Monday, October 28, 2013

Captain Phillips -- CALL discussion Notes

Captain Phillips -- director Paul Greengrass

In 2009 four Somali pirates led by Muse (Barkhad Abdi) hijack the unