Bowen’s Cinematic

Hollywood’s view of the middle class – suburbia, small towns, and neighborhoods – the white houses, the lawns, the cook-outs, the McJobs – can be schizophrenic. When filmmakers seek money, which is about ninety percent of the time, they pander like crazy: equating success and ambition with evil – assuring us that we were right to take the job out of high school, marry our sweetheart and move in next door to our beer-swilling best friend from third grade. This reassurance abounds in redemption fables and comedies – sometimes borrowed from Scrooge – such as The Family Man or The Devil Wears Prada, or virtually every movie with a lawyer or a reporter or an agent.

If the filmmakers want awards (given to them by one other) – they instead condescend: depicting the middle class as drunken, adulterous cowards who’re unable break free of the machine to follow their desires (normally to be artists). The filmmakers are congratulating themselves, for their ambition, their “truthfulness”, and for that self-congratulation they expect further congratulation – and the critics, terrified they might be the last ones to call the new movie by Mr. So-and-So a masterpiece, normally play along – mistaking easy cynicism and unpleasantness for truth. The Ice Storm, American Beauty and Little Children are obvious exhibits (The Ice Storm is a bit better) but this attitude prevails in all sorts of other movies – pictures as mindless and seemingly harmless as Just Friends or Sweet Home Alabama reek of resent-the-local-moron nastiness. No wonder the little man is so miserable, this is his entertainment. I’m only so sympathetic to a public that grants pictures like Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Paul Blart: Mall Cop success, but Hollywood’s continued simplification of the middle class is appalling – furthering our fascination with/resentment of the celebrity as misplaced royalty. These suburb pictures are clichéd group-think decrying group-think – a.k.a. hypocrisy.

Sam Mendes, the British theatre director turned filmmaker, was responsible for American Beauty, as well as the equally misguided-egotistical Road to Perdition and Jarhead. American Beauty is one of those pictures that pretends to satirize “checking out” only to eventually resort to life-affirming platitudes that reinforce checking out, to ensure that everyone in the audience had something different to latch onto; and because the Oscars like that sort of thing. It worked. American Beauty did have some bitchy sitcom humor in the first half to keep things moving, as well as Kevin Spacey’s best Jack Lemmon impersonation. Revolutionary Road, Mendes’ newest, doesn’t even have the humor – its American Beauty with the portentousness cranked up to 10.

Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe, adapting Richard Yates’ novel, immediately establish their disinterest in anything other than surface beauty and intensity. From the beginning, Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) are married, with house, two children (a .5 on the way), and jobs as salesmen drone and defeated housewife already firmly secured. The Wheelers’ idealistic beginning – she’s an aspiring actress, he’s a young smoothie on the make, his lack of focus a calculatedly self-effacing punchline for the ladies – is occasionally flashbacked to – with show-off over-lighting to underline their initial utopia – a black reminder of how far they’ve compromised themselves. The actual current of this transformation – the slip from idealism to disappointment – an opportunity for insight – is missing. Revolutionary Road is just a cage match between two wounded, rabid animals – with the usual exclamation pointed caricatures (whom I’m sure Mendes would term “archetypes”, second only to “satire” as the go-to justification for the self-important, short-cut artist) in place of context.

Revolutionary Road is the sort of film in which points are scored with beyond-clichéd images of identically dressed men marching in unison to the same job (similar moments in the less chic Joe vs. the Volcano and About a Boy are more resonant.) Or where an older, acidic alcoholic co-worker (Dylan Baker) is employed as comic relief as well as harbinger of the protagonist’s fate; or where a neighbor’s disturbed son (Michael Shannon) is the only deliverer of truth, the only one immune to the toxicity of cowardice and self-delusion. (Never mind that his superiority is an equal cop-out, the filmmakers’ have adopted the same superiority.) And someone, of course, must die – in order to lend a false sense profundity and closure.

And there’s the ultimate rub with movies like Little Children and Revolutionary Road, which filmmakers and critics sometimes call tragedies – an indication of their too-many-movies-a-day naiveté. Any filmmaker or author who claims to be aiming for “real life” is usually setting themselves up for the opposite – their visions of life are thick with pre-digested symbols and rigged moralizing. Conclusions are definitively drawn, endings definitively reached – but in life there’s no specific end, no tragedy, no comedy – life is a little all of that, in bits and pieces, dribs and drabs. These suburb movies reduce a stew to one ingredient and present it as the entire meal; and the filmmakers normally aren’t even that accurate – they pluck out a carrot – draw a sketch that’s informed by other stories of other carrots, and present that facsimile of a facsimile as the all. The little details and contradictions are missing in Revolutionary Road – its one knock-down drag-out after another, and those aren’t staged with a clear-head. Mendes takes sides: April, who’s more delusional than the truth spewing delusional, is meant as a sacrifice for the dreams dashed by the kind of lying down that Frank is meant to epitomize. April claims to want Frank to “find himself”, but Frank does find himself – the job that he initially detests reveals itself as a talent – but April doesn’t, can’t, won’t, understand that – a promising conflict for a good movie that this movie doesn’t understand either. Frank’s changes are equated as weaknesses, while April is granted the movie stature of fallen Goddess.

