Interdependence

There’s an aha! moment in The Journey, and thankfully it comes early enough in the movie that it keeps your attention, keeps you involved in the rest of what is to come. We see Eric Saperston, apprentice Deadhead, owner of a bright yellow Volkswagen minibus, preparing to leave on a cross-country voyage of self discovery. He somehow manages to talk himself into an interview with Jimmy Carter; they sit down, talk about life and suchlike. Eric comes to the aha! moment soon afterwards; he realizes that he should have had a camera with him, should have immortalized the words of wisdom he heard, should have shared it with others. In other words, he makes the decision, right there in someone’s Atlanta living room, to be a filmmaker. And that’s kind of cool.

It’s one thing to make a decision like that; quite another thing to follow through on it. The Journey is, in a way, Saperston’s journey from being an aimless soul to having the goal of making a movie, from being a wandering generality to a meaningful specific. That he’s working on this goal makes The Journey fascinating; that he doesn’t quite realize it himself makes it maddening.

The concept is simple enough. Take one part reality TV, like Road Rules, with young people roaming across the country in search of America or wisdom or what have you. (Saperston and his crew even run into an MTV crew filming Road Rules, and even manage to poach one of the staff.) One part classic Americana road trip; John Steinbeck and Travels with Charley, Jack Kerouac and Charles Kuralt out On The Road, William Least Heat Moon out on the Blue Highways. And then add to that one part Barbara Walters, with Saperston working the phones and working the faxes, trying to get the “get”, the interviews that make the movie about something more than a bunch of twenty-somethings and a dog in an ancient VW bus.

What makes The Journey work, to the extent that it works at all, is Saperston’s genius. He is not a genius filmmaker, by any means. (One of the drearier parts of the movie is his running battles with David, the semi-competent cameraman.) He’s definitely not a genius interviewer. What he is, though, is a marketing and PR genius. He’s able to magically conjure checks from major companies, seemingly from out of nowhere. From being a one-man show, selling cheese sandwiches for a dollar in rest stops, he suddently has financing for a crew and cameras and gasoline and cappuchino.

It’s a skill that helps him tremendously in getting interview subjects. The way Saperston works his network, getting people as diverse as Ann Richards and Billy Crystal to appear in his movie, is nothing short of breathtaking. And he does this in the nicest, most polite way possible — no horrid guerilla-movie tactics here. The Journey wants to believe it’s a movie that teaches valuable life lessons; it succeeds in teaching some of them, and these are the value of persistence and networking and creativity and tenacity.

For example, early on in the movie, Henry Winkler gives Saperston a giant plastic pencil, almost as tall as he is. Saperston totes the pencil with him on all his interviews with some surprisingly elite Hollywood times. It’s a good-luck charm, but it’s something more; it identifies him and breaks the ice. When people know you’re the guy with Henry Winkler’s giant pencil, they tend to remember you. You gotta have a gimmick.

When The Journey plays to Saperston’s strengths, it’s an interesting, quirky documentary. He’s clearly talented, honest, and often engaging, and he makes the movie watchable and interesting, up to a point. Unfortunately, Saperston has significant weaknesses as well, and they play a significantly larger role.

The worst part is that he has no narrative gift to speak of; The Journey is ostensibly about storytelling, but it does nothing of the sort. It just bumbles along, never settling on one thought or one theme for very long. At times, it’s about bridging the “generation gap”, but it’s unclear if this is the movie’s real purpose or (more likely) a way for Saperston to scam a free helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon. At times, it’s about twentysomething alienation and depression. At times, it’s just about having fun. The movie just runs off on too many directions at once. It’s kind of like watching a golden retriever chase a ball around a yard; you can tell he’s having fun, but he’s not getting much accomplished.

Also, The Journey spends a lot of time interviewing people that aren’t famous or successful, or have any particular words of wisdom. There are too many detours along the way, too many pointless encounters with Kinko’s managers or old college roommates or older married couples for there to be any real coherence or point to the movie. (Saperston also spends a lot of time dealing with the mechanics that service his aging VW Microbus; getting a $1100 bill for an engine rebuild teaches you a lot more about life than any conversation with random people ever could.)

Early on, one of the corporate CEOs funding this extended road trip points out that one of the problems people have is not asking for help. There’s nothing wrong with The Journey that some professional help couldn’t cure, in the form of a screenwriter or an editor or some professional someone to make all of this make sense. One of the things that all of us learn on our individual journeys is the power of interdependence; that all of us need to help one another and take advantage of each other’s strengths. No matter how smart and talented we are, we can’t do it alone, none of us can. The Journey shows, clearer than anything else can, that even the most bright and talented person can’t create a movie on their own. Saperston has a good idea, and does his best to pull it off, but it doesn’t quite work. The movie’s energy and daring are advantages, and even its lack of skill or craftsmanship can be endearing. But a little bit of professionalism, here and there, would have helped it a great deal, and that’s just missing.

The real problem with The Journey is that Saperston still doesn’t seem to get this. The climax of The Journey shows his reconciliation with his parents, which is fine from his perspective, but it doesn’t provide the audience with a sense of closure. We also see an epilogue showing what the rest of the crew is doing now, but all we hear about Saperston is that his bright yellow VW is sitting under a tarp, somewhere in The Greater Atlanta Metro Area, waiting for the next adventure. The only reason to stick with the long rambles of The Journey is to see whether Saperston learns anything along the way, but we really never see that happen. Which is a pity. Hopefully, the next installment of his personal journey will turn out to be more worthwhile, or at least more coherent.

Enter The Escapist

“Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats, and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains! This - is - The Escapist!”

– Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

If you haven’t read the book — a Pulitzer Prize winner, check it out — you might not be familiar with The Escapist, that blond-haired blue-eyed symbol of liberty, true-blue friend of humanity, and Member of the League of the Golden Key. The Escapist is the comic-book creation of Chabon’s protagonists, the funny-book team of Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, and performs great feats of derring-do while taking on the manifold forces of the evil Iron Chain.

Behind Enemy Lines is nothing more than your basic military comic-book movie. Owen Wilson’s character, a naval aviator shot down over the Balkan hinterlands, is a dead-ringer for Chabon’s Escapist (enough so that one wonders if the folks who are doing the casting for the movie version of Kavalier & Clay are paying attention). Almost from the first moment he is shot down, Wilson is on the run, chased by a hundred Serbian soldiers with the bad aim so common in comic-book movies. Although nobody in Behind Enemy Lines will admit to it, Wilson has all the attributes of comic-book heroes; he is fearless, can outrun bullets and land mines, is invulnerable to the cold, and can run for hours without food or water or rest.

(Almost, that is. Behind Enemy Lines has two of the damnedest product placements you’ll ever see in a movie. The first is when longtime United Airlines pitchman Gene Hackman, playing an admiral here, tells his pilots to go out and “fly the friendly skies”. The second is when a hitchhiking Wilson is picked up by a band of rebels. He asks for water, and they give him a bottle of Coca-Cola. Shameless stuff, you’ll agree.)

Although one senses that Behind Enemy Lines is a comic-book movie at heart, it desperately wants to be a hard-boiled military action flick. Unfortunately, it’s not grounded enough in reality to accomplish that mission. Besides the unlikeliness of Wilson’s escapes, there’s the scene where Wilson and his pilot are shot down, which is almost completely ludicrous to anyone who knows the first thing about surface-to-air missiles. Also, the movie has its own completely unlikely set of bad guys, including one fierce enemy sniper who insists on wearing a dark-blue track suit with white stripes that makes him stand out like a sore thumb in the winter landscape. (We also see Wilson taking a breather on top of an abandoned dam, where he sticks out like a fly on a plate.)

Furthermore, Behind Enemy Lines is set in the political wilderness of the Balkans, which even the experts don’t pretend to understand. (The movie handles the intricacies of Balkan politics for the dim American audience by not explaining them, which makes a certain loopy kind of sense.) Add to that the completely goofy internal NATO politics which keep Hackman from staging a rescue mission until the final reel of the movie. Add to that the insanely botched rescue mission of a French helicopter team. (In real life, the French would have landed their helicopter and surrendered promptly.) Behind Enemy Lines takes a good man-on-the-run plot and ruins it with all sorts of extraneous nonsense.

This is not to say that the performances are bad; they’re first-rate. The smartest thing that Behind Enemy Lines does is casting Wilson in the lead, his quirky charm enlivens the movie and elevates it somewhat. Hackman has your basic Gene-Hackman-is-good-in-everything role, the kind of part that he could play with his eyes closed but never seems to.

Like any good comic-book movie, Behind Enemy Lines is well-photographed in an iconographic way. (It’s almost beautiful at times, especially in scenes that feature a ruined statue of the Madonna — Our Lady of the Shell Fragments.) Unfortunately, its unrealistic attitudes do not carry over well into the realm of the military action drama. There’s nothing wrong with Behind Enemy Lines that Kavalier & Clay couldn’t fix.

Fear No Darkness

The one thing that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King should be, but isn’t, is a horror movie. What the movie really ought to do, to borrow a word from one of director Peter Jackson’s other movies, is put the frighteners into the audience. It has all the ingredients to do so; giant trolls, massive hungry spiders, elephants on steroids, nasty scheming orcs, evil Ringwraiths mounted on flying dragons. All of these things should be scary — and perhaps are quite scary for the youngest folks in the audience — but somehow aren’t, and that’s problematic.

The images — and that’s what all the CGI demons in the movie are, is images — are powerful stuff, extraordinarily well-done. But they don’t inspire fear, or abject terror, or anything close to it. Even Sauron his own bad self just sits up on top of the parapets of Barad-dur, like the eye on top of the pyramid on the one-dollar bill, staring at all the wrong things. The evil characters in The Return of the King certainly look evil enough, but we rarely see them do evil things, except in the shadows, here and there. They are the bad guys because they look bad, not because they are bad, or at least Jackson doesn’t show us this. (The trolls and elephants also look bad because they’re so big, so oversized that they seem more ludicrous than frightening.)

Badness is one thing. The Return of the King is plenty good without the bad characters being spectacularly bad where we can see them. But they don’t act with any suspense, or anything like it. In a movie that takes place not in the hills and dales of the Shire, or the heroic ramparts of Helm’s Deep, but on evil’s turf, thrills and chills should come with the territory. They ought to be standard equipment on this thrill ride, but somehow, the spills, chills and thrills aren’t quite as potent as they ought to be.

With all that is good and wonderful and stirring in The Return of the King, why concentrate on one minor flaw? Why insist that the movie — which handles every other emotion it takes on so deftly — provide us with horror, fear and dread as well? Why should The Return of the King have a little less J.R.R. Tolkien and a little more H.P. Lovecraft?

The Return of the King is about many things — not stealing crystal balls from snoozing wizards, the necessity of honor and leadership, the continuing irrelevance of character development — but it is primarily about courage. The Return of the King is a relentless assault on the forces of good by the forces of evil, and all that holds them back is courage. The spectacular walled city of Minas Tirith, wedged up against the flank of an impressive mountain, is the biggest symbol of courage going; you’ve got to have no fear to defend a fortress that spirals up like the Guggenheim Museum, with no obvious back door or supply lines. (Additionally, “Minas Tirith” seems to be Elvish for “shoddy stonework”.) You’ve got to have courage to go into battle against a vast army of foul fiends, vast as Lake Erie and twice as filthy, with the always-inspiring battle cry of “Death” on your lips. You’ve got to have a complete lack of self-regard to go down the path where the locals say, “nobody who ever went that way ever came back.” And the whole idea of breaking into Mordor, anyway, is just so completely foolhardy that it almost isn’t worth thinking about. The Return of the King is about courage, and a good thing, too.

