Preaching to the Choir

The Passion of the Christ is breaking all the box office records for movies in Aramaic with English subtitles. Sales are particularly strong amongst church groups seeing the movie en masse. There’s a reason for that. The Passion of the Christ — like all works of the hand of man — has many failings, but by far the worst is that it is not what you would call inclusive.

I do not mean to repeat here the criticisms you’ve probably already heard about The Passion of the Christ; my concern is wholly separate from that of others. Yet, it is instructive to note that The Passion of the Christ is — while not overtly anti-Semitic — going to turn off Jewish moviegoers, if only because of one early scene featuring Judas Iscariot greedily scrambling on the ground for his thirty pieces of silver. It is impossible to avoid the criticism that The Passion of the Christ is not for children, or the faint of heart; anybody not brought up on Quentin Tarantino flicks is going to recoil at the many scenes featuring the unspeakably gashed body of Christ.

My criticism has more to do with the personality of Christ, a personality that is in many ways not evident in The Passion of the Christ. The movie begins in medias res, with Christ (Jim Caviezel) praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, after the Last Supper, and right there, at that point, it separates its audience irrevocably. Everyone in the audience who has gone to church, heard about Gethsemane in Sunday School, or even given the Gospels a cursory reading — understands the part that Caviezel is playing, and what the situation is. Those that don’t understand who Jesus is, or aren’t familiar with the Biblical accounts will be instantly wondering what the fuss is about, and why Caviezel’s character is on trial, and for what.

A better example might be early on, on the Via Dolorosa, where we see Christ carrying his cross down the Way of Sorrows, and we see the crowd from his perspective. Suddenly, the scene shifts, we still have Christ’s perspective, except that we see a donkey’s ears and crowds of adoring people carrying palm branches. Christians who know the significance of the palms will instantly make the connection; this is a flashback to the events of Palm Sunday, five days prior, and Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Anyone else in the audience is going to wonder what in heaven’s name is going on.

The worst failing of The Passion of the Christ is that it does not sufficiently develop the character of Christ. During the majority of the picture, Christ is a victim, suffering a degree of physical abuse that Bruce Willis wouldn’t have put up with in a Die Hard sequel. While the churchgoing part of the audience sees the Suffering Servant of the Gospels, the rest of the audience is looking at a man who appears to have lost an argument with a Weed-Whacker. We only see a whole, intact, unwounded Christ in brief flashbacks, and often as not, he’s preaching, speaking the homilies that we’ve heard over and over again, from preachers and politicians and charlatans and salesmen. The now-famous decision to shoot the movie in Aramaic and Latin instead of in English hampers things even more; Caveizel is given no opportunity to use his voice to really articulate just what it is that Jesus had to say to his disciples. Outside of one touching scene in Nazareth showing Christ and his mother bantering over a newly-constructed kitchen table, there’s nothing in the movie that shows Christ as being either fully human or fully God. Whatever it is about Christ that — even two thousand years after his death — inspires such devotion amongst his followers is simply missing in The Passion of the Christ, and for no good reason.

More than anything else, this explains the looking-glass reaction to the movie. If you look at Caviezel and see Christ, The Passion of the Christ is a strong, important, powerful movie about the meaning of suffering and the devotion of Jesus to his flock, even unto the cruel death of the cross. If you look at Caviezel and see an actor, you’re looking at a figure of pity and sympathy and — ultimately — horror, albeit with the courage to take a beating and forgive his tormentors.

The Passion of the Christ fails in that it only preaches to the choir, in that it will have its greatest resonance among the converted, among Christians who are devoted to Christ and can empathize most strongly with his suffering. “I am crucified with Christ,” the Apostle Paul tells the Romans, and those who share his vision will find in The Passion of the Christ a reinforcement of their belief, a restatement of their faith. But it is an exclusivist movie. It makes little or no attempt to widen the circle of faith, to bring the audience to a deeper understanding of Christianity, to show Jesus as anything other than a grotesquely broken man. The Passion of the Christ is, perhaps, the grandest missed opportunity for Christian evangelism that there ever was.

Worse than this, though, is the movie’s effect on the Christian side of the audience. A movie that effectively showed the teachings of Christ on screen would have a galvanizing effect on the faith, giving much-needed reminders to Christ’s flock about charity and prayer and love. Instead, the emotions primarily evoked by The Passion of the Christ are anger, shame, and nausea. After the resurrection, Christ told his disciples, “If you love me, feed my sheep” — in other words, do good works, support your brothers in love, take care of those who need care. Instead, it seems likely that what The Passion of the Christ will inspire will be more negative, un-Christian emotions, such as smugness, or disdain for movie critics and others who dare point out the problems with the movie.

Character development is the chief problem with The Passion of the Christ, but there are others. The occasional sighting of demons (including one very creepy demonic baby) is weird and off-putting. The presence of Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) throughout the movie is generally ineffective and counterproductive. (However, the one scene where Satan drifts in and out of the Jewish and Roman crowd watching Christ’s flogging is very powerful, and helps rebut the charges of anti-Semitism.) The background music is just awful; the movie would have been far better without it.

Where The Passion of the Christ lives up to its considerable promise is in its bit players. Monica Bellucci and Maia Morgenstern (as the Magdalene and the Virgin) carry most of the emotional freight of the movie, with their blank-faced serenity shattered now and again by unspeakable heartbreak. Francesco De Vito, as Peter, has just the right mix of devotion and shame as the apostle who denies Christ. Jarreth Merz turns in a spectacular performance as Simon, who helps Jesus carry his cross.

The personality of Christ, as illuminated in The Passion of the Christ finds its best, most productive outlet through his followers, which perhaps is as it should be. But the message of Christ is still muffled, all but drowned out by the movie’s torrent of blood. It’s a message that survives in the best of the Christian hymnal:

King of my life, I crown Thee now,
Thine shall the glory be;
Lest I forget Thy thorn-crowned brow,
Lead me to Calvary.
Lest I forget Gethsemane;
Lest I forget Thine agony,
Lest I forget Thy love for me,
Lead me to Calvary.

This is the kind of message that’s delivered every Sunday in churches across the world. The Passion of the Christ enables Christians to remember this message, but sadly, it does little else.

Blood and Irony

“I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us,” wrote Private William Thompson Lusk of the 79th New York, Army of the Potomac, on the occasion of Gen’l Ambrose Burnside’s infamous “mud march”. The “mud march” was the result of a particularly feckless decision by Burnside to march his troops through an infinity of Northern Virginia mud to get at Lee’s army, and it came in the wake of an even more asinine decision to keep hammering away at the Confederate position on Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg.

But, of course, it could have been written anytime, anywhen, in any war. We remember Lee and Grant and Jackson and the great generals for their brilliance, we forget Burnside, Pope, Hooker, Butler, Doubleday, Bragg, and Banks despite their manifold flaws. And, as Stanley Kubrick reminds us in Paths of Glory, the common run of generals in The Great Butchery of WWI was no more distinguished and no less foolish than Burnside.

Paths of Glory is perhaps unique in the annals of war films for one reason; we don’t ever see the enemy. Oh, the Germans are out there, of course, and they’re lobbing shells into the French lines, but they are an invisible presence. The closest we come to seeing anyone in a German uniform is from far away on the parapets of the fortress known, fittingly, as the “Anthill”. It is this fortress that Kirk Douglas and his battered regiment of French troopers are ordered to take and hold against overwhelming force.

Paths of Glory shows us the charge through no-man’s-land in glorious black-and-white. It’s every bit as technically well-done and historically accurate as Spielberg’s Normandy landing, with as much gore as they’d probably allow in the Fifties. The difference between the two films is that the battle sequence is the kickoff of a great, powerful movie. In Paths of Glory, it’s a thin slice of cheese between two crusty, thick slices of French bread. And to extend that metaphor a little, Paths of Glory smears platitudes on thicker than mayonnaise.

Paths of Glory starts out with a contrast familiar to viewers of the British TV series Blackadder, it moves back and forth from the luxuriously appointed chateau that hosts divisional headquarters to the squalid and filthy trenches. In both places, however, platitudes abound — the sort that get men killed. Even Douglas, playing a tough, smart infantry colonel, gives in to the temptation. “My men will take the Anthill, if any men can,” says he, echoing Pickett and Custer and Raglan and every other general that’s placed sentiment and overconfidence above objective combat reality. The plan fails, and the attack is beaten back. But half of Douglas’s troopers never make it out of their trenches, and charges of cowardice are leveled. (Nobody in my audience yelled at the screen; “Get out there and fight, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” but they could have.)

And so, we head back to the chateau, where three men are chosen from the ranks by various foul means to face a court-martial for cowardice, pour encourager les auters. (Pardon my French, that’s a Voltaire quote: “It is well to kill from time to time an admiral to encourage the others.”) The court-martial is supposed to be the dramatic highlight of the movie, I guess, but it played out much more like a black comedy, with laughter throughout the audience. It’s a splendid scene, anyway, crackling with savage irony and moral outrage, and Douglas plays it to the hilt. Here, the villain is not so much military tactical stupidity as it is military bureaucratic stupidity, and Douglas has to do all he can to keep his frightened men out of the wheels of this particular miscarriage of justice.

Paths of Glory ends with a montage of soldiers that foreshadows the opening haircut scene in Full Metal Jacket; we see faces of soldiers with utterly improbable facial hair softly singing a German lullaby, of all things. Their expressions are ambiguous; some are homesick, others weary or shell-shocked, others sad and wistful. But as they head back to the trenches, they must all be thinking the same thoughts about disaster and the fools that bring disaster.

An Antidote to Clintonism

“But there is still too much violence on our nation’s screens, large and small. Too many creators and purveyors of violence say there is nothing they can do about it. And there are still too many vulnerable children who are steeped in this culture of violence, becoming increasingly desensitized to it and to its consequences and, therefore, as studies show, hundreds of them more liable to commit violence themselves.”
– President Bill Clinton

They had the White House Conference of Youth Violence yesterday, or maybe it was the Summit on School Safety, I forget. Lots of blather and well-meaning phrases thrown around by a bucketful of sanctimonious do-gooding hypocrites, stuffed to bursting with self-regard. It was all over the media, of course, plenty of pictures of the Clintons getting all misty over the thought of the threat posed to America’s children by violent video games and movies. All sorts of deep-thinking, sensitive quotes like the one above. Rubbish.

Payback is not a perfect movie, but it is the perfect antidote to the current political and social climate. In a world where violent movies are reviled and blamed for the ills of our nation’s youth, it’s refreshing to see a movie that is unapologetic for its content, straightforward in its delivery of action and mayhem, courageous in its utter lack of regard for the effect of the culture of violence on American children. Payback is a throwback, a gritty, thoroughly amoral action movie that celebrates all that is violent and dangerous and mean-spirited. It celebrates only the manliest of virtues — self-reliance, grit, determination, stubbornness, courage, fortitude, and sheer cussedness — and presents the back of its hand to sensitivity, gentleness and wimpishness. It has no redeeming social value, no higher message, no spirit of goodness or decency or honor.

I loved it.

The moral tone of Payback is set in the first few minutes. The first words in the screenplay are “G-S-W. Gun Shot Wound,” and there are bunches of them. We see people drinking and smoking cigarettes and eating red meat and not wearing seat belts and all the other things that real Americans used to do. (Payback does demonstrate why you should wear your seat belt, though.) Things go downhill from there, morally speaking, with murder and mayhem and torture and sudden violent death.

Payback is not a film for everybody. There will be plenty of people, I’m sure, who will bemoan the level of violence in this movie and wring their hands over the constant insensitivity and moral deafness of the characters. I have a message for these people: stay home. Or go watch Notting Hill or rent Sleepless in Seattle or watch Lifetime. Payback is a man’s movie, chock-full of action and grit and double-crossing and plot twists and pain and everything that makes a movie enjoyable. It is not pretty, it is not socially redeeming, it is not politically correct, but it is a hell of a ride.

Payback is Mel Gibson’s movie, and Mel makes the movie tick along like the engine in a 70’s muscle car at high rev. Mel plays Porter, a professional thief trying to settle a score with his former partner, who stole Porter’s fair share of a heist. Along the way, Porter runs afoul of the Chinese Mafia, two crooked cops, his wife, his girlfriend, a sadistic prostitute, and an assortment of mob bosses, all of whom stand in Porter’s way… but not for long.

What makes Payback work is the innate coolness of Porter. Porter is the coolest bad guy since Samuel L. Jackson in Jackie Brown (or Pulp Fiction, take your pick), but with a more laconic, brutal attitude than Jackson’s smooth jive talk. Porter is so cool that he makes Fonzie look like Bill Gates. .

Coolness is like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. Take this scene: a group of mob bosses are staking out Porter’s motel room in a big, flashy car. Porter sneaks under the car, cuts the gas line, and then stands behind the car just long enough for the mob driver to see him. And then slowly, he drops his lit cigarette… which falls in a pool of gasoline… which leads back to the car… which goes kaboom! And we see Porter, through the smoke, staring at the wreckage. It’s a cool moment in a cool movie, and it’s absolutely silent. (Except for the kaboom.) Gibson doesn’t have to say anything, not even a Schwarzeneggerian one-liner. His cool is intact.

To make things even better, Payback is a movie where uncommon coolness is a common virtue. Maria Bello is supercool as Porter’s hooker girlfriend, but she’s easily outstripped (chuckle) by Lucy Alexis Liu’s sadomasochistic hooker-with-a heart-of-barbed-wire. The gangsters are just as cool, with William Devane, James Coburn, and Kris Kristofferson all contributing to the movie’s ice-cold spirit.

The only real drawback to Payback was the two girls who sat behind me and related plot points to each other the whole way through the movie. I am pleased to say that I resisted temptation and let this antisocial behavior pass without resorting to violence or even an unkind word or two. I hope, however, that the Presidential Summit to Prevent Unnecessary Talking In Movie Theaters gets underway soon. It’s time for Washington to lay off the entertainment business for awhile and take an interest in the real problems our country faces.

All The Reasons Why

There’s a scene in Pearl Harbor that comes between the impressively detailed carnage of the Japanese sneak attack and the audacity of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. It involves the problem of launching an Army Air Force heavy bomber off of a Navy aircraft carrier (USS LEXINGTON, playing the part of USS HORNET). If the plane is too heavy, it won’t take off and will crash into the unforgiving sea, and if the plane doesn’t carry enough fuel and bombs, the mission won’t be completed. The answer is to strip the airplane of all non-essential parts, including the bombsights. (The bombers drop their loads perfectly on target, though.) Removing all the things that aren’t absolutely necessary makes the bombers light enough to fly off the carrier while still having the fuel and weapons needed to complete the mission.

The irony is that someone didn’t think to do the same for Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is a massive, lumbering beast of a movie that is so loaded down with unnecessary plot lines and stupid dialogue and romantic conventions that it can’t possibly get off the ground, much less fly. If you imagine one of the Doolittle bombers trying to take off, engines screaming in protest, weaving drunkenly down the runway, only to explode in a big fireball at the end of the runway and disappear forever beneath the waves, you have some idea of what Pearl Harbor is like. It’s not necessarily a bad movie but a failed movie; a movie so filled with mistakes and miscalculations and wrong decisions that it ends up being every bit as doomed as the vessels on Battleship Row.

Any discussion of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor involves a certain amount of historical second-guessing; if only the State Department or the White House or the Navy had known about or done thus-and-so, maybe the attack could have been countered. The cinematic version of Pearl Harbor engenders a tremendous amount of second-guessing on its own, but of a different sort. That second-guessing begins almost with the completely unnecessary first scene of the film, when we see younger versions of our heroes (Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck) playing around on a makeshift airplane. The movie tells us that this scene takes place in Tennessee in 1923, which immediately puts the audience on alert to the awful truth; Oh my God, they’re going to make Ben Affleck talk in a Southern accent. And Affleck is not alone in his vocal travails; Kate Beckinsale is saddled with a phony American accent, and Jon Voight has to do his bad Franklin Roosevelt impression, and various other supporting characters have to adopt various other accents so we can tell them apart. It’s a bad sign for any movie when you start wondering what percentage of its budget went to speech coaches. (Money, by the way, that could have been better spent on acting lessons, for Alec Baldwin if for no one else.)

And it’s not too long afterwards that something else makes you scratch your head. Young Affleck and Hartnett climb into a crop-duster and manage to fly it a few feet off the ground; Hartnett’s father pulls them out of the plane, gives Hartnett a smack on the butt, yells at him, and takes him home. The young boy playing Affleck does something that no Southern boy of that era — or probably any other — would do; he takes a two-by-four and levels his friend’s father. Why? Because we can’t have a scene in a Disney movie that shows a kid getting spanked; it might be seen as glorifying child abuse, that’s why.

And that’s not the real problem with this scene. What you have here in Pearl Harbor is a three hour movie, for the love of God, and you have this long ten-minute scene that does nothing to establish anything about any of the characters in any significant way, and, in fact, hurts the movie because it forces your main character to talk Southern, and nobody apparently ever stops to ask the question, “Hey, can we get rid of this scene?” (Anyone who thinks that, say, Top Gun would have been a better movie if there had been a scene where young boys playing Maverick and Goose watch the moon landing together, please raise your hand; you’re excused from reading the rest of this review.)

One of the bad things about Pearl Harbor is the way it makes you approach every scene like a querulous three-year-old. Why go to the bother of telling the story of the Meet Cute between Affleck and Beckinsale in flashback? Why, if Affleck is going to England, do we see him taking the train to get there? Why does the movie spend so much time with the Japanese fleet? Why is Dan Ackroyd in the movie? Why does the movie use those phony newsreels? Why does Pearl Harbor recycle Cuba Gooding’s character from Men of Honor and Tom Sizemore’s character from Saving Private Ryan? Why, in a movie about an attack on a Navy base, are so many of the characters in the Army? Why isn’t Kate Beckinsale given even one good, realistic line to say in the whole movie? Why is the Roosevelt character portrayed the way he is, and wouldn’t it have been better just to use the authentic FDR voice? Why isn’t Alec Baldwin in France, already?