How’re Kate and Leo? Effective, at times more so – they blur Mendes and Haythe’s diagrams. Frank is more than a departure from DiCaprio’s recent miscasting as street toughs in Gangs of New York and The Departed – he’s also, intentionally or not, a redefinition of the player that DiCaprio embodied (superbly) in Catch Me If You Can and The Aviator. DiCaprio has always questioned his greatest assets as a star anyway (hence the miscasting) – the poise, the voice that’s more revealing than intended, and he confronts that here. Frank’s confidence and charm betray and reveal him in ways that don’t openly capitalize themselves; and DiCaprio doesn’t fudge and assure you that, underneath, he’s above it all, just playing. DiCaprio’s empathy is intense, measured – his work here may be, despite the surface gulfs between star and character, partially autobiographical. DiCaprio’s more self-consciously “serious” performances can be strained and eager-to-please, a superstar’s plea for a Real Actor certificate of authenticity that jives with Frank, who is always on the verge of internal combustion, always desperate for the acquittal that April can’t grant.

There’s one moment, typically overdone (the cinematography, by the amazing Roger Deakins, is beautiful and completely wrong for the picture – the emotions are fossilized in that specifically Mendes way) where Frank, fresh from an afternoon with the new secretary, returns home to find that April has planned something special for his birthday. The gratitude and shock in DiCaprio’s face is possibly worth sitting through the picture for. DiCaprio’s role has been written with obvious, awards-ready “acting” in mind – but the star doesn’t let it rest there – he gets messy and mushy, there’s flop sweat and an admirable lack of sentimentalizing about the void Frank ultimately is – he’s a normal guy who stands for terrifyingly nothing – and he knows it.

Many stars play games with their audiences, transparently trying to emulate legends that have come before them. Kate Winslet, the best actress of her generation, is disconcertingly missing calculation – there isn’t a window between her thoughts and whims and us. A star’s beauty can, despite talent, limit them, they work extra hard convincing the audience of their everydayness and the exertion boxes the performance in – we’re too aware of the work (as DiCaprio should know). Winslet’s beauty is the opposite: open, expressive – vital to her effectiveness, she draws you in without sacrificing subtext. April is a conceit, and virtually everything she says is overwritten, but Winslet occasionally lets you forget that – like DiCaprio, she plunges right in, she doesn’t direct you as to how to react – April’s a mystery, like Frank, we can’t quite distinguish the disappointment, from the anguish, from the potential instability. There’s a limitation to the role that Winslet can’t overcome: that the character, who’s supposed to be unavoidably average, is anything but. April may not be an actress, but she’s certainly a megawatt something – a gorgeous, only-in-the-movies-damaged knockout.

Other performances: Kathy Bates as a predictable neighborhood hypocrite clearly meant to further the Titanic allusion (that picture’s love scene is also recreated, in a considerably less ideal context). Zoe Kazan is a haunting raw nerve as Frank’s secretary with the best moment in the film – a literally naked realization that she’s just a lay, bedroom therapy. Michael Shannon, wonderful in Shotgun Stories, has the task of briefly jolting us in the plastic-edgy American Beauty fashion. Shannon does some effective freak-show acting, and it just won him an Oscar nomination, but his work here alarmed me. While Shannon could be the next major American actor, this picture threatens his Kevin Spacification – a once promising character actor franchising his eccentricity for awards and stints as bad guys in dumb action movies. Conformity through smug anti-conformity: how apropos, how tragically typical.

Theatre can be more artificial than film because the artifice is accepted as a necessary means to reaching the audiences in the back rows; the artifice can also – with the immediacy of being in the same room as the performers – be poetic in its directness – we accept that we’re watching something with a different approach to approximating, or searching out, thought and/or emotion. Theatre (please accept that I’m speaking in generalities for my own effect) grapples, airs out, dusts up, cleanses; films, which can zoom in on actors’ pores if need be, can strive for the observational – many serious-minded movies, especially now, go for effect by seemingly trying to elude it – they ask you to come to them, and, in that process, you hopefully find something. A year or two ago I read that Philip Seymour Hoffman was teaming with Meryl Streep for a play I don’t remember, and I was flushed with expectation and envy – it’s a show I wouldn’t possibly be able to see, and I wanted to see Hoffman and Streep – two of the great actors of their respective generations – I wanted to be under the rafters as they blew.