But a movie that’s about courage has a special obligation to have its characters show fear, and its audience feel that fear. Other than the sensible Pippin Took, none of the principals seem to know what fear even is. Even Merry Brandybuck rides into battle with a fierce smirk on his open, trusting hobbit face. There’s even a wrenching moment, straight out of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, where the best and brightest of Gondor sally out across the Pellennor Fields to retake the river fortress of Osgiliath, blithely unconcerned about the mass of arrows that await them from the goblin defenders on the other side. That’s courage, sure enough, but not the sort of courage that one would want to uphold as an example for, say, American troops in combat.

The Return of the King comes along at just the right time then, when the country is on Orange Alert, when there’s enough fear out there percolating amongst audience members to fuel the movie. And it comes at a time in the War on Terror where encouragement is needed, when half the country is buckling its chinstrap against the next attack, while the other half is complaining about the whole enterprise, ready to declare victory and go home. The Return of the King is at its best when its leaders work to whip up the courage of the movie’s extras — Gandalf careening around the spiral slopes of Minas Tirith on his white horse, Aragorn sailing up to the Black Gate to challenge the might of Sauron, Theoden declaiming to the Riders of Rohan at the brink of the Pellennor. These are the best scenes in the movie, easily outdoing anything that Jackson can accomplish in terms of CGI and other forms of wizardry.

The Return of the King is exceptional because it reminds us that we are not to fear the darkness, but to stand strong against it, and fight it where we can, where we are. It not only stirs our emotions, but it stirs the correct emotions, the virtuous emotions that we all should have but occasionally need reminding about. As such, it does a meritorious public service if nothing else. On top of that, it tells Tolkien’s story as well as it could possibly ever be told, and stands squarely with the first two volumes of the trilogy. Despite a few caveats here and there — the unnecessary Orlando Bloom action scene that shamelessly panders to the teenage girl audience, for example — The Return of the King is a mighty, worthy effort, equal to the challenge of the great work that inspired it. If you have read and loved the books, you cannot ask for a better ending to the trilogy.

But if you haven’t, and if you would, for example, like a bit of character development, or a little suspense, or a good scare, The Return of the King doesn’t have much to offer you. However, we have a long movie year ahead of us in 2004, and many other opportunities for thrills and chills. Be of good courage, and fear no darkness.

Cliché Alert! Cliché Alert!

One one hand, I suppose, you have to hand it to The Bone Collector for having a hero with a disability — several disabilities, in fact. Denzel Washington plays Lincoln Rhyme (rhymes with crime), a New York City police detective who has quadriplegia, massive, life-threatening seizures, and depression. Rhyme can still fight crime from his apartment, using his forensic and analytical abilities to solve murders. However, this being a movie, Rhyme has lots of help: unlimited health insurance, a fancy New York apartment with more forensic tools than the Bat Cave, 24-hour nursing care, and millions of dollars worth of assistive technology (literally) at his fingertips. Hollywood obviously still has a long way to go in portraying the reality of people with disabilities.

Unfortunately, the glamorous treatment of disability in The Bone Collector is the only real reason to see it. The Bone Collector is nothing more than a sad, feeble attempt to recapture the past glories of the serial-killer genre. It accomplishes nothing more than to remind us of how well done some of those movies were by comparison.

The Bone Collector aspires to be Seven, or The Silence of the Lambs, and fails utterly. Both Seven and The Silence of the Lambs had innovative screenplays that rejected the clichés rampant in standard, generic Hollywood thrillers. The Bone Collector doesn’t reject these clichés; it embraces them like a long-lost millionaire uncle.

The Bone Collector is not the worst movie of 1999, but it is clearly the least original. The plot, which involves Denzel directing the investigation of the serial killer by remote control through rookie cop Angelina Jolie, is a direct rip-off of the underrated 1995 film Copycat, where an agoraphobic Sigourney Weaver directed the efforts of Holly Hunter’s detective. But where Copycat was smart and original, The Bone Collector is dumb and derivative. If you don’t mind movies that throw in tired, worn, overused bits like pigheaded police captains or the Law of Economy of Characters or Ed O’Neill or an unlikely romance between the male and female leads or killers who tell the hero their evil plans before they try to kill him, you’ll probably enjoy the heck out of The Bone Collector. However, if you’ve seen more than one movie in your life, you won’t.

The one plus to The Bone Collector is the overall excellence of the casting. It’s a treat, for example, to see Queen Latifah in a movie where she doesn’t get killed in the first reel. (Latifah plays Denzel’s attendant, who apparently is capable of working three shifts a day without getting tired.) Luis Guzman is a hoot as the wisecracking forensics cop, and even Ed O’Neill doesn’t embarrass himself too badly as Denzel’s best cop friend. Denzel, of course, is fabulous, although one wishes again that he could get a role where he’s neither a cop or an icon of the civil rights movement. Only the orthodontically perfect Angelina Jolie strikes a false note as the whiny girl cop who must crawl around the sewers and basements of New York with Denzel directing her by remote control.

The Bone Collector didn’t garner any Academy Award nominations, although Jolie got one for Girl, Interrupted and Washington got one for The Hurricane. Interestingly enough, every year since Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man in 1989, at least one Best Actor nomination has gone to an actor playing a person with a disability (Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story this year, for one) — and in every year but two, that actor has taken home the Oscar. (Jeremy Irons’s portrayal of Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune beat out Robert DeNiro’s encephalitis patient in Awakenings in 1991, and Roberto Begnini beat out Tom Hanks’s portrayal of an infantry captain with post-traumatic stress disorder in Saving Private Ryan last year.) Jolie (who played a person with a disability in Girl, Interrupted) and Washington may very well take home Oscar gold this month, but they had better hope that the Academy members either didn’t catch The Bone Collector or are generous enough not to hold that against them.

A Creative Perspective

The great Yogi Berra was once hanging out with his Yankee drinking buddies when one of them suggested going to see a porno movie. “C’mon, Yogi,” one of them said, “let’s go see a dirty movie.”

“I don’t know,” Yogi replied. “Who’s in it?”

By their very nature, pornographic movies don’t spend a lot of time on character development or acting ability or costumes or, well, anything. Boogie Nights is a real movie, with the goal of showing the audience the personalities and the lives of the otherwise anonymous naked people working in the 1970’s pornography industry. It spends time on all of the things that the dirty movies leave out, and its attention to the details of the period and to the development of its characters make it a very watchable and sometimes gripping film.

This is a movie that walks a narrow knife blade. If this was a movie devoted to romanticizing and glamorizing its characters, people would have stayed away in droves. The subject matter is not the stuff of high tragedy, and the characters who populate the film are a little too sleazy to merit overly dramatic treatment. At the same time, it wouldn’t have taken much of an effort to turn this script into a piece of comic fluff as insubstantial as Burt Reynolds’s hairpiece. The 1970’s setting, the sexual content, and the essential dimness of the characters, if handled improperly, could have landed this film into the straight-to-video “Wild Comedy” shelf at Blockbuster. Boogie Nights is a balanced movie, walking the knife blade steadily, and almost without a slip.

The center of the Boogie Nights universe is the San Fernando Valley mansion of stag film director Jack Horner (Reynolds). It’s sort of a low-rent Playboy Mansion, complete with string bikinis, a hot tub, a wet bar, and a basement studio where (apparently) all the movies are filmed. And almost everybody we see in the movie is down in that basement at one time or another, running the cameras, checking the lighting, taking off their clothes… it’s an odd setup, and could have been interpreted as a hedonist’s Valhalla or a moralist’s Sodom and Gomorrah. Boogie Nights only works because we get a third perspective: the creative perspective, where the details of lighting and sound and storyline are actually taken seriously by a dedicated team of people who are sincere about their desire to make better dirty movies.

The movie is ostensibly about the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), a young busboy-turned-video mattress dancer. Wahlberg does a better acting job than anybody had a right to expect — unless he’s just naturally dim and earnest by nature. If the Dirk character is ever — for one second — unlikable, or if the audience ever takes his macho posturing seriously, the movie is doomed. A movie like this is a heavy load for a young, untried actor, but Wahlberg carries the movie like a veteran.

He is aided by a spectacular supporting cast. I’m not convinced that the performances of Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds are Oscar-caliber, but Moore is sweet and affecting as the earth-mother porn-star Amber Waves, and Reynolds’s sleazy charm is made-to-order for his role. Heather Graham is luminous in the thankless role of Rollergirl, whose ever-present roller skates are one of the movies many sight gags — speaking of which, William H. Macy’s hairstyle and drooping mustache accentuate his brief part as a hangdog assistant director and unloved husband (whose wife has the movie’s signature line).

The unsung hero of Boogie Nights is Don Cheadle, best known for his role as a district attorney on TV’s Picket Fences. He plays Buck, the only member of the porno crew to have an independent existence outside the industry — as a low-rent stereo salesman, aspiring to open his own shop with low wholesale prices. He must have done something in a past life to earn the enmity of the costume shop, because they’re unmerciful to him, dressing him in everything from Roy Rogers cowboy outfits to a Pat Boone white suit. Nevertheless, Cheadle has one scene that defines the movie. He is (for once) dressed in a conservative suit, and is in a bank looking for a loan to open his shop. The bank manager denies Buck’s loan application on the grounds that he’s a “pornographer”.

“It’s not fair,” says Cheadle, and the great thing about this movie is that we the audience agree with him. We’re relating to Buck as a person and not a piece of meat. We know his hopes and ambitions, we know they’ve been crushed, and we identify with him completely — just as we identify with Julianne Moore as she loses custody of her son, just as we identify with Burt Reynolds as he’s forced to give up his pretensions of being a filmmaker. Without that identification, without that relationship, Boogie Nights would sink like a stone — but the acting is so good that we’re rooting for the characters, even as their worlds come crashing down around them.

Boogie Nights also boasts superb set design and costume work. Having spent the latter part of the 1970s at Lyndon B. Johnson Elementary School in suburban Texas, I am not qualified to judge whether or not director Paul Thomas Anderson has successfully recaptured this era, but it certainly looks that way. The movie looks like a whole squadron of UCLA cultural anthropology students have spent the past twelve months digging through the flea markets and bargain bins of Los Angeles just to find the appropriate Cheryl Tiegs poster to put in Mark Wahlberg’s bedroom, or the appropriate 8-track hi-fi for stereo salesman / porn actor Don Cheadle to sell, or the just-right platform shoes and “imported Italian nylon” costumes. By making the audience chuckle at the bell-bottoms and disco balls that abound in Boogie Nights, writer/director Anderson keeps them from taking the story too seriously, and also allows the set design to carry the burden of the humor.

Dirk Diggler tells us that everybody has “one special thing” (his being the size of his manly region, a running joke throughout). Boogie Nights is fortunate to have at least two special things: the excellence of its set design and the quality of its actors. If it’s not a great movie, it’s an exceptionally well-crafted movie, and these days, that goes a long, long way.

An American in Paris

The scene I liked in The Bourne Identity is a very American scene, one of the few in this aggressively Euro-centric movie. Matt Damon is standing in a train station; it has a big billboard marking arrival and departure times, like you would see at a large airport. Damon does what travelers do; he stares at the billboard for a moment, looking at the destinations. Amsterdam. Antwerp. Madrid. But he’s not looking to catch a train, or pick someone up; he’s only there to drop off a mysterious red bag in a locker and get back in his car. He’s looking at all the places he could go, all the places he would rather go, everywhere except for the one place he has to go. And just as the airline traveler who would rather go to San Francisco or Miami sighs, shoulders his bags, and gets on his assigned plane for Charlotte or Cleveland, Damon turns away and gets back in his car and drives off. (Unlike most people, though, he is swiftly chased by the French police.)

Matt Damon is best at playing brainy types that are a little overwhelmed by the world around them. Will Hunting is the most extreme example; a brilliant mathematician who retreats from his genius into a familiar world of bars and construction jobs. Mike McDermott from the underrated Rounders is a savvy cardsharp who is out of his depth in law school and in the seedy poker parlors of New York. Rudy Baylor from The Rainmaker is a smart, hustling law student who scuffles his way through a medical malpractice case. Tom Ripley is a bright but socially inept young man whose coping skills, unfortunately, include the odd murder here and there. (The reverse of this pattern also applies, with Damon playing confident lunkheads like Private Ryan, the apprentice thief from Ocean’s Eleven and Loki the angel from Dogma.)

The Bourne Identity presents Damon with a typical role. Damon plays Jason Bourne, a phenomenally well-trained CIA assassin, skilled in foreign languages and unarmed combat. After a botched assignment, he is found floating in the Mediterranean Sea by a beat-up fishing boat. He has no memory of who he is or why he was there, and no clues to help him except two bullet holes in his back, a really ugly brown cable-knit sweater, and a mysterious capsule implanted in his hip.

We know Bourne is bright, because he’s, well, Matt Damon. And he is capable, but completely clueless about his identity and why all these people are chasing after him. Bourne knows all the license plate numbers of all the cars in all of the little roadside diners in France, but he doesn’t fully comprehend that returning to his bank in Switzerland or his apartment in Paris makes him a target. This makes him vulnerable, especially to gypsy maiden Franka Potente, who he bribes to give him a ride to Paris. Fortunately, this vulnerability does not extend to his martial arts and unarmed combat skills, which carry him through a number of unpleasant encounters with strangers sent to kill him.

There isn’t much to The Bourne Identity, it’s just an attractive couple on the run from fearsome killers for reasons that cannot be explained very easily. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons outside of just the natural summertime impulse to get in out of the heat. (Which is hard to do in Midtown Atlanta, the air-conditioning is still out at two of the theaters of the Midtown 8.) First, there is Doug Liman, the director here, and he is always a treat to watch. Mostly, he is not afraid to let a little incidental humor creep in once in awhile. This is what made Go such a fun ride, and it works here, too. Damon is pretty humorless, but Potente adds a lot of charm. She’s not just The Girl, she’s along at first because she knows a good thing when she sees it, and she doesn’t buy into all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. One of the fun scenes of the movie involves her covert attempt to get some documents from a stuffy Paris hotel; watch Damon’s reaction when she tells him how she did it. (The rest of the supporting cast is pretty good, too, especially Brian Cox as a befuddled CIA executive, and Chris Cooper — the colonel from American Beauty as the hard-nosed CIA enforcer.)

But the real fun here involves Damon as an American in Paris. The best scene in the movie is the most celebrated, a hybrid American-style car chase scene with tiny little European cars. (Note to Europeans: American police officers drive great big V-8 Crown Victorias; you wouldn’t get ten feet in a car chase in America with the beat-up Austin Mini that Jason Bourne drives here.) It’s a lot of fun to watch, but the underlying subtext is just as interesting. Add to this the moral confusion that amnesiac Damon feels, with his CIA assassin’s instincts conflicting with his innate American innocense, his sense of what is right. All the assassins chasing him are ruthless, world-weary European types, except for Cooper (and the silently wholesome-yet-mysterious Julia Stiles, who says maybe ten words in the whole movie.) Damon, however, remains as optimistic and hopeful and resourceful as the situation allows, caring for children and dogs, in the best tradition of the American serviceman overseas.

At the end of the day, though, the moviegoer stands in line at the ticket counter the same way the passenger stands in the airport terminal, looking at the different choices, trying to decide which direction to go. The Bourne Identity is not a bad choice here, assuming that you’ve already seen Spider-Man and The Sum of All Fears and, most importantly, the air-conditioning in the theater is working properly.

The Foe-Glass

J.K. Rowling, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, introduces us to the Foe-Glass. The Foe-Glass shows not your face but the faces of your enemies. If they are far away, they appear indistinct. If they are near, then they appear sharp and clear. The Foe-Glass provides you with a warning of your enemies, their movements, and their intentions.

It is not my intention here to dissect or discuss the Columbine massacre, which by now has been traipsed over by more people than any other part of the American landscape except for the grassy knoll in Dallas. And like the Kennedy assassination, the Columbine massacre has become a Foe-Glass. People look at it and see the reflection of their enemy, whatever their enemy might be.

It is to Michael Moore’s credit that he recognizes this, although he does not fully appreciate it. There is, in Bowling for Columbine, a montage that suggests this; a series of talking heads on cable news channels, bleating the names of the enemies in their respective Foe-Glasses. Video games. Television. Mass-market media. Music. Rap music. Marilyn Manson. Bill Clinton. Satan. It’s an effective piece, and it tells the story not so much of the massacre but of the overwhelming, multifaceted, Hydra-headed public reaction to the massacre.

