Horror movies tend to provoke extreme reactions – people seem to either discount the genre in its entirety or consume it to possibly unhealthy degrees. Consequentially, film writers seem to come in two flavors: the snobs and the apologists. The snobs are trying to overcompensate for the apologists, and the apologists are trying to overcompensate for the snobs. In his non-fiction Danse Macabre, Stephen King compared horror fans to gold miners, and while I would extend that metaphor to film lovers (or merely lovers) in general, he’s got a nearly inarguable point – particularly now as the film landscape continues to change – to flip. (Please accept that, yes, I’m speaking in a generalization for, perhaps futile, effect.) The trash is hitting the big screens, and the smaller, more ambitious, interesting films are going straight to On Demand or Direct-to-DVD. We need to modify our assumptions of Direct-to-DVD, particularly as it applies to the horror picture, because the good horror pictures aren’t getting the support that nurtures the production and, especially, release of more good horror pictures. A good horror requires a bit of faith and willingness to suffer crap – it, again like most everything else, requires love.
I’ve recently hit a minor run: three low budgeted, essentially direct-to-DVD horror films (to varying degrees) that are lean, focused and imaginative, with the occasional social pressure point floating by like a fallen branch. Splinter, directed by FX guy Toby Wilkins in his debut, is another variation of that old standby (practically a genre unto itself): The Diverse Group Trapped Together Must Face the Outside Thing picture. Night of the Living Dead is the most famous, though certainly not the first, there have been of course, among others, Howard Hawks’ original The Thing from Another World and Hitchcock’s The Birds (a major influence on Night, at times to point of playing as unofficial remake). Splinter resembles an even lower budget version of a more recent variation, The Mist – with a smaller group of people facing a smaller monster in a smaller convenience store. Good intentions aside, I enjoyed but didn’t quite buy Frank Darabont’s attempt at King’s Mist – he couldn’t, or didn’t, get around some of the author’s stupider turns: such as the beyond-requisite-for-King religious fanatic who turns everything into a silly, compressed version of Lord of the Flies. Smaller works for Wilkins: smaller means less characters to develop and less tensions and cross-currents to sell as he speeds toward revealing the big beastie. Smaller means that Wilkins has the sense to exploit the one terror of the horror picture that can be courted and attained for free: the tight dread of what’s just outside of the frame (Larry Fessenden also tries to camouflage meager budgets with close quarters, but his pictures never work for me, he never eludes a certain chintzy, cheesy, preachy quality). And it also helps that the actors in Splinter are stronger, less showy, than the bigger names in Darabont’s picture.
Splinter marries the one location monster outside picture with the equally dependable Desperate Hours hostage scenario (Tarantino and Rodriguez took this for a mock spin in From Dusk Til Dawn). Shea Whigham and Rachel Kerbs are outlaws who kidnap the vacationing Paulo Costanzo and Jill Wagner and run into something they shouldn’t in a small gas station that’s curiously lacking in attendants. I won’t spoil the creature, that’s, of course, half the fun – but I will say that I found it bizarre enough to warrant all the derivations from previous films, and I was taken with Whigham’s tough, commanding performance, and with how the entire cast sells the usually un-sellable unite! unite! unite! scenario. The cast and filmmakers suspend our disbelief by allowing the scenes a lived-in quality, and by refusing to inflate anything with social significance or to wash up the characters for our “acceptance”. Wilkins only wants to scare you, and to see how far he can get with five minutes of up front monster and buckets of blood. He succeeds admirably – each obstacle has the giddy what-will-happen-next-quality of a campfire tale.