John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize winning Doubt comes as close to achieving that theatre effect as a film has in years – he utilizes the two mediums as James Foley did in Glengarry Glen Ross. Shanley and master cinematographer Roger Deakins alternate crisp, beautiful medium shots – of streets, trees, the church – with close shots closer than any vantage point you could possibly find in the theater, and many of those close shots are askew – twisting out of the characters’ desperation and claustrophobia. I know. I generally find the gonzo angle device as hoary as the next, but everything is of a piece in Doubt – the picture is a laser beam of anger and panic. In Shanley’s cramped, inescapable angles, the actors still shoot for the moon as they would on the stage, while still seeming, at the same time, to be shrinking away from the camera. The effect is overpowering and shockingly intimate. It doesn’t much matter that the theme here – that we’re united, and kept humane, by doubt and that certainty has self-righteous, fascist tendencies – isn’t particularly profound – the actors’ are more than enough – open, close, devastating.

Shanley’s most welcome touch is the performance he gets from Hoffman, who sometimes mistakes self-punishment for integrity. Hoffman normally uses his overweight against himself – as a sign of uncertainty and turmoil and anger, but the truth is that he’s an unconventionally attractive man as well as a quick and forceful personality – which is why his suffocating autobiographical-confessional tendencies can be infuriatingly one-sided. Hoffman’s performances, at their best, speak to that part of us that wants to stand in the dark and throw paint against a canvas or write poetry or eat or drink to the point of passing out – he gives all of our compulsions and uncertainties the confidence, the sexiness, and the drive of true un-self-consciousness.

Hoffman probably feels enabled to allow his Father Flynn grace because the character is possibly attracted to children – and that encourages Hoffman to go nice, and funny, in the service of ambiguity and irony. I hope this doesn’t signify an emerging trend in Hoffman’s roles (awful, miserable losers and geniuses, charismatic potential predators) but, for this moment, I’ll take what I can get. Flynn is Hoffman at his loosest and most commanding since his supporting turns in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Almost Famous. Flynn isn’t that sort of role, he’s quieter and more restrained, but the relaxation is similar – Hoffman (occasionally) occupies a space in Doubt without the entire world hinging on his next movement. There are some Major, Important, Superb scenes, but there are also little moments, stories in themselves, that give the character, and the film, fullness. Flynn, from the evidence offered here, is an exceptional priest, and not in that wishy-washy, generic, cliché-rich, free-spirit way that movies sometimes embarrassingly insist upon. We palpably understand Flynn’s strength, he takes the Book, which many of us see as obligatory or bogus, and he connects to it. This is why the doubt of Doubt is so unshakable – Hoffman gives us a fragile soul who’s come out on the other end to lead – only to be threatened to be quashed again in the favor of those priggish comforts in dogma that we’d resented and expected all along – that he’s threatened because he could be dangerous is a near afterthought (and the central disturbance of the material). Flynn has an eccentricity – long fingernails – that comes to crystallize his friction with Streep’s Sister Aloysius, and it’s a device, but Hoffman’s explanation of the fingernails is succinct and revealing – bashful, entitled, whispered. This man may not touch children, but he’s been through something, and that something feeds his brilliance as a priest and nurtures Aloysius’s old-school hatred. Hoffman even allows his weight beauty – his chubby face opening into a smile tells us more than any gesture in Penn or Pitt’s Oscar bait.

Hoffman’s performance is essential to Doubt the movie, but it could have also been dangerous, he’s so sympathetic he threatens to turn Aloysius into a crone, and tip the picture into typical Dead Poets Society, Name Your Inspirational Figure Who Falls For the Sake of His Teachings Film here-style melodrama. And Streep’s appearance as Sister Aloysius nearly kept me from seeing the film: apparently about a century and half old on a good day, she looks as if she just flunked an audition with the Weird Sisters. The severe look and the New Yawk accent are just toys though, the usual things that Streep, an amazing technician, who, over the last fifteen years, has become our most intuitive, consistently human actress, likes to play with when she goes to work – the accent and the makeup are misdirections – dares to herself and her audience. Aloysius threatens to play to our puritan desires to see Puritanical intolerance righteously punished – for a while anyway – but Streep is too empathetic, too fast, too funny; her bloodshot eyes too quick and tentative and seething with misery and thought and regret.

