war, genocide, and epidemiology, oh my

I don't have a particularly great thematic link between the three movies I want to talk about in this post-- other than they're all about social ills and other bad stuff. But I'm gonna try anyway...

The Painted Veil
In general, I don't have a hell of a lot of patience for standard pretty period-piece sorts of movies. Some of them are nice to watch, sure, but more often than not, they are adapted from novels by long-dead writers, and as such, provide a distinct disconnect for one such as myself, who regularly ferrets out the new, new, new, just to keep her interest aroused. I'd heard this movie was different from every other staid, conservative period piece. But it wasn't. Sure, there's some extremely modestly filmed extramarital bed-hopping... and there's a stab at depicting the early awakenings of a social conscience among colonialists, but in the end, it's still a stuffy Somerset Maugham morality tale that just happens to be shot in a dense China jungle. This movie even snagged Ed Norton and Naomi Watts, who have both been known to put forth a risky performance now and again. But here, they're both underutilized in terms of talent.

The most recent cover article for one of my favorite magazines, Bookforum, is Phillip Lopate's in-depth discussion on the benefits and pratfalls of trying to adapt the novelistic form to the cinematic form. Most of the films he talks about are really old, and, as I've said, I'm certainly no film historian (if it was made before I was born, you'll probably have to sit on me to make me watch it(except for Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, Mon Amour, one of my favorites)), so I didn't know what he was talking about. Still, he brings up the age-old argument of fidelity to the text vs. directorial ownership over subject matter in a pretty interesting way. But here's what he says about The Painted Veil:

Recently, I saw The Painted Veil (2006), a movie directed by John Curran from a W. Somerset Maugham novel. It is a competent and affecting picture, with a terrific performance by Naomi Watts as the beautiful, shallow, adulterous wife of an idealistic doctor, who is transformed by her husband’s death. Many film critics tempered their praise by calling it “old-fashioned,” and indeed it is, not only because the adultery-in-the-colonial-tropics story and the theme of sacrifice seem fussy for today’s audiences but also because the craftsmanship of the adaptation is so unobtrusively intelligent. The Painted Veil is criticized as old-fashioned for making human sense of a now-dusty Maugham novel that was just the rage in the ’20s and ’30s.

For my money, "unobtrusive intelligence" is not what makes a movie "old-fashioned," nor is it something that is absent from good films that have been produced more recently. However, the fact that there is very little adventure to be had in the viewing of this film IS what makes it "old-fashioned," in my mind anway. It is, well, enjoyable, I guess, to sit through, but I would say that I was less "affected" by it than Lopate claims to have been.


The Last King of Scotland
The morning after squirming through this volatile and riveting film, I emailed a friend at work to rave about it and, coincidentally, he'd also seen it... and had fallen asleep in it! Unbelievable. Though he claims it was because the movie was boring, I stand by my assertion that he was tired because he aspires to arise at the buttcrack every morning. Really, Forest Whitaker's fumbling, brutish performance is all that it was cracked up to be... and more. It SHOULD be enough to keep the drowsiest among us shifting in our seats and peeking through our fingers.

At one point near the end, James McAvoy's character, Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, says to Whitaker's Idi Amin something along the lines of "you're just a big child! And that's why you're so fucking scary!" Shortly thereafter, the good doctor is quite literally strung up by his aureolas. The point is, Idi Amin was a horrendous tyrant and executor of grand genocidal atrocities because his psychological development was so seemingly stunted that he was unable to determine that he was accountable for such horrors. Watching Whitaker tunnel through this disconnect is well worth the price of the rental.

Interestingly, this movie is also adapted from a book, but it presents a far different set of challenges for adaptation than did Maugham's older narrative. It's a fictional account of a fictional character--our Dr. Garrigan--and his life with a real historical figure-- and one of mythological proportions, at that. This incorporation of real people into fiction has been a fun little game for some so-called "postmodern" writers (Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer, for two easy instances, like to name fictional characters after themselves). But when you have to depict a real monster like Idi Amin as a human, a legend, a historical figure and a veritable devil, well, it's a tall order for filmmakers and actors alike. By and large, I think Whitaker carries the film remarkably well... and pretty conscientiously, for the most part. And McAvoy is also compelling as we follow him through his Dante-esque descent into politico-hell. But the film remains a work of fiction, and somehow, for me, anyway, this lessens its punch.

Pan's Labyrinth
This film is what you would get if Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask and Spielberg's Schindler's List produced a gimpy little baby. It's a funky, dark-but-cute fantasy film with a brutal torture-and-war drama buried within. The general atmosphere that the director, Guillermo Del Toro, creates is one that would be very familiar in a kid's movie. It's got the obscuring and glimmering lighting effects of the Harry Potters and the like, but then, a guy gets shot through the ear for hunting wabbits. And a guy sews his own lip back on after getting skewered by his maid (she's the good guy, he, the villian, of course). I quite like how confusing this mixing of genres is. I mean, the patina of the fairytale that settles over the film from the earliest scenes onward lulls the audience to the point that you feel, when the more brutal moments happen upon you, at once removed at some distance from them, but also startled from your movie-watching trance. It's a movie told from a child's point of view but it is not a movie for children-- and in its most stylistically careful way, it succeeds far above and beyond Terry Gilliam's Tideland, which purported to do the same thing.

In some ways, I think what a film like this does-- telling the narrative of Franco's Spain in the guise of a fairytale-- is really kinda genius because it's so subversive. I mean, if you want to push a particular political perspective or story upon people who might not seek out the information themselves, what better way to do it than to present it from the innocuous perspective of the child's-eye-view? Here, I'd like to make a little comparison with V for Vendetta, a film about which I still have mixed feelings, a couple years after I saw it. On one hand, it's a grand-scale, flashy, big-budget comic book come to life sort of movie... and therefore generated the sort of audience that frequents flashy, comic-y movies (i.e., not me). But on the other, it was notable for its relentless onslaught of criticism of totalitarian goverments-- and those that look like they might be heading in that direction (i.e., Bush's America). It's no coincidence that a very Cheney-esque actor plays a prominent villainous role therein.

And so, in the end, you've got a pretty thinky political allegory masquerading as a pyrotechnic geekfest for teenage boys. And what more insidious way to get a subversive message across than to sneak it into just such a vehicle? To be fair, I did not feel like I was the best audience for this movie. It's all together too flashy for my taste-- and also FAR to reductive and monosyllabic in its message and impetus as it paints its point of view with very broad strokes... but if it tricked some suburban adolescent out there into thinking a little bit about his own relationship with his government, well, that's kinda great! And though Pan's Labyrinth is subtitled, start to finish, and very indie in terms of cinematograhic texture... and will probably never find a viewership larger than those of us who seek out that sort of fare... there is still something a little dangerous about splicing kids' movies and war dramas into the same film. And for that, I'll continue to hold a candle for that very elusive viewership.

What remains

I feel I can safely say that the image of contemporary California held in the public consciousness has little to do with old Hollywood westerns. I mean, with the shopping malls, and Clueless, and the beach-dwellers of The O.C.... well, they're just not all that Clint Eastwood-y anymore, you know? But the romance with the Manifest Destiny, the old West-- and its denizen, the bow-legged cowboy, is still alive, isn't it? Or at least I would be led to believe so by the likes of Deadwood (which I gather is an original and smart take on the topic, though I haven't seen it and can't really comment upon it even remotely-- damn, HBO is pricy in these parts!). But then along comes a movie like Down in the Valley-- which is a sharp, eagle-eyed look at the stinking corpse of this very romance.

In the accompanying materials on the DVD, there was a rather elucidating Q&A session with Ed Norton, the star/producer and David Jacobson, the director, in which Norton recounts a conversation he had with Jacobson early on in production in which Jacobson said something along the lines of, "I'm not interested in the sociological, I'm interested in the psychological." Norton, himself, is clearly more interested in the sociological implications of this movie--as am I, of course-- but it's interesting that the director denies that they were even a consideration for him. Because, if it's nothing else, this is a movie about community and context. And those who intrude thereupon.

Basically, it's a movie about a teenage girl so wrapped up in her sultry San Fernando Valley ennui that she sets out to entangle herself with a self-deluded cowboy in the guise of the ever-adorable Ed Norton. OK, so this is an actor who is never good-looking that we could consider him a sex symbol and yet he has so much on-screen charm, intelligence, affability, and, well, muscly arms that his appeal is undeniable. And Evan Rachel Wood--well, I have yet to see this girl in something wherein she hasn't been shockingly good. I mean, her features are delicate and childish and yet she's got this complicated vulnerability/ferocity that makes me really glad that a pretty blonde teenager can still get taken seriously in Hollywood. And though both of their characters have loose-cannon tendencies, she is really the one calling the shots in this story-- and she's also the one who evolves the most.

And I suppose (because I'm me and I always talk about this stuff) I'll address the issue of a teenage girl/grown man sex: Yes, it happens. Yes, it's appropriate to the story. It's only interesting in this case because it's yet another example of the so-called impressionable young girl employing her own sexual agency-- she chooses this man and makes him fall in love with her, makes him desire her. There is no way in hell someone could interpret this situation as one in which he takes advantage of her. If anything, it's the other way around. But, for once, in this case, their intimate interactions aren't so interesting to me when there is iconic Americana at stake.

I, unlike the director, am much more interested in what's happening in this little San Fernando Valley than I am in what's happening inside the heads of these folks. Given, their despair, their malaise... it's palpable. But what happens when that old image of the lone wolf cowboy find himself caught up in this family on the verge of splitting at its seams? And if this cowboy seems to maintain that particular and peculiar variety of innocence that is destructive in its very ignorance, well, he is somehow simultaneously both very American and very out of touch with American people. And what is there to do with a vision of America that we can neither live up to nor live down? Well, if this movie is any sort of example, we treat it as an aberration and then we destroy it.

And, I know, it's hard to talk about cowboys these days without bringing up our shit-kickin' president-- or at least, it's hard for me to think about the word "cowboy" without also calling up his very visage. But this movie isn't about the war, or global vigilantism. It quieter and smaller and about a girl who loves a man who is at odds with his community-- because (spoiler alert)we learn he not so much the outsider that he purports to be. He is both huckster and victim-- and what makes this movie so great is that he exists so fully in that paradox.

This movie is in love with its smoggy, dusky landscape... and its blanched California faces. And, truly, it's a rank, sunbleached, old cadavre of a western-- but an engaging, thoughtful, wrenching chapter in that story that's as old as American pioneerism.