J.T. Petty’s The Burrowers wants to be good for you, but you don’t see that coming a mile away as you do in Fessenden’s work; it sneaks up on you, and there’s a moment, about an hour in, when a captured woman says of the picture’s monsters, “they used to eat the buffalo before you shot them all”, that stings. I generally don’t go for dialogue that on the nose, but this moment epitomizes the violent resentment that’s been flowing throughout the picture. That line has a hard, succinct snap. The Burrowers is a Western-horror picture set in the Dakota Territories in the 1870s, and it’s an example of the Monster as Crystallization of Our Collective Unrest picture – in this case, the White Man must pay for his rape. Petty is most famous for his Tom Clancy videogame duties, and for S&Man and the third Mimic movie (before you laugh, that picture was shrewdly done on its terms) and so he has an experienced genre man’s intolerance for superfluous expositional fiddling – The Burrowers gallops in hard bursts, with character actors getting knocked off on disconcertingly unpredictable beats. Sadly, this intolerance extends to characterization, genre reliables such as Clancy Brown, William Mapother and Doug Hutchison (the most ridiculous performance in the movie – as bad as his work in The Green Mile), are stranded, but Petty’s efficiency, and a terrifying monster, keep you from carping too much – I’d love to see what he’d do with an adaptation of Kuttner’s celebrated The Graveyard Rats.
Timecrimes is the best picture of the three, and probably thematically inapt to include, as it’s not a monster movie, but Nacho Vigalondo’s picture is another that benefits from sweat and lack of cash. Vigalondo scales a familiarly big time travel premise to fit two or three characters, a backyard, and an ominous building that might as well have a tower with lightening bolts. The exposition here is, as with the other two pictures, chillingly lacking – Hector (Karra Elejalde) spies an alluring woman in various stages of undress, and from there tumbles into a nightmare that has a darkly funny brick-by-brick logic. Timecrimes could almost be a slasher-movie spoof of the absurdity of the latter Terminator movies – our protagonist here finds himself undoing one time-travel loop only to immediately slip into another (he’s stuck in sequel after sequel): a haunting variation of the notion of Hell being repetition after hopelessly numbing repetition. Its Vigalondo’s matter-of-factness that lingers: many filmmakers, desperate for effect, would pound Hector’s final decision into our heads; Vialondo only pulls back. My companion took this picture’s ending as a happy one, but it’s only deceptively so – Timecrimes taps into the most primal terror of anything being able to fly away at any time – the stability at the end being the ultimate pretension: the illusion we sell ourselves day by day, day by day, hour by hour, hour by hour.
Archive for April, 2009
Splinter, The Burrowers, Timecrimes (2008)
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009Observe and Report (2009)
Friday, April 17th, 2009
Being a bad-boy filmmaker is like being cool or sexy, the more obviously you’re courting it, the more likely it is you aint it. The usual bad-boy suspects - early Scorsese, early Waters, Lynch, Almodóvar, Miike - didn’t seem too concerned that they were going to be perceived as boundary-pushing, they were following their inner tune without choice. In these filmmakers’ great films, or even not so great, you get the sense of the directors’ being tickled by what they’ve unleashed, from what is bubbling up, and we sense the honest struggle of their attempt to corral their visions into something that has some kind of coherence. These men went (or go) with their gut, and they didn’t (or don’t) bullshit themselves. That’s bad boy. That’s also cool or sexy, for that matter.
Watching Observe and Report, one gets the impression of writer-director Jody Hill bouncing a basketball off his parents’ bedroom door, desperate for someone to notice. Hill’s picture has received quite a bit of attention both positive and negative, and that certainly testifies to someone’s savvy somewhere. Observe and Report, which (like Hill’s first film, The Foot Fist Way) follows the slow decline of a delusional misfit who has a brief, facetious glory, is an embarrassing non-event: the pacing slack, the tone inconsistent, the dialogue an obviously ad-libbed search for jokes that never show. All of the clichéd totems of bad taste are touched upon: abuse of children, abuse of the disabled, ridiculously prolonged bursts of profanity, racism, unexpectedly lurid violence, drugs, vomit, all capped with the now de rigueur extended shot of an unattractive man’s penis (funnier in Sideways – which bothered with such niceties as context).