Streep also gets the one moment in the picture that authentically surprised me. In her office with Flynn, who’s demanding mercy, or, at the least, empathy, he asks “Have you not sinned?” I braced myself for the inevitable sanctimony to follow, except it doesn’t, Aloysius owns to it, “Yes”, with a pain that’s ferociously immediate. Aloysius is the shrewish, conventionally minded Pod Person avenger that filmmakers love to hate who just happens to have, mercifully, been extended a little perspective by her author and her performer. We see in Aloysius, not viciousness, but a tragic, childish black-and-white sensory-perception born of untold personal damage. She hurts, she wants to hurt in turn, but Aloysius also wants justice, and her willingness to sabotage herself for that justice adds a contradictory wrinkle to the obviousness. Streep even gives her final line – which should be an over-scripted theme marker, weight – she refuses to let you forget the person trapped in unwavering conviction.

There are three other performances: Amy Adams as a young sister caught in between, Joseph Foster as the boy potentially molested, and Viola Davis as the boy’s mother. I’ve grown tired of Adams’ field mouse routine, and she adds little to that here, but she’s necessary – helpful scale for the heavy weights (you’d never know how big Kong was unless he was occasionally photographed next to a human). Foster is underused, but affectingly free of affect – he doesn’t maul your heartstrings as some children do – he’s purposefully frustratingly vague. Davis has been celebrated by the press, and she’s terrific (she’s made a career of making immediate impressions in limited minutes) but she’s also in an entirely different film that I didn’t quite buy. It’s clear that Shanley’s trying to avoid the condescension for blacks that have marred so many white guilt films, and I admire that intention, but Davis’ two scenes never come off as anything other than intention – a writer’s conceit. Davis threatens Doubt with certainty – we begin to see the writer’s strings which have been, up until this point, gloriously hidden through force of will.

We’ve all figured out by now that typical “art” films play just as willingly into the hands of the audiences determined to embrace them as the “blockbuster” films. Clint Eastwood’s brilliance and the key to his endurance – at least as a filmmaker – is that he’s learned to play both audiences at once. Eastwood’s appeal to mainstream filmgoers is obvious – he’s a strong, vibrant presence and he makes over-powering, sometimes brutal pop movies – traditional morality tales spit-shined with a bit of irony and cynicism and polish for the next generation. Off and on for the last fifteen years or so (since Unforgiven or maybe a shade before) the critics have gone for Eastwood because they need a popular icon they can embrace as willingly as general audiences, and his legend appeals to them, and his pictures have a lot of ponderous, slow, undefined unpleasantness that appeals to their sense of what an important American film should be. Eastwood’s pictures are bare in story and character, and that’s been allowed to signify some sort of existential knowing – so there’s the fun of watching masculine pulp with the self-congratulation and assurance of knowing, or believing, that it’s more, that it’s actually a picture by one of the great American filmmakers – it’s the joy of getting paid to take a smoke break. Never mind that Eastwood’s pictures haven’t progressed one iota morally since his Hang ’Em High days, or that many of the broad supporting performances of his last few films would be laughed out of any other director’s pictures, Eastwood is redefining his legend, they say, re-exploring his violent days with a newfound clarity.

Truthfully, Eastwood’s pictures were more clear, and honest, when they were just taken as violent genre exercises, when they fast and funny and of questionable taste, and not stretched like taffy to please the critics. Eastwood is talented, and I enjoy his pictures, but we need to stop rationalizing our pleasures and reveling in hyperbole designed to get us attention – critics have become, with few exceptions, more casually hyperbolic than the traditional filmgoer. I run into people in the video store or theatre all the time with that “what were they thinking?” look in their eyes. The critic is losing currency, and the word “masterpiece” appears to mean nothing. If something as contrived and simultaneously over and under-written as The Dark Knight or Million Dollar Baby can be called a masterpiece, then what do we call a film by Renoir or Altman? We have to either invent another word or take the original word back.

The celebrated ambiguity of a modern Eastwood film, such as Mystic River, or Million Dollar Baby, or now Gran Torino, is actually a lack of focus – Eastwood playing every note in his instrument with the hope that something sticks. There are a few anti-violent “what is it to kill a man?” passages for the critics alternated with scenes of men and women getting killed or beaten dramatically, up-close, vividly, for the audiences. Even Unforgiven, a powerfully effective, wonderfully acted, genre piece, is hampered by hypocrisy – decrying revenge only to serve us righteous storm-drenched vengeance anyway. (Most revenge films succumb to this inevitable contradiction – to see a picture that doesn’t catch last year’s Shotgun Stories.) The clearest, most disciplined Eastwood picture that I’ve seen (and I’ve missed a few), as well as containing his best on-screen performance, is The Bridges of Madison County, which is ironic considering that the awful novel it’s taken from could’ve played to Eastwood’s most self-glorifying tendencies as a filmmaker. Somehow though, Bridges, starting with a stronger than usual script by Richard LaGravenese, came together – Eastwood, opposite Meryl Streep, bared himself emotionally to deliver a hanky picture that earned its tears.