However, the only thing worse than the incessant questions are the reasons why. The story of the heroic Dorie Miller, an African-American sailor who won the Navy Cross on USS WEST VIRGINIA is told not so much to honor his valor but to burnish the movie’s PC credentials; Pearl Harbor can’t convincingly tie in his story with the Affleck-Hartnett-Beckinsale romantic triangle. (The Dorie Miller story deserves a movie of its own.) There are any number of scenes involving Admiral Husband Kimmel that serve no purpose other than to help efforts to repair his reputation posthumously. The scenes showing the Pearl Harbor hospital after the attack look as though someone smeared some Vaseline on the lens of the camera; showing the actual carnage apparently would have jeopardized the movie’s cherished PG-13 rating. And most famously, extensive steps have been taken to make Pearl Harbor palatable for the Japanese audience. (That sound you hear is John Wayne spinning in his grave.)

Of course, the biggest question in the movie is unanswered. Why bother? Why was the movie made? The only possible justification remaining is the boffo action sequence featuring the Japanese sneak attack. (That must be the third time I used the term “sneak attack” in this review; I’ve probably lost all the Japanese audience by now.) It’s a fabulously well-done forty-minute slice out of an otherwise wretched three-hour movie. The attack on Pearl Harbor is delivered in the best Michael Bay - Jerry Bruckheimer tradition, and action fans can’t ask for much better than that. The battle scenes are exquisitely photographed and the CGI special effects are blended in seamlessly. Outside of the movie’s shameless decision to blur out the horrors of the hospital scenes, there’s nothing about those forty minutes that anyone would want changed, except maybe to lengthen them. (Would it have been asking too much to show, let’s say, the capture of the Japanese midget submarine, or the courageous attempt by USS NEVADA to get out of the harbor?) For those all-too-brief moments, Pearl Harbor is an unqualified triumph, an outstanding vision of the horrors of war.

But it’s not enough. Even the blockbuster special effects can’t save Pearl Harbor from itself, can’t keep the overwhelming burden of bad decisions and bad acting from crashing the movie. The blood and the bombs don’t make any discernible impact on the characters, Beckinsale at one point blithely dismisses the whole sneak attack by saying, “And then all this happened,” and continues to spout inane drivel in the general direction of Ben Affleck. (Which is surpassed only by the inane drivel tossed around by Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle.) When the bombs are dropping, Pearl Harbor is a masterpiece, but in any scenes that involve people talking, it’s a terribly mismanaged, misbegotten film, bordering on the truly awful and pathetic.

There are reasons why you should see Pearl Harbor, and all of them have to do with explosions and bullets and airplanes and courage. There are reasons why you should not see Pearl Harbor, and all of them have to do with clumsy romantic scenes and poorly presented history and bad acting and phony accents. There are reasons why the dramatic parts of the movie don’t come close to measuring up to the action parts of the movie, but none of them are any good. And all the reasons why result in a movie that does little more than crash noisily and sink forever beneath the waves of our consciousness.

Deconstructing Destruction

Phone booths don’t exist anymore. Phone Booth itself admits this, early on. It explains part of why they don’t exist, which is the rise of the cellular telephone. (It does not explain the other reason, which is the accessibility requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which discourage phone booths as not being friendly to people who use wheelchairs.) Phone Booth pretends to take place on the last day of the life of the last phone booth in New York. But it knows the truth, even though it doesn’t acknowledge it. Phone booths don’t exist anymore.

And even though the phone booth doesn’t exist anymore, and even though there’s no specific dramatic reason why Phone Booth has to take place in a phone booth at all, the phone booth is still there, taking center stage in the movie. Why is that? If it doesn’t have a narrative significance, or a cinematic significance, or a dramatic significance, why include it? Answer: it has a symbolic significance; it stands for privacy. Phone Booth actually makes a big deal of this, early on, talking about how cell phones are so ubiquitous in New York that it’s a commonplace to see people talking to themselves incessantly, broadcasting their thoughts to the open air, without a thought for privacy or discretion. The phone booth has no true significance in and of itself, but it stands for something else that’s even more important. It is the Rosetta Stone to the movie.

Once you realize that the phone booth has independent symbolic significance, well, then you’re through the looking glass. One of the easiest things to do to a movie is to destroy it — easy enough that it keeps movie critic guys like me busy and employed every time Hollywood churns out another oinker. But just as easy — but less fun — is to deconstruct a movie, looking for particles of meaning here and there, trying to root out the deeper significance, if there is any. With the vast overwhelming majority of movies out there, of course, you really don’t have to bother. But Phone Booth is a little different, a little more thoughtful, and it is one of the few movies that invites, and rewards, a serious deconstructive analysis.

Fortunately, the cast is small enough that there isn’t that much analysis required. You only have two main characters; everything else is window dressing. One is a madman, and one is a weasel. The madman (Kiefer Sutherland) is just a voice on the phone and a deadly accurate rifle with laser sights. The weasel (Hollywood stud-of-the-moment Colin Farrell) is a low-life showbiz publicist, trying to talk his way into bed with a cute starlet, and using a nondescript phone booth to do so because he doesn’t want his wife perusing his cell-phone records too closely. Sutherland has Farrell trapped in the phone booth, and promises to shoot him or someone close to him if Farrell ever hangs up the phone. Simple concept, but the symbolism is everywhere.

Let’s start with the Sutherland character. The odd thing about him is that he is not, like the snipers in the Washington, D.C. area whose rampage delayed the release of Phone Booth, out for money or revenge or much of anything at all. Farrell has not wronged him that we know about. Farrell does not have the clue to the missing treasure under the loose floorboard, or the location of the secret atomic papers, or the Koh-i-noor in his pocket. He is almost a random victim. But not quite.

Farrell is not quite a random target because Sutherland’s sniper has studied him, stalked him. Sutherland knows his moves and his routines and his sins. And for whatever reason, he is determined to make Farrell confess his sins and ask forgiveness. But he does so in an odd way, with an odd attitude. He is smug, utterly self-righteous, and eager to assign blame for every little thing. He is overly concerned with the nuances of public behavior. He has a perfect command of technology, and an eye for the workings of the press. He is not responsible or accountable in any way. All he does is kill, and makes an almighty noise in the process. His only consuming interest is what the late Vince Foster called the “politics of personal destruction”, and never mind the human consequences.

Any of this sound familiar? Sutherland is the media. He has the media’s same dogged persistence, its same sense of self-righteousness, its same fierce concentration, its same power without consequences. Sutherland himself, at least arguably, is not acting in a recognizably human way — or even a consistent way, which you could expect from a madman — but he has the same motives and methods as a trained scandalmonger, even if he doesn’t use the same weapons.

Then you have Farrell. He is in the phone booth, so he craves privacy. But he also spends the (very imaginative) first few minutes of the movie stirring up publicity for his client on his cell phone, out in the open air, so he’s still a public character. He is slick. He is a practiced liar. But he is terribly likeable, and competent at what he does, and inspires trust and loyalty in his underlings. He is good-looking and charismatic, but terribly self-centered and vain. He has a good marriage to a striking blonde, but has a wandering eye, and is partial to svelte brunettes (Katie Holmes).

Sound familiar? Farrell is Bill Clinton. And like Bill Clinton, his sex life has him in trouble. He’s a great big target, in the gunsights of the media, which is focused on his personal destruction. He is crouched in the phone booth, seeking privacy and safety, but he is in the media’s line of fire, and the media will never let him out until he confesses his sexual peccadillo.

Phone Booth, then, can be seen as an allegory for the impeachment debate. (The Republicans here are represented by the trigger-happy NYPD sharpshooters; Forrest Whittaker as the police captain is the lonely voice of reason and calm.) The question of the movie is simple; is it fair to punish Farrell so outrageously for what amounts to, in this case, aggressive flirting? (The movie is much less complicated than real life, of course, we never see Farrell lying to a grand jury or engaging in shady Arkansas real estate deals or making illicit profits in the cattle futures market or selling missiles to China or… well, you get the idea.) Is Sutherland justified in targeting Farrell? Of course not, the movie argues, and pours all its empathy on Farrell, crouched in the phone booth, seeking desperately some way out of his situation, lying and dissembling for his very life.

The point of Phone Booth, to the extent that it has one, is that it is not nice and completely unfair for the media to pick on people for sexual wrongdoing. Obviously, Phone Booth deliberately understates what Farrell has done (we see him getting rebuffed by his svelte brunette) and overstates the power of the media (nobody at Fox News has high-powered rifles outside of maybe Bill O’Reilly). But the situation is the same, and the stakes — the process of personal destruction — are the same in both cases.

This particular deconstruction is, I think, illuminating. What it does not do, unfortunately, is tell you about the strengths of the movie. It is very clever in its use of split screens — even handling the despised Mike Figgis four-corners thingy — and has a subtle, but fascinating, animated scene similar to Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. The more traditional parts of the movie are (sigh) very well done, as much as it pains me to admit that hack director Joel Schumacher does anything well. It’s easily Farrell’s best role so far in his short career; his progressive breakdown is key to the movie’s suspense.

“Suspense”, of course, is the key word here. If Phone Booth was primarily a pro-Clinton allegory, very few people would see it (waiting, instead, for the sequel to Primary Colors). Phone Booth is marketed as a suspenseful movie, and to deconstruct it (as I have done) is really to destroy it, to take away that suspense. As a suspense flick, it is entertaining, and at times, chilling, and that may be reason enough to see it (especially given the alternatives in theaters right now). Not to mention that, surprisingly, it is good enough and thoughtful enough to spark this kind of discussion. The real tragedy of Phone Booth is that movies like this are becoming as rare as phone booths themselves.

Persistence of Memory

There are lots of reasons to see The Pianist, whether you want to or not.

And you may not want to. I write this not during the overheated Oscar season, for which Adrien Brody’s fine performance in the title role earned him the Best Actor award. I write this in the summertime, when you may not want to see a serious-minded movie, when sequels and explosions beckon. If that is your wish, you are certainly free to see Tomb Raider 2, I won’t stand in your way. But you see the problem. The summertime movies may be the dessert in our national movie menu — whether that be sweet, sinfully rich Blue Bell Pistachio Almond in The Matrix Reloaded, or a cheap Jell-O mold in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Movies like The Pianist, in comparison, are towards the leafy-green-vegetable side of the food pyramid; there’s a certain eat-your-vegetables vibe that junk-food moviegoers get around Oscar season. You may not want to see The Pianist, and, especially this time of the year, I am not going to be the one to tell you that you should. It’s entirely up to you. If you miss out you miss out.

And then again, I am not going to get into the politics of the movie. I do not know and do not care what studio made the movie (I could look it up, if I were so inclined) or how the Oscar politics of the thing got into The Pianist not getting Best Picture. And I am certainly not going to get into the sad, strange case of Roman Polanski, about which I have nothing instructive or useful to say. All of the hoopla tends to swallow up movies like The Pianist, which are essentially modest and unassuming to begin with.

Of course, there is the subject matter to contend with. The Pianist is a memoir, in the best sense of the term, about a Jewish pianist caught in the Warsaw ghetto and the tremendous unlikelihood of his survival amidst the ruins. It is a powerful story, and a stirring one, but it is necessarily unrelievingly grim. especially compared to the sunny visage of Renee Zellweger singing and dancing her way through Chicago. (If I were to say, at any point in this review, that you should see The Pianist, it would be because of the subject matter, but I’m a realist; ESPN and Lifetime get lot higher ratings than The History Channel for a reason.)

Having read all of this, the reader (that’s you) may be inclined to wonder to himself or herself, “Well, good gosh, who would ever see this movie anyway, and isn’t this supposed to be a positive review anyway?” Very true, so it is, so it is. But The Pianist is not positive the way that other movies are positive, it is not even necessarily good in the way that other movies are good.