Shoddy craftsmanship could possibly be forgiven (Waters never really seemed to know what he was doing in that department) but Hill’s hipster distance undermines – the only thing that gets under your skin in Observe and Report is its unearned smugness. On paper, The Foot Fist Way sounds like the same movie, and it was unpolished with imprecise timing, but Hill shrewdly played that to his advantage – the picture was revealingly imprecise – the characters’ pettiness and regret were choked and pointedly allowed to hang – each dashed vignette added up to a surprisingly funny inversion of the kind of glory of the slob comedy (most atrociously represented in Step Brothers) that packs the seats these days. The Foot Fist Way was an implosion of formula disguised as a formula picture – showing the formula to be pandering and sad.
As with many directors with a surprisingly successful no-budget debut, Hill, flush with admiration, gets carried away in his victory lap and builds the audience reaction into his follow-up – effectively muting everything that was loose and raw in the first picture. Hill has said in interviews that Foot Fist’s clenched defeat came from his frustration with watching friend David Gordon Green’s success from the sidelines, and that shows – the picture has pain that’s authentic. Observe and Report is a conscious tending of reputation; and the immediacy has inevitably dulled. Hill accentuates every bit of cruelty in Observe and Report, every incident has we-want-it-both-ways quotation marks: there’s rape imagery without the rape, murder imagery without the murder. Even the people who get it bad here largely deserve it, and that allows an accidental inhumanity to creep in: the slut deserves to get fucked like an animal in her own vomit, while the good girl, a born again virgin with a bum leg (Hill apparently unaware that’s he stacking the deck in a conventional way that dates back to the silent era) gets to waltz off with her kinda prince. What if the good girl got fucked the wrong way? And the prince’s meant-to-be-ironic heroism earned him the slut? (Not a stretch in the world outside the movies.) Hill’s conventionality sinks him here, as it did to a lesser degree in his still-funny HBO show Eastbound & Down, which detailed the plight of a pro baseball player stuck in his home town after washing out. The season’s recent ending was earned and unsentimental, but Hill doesn’t appear to grasp much beyond “losers losing”. This sensibility had an unexpected charge in Foot Fist, but Eastbound, which flirted with satirizing the reasons we resent pro-ball players, needed something else – it would have been more subversive to let this monster, after lording his prior image over struggling friends and family for six episodes, win again. Underneath O and R’s posturing (which includes endless musical montages and rapid-fire cuts of guns blasting, both meant to remind us that we’re watching, as some critics would have us believe, some sort of satire/zeitgeist summation of Middle America) is a prudish cautionary tale. Hill wants the bad-boy rep without the risks – he inverts the clichés in directions equally clichéd.
The picture’s detractors have taken issue with Hill’s inability to establish any kind of convincing reality for the misbehavior to rupture. Valid, but anarchic directors have gotten around that in the past with the purity and intensity of their visions. South Park, that ferocious lance of sanctimony, flies with it on a weekly basis. There’s no convincing outer reality in Pink Flamingos, but it’s still an unshakable, fearless, rebel yell, because Waters didn’t dilute his intent with previously accepted pop-crutches (the pop references only intensified the creep-out) – you feel like you’re swimming in a stagnant pool of furious id. There’s nothing, if I recall, too real-world familiar in Miike’s Visitor Q, which I nearly turned off – but it’s still one of the most disturbing parodies of the casual exploitation of “reality” television and of diseased family that I’ve ever seen. I should revisit both of these pictures to freshen my perception but I’m not sure I can.