I imagine a few are going to cry at Gran Torino, which is obviously going to be a big hit. It’s essentially a late-inning John Wayne-Howard Hawks faded manly man picture, with a bit of Paul Haggis after-school socializing sprinkled in, with a dollop of Shane and Blackboard Jungle on top. The picture, written by Nick Schenk, has the dramatic inadequacies that we’ve come to expect from Eastwood’s movies, particularly ingrate sons and a priest as ridiculously one-note as that family of ogres in Million Dollar Baby. But there is a difference – Gran Torino is sensationally paced, and Eastwood, ever the adapter, imbues his usual tonal uncertainties with a suggestion of self-parody – the fun of the first half of the picture is trying to sort the intentional humor from the unintentional. For about forty-five minutes I thought I was watching a comedy – a poke from Eastwood at what his detractors claim he’s been making all along – but then redemption comes, and the humor is sidelined for the usual Christ metaphors.

Eastwood, appearing in front of his screen for the first time since Million Dollar Baby, is certainly, something. As an aging bigot widower, now alone in a Detroit slum largely populated by minorities he despises, Eastwood is absurd, ballsy, commanding, hilariously out there – what he’s doing may be cracked vaudeville but you can’t take your eyes off it. Hissing in that growl that imitators have been lending him for years, Eastwood epitomizes the idea of holding the screen with pure damn will – when he tells punks to get off his lawn (and yes, that’s actually in the movie) it’s obvious that he’s speaking to the audience as much as to them and himself – and he’s startling in his conviction – his viciousness isn’t once winked away. As broad as it goes (and it’s broad – right down to muttering “what is it with kids these days” and “kid, you’re alright”) Eastwood’s work here may be his best onscreen since Bridges, there’s a purity to his hatred and awkwardness that’s cleansing and occasionally surprisingly subtle and poignant. It’s a shame that the rest of the acting and plotting is so disappointingly typical.

Gran Torino is a more schizophrenic than usual mating of 1970s-1980s genre Eastwood and 1990s-2000s good-for-you Eastwood. The morals are quaint man’s-gotta-do-whatta-man’s-gotta-do here, with some lame, unexpectedly blunt racial bantering to rough things up. Eastwood eventually befriends a Vietnamese teen being harassed by a gang, and the picture’s idea of growing him up has something to do with the kid weathering cries of “gook” and “slant” every ten seconds with a leveled sense of good humor – he just needs to learn how chew steak and carry a gun and yell fuck-shit-pollack-Godammit like he’s got a sack in those shorts! (A scene in a barbershop is embarrassing.) The teen’s family, which is defined by its blind acceptance of Eastwood’s intolerance – is a racist white man’s dream of someone knowing their place – knowing he’s just foolin’ – he’s a good man underneath. I look forward to people’s reactions to the finale – an absurd attempt to underline the exploitation that has come before it with unearned “significance” – Eastwood remembering to soothe those critics. Harry may have found that kind of naked hedging of bets a little fruity. (Again, we get our explosive violent ending, but the circumstances have been flipped for instant-irony.)

Changeling is more consistent than Gran Torino, which means that it’s also more polite and boring – imagine Mystic River without Sean Penn’s blunt pit bull performance to drive it home. Like Mystic River, Changeling concerns the reverberations caused by a possibly dead child – this time in 1920s California, which is overrun with corrupt police. Angelina Jolie is the star, the mother of a little boy she loses only to find again; only to become convinced she’s hasn’t found him after all. The police chief, played by Jeffrey Donovan in a sort of John Garfield impression, tosses her in a loony bin that Fuller and Castle would envy, spurring John Malkovich to come to the rescue. The picture has a brute horror power for awhile, but it’s endless and overdone (Jolie looks like a colorized Japanese movie demon) and one begins to wonder what the point of it all is. Here’s the problem: Changeling hinges on uncertainty, a vengeance that’s never directly obtained, leaving Eastwood bored, twiddling his thumbs – he needs the bullets to fly. Eastwood and his overzealous critics need to come to terms with the same thing – our precious love of trash, for trash’s sake. I’ll take Gran Torino or Blood Work over Million Dollar Baby or Changeling any day, but as the uneven, tastefully debatable, dramatically limited products they are, directed by a filmmaker I enjoy but don’t over-think. Good trash is far more valuable, lasting and revealing than faux-art.