When Bowling for Columbine works, and it works occasionally, it is because Moore recognizes this concept and uses it. The title itself seems to indicate this. Apparently, the last thing that the despicable young men who committed this atrocity did with their pathetic lives before loading their weapons and preparing for bloodshed was to go bowling. Why not, Moore asks reasonably, blame bowling for the massacre? Why shouldn’t bowling be as culpable as Marilyn Manson for the deaths of the innocent students of Columbine? (”Maybe we could go somewhere and just eat a bunch of caramels.” “What?” “When you think about it, it’s just as arbitrary as drinking coffee.”)

This gives Michael Moore a lot of opportunity to make fun of sanctimonious, uptight, right-wing types. (Although, one wishes that he would take any of the other innumerable opportunities to do this and leave the poor folks of Littleton, Colorado alone.) If you’re in the right mood for it, this can be a source of harmless amusement, like watching little boys kill ants with a magnifying glass. Moore interviews members of the Michigan Militia (including an unindicted co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing), har har har. Moore interviews a compassionate and thoughtful Marilyn Manson, hee hee hee. Moore pesters poor Charlton Heston in his home, huh huh huh.

All of this is meant to be funny, and (discounting my slightly-to-the-right-of-Atilla-the-Hun political philosophy) I guess it is. But really, all this does is show Moore’s terminal lack of talent. Bowling for Columbine is on about the same comic level as Jay Leno’s man-in-the-street gag. You take a camera out where the really dumb people are and wait for them to say dumb things, and you don’t have to wait very long. You can say lots of things about Michael Moore (”fat”, or “obnoxious”, or “repellant”, or “witless”, or “huge great bloody git”*) but you can’t call him talented, or creative, or groundbreaking, because he isn’t. He’s a marginally skillful filmmaker, trading on the generous credulity and liberal political leanings of overly-indulgent film critics.

This may sound like childish invective. Well, it is. But I have three complaints against Bowling for Columbine that I would like to share with you, complaints that have little or nothing to do with my political leanings or Michael Moore’s, but about the quality — or marked lack thereof — of the film.

The first is the easiest to spot. Bowling for Columbine is tasteless. It is easily one of the most tasteless movies of the year. And in a movie year that brought us Jackass and The Scorpion King, that’s a pretty serious charge to level. But it’s true.

One example. Why use the footage of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center? Why dub that footage with Louis Armstrong in the background, reaching a crescendo as the plane hits the tower? Because it reinforces his argument? Because it makes some kind of point? Because it’s necessary to the movie? No. It is there simply out of tastelessness - because Moore doesn’t know any better not to put it in, because he childishly thinks that’s the best way to shock and horrify the conservative part of his audience. (Moore is on record as criticizing the 9/11 terrorists for not targeting buildings in majority-Republican states.)

The second is that Bowling for Columbine is not honest. (This should come as no surprise; as Snopes.com said about Moore, “Some folks play fast and loose with the facts when they’ve an axe to grind”.) Without directly impugning Moore’s inane political beliefs, one can point to all sorts of dishonest bits in the movie. The close of Moore’s interview with Charlton Heston is one good example. (Michael, baby, we’ve seen Broadcast News.) Blaming my old boss George W. Bush and — of all people — Dick Clark for a tragic Michigan school shooting is another. I don’t really care that Moore is dishonest — he’s no more or less honest than, say, Oliver Stone — but he’s got low enough credibility with me; he doesn’t need to waste that on cheap lies.

The third, and fatal problem with Bowling for Columbine is its own lack of self-awareness. Moore recognizes that Columbine is a Foe-Glass for others, but fails to see that truth for himself. When Moore shows how others look at Columbine and how they assign blame to their demons, Bowling for Columbine is a dull-but-worthwhile satire. But when Michael Moore looks at Columbine and sees his own demons (nuclear weapons, American foreign policy, Republicans), he fails to recognize the need for self-parody.

This should come as no surprise. Moore has made what career he has at pointing out the ironies inherent in the alleged stupidity of others. But he presents his own lunatic point of view utterly without irony, or humor, or even the awareness that he is falling into the same traps he has set for others. What Bowling for Columbine is missing is the realization that Michael Moore is just as dim and deluded as the right-wing yobbos he so gleefuly sends up. Bowling for Columbine proves that, in his own way, Michael Moore is every bit the “Stupid White Man” that he proclaims others to be.

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* Check out, if you will, what Jonah Goldberg has to say about Michael Moore: “noisome buffoon”, “bitter and twisted jerk”, “renowned bleeding heart”, “stinky”, “professional jackass”. I have a bachelor’s in invective; Goldberg has a doctorate, and good for him. 

Monty Python’s Flying Gulag

If Brazil does nothing else, it helps prove that George Orwell was brilliant, and wrong. Brilliant, first, in his role in creating the “negative utopian” form of literature, which still stands as a proud and noble genre. Wrong, secondly, in his portrayal of England under a totalitarian government. 1984 is a wonderful and important book, but it buys into the mythos of the “New Soviet Man” just a tad too much in assuming that Englishmen would lose their essential national character as a part of Airstrip One.

Brazil knows better. Brazil features a scene with the hero (Jonathan Pryce) being taken to the Ministry of Information in a Black Maria straight out of the Gulag Archipelago. Pryce is lying on the floor, battered and bruised after a tussle with the stormtroopers. Two of the stormtroopers start chatting about their helmets, and how much it makes them sweat. One of them says how fortunate he is to have thick eyebrows; they channel the sweat away.

Solzhenitsyn has a scene that’s briefly alluded to in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago; his Black Maria actually got lost, and he had to help his guards find Moscow on the map. Lewis has a scene in the dungeons of Belbury in That Hideous Strength, a conversation between the hero and a wandering tramp that involves the health benefits of toasted cheese. The point that both these writers make — and a point that Orwell doesn’t make, for reasons of his own — is that you can’t dehumanize someone, not really, not fully. Despite the best efforts of pirates and despots and Democrats and tyrants, men and women retain some part of their essential character under the most difficult circumstances. The world of Gilliam’s movie is dark and hopeless and bleak and full of advertising and exposed ductwork, but it is a richly — although darkly — humorous world.