And that’s what Jody Hill doesn’t want, he can claim whatever to the contrary, but he wants a picture that’s just fashionably cynical, he’s just visiting. Take a moment from The Foot Fist Way that occurs early in when an older woman gets punched, shockingly, in the gut and collapses. Hill frames the violence in a mercilessly aloof medium shot, and you laugh despite yourself because the scene punctures the hero’s ballooned ego and because older people, particularly women, are not supposed to get beat up so casually (without slapstick to soften it, that is) in the movies, even in wild-man comedies – the scene challenges the cruelty we casually accept in our “escapism”. This scene is more disturbing than anything in Observe and Report, because Hill signals, signals, signals this time; a climactic gunshot in this film is far more surface violent than anything in Foot Fist Way, but we immediately shake it off because it doesn’t reflect or fulfill any interior logic in the movie (by this point, we’ve been led to believe that the shooter would be unstable enough to kill the victim, and the picture’s pretend-spoof of gun culture would be more effective if the damage was taken all the way – this would further divide our sympathies) – it’s just show-off splatter.
The performances (including Ray Liotta and Anna Faris) are generally as strong as they could be considering the circumstances, save Rogen – who is stranded and revealed. I may have underestimated Danny McBride’s contribution to Hill’s earlier efforts. McBride, who, in a tiny scene, has the only funny moment in Observe and Report, redeems bad/broad jokes with an electric conviction – he has the fearlessness Hill lacks. McBride, particularly in Hill’s projects, doesn’t have the Will Ferrell or Seth Rogen compulsion to assure you that he’s “likeable”, he goes full on with his Sonic the Hedgehog build and strangely soft, passive-aggressive voice – McBride is a below-Everyman with the unchecked rage of someone who knows what they are (his timing is stunning). Watching Rogen, our unexpected, shaggy lead man of the last few years, go gun-booze-America crazy is a good joke on paper, and could have been truly unsettling, but Rogen lacks either the range (he’s never more than the same goofball) or the guidance, or, most likely, both. The critics, who rush to praise most anything that demonizes lower/Middle America, are the truly delusional. Jody Hill should make a picture about them.
Adventureland (2009)
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
Women have been known to occasionally wonder, with some understandable bite, why seemingly every male filmmaker has an awkward-young-man-comes-of-age-with-the-guidance-of-a-supernaturally-beautiful/poised-young-woman-who-instantly-inexplicably-just-plain-gets-him movie in him. It has something to do, most obviously, with understanding. At a certain age, for a certain guy, the idea of reaching any kind of even rudimentary plane of understanding with a woman, much less a continual relationship, is scary and mythical and distorted through all the coming of age stories the young man has, himself, already consumed. The young man, a writer, may be the person least likely to view his own childhood with any coherence or accuracy, because he’s always seen himself as the hero of the movie he hasn’t yet made – he’s willing the memory of his story into cliché before it’s had the chance to play out for real in the present. The movie that will be made, of course, will explain it all – those sticky, stewed emotions and longings that the writer, though he’s canny enough not to admit it, secretly believes are his and his alone. His coming of age movie, no matter how similar to all the others, fulfills something in him and, regardless of how many women with whom he’s since experienced some kind of reciprocation, secretly evens the ledger – it empowers him in the way he imagines the lucky guys and girls to have been prematurely empowered at the time. The major problem can, as the above would imply, be one of tunnel-vision; the filmmaker is so consumed with the pain and mystery and legend of his youth that he cheapens every other character – especially the would-be lover and the parents – into stereotype, sometimes yielding a monstrously self-absorbed ego trip (Garden State) or a too-in-love-with-love-movie-movie that negates common sense in the self-conscious desperation that you most absolutely get it (Almost Famous).