It is technically good, of course. This almost goes without saying nowadays. I honestly don’t know what’s more amazing — that the movies we have now, even the bad ones, are so well done, create such a sense of time and place, or that we, as moviegoers, take this for granted, that we expect movies to automatically create Victorian London or Eisenhower America or the Rome of the Caesars with such fidelity. Here, the Warsaw ghetto is not so much recreated as resurrected; there is little in a movie that can be more real than the way that German tanks drive up and down the bombed-out streets. The city is a masterpiece of grim design; its ruins are wonderfully ruinous. The sense that the viewer is there, in Poland, in the time of the long knives and the gas chambers, is almost overwhelming.

The set design and costume design and other movie-magic stuff is not just a good idea and a way to soak up the producer’s money. It is absolutely necessary for the movie to be what it is. The Pianist succeeds not because of Polanski or Brody or anyone else involved but because of Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Polish pianist whose life is chronicled in the movie, and who survived the horrors depicted within.

The Pianist is not about music or even survival so much as it is about memory. The oddest thing about the movie, from a conventional perspective, is where it begins and where it ends. It begins in a radio studio, where Szpilman is playing the piano for a live broadcast, and it ends on a concert stage in Warsaw after the war. Conventionally, neither the beginning or the ending of the movie work very well. But this is not a conventional movie; it is instead a series of memories arranged in a logical, tragical sequence. It is the collection of all that Szpilman remembers from his war, which started with the bombing of the studio, and ended with his life returning towards normality. This is an unconventional way to tell a story, but it is audacious and brilliant once you realize what’s going on. (The Pianist may very well work for you like a delayed-action fuse; if I had reviewed the movie as soon as I’d finished seeing it, I would have been very hard on it. It may take awhile for its brilliance to sink in.)

The only movie that I can quite think of that is like The Pianist deals with the same issues and the same perspective; Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The narrative of that movie is often accused of being inconsistent — many people like the Parris Island scenes much more than the Vietnam scenes, for example — but both movies are inconsistent in the same way; both movies present the memories of their protagonists, and memory isn’t always logical or linear. Kubrick is a better director than Polanski; Brody a better actor than Matthew Modine, so the two movies balance each other well.

It isn’t often that you see movies do what The Pianist does, which is as good of a recommendation as I can possibly make for you right now. What’s wonderful, amazing, and flat-out special about movies like this is that the memories contained in them persist, that they are shared with the audience, almost implanted, so that the memory of the protagonist stays with the viewer so long as there is memory. You may not want to see The Pianist, and I am not saying that you should. But if you see it, you will never forget it.

Always True To The Code

I was all ready, in the first draft of this review, to declare the race for Best Supporting Actor at the 2004 Academy Awards over, to give Johnny Depp the Oscar, to let the other nominees, whoever they may be, know that they can spend the evening at home watching the ceremony on TV. That is, until I read the most recent Roger Ebert Movie Answer Man piece, which revealed that Depp’s performance in The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was, in fact, a cheap impression of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

It’s still funny as hell, though.

The Pirates of the Caribbean is, after all, a fairly vanilla movie. It’s Disney, naturally, and PG-13, with a tepid love interest between its leads. These are, to begin with, inexplicable teenage hearthrob Orlando Bloom, appearing here without his elf ears, as a stalwart dull plodding apprentice blacksmith with a major crush on the governor’s daughter. She is in turn played by Keira Knightley, last seen in Bend it Like Beckham as the sprightly blonde soccer star, and seen here as the plucky-but-unlucky target of pirate revenge.

Bloom is a stiff, a completely boring and uninteresting foil to the other pirates. Knightley is only really good here when she’s playing the sacrificial virgin, less convincing as a kickboxing whiz. Outside of maybe Geoffrey Rush’s sneering, leering pirate captain, and the way-cool CGI that turns the doomed pirate crew into walking skeletons by midnight, there really isn’t that much to recommend Pirates of the Caribbean to audiences.

That is to say, outside of Johnny Depp.

In the larger scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter whether Depp’s performance here is brilliantly original or just an inspired parody. The fact of the matter is that it works, and that it saves the movie, and comes damned close to saving the summer. Pirates of the Caribbean had every chance to be a big, dumb, pointless summertime flop. Depp rescues the movie from its own seriousness, and this is as big an acting achievement as you’ll see this year.

You really have to see Pirates of the Caribbean to appreciate just how completely brilliant and utterly dotty Depp is as Captain Jack Sparrow. He’s created (besides the obvious-now-that-I-think-about-it homage to Keith Richards) a completely original character; a swashbuckler for the postmodern era, Errol Flynn on steroids. Depp is drunken, obnoxious, heroic, and mesmerizing, easily outacting and outdistancing everyone else in the movie — heck, everyone else in the multiplex.

Basically, Depp is the only person in the movie who realizes that he’s in a movie, that the action is not a life-or-death struggle against undead pirates but a goofy Jerry Bruckheimer summer pic. (In fact, if only Orlando Bloom were a few points sharper — or more like Mick Jagger, come to think of it — you might have had something like a Hope-Crosby Road movie, but he isn’t, and you don’t.) In a movie that takes itself very seriously at times, Depp is the necessary counterweight; his silly accent and foppish mannerisms and deranged outfit is absolutely necessary for Pirates of the Caribbean to have any sort of resonance.

Pirates of the Caribbean is not a great movie, but it is far better than it has any right to be. It not only overcomes its base and shameful origins (i.e. a commercial for some ride or other at one of the Disney parks) but transcends them. Pirates of the Caribbean without Depp is a passable way to spend a summer afternoon, with Depp, it’s nothing short of magic.

We hear a lot in Pirates of the Caribbean — probably too much — about the “Pirate’s Code”. (”It’s more like a guideline,” Rush explains.) Pirates of the Caribbean is true to a different kind of code, the Action Picture Code, one all too often ignored in Hollywood. Boiled down to its bare bones, that code says that a movie, first and foremost, must be entertaining. In no small measure due to the pleasure Depp takes from his role, Pirates of the Caribbean is true to that code, and thankfully so.

Devoid of Imagination or Vision or Grace

Tim Burton’s knock-off of Planet of the Apes is guilty of many besetting sins. The worst among them is that the movie is dull. Not just dull but terribly, terribly dull, mind-blowingly dull. It features Mark Wahlberg, who may be America’s Dullest Actor, in a part that calls for him to do nothing but be dull. Its villain is Tim Roth, whose usual energy and verve are dulled by about fifty pounds of makeup. Its love interest is the winsome Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the movie’s token bleeding-heart liberal — which, of course, makes her duller than C-SPAN on a slow night.

Everything about the movie is ponderously dull. The plot plods along unmercifully. The story of a stranded astronaut on a planet of hostile talking apes hasn’t been rethought since the original 1968 version, and it seems much the worse for wear. The action scenes seem lifted from pro wrestling, with a lot of leaping and jumping to no apparent purpose. While we’re on the subject, there’s more emotional resonance to a pro wrestling bout than there is in this whole movie; there’s never a reason to care about anyone involved.

The problem with Planet of the Apes is that it is a dangerously unbalanced movie. On one side, the movie displays some amazingly good technical work. The makeup effects for the apes are first-rate. The set design in the ape city is remarkably involving; enough so that we wish more of the movie were set there. Even the little things like showing Helena Bonham Carter writing with her feet are handled with skill. The cinematography is expert; there’s even one scene that even evokes Lawrence of Arabia, if you can believe that.

On the other side, there is the script, which should have been chopped to bits with the shreds scattered over the Fox lot as a warning to other hack screenwriters. The script is horribly, painfully bad. The dialogue is wooden and uninteresting where it does not wholly consist of grunts. Most of the non-Wahlberg human characters have practically nothing to say and less to do (if you don’t count running away from the apes). All the humor in the movie is unintentional — at least from the apes’ perspective — and consists of making fun of Barry Goldwater and Charlton Heston (who appears in a brief, unneeded cameo). The movie involves just about every action-movie cliche known to man except one, and the only reason that’s not used — i.e., Roth’s character not falling to his death — is that there probably weren’t any tall buildings available.

The worst, most stunning disappointment in Planet of the Apes is the quality of its direction. Whatever his other faults, Tim Burton has the reputation of being an imaginative director, and all the imagination of this movie is concentrated in its last three minutes. The vast majority of the movie is devoid of anything resembling imagination or vision or grace. Tim Burton’s movies up to this point have been disturbing and challenging or at least entertaining; the last thing anyone expected was a dull, dreary, mindless, witless summer movie, but that is what’s up on the big screen. The 2001 version of Planet of the Apes doesn’t have any lines the equal of Heston’s screech, “You maniacs! You blew it up!” Such lines are left to the audience, who can direct them at Tim Burton, along with any mushy tomatoes or rotten eggs they have handy. Planet of the Apes is a terrible movie, immersed in dullness and devoid of imagination.

Note: I won’t give away the ending here, but be forewarned that there is one scene that’s a little disturbing, given recent events. (It says something that practically the only disturbing moment of the movie is unintentional.) It involves Wahlberg’s spaceship, which comes careening into restricted airspace above Washington and crashes at the steps of a national landmark. This probably won’t give anyone any more than a skipped heartbeat, but anyone who is looking to completely escape from the horror and tragedy of September 11th would do better to watch something else. Prayers and thoughts, of course, to the victims, their families, the rescuers, our President and leadership, and especially to our military forces who constitute the sharp edge of the sword that will surely land on those responsible.

Read A Book Instead

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Calvin’s Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just that the world was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Calvin’s Dad: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930’s and it was pretty grainy color there for a while.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color? If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Calvin’s Dad: Not necesarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Calvin’s Dad: Of course. But they turned colors like everything else did in the 30’s.
– Bill Watterson, Scientific Progress Goes “Boink”, A Calvin & Hobbes Collection

There are only two good things about Pleasantville. One is that it made me get my Calvin and Hobbes books out of the closet to find that quote. The other is the seamless integration of color and black-and-white images as the small TV town of Pleasantville metamorphizes into a colored world. Other than that, there’s not much to recommend this awkward puzzler of a movie about a town that struggles as its population and landscape starts to take on new hues.

We’ve seen this technique before, most notably in Schindler’s List, where Steven Spielberg chose to color his black-and-white vision of the Holocaust by showing us the color of a doomed girl’s red dress and the bright flame of candles. But Schindler’s List had a great story to tell — the color was just a device to accent two moving and poignant scenes. In Pleasantville, the color changes aren’t accents, they’re the whole story — and it’s not a story that’s emotionally compelling in any way. (Although the line between Pleasantvillians and the Nazis turns out to be very narrow.)

Pleasantville draws from two main sources of inspiration: time travel and alternate reality. In this instance, two modern quarreling teenagers (Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) are thrust into the alternate universe of a 1950’s television sitcom. While this seems like an original concept (or it must have seemed like an original concept to the studio bosses who greenlighted it), both strands of this genre have been done before, with better results. Back to the Future, a less ambitious but more entertaining movie, effectively showed the culture shock of a modern teenager coping with a world without MTV. Peggy Sue Got Married does an even better job of cultural juxtaposition.

Pleasantville is able to manage only a few pokes at satire in a setting that’s ripe for it — even the wretched-beyond-words Last Action Hero and the listless Truman Show managed to skewer their respective targets somewhat effectively. The only cleverness exhibited by the script is in its references to the segregation rampant in the 50’s: the people who have transformed from black-and-white to Technicolor are branded as “coloreds” and forced to sit in the balcony of the courthouse.

The problems of Pleasantville have nothing to do with the cast. Maguire is given the lead, and he’s effective and touching as the leader of the “coloreds”. He starts out as an uber-geek, a fanatical devotee of the Pleasantville reruns on a “Nick at Nite” knockoff. When he wrestles with his sister for the remote control on the night of the Pleasantville marathon, he shouts that he’s been waiting a year for this — and we believe him, and that’s very very sad. Somehow, he matures emotionally during his stay in Pleasantville, and it’s a treat to see his character transform into a compassionate and sensitive adult. But his character is a mass of paradoxes. Thrust into his ideal fantasy world, he screams to be let out, presumably to watch the show some more. He watches the show ostensibly to bask in the parental love missing in his dysfunctional family, but we never see him spending much quality time with his parents. He wants to preserve the town of Pleasantville, but ends up altering it forever. We’re never sure what Maguire is thinking, or why he acts the way he does — a trait, unfortunately, he shares with his fellow townsfolk.

