive, life-long production that is the detailing of his creation of his wannabe masterpiece. Reality and art blend and converge and entangle because that’s what they do in this sort of movie. The picture is about Death, Death, the decay of the body, Death, and a very sad man who’s, like Woody Allen characters, so fixated on the dwindling fragile gift of life that he squanders his gift of life – he wastes his life trying to create art that makes proper sense and stock of his life. Kaufman dives into his preoccupations in an attempt to get at something purifying in its unwavering fixation, but Kaufman, trying to create a Great Thing, loses his voice, and the seams show – we watch this new picture thinking less of Life and Death than of the various other similarly overrated movies Synecdoche recalls – Paris, Texas, certain Allen, off Lynch, etc.

It never occurs to these filmmakers, trying to capture real life, that bleak for the sake of bleak is every bit as false, perhaps more so, as the candies the movies sell us on a regular basis. Synecdoche is a self-deceiving, hypocritical picture, a picture concerned with life that never manages to establish what’s being squandered in the tunnel vision. There’s nothing at stake – because everything we see is a comic, pretentiously ugly, self-consciously theatrical Hell. Hospitals look like diseased warehouses, bathrooms look like warehouses, theatres look like warehouses. Warehouses must be, in this picture, the part that represents the whole. It’s a mark of this movie’s delusion that Philip Seymour Hoffman, cast as Kaufman’s stand-in, goes to bed with practically every notable awards bait actress in Hollywood without so much as a pause of pleasure. Kaufman directs as a writer venturing behind the camera sometimes does – he doesn’t. I underestimated Jonze and Gondry’s contributions to Kaufman’s prior films – perhaps they helped hone those pictures’ dazzling drives (though Gondry lost his way too this year, in Be Kind Rewind). Synecdoche has no shape, no form; all of the scenes (intentionally) appear to be worked up specifically for actors to workshop – each scene is a disconnected movie onto itself: overwhelming, numbing – every moment, save one, in this picture is an emotional crescendo –there’s no down time or fleeting enjoyment, every scene is a Scene, and they’re all basically the same.

Kaufman has essentially made the sort of film that he parodies in his other pictures but he may, unlike Allen, be aware of it, because the humor in Synecdoche is primarily self-satirical. We see pretentious plays and books and art work, points are scored on all the blowhards who believe their own rarified hype. So Kaufman, presenting his circle of Hell, his portrait of a man incapable of pleasure, can’t even commit as wholeheartedly as he initially appears to be committing – there’s a post-modern escape clause – the picture could be a pretentious dark comic spoof of pretentious no exit art. Synecdoche, New York (did that really have to be the title?) never quite commits to anything – it can be anything you want it to be, and you can use you whatever part of it you want to justify whatever excuse you want to cook up for liking it. The contradictions are intentional, part of Kaufman’s master plan, evidence of his brilliance of perception of the human condition the fans will say, and they are partially right – but it’s a master plan to string together ten years of ideas that didn’t quite make it into the other scripts.

I haven’t read too many reviews of Synecdoche, New York, but I’m guessing that Hoffman has received his usual enthusiastic notices. Hoffman is an intense, inventive, commanding actor – but his work in Along Came Polly is more original. Hoffman, like many of the actresses of a certain age so desperate to prove that parts still exist for women of a certain age that they take anything with a whiff of pedigree, is beginning to fall into the trap of acclaim: Kaufman’s trap here of mistaking ugliness for profundity. There’s no discernable difference between Hoffman’s work here and his work in The Savages or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, except for the fact that we’ve now seen the performance at least three times. This brilliant actor, brilliant in The Talented Mr. Ripley, forgiving and human in Almost Famous, blackly funny in Love Liza, appears to be allowing an autobiographical self-disgust to warp his range, and weigh him in something that’s very close to formula. There’s little surprise in this Hoffman performance, stranded by Kaufman, he spins himself in circles.

There’s one moment, between Hoffman and Samantha Morton, who gives the best performance in the film. Morton, a shy box-office attendant in the first act, and a hall of mirrors illusion in the latter seventeen acts, instructs the impossible Hoffman character on how to win her. Hoffman goes along, longing giving way to flirtation giving way to kinship and attraction. This tiny bit reminds us of Kaufman’s wonderful past tricks, which are really sci-fi screwball comedies for the current generation; for a moment, we’re allowed to understand what Hoffman and Kaufman are so terrified of losing.