I got Greg Mottola’s Adventureland – it’s one of the most purely pleasurable movies I’ve seen in years, and it threatens to pull the “coming of age” scenario out of the cheese ball ghetto that it, normally deservedly, resides. Ten or so years ago, Mottola made a picture called The Daytrippers that was unfairly looped in with every other young filmmaker’s movie about an eccentric family on a road trip. After years of TV, Mottola returned to movies a few years ago with the Judd Apatow produced Superbad, written by Seth Rogen and his partner Evan Goldberg. Superbad is the most unusual of the recent teen movies, as well as the Apatow movies, because of the clear split in sensibility in the film’s makers. Rogen and Goldberg, typical of writers in their 20s, revel in the possibility of recreating their youth in the image of the movies they were watching at the time. On the page, Superbad is a ridiculously profane teen-id romp, occasionally punctuated with moments with cops (Rogen and Bill Hader) that played like a deranged version of the Wolfman Jack scenes in American Graffiti. Yet, there was Something Else to the picture, a perspective that most of this is a boy’s fantasy, presided over by an older boy who had outgrown it. The moment between Jonah Hill and Michael Cera at the end in the sleeping bags strikes me as considerably more Mottola than Rogen-Goldberg – it’s the fulfillment of anxiety that has fueled the picture all along. Superbad is a genre movie, and the twin sensibilities inevitably uneven it – but I’ll take that inconsistency over many more polished pictures.
Superbad, a hit, must have afforded Mottola Adventureland, which he wrote himself, and that unguarded sweetness that would occasionally surface in the prior film (like a mirage) fully emerges here – the surprise is that the edge hasn’t dulled. Adventureland is, yes, a youth picture set in the 1980s about a young man, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), who is, yes, awkward, yes, destined to meet an otherworldly young beauty, and, yes, an aspiring writer – the picture is his summer in the titular amusement park while healing from some unexpected disappointments. Mottola has a stronger control of mood than most filmmakers in this genre – he, and this is rare, appears to be inside and outside of his characters at once – reveling in their nonsense rhapsody while still allowing that they’re living in a postponed-adolescent vacuum that’s exasperated by the fact they can now drink and screw. There’s another difference – the characters of Adventureland, especially the males, brainwashed by the writing they emulate, are looking, under the guise of academic cynicism, for that storybook bliss, and, convinced that nothing’s the storybook, go about doing just that – nothing. The young men and women of Adventureland aren’t as self-pitying as most movies have led us to dread, and that self-knowledge goes along with the self-delusion to leave these characters shockingly exposed.
A few critics have likened the picture to Truffaut, and there’s validity to that, Adventureland has that cleansing empathy that partially defines Truffaut, but it’s really what fans of the television show Freaks and Geeks secretly hoped for when they heard that Apatow was going to the movies: this picture doesn’t hide behind accepted pop culture, it peaks behind the curtain of it to reveal how these young people have already conditioned, and hardened, themselves with socially accepted pop shorthand, such as Lou Reed, Madonna, booze, pot, literature; and when the movie-movie moments do actually occur, as they occasionally do in real life, it blindsides the characters, as it does us.
And that imbues the movie-movie moments with a lunging, hungry quality – Mottola sustains his mood so effectively he redeems scenes you wouldn’t expect – a moment between James and his tentative-possible first romance, Em (Kristen Stewart) as fireworks explode in the skies, with “Don’t Dream Its Over” accompanying, has a stoned rapture. A date between James, who’s bracing himself for a rebound from Em, with the local sexpot in training, Lisa P (Margarita Levieva, in a layered performance), trumps the typically distasteful rituals of the genre – they’re both virgins, and Mottola understands how this manifests itself differently in the genders: for James it’s a mark of shame, for Lisa it’s an emboldening mystery; their brief time together – sucking at one another for air – lingers. Martin Starr, the bravely, jarringly transparent Bill in Freaks and Geeks, is a major actor, intuitive, economic in gesture, and seemingly incapable of platitude. Starr’s Joel, who smokes a pipe and spouts Russian lit so as to have personal control over his rejection from society, is at the perpetual romantic sidelines, and knows it. Starr grounds Adventureland from shooting too far off into the stratosphere, he’s most of the picture’s intended audience, the present and arrested geeks, wondering when the hell it’s ever gonna happen to them.
A close friend has been selling the talent and charisma of Ryan Reynolds to me for years now, but I finally got on board last year with Chaos Theory, which was slight and familiar but well-performed and moving. Reynolds is usually cast as the good-looking smoothie pimping his apathy to the ladies, and his Connell, a glorified janitor at Adventureland who just happened to have kinda-maybe-possibly-just-this-once jammed with Lou Reed just maybe just kinda, plays on the star’s familiarity and digs deeper into it. Connell is a cipher who’s likable and despicable because he knows he’s a cipher. There’s a moment when James, anxious to contribute to Connell’s ego, asks him where he’s currently playing, Reynold’s reaction is moving, succinct.
There are other little performances that deliver, particularly Hader and the consistently terrific Kristen Wiig as the park’s owners (someone needs to hand them the reins to a romantic comedy), but Adventureland ultimately rests on the shoulders of Eisenberg and Stewart. Eisenberg has been playing the nervy, pretentious (as mask for something else) young man for several films now, and he’s looser and more confident with every film – he has an off-hand timing that can detonate two or three verbal punch-lines at once, without shortchanging the character for an easy laugh – he’s got the materials of a great actor. Stewart, with those eyes that radiant a carnality she barely seems to grasp (she stopped Into the Wild dead) is more a found object at this point than an actress, but she, like most everyone else in this picture, has a control beyond her years. James and Em play into each other, off each other, naturally, and they fit into all the other eccentrics of Adventureland with a grace that’s become rare in American comedy – we don’t get the feeling of a bunch of character ideas being randomly poured into a script. Adventureland, like Almost Famous in its best moments, captures the simple exhilaration of fleetingly, accidentally finding yourself at the right place at the right time. I’ve read disappointments with Mottola’s ending, which is clearly taken more from a movie place of what-shoulda-been than what-most-likely-was, and I normally agree, but that only cherry-topped this picture’s charm – Adventureland is gloriously pie in the sky.
Pardon our Progress
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009We are in the process of moving Bowen’s Cinematic to some new hosting. Parts of the site may be unavailable until everything gets sorted out.
In the Electric Mist (2009)
Friday, April 3rd, 2009
In the Electric Mist, the new picture directed by Bertrand Tavernier and starring Tommy Lee Jones as, for a change, a weary, sharp-tongued, law enforcer, is a modest, TV-size movie where several actors you know circle in traditional small-town movie settings – run-down bars, run-down gas stations, screened-in porches, backyard insider-politic parties – needling one another in the ways that we associate with their star personalities. We know Tommy Lee Jones’ character, investigating twin murders, one of which decades old, will chafe locals on both sides of the law with his dry inability to suffer self-entitlement, fools or bullshit. We know Peter Sarsgaard, in one of his best performances, will do a self-amused, ironic send-up of the sort of hipster posturing many of his contemporaries favor. We know Kelly Macdonald, more gorgeous than ever, will be the bruised soul who must unfairly pay for the corruption of everyone around her. We know Mary Steenburgen, busy again lately – will do her best with a role that’s beside the point. We know that John Goodman will either be a confidant or a shady red herring (hint: he plays a pimp). And we know that Ned Beatty will play confidant, red herring and possibly the bad guy – all in one.
I don’t point to the familiarity with contempt; it’s the source of the tension and occasional shock of Tavernier’s picture. A month or so ago I re-watched Robert Altman’s Grisham thriller The Gingerbread Man, which also centers on buried corruption in the South. In my more hyperbolic days, I used to be fond of telling people that The Gingerbread Man was an overlooked masterpiece, but the film, while polished and well-performed, doesn’t amount to much more than Altman’s feeling of superiority to the subject matter. Considerably less talented directors would have found the plot rickety and predictable, so all that’s left is Altman’s impressive, but equally predictable, showing off. You’re braced for a film like The Gingerbread Man because of the director and hype, you know that something is going to be subverted or played with (although I guess that is the one surprise); pictures like The Gingerbread Man are as prepackaged with audience responses as less-acceptable-to-like pictures – its just a different set of responses.
We don’t have that hood looming over us with In the Electric Mist – we expect a higher-end blend of The Big Easy and Mayberry, largely get just that, but occasionally also pick up something more disturbing. In the Electric Mist has the story uncertainties one expects from a supposedly chopped up film – the social parallels between the murders don’t connect as richly as one would hope, the resolution is an anti-climactic bust, but this murkiness also enriches the picture – giving it a chillingly vague sense of elusive evil. Tavernier isn’t the virtuoso that Altman is, few are, but his depiction of a society coming out of a literal and metaphorical storm is more understated and chilling (the Katrina references aren’t pointless and exploitive, as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). The murders are solved, but we get a sense, without State of Things laboring, of nothing having been resolved. The violence, particularly one killing, is unnerving – puncturing the lull the picture sometimes induces – the comfort we find in the mild sense of humor and familiar faces.
I won’t hammer you with the picture’s point, it’s an almost gothic where the sins of the fathers revisit the sons, but there are two collections of scenes that I think are extraordinary, and highlight Tavernier’s destined-to-be-underrated confidence with tone. The first, and trickiest, is an encounter between Jones’ character, Robicheaux, and a confederate ghost he sees along the river while tripping on acid (as strange as it sounds). Tavernier doesn’t trick the scene up with the subjective/ambiguous hocus-pocus that other directors have accustomed us to expect of these sorts of moments – their passages together are straightforward, plain, just like every other moment that happens before or afterward. This casual invasion of the supernatural (with a memorable, despairing performance from The Band’s Levon Helm) in a genre that rarely permits it no less, hints at a larger, stagnant yuck – a terrifying malaise and disconnection.
There are also a few scenes with an old around-the-town-for-ages man that Robicheaux solicits for help. The man is played by James Gammon (the gravel voiced coach in Major League) and, if you’re familiar with his work, his appearance here will jump out at you. Once a beer-bellied scene stealer, here a skeleton almost only recognizable by that voice, Gammon embodies the eaten, rotting, hatred that the hidden murders, seemingly randomly bobbing up at everyone’s inconvenience, threaten to signify. Gammon, like Jones, is intolerant of actor mannerism, and his casual regret, which he anesthetizes with beer, lingers – the entire picture lingers. Don’t let the direct-to-DVD release, which means nothing these days with studios giving up on more and more films for typical exhibition, dissuade you from In the Electric Mist – it fulfills the title’s dream-trance melancholy.
Heaven Can Wait (1978)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
It was Warren Beatty’s birthday a few days ago, and the always on-the-ball TCM was on hand to commemorate. Time was an issue, so I only re-watched Heaven Can Wait, one of my favorite Beatty pictures, and part of The Fortune, a collaboration with Jack Nicholson and Mike Nichols that I’ve never seen, though it looks a little like certain Bogdanovich (didn’t see enough to tell if that’s a good or bad thing). It’s easy to point to the big trailblazing movies of the 1970s (Mean Streets, Nashville, etc) as evidence of that decade’s richness, but the pop films, like Heaven Can Wait, are possibly more revealing. Heaven Can Wait was a high concept picture, a remake (of Here Comes Mr. Jordon), and the recipient of multiple Oscar nominees, but it still doesn’t look and move as a pop picture does today. It wouldn’t be a pop picture today – Heaven Can Wait’s best hopes these days would be in a faux-art-house marginalizing platform release like Sideways or The Wrestler.
The issue with Beatty’s picture today (which he also co-wrote, with Elaine May, co-directed, with Buck Henry, and produced, by himself) would be that it doesn’t maul you with editing and music and pace – the picture breathes in that way that was far more common in that 10-15 year period. There are fewer scenes, and each scene reaches a crescendo that’s unusually leisurely for a picture whose premise sounds like a screwball comedy – this room allows an unexpected pathos. One of Beatty’s strengths as a movie star and an actor has always been his convincing naiveté and optimism – he never feels like a rich man playing down to you. From an everyman actor that is still impressive but not as surprising, from a Major Star, Ladies Man, like Beatty that’s unusual – and jerks your sympathy in directions you don’t anticipate from a cuckolding hairdresser (Shampoo – one of his best movies) or, especially, a murderous bank robber (Bonnie and Clyde – possibly his best movie). Beatty conveys, without looking idiotic, that heartbreak a schoolchild first feels when he discovers things don’t always work out as they should; that, in his case, delayed, discovery is the driving conflict of many of Beatty’s pictures.