Brazil is an incredibly dark comedy, or an incredibly light and Pythonesque dystopian nightmare, take your pick. It’s chock-full of quirky performances from veteran Brit character actors like Ian Holm and Jim Broadbent and Michael Palin and Bob Hoskins, and expert back-up from Robert DeNiro and the underrated and underappreciated Kim Greist as the object of Pryce’s affections. It’s got a twisty, mindbending script courtesy of Gilliam and the redoubtable Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, most recently).

The movie revolves around Pryce’s character, an everyman at the Ministry of Information, Records division. He is called on to rectify a typographical error that led to the accidental death of a humble shoemaker at the hands of the torturers. This is done by means of a check for 31 pounds to cover the cost of the interrogation and investigation, and the scene where Pryce delivers the blood money is the most riveting in the movie, emotionally. From there, he falls in with a truck driver (Greist) who lives upstairs and who he’s previously only seen in dreams. His quest to find her, win her, and protect her from the clutches of the bureaucracy is the meat of the second half of the movie.

The plot — as important, as vital, as deliciously mystifying as it is — is secondary, however. The visuals are the best and strongest reason to see the movie, and in watching Brazil for the first time — fifteen years after it was made — you can truly see how influential it’s been. (Alex Proyas’s Dark City doesn’t look half as good with ten times the CGI.) The movie is incredibly stylish and visually interesting in every possible way. The computers are a wonder of exposed wires and tiny screens that require giant plastic magnifiers; it’s as if they were designed by Janet Reno, in total misapprehension of market forces.

I find that, in describing just one aspect of the visuals, that I’m back where I started. There’s no way to even begin to describe all of the things that you see in this movie — and I’ve only seen it once, mind you — it is something that you have to experience for yourself, on the biggest screen you can find.

And All The Craggy Mountains Yield

There are two separate scenes in Brokeback Mountain where each of the two cowboys are confronted by their wives about the nature of their relationship with the other. One you probably remember, and one you probably don’t, and it’s the less showier scene that gives the game away.

The scene you remember is the one where Michelle Williams (who got an Oscar nomination) confronts Heath Ledger (ditto) at a Thanksgiving dinner following their divorce. She complains that Ledger never brought back any fish from his “fishing trips” with Jake Gyllenhall (him, too), and that she tested him by tying a note to the end of his fishing line, which he never found, so what was he doing up there all this time? This leads to a good deal of over-the-top acting, which isn’t that great, but as I said, is memorable, and that’ll probably show up on the Oscar telecast. But that’s not the really interesting scene. The interesting scene is Gyllenhall and Anne Hathaway, when she obliquely confronts him about the same trips, but wonders why he always has to trek up to Wyoming, and why Ledger’s character never schleps down to Texas.

It’s a good question, and a fair one — especially because we later see Gyllenhall drive from Childress, Texas to Riverton, Wyoming and then turn right around and drive to the Mexican border — 18 hours up, 19 hours to (probably) El Paso, and 12 or so hours back home. That’s in a 1970’s era pickup truck, with no satellite radio. Not my idea of a vacation, and you’d think that Gyllenhall would be within his rights to get Ledger to come down to Texas for their next liaison.

So why does he go back up to Wyoming?

That’s a question that director Ang Lee (another nomination) is perfectly suited to answer. Lee is best known for the sublime Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was just as much about the glory and majesty of nature as it was about Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi and the Green Destiny. Here, Lee has the Albertan Rockies to play with, and his sure-fire aesthetic sensibilities are all a-tingle in the high mountain air. Brokeback Mountain, before it is any other thing, is essentially a pastoral, a hymm to the outdoors and the outdoor life and living in a tent with the one you love, surrounded by the rugged beauty of the craggy mountains all around. Even the title tells us this; it is not “Ennis and Jack” or even “Gay Cowboys Eating Pudding”, it instead refers to the mountains and the sense of freedom and beauty that’s gained from being outside civilization. This explains why they never go to Texas; the area around Childress is anything but picturesque. (Having said that, nothing but love for North Texas — my folks are from Wichita County — but you know what I mean, friends.)

This of course is all of a piece with the canon of screenwriter Larry McMurtry (nominated, too, with frequent contributor Diana Ossana), who has made his reputation on books that contrast the Western skies of the Lone Star State and other locations with the problems of modern civilization, and who knows just what Childress, Texas looks like. Ledger and Gyllenhall are (after a fashion) the spiritual descendants of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, mourning a diminished frontier and seeking to leave civilization behind. In their case, they just leave a lot more behind than most other folks.

The diminished frontier is how Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar and Gyllenhall’s Jack Twist get together in the first place. The only available job in that part of Wyoming worth doing for people with no tangible skills seems to be herding sheep up to high elevations where they can graze for free on Forest Service property. Del Mar and Twist show up for the job, get it, and head up to the mountains to spend the summer amidst the natural splendor of trees and rivers and a thousand head of sheep. We see Twist furtively eyeing Del Mar, and Del Mar gruffly spitting out his words as though they were money. (Ledger can’t apparently. manage a decent Western accent, so he talks through the whole movie like his mouth was full of hot oatmeal.) They ride together, herd sheep together, drink cheap whiskey together, and eventually they sleep together, and that is more-or-less the point of the movie.

Del Mar tells himself that the relationship is a “one-time thing”, but it’s not clear that he ever believes that. So he and Jack meet up together, over the course of years, and they go back up to the high country and frolic naked in the streams, and ride horses and have monosyllabic conversations about how the world would be different if everything wasn’t the same. And in between the occasional high-altitude rendezvous, they go back to their wives and try to live as conventionally as they can manage.