Witherspoon sparks the sexual revolution in Pleasantville and then all but disappears. She looks outstanding in black and white, and she makes angora sweaters look better than anyone this side of Johnny Depp in Ed Wood. But she’s given very little to do in the second half of the movie, and the movie is poorer for it.

The Pleasantville parents are absolutely dead-on in their portrayal. Veterans William Macy and Joan Allen look like they were born to play their roles of Mom and Dad. I would have loved to have seen Macy get a little bit crazy with the whole family-man thing, the way he did in Fargo, but instead he settles into befuddlement. Allen is the spouse who gets to rebel, but her transformation from prim housewife to town scandal happens so sharply that it’s scarcely credible.

Of the other grownups, Jeff Daniels is wasted as a soda jerk with an odd learning disability who learns to paint overnight, while the late great J.T. Walsh glowers effectively in his last performance. (Don Knotts makes the least sense of anyone in the whole movie as the TV repairman who sends Maguire and Witherspoon on their journey: if he’s a comic genius, then I’m Pauline Kael.)

Pleasantville reminds me of a film that seems to be its polar opposite: Alex Proyas’s brooding nightmare Dark City. Both films are well-cast, with outstanding set designs and cinematography emanating from an overarching vision. But neither of them has a plot to speak of. They both lie up there on the screen like well-dressed corpses, waiting for a spark to animate them. Dark City is marginally worse, I suppose, because it’s largely humorless, but it’s a close call.

I did like one scene in Pleasantville, where the high school kids stand in line waiting to go to the library, whose books have miraculously sprouted words. Kudos to Pleasantville for encouraging reading. And that’s the message of this review as well: Don’t watch Pleasantville, read a book instead. (And no, sorry, Calvin and Hobbes books don’t count.)

Meet Kevin Costner

When you say the words “Frank Capra” and “Christmas movie”, most of us are hard-wired or one response: It’s a Wonderful Life. But there is another Frank Capra Christmas movie that gets overlooked as a result; Meet John Doe, starring Gary Cooper.

Cooper plays a down-on-his-luck baseball pitcher, suffering through the Great Depression. A newspaper reporter, who has fabricated a populist political column under the name of John Doe, hires Cooper to play the part. Cooper ends up doing too good of an acting job, and finds himself at the head of a political movement — which is soon sabotaged by rich and powerful forces.

I mention the movie partly because I really like it and recommend that you rent it, but mostly because Kevin Costner has remade it, and called it The Postman.

(Note: The Postman was actually adapted from some novel. I get that. I used to occasionally get angry letters from people about this, calling me an idiot. So, fans of whoever-it-was that wrote the novel, chill.)

There are lots of bad things about The Postman, enough bad things that you could argue that it deserved every bad review it got — and it got plenty. However, I’ll confess that I enjoyed The Postman, not for what it is, necessarily, but for the sake of what it tries to be. Costner — who directs, produces, and stars — may have created an overlong vanity picture, but at least it’s a well-intentioned overlong vanity picture, and that’s worth a good review.

The Postman’s premise is that some nameless calamity has destroyed the cities, leaving the plague-infested population to cluster in small towns. The only political power is the power of the Rod and the Axe, wielded by a group of paramilitary white separatists led by General Bethlehem (Will Patton). (The group is called the “Holmists”, and a misunderstanding had me scratching my head through the first half of the movie — why are they calling themselves “the homeless”?) Itinerant actor Costner is captured by Bethlehem’s band of raiders, and is indoctrinated in their merciless political philosophy.

Costner manages to escape Bethlehem’s rag-tag army, but has the bad luck to do so during a snowstorm. He finds shelter in an abandoned postal truck, and once morning comes, he appropriates the uniform and letters he finds inside, seeking to trade them for food.

What happens next is straight out of Meet John Doe: he starts telling lies for food. Costner tells the impoverished and news-starved Oregon small-town residents that he’s a postman, a representative of the newly restored government, and that a new President and Congress have been elected. Just as in Meet John Doe, the lies are believed enthusiastically. And just as the hope-starved Depression populace in Capra’s fable starts a string of “John Doe Clubs”, the restless teenagers of the post-apocalypse start their own postal routes, in imitation of their legendary hero, The Postman. It’s at this point that the narrative starts to go all to pieces, and the movie disintegrates into a predictable contest of good versus evil. But there are a few good moments, where an utterly dumbfounded Costner tries to address his troops, and where he tries to keep them from saluting him all the time.

Costner is a fine actor, combining Gary Cooper rectitude with Jimmy Stewart charm — and he needs every atom of talent he possesses to help dig The Postman out of the ditch. He’s a much better cinematographer than a director, though. Just as in Dances With Wolves, the scenery is diverse and fantastic, but the interactions between characters are weak at times. Patton, sporting a Civil War general’s beard, is blustery and good as the murderously efficient General Bethlehem.

As for the rest of the movie — well, it’s a mess. The other characters aren’t well written, and the performances are uninspired. There are a couple of scenes that have absolutely no purpose whatsoever than to make Costner look like a hero — and for some reason, these scenes include Costner friends (Tom Petty, in a cameo) or family (two of the Costner children find roles.) And where the no-way-out ending of Meet John Doe was touching and romantic, the ending of The Postman is as bad as it can be.

I’m not a fan of movies ripping off other movies. I think it’s a mistake for Hollywood to spend more time on overbudgeted ripoffs like The Jackal or Blues Brothers 2000 while making it difficult for original films like The Apostle or Good Will Hunting or As Good As It Gets. But if you’re going to rip off another movie, I think you at least ought to pick a movie that’s worthy of the homage. The Postman is at least ripping off one of my favorite movies, and I’ve got to give Costner credit for that. (But be sure to rent Meet John Doe, OK?)