In Heaven Can Wait – Beatty is Joe Pendelton (the first name not accidental), an aging football star threatening a second wind until he’s mowed down by a careless driver in a tunnel, and yanked into the tunnel prematurely by an equally careless representative from heaven (Henry) who, in his first case, couldn’t bear to wait to see if Joe might possibly come out of it first. This unusual loophole affords Joe the opportunity to come back as himself in another person who’s about to die for real – it’s a fantasy of the ideal reincarnation (which is ideal enough) where we have guidance and foresight, and we know, beyond doubt, that someone’s looking out for us. As Mr. Jordon, the closest the picture comes to suggesting God, James Mason exudes that dry, good-humored, only slightly exasperated authority that we fantasize our fathers, including God, to have, and his give-and-take with Beatty has a rarely allowed bliss. A great movie is hard enough, a great comedy is harder still, and a great comedy of optimism must be next to damn impossible.
Beatty manages in this picture what, for me, Capra rarely achieved. Capra, in pictures like Meet John Doe, wallows in the good vibrations in a cynical way, he whacks you over and over trying to sell himself as much as you. Beatty’s picture has the illusion of effortlessness, you – and this is particularly impressive for a directorial debut – never feel him going for his effects. Heaven Can Wait has that sunny, ticklish, romantic, warm bathwater melancholy of Shampoo. Joe, now stuck in a socially apathetic businessman about to be murdered by his wife and secretary (Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin, both with the panicked whiplash timing you expect), turns a board meeting into a press conference and, questioned on the way in as to how to hop a particular legal hurdle, responds with an off-the-cuff, not delivered a moment too soon or too late, “I don’t know, bribe them?” (This moment anticipates Bulworth). Many, including Capra, spoil the fish-out-of-water story by trying to teach us something, Beatty’s stoned humor takes the lesson for granted and moves on to the movie-movie pleasure we actually want. We don’t go to a Heaven Can Wait to learn banal, possibly false, lessons about Corporate Evil; we go to see how Beatty can beat death to win Julie Christie.
In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait, Beatty and Christie have one of those instant-instinctual chemistries – they are both superstars who are uncannily convincing as lost creatures – they flip their beauty and presence into a point of separation from the rest of society without triggering our resentment. Beatty and Christie manage this feat, time and again, together or separately, because they put more of themselves forward than most stars are willing. I found Julia Roberts’ performance in Notting Hill particularly difficult to take for this reason – she spends the entire film pleading for our sympathy without giving one inch of herself in return, that this is purposefully built into the picture’s script doesn’t help much – we resent her self-pity (the film wasn’t very shrewd, in this respect, either – giving her considerably less comfortable people to unload on). Julia Roberts, or any other contemporary star, has never given us, or tried to give us, a moment such as Christie and Beatty’s final scene in Heaven Can Wait – in which everything the picture has been building towards (You’re the quarterback?”) clicks with an exhilaratingly simple romantic fulfillment.
The best scene is right before the lovers’ finale though, between Beatty and the always-welcome Jack Warden (also of Shampoo) in a locker room. Warden is Joe’s trainer and friend, and knows of Joe’s body hopping; he slaps Joe on the back and congratulates him. Joe, who has now been fully reintegrated and remembers nothing, looks at him and politely shrugs. At this point – Warden, who’s already had to mourn his friend’s death once, only to be talked out of it for the sort of reversal fantasy that must run through the minds of all who’ve ever lost someone, must finally put his friend to rest for good. This is a wonderful movie.