It is here that Lee most flagrantly puts his thumb on the scale. The pastoral tug of Brokeback Mountain only works if Lee can make it look attractive — make it look necessary — compared to the rest of civilization. Del Mar’s home town in Wyoming is flat and gritty and ugly enough for even the most discriminating connoisseur of ugliness to relish. Twist’s ranch-style home and farm-equipment dealership don’t look a lot better, especially coupled with his overbearing father-in-law. It’s easy enough to make the great outdoors look beautiful and inviting, but maybe a little harder to make home and hearth look so unattractive, and Lee manages both. (Lee does an outstanding job; the only problem he really has is that he doesn’t seem to know from country-western music — except for one outstanding use of a particularly grim Merle Haggard song.)

This does not, of course, address two primary questions. First, it doesn’t address why they don’t just go fishing; you’d think you’d do a little fishing up there, no matter what your sexual orientation is. Second, it doesn’t address the moral issues attendant to pastoral love. I am not speaking here of homosexual love, necessarily. Brokeback Mountain introduces that question — wouldn’t it be grand, it seems to say, if the world celebrated gay-cowboy relationships instead of violently condemming them — but doesn’t dwell on it. Instead, its concern is more universal, and that’s all to the good. What would happen, it asks, if we followed our instincts and lived in a setting where pastoral love was not just something in poetry?

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

There I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair linèd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

Well, who wouldn’t want to live that way if we could? That is to say, if we could bring an XBox 360 and an iPod, and if we could get Orville Redenbacher popcorn and Canadian icewine and nachos from the general store. Wouldn’t it be better if we could leave civilization behind and merely spend our lives enjoing the natural world and each other’s company? (Read into “company” whatever sorts of activities — carnal or otherwise — that you prefer.)

The traditional, historical response is that civilization is worthy and worth fighting for, and that the pastoral life is an illusion, a dream, something that can’t stand the scrutiny of reality, no matter how much we wish for it and want it. Jack Twist advocates for the pastoral setting, for a remote life spent with Ennis — but then we see, towards the close of the movie, just how bleak the life he intended would have been, living in a corner of his parents’ farmhouse on the dusty Western plains. Ennis is the traditionalist, and he argues for sacrifice, for putting jobs and responsibilities and children over pastoral frolicking and high-altitude intercourse. And it is his will that prevails, despite the costs. In the traditional, values-laden world, his is undoubtedly the right choice, the normal choice, the responsible choice. It is the choice that we hope we would make for our own lives.

Where Brokeback Mountain becomes transcendent, where it shatters the mold of the genre it has created, is there at the end, where we see the lonely, heartbreaking place where Ennis’s choices have left him, and Lee dares to ask the question — has it been worth it? Has Ennis made the right choice after all? And what would have the craggy mountains yielded?

Pixar’s American Dream

I went into A Bug’s Life with certain expectations, and I was not disappointed. I expected to see a technically advanced movie, with visually stunning sets. I expected to see cutesy little characters spouting bad puns. I expected to hear lots of celebrity voiceovers. And I expected A Bug’s Life to rival it’s predecessor, Toy Story, in providing that ineffable something known as movie magic. If A Bug’s Life did nothing more than meet my expectations — which it does — it would be a very good movie indeed. In movies, and life, you’re supposed to expect the unexpected. What makes A Bug’s Life a wonderful movie is the one thing I didn’t expect going in. A Bug’s Life just happens to be a grand celebration of something that seldom gets celebrated in Hollywood these days: The Values that Made America Great.

First, you need to know that A Bug’s Life is about a clash between three cultural and political systems. We start off with the Ants, who are a nameless, faceless, Communist horde. (To their credit, the ants are the nicest, cutest Communists you’d ever want to meet, and they’re ruled by Phyllis Diller instead of Big Brother.) They are opposed by the Grasshoppers, who are an evil Fascist menace led by Hopper (Kevin Spacey), who rules Grasshoppers and Ants alike with an iron, er, fist, I guess. The Ants work like Stalinist shock-workers to gather enough food to feed themselves and the Grasshoppers.

Along comes Flik, who — with one exception — is the digital embodiment of the American Spirit. (Save for his voice, which is provided by Canada’s Dave Foley.) Flik is an Eagle Scout among bugs (yes, they have Scouting in A Bug’s Life). We know right from the outset that he is smart, creative and inventive — we see him with a jerry-built harvester designed to collect grain more efficiently. When he accidentally endangers the colony, he accepts responsibility and tries to stand up to the bully grasshoppers. He bravely goes forth on a noble quest and returns heroically — then uses his daring and ingenuity in the final battle with the grasshoppers. Flik is the closest thing to a Frank Capra hero we’ve seen since Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan (and before that, Kevin Costner’s Postman, which makes you wonder where all the Capra heroes have gone.)

Flik is aided on his mission by a wandering troupe of circus bugs, who make the trip to the ant colony thinking they’re there to entertain — instead of serving as mercenaries. The troupe provides all of the other elements that you’d expect from a Pixar movie: lots of celebrity voices, physical humor, and cheap puns. The top act at the flea circus is at least as visually complex as the “falling with style” sequence in Toy Story, and the ending battle with the grasshoppers is as inventive as Buzz and Woody’s final dash for the moving van. My only complaint is that there are probably one or two too many circus performers, and the ones who are most interesting (say, Bonnie Hunt’s black widow) don’t get enough screen time.

However, this is a minor quibble, and in no way should affect my admiration for the hard work of the Pixar team in bringing us this lively holiday gift. A Bug’s Life is a labor of love in an industry that all too often takes the quick and dirty approach. Best wishes to them and to their marketing department, which is now, I’m sure, busy selling little Flik dolls… because capitalism is an American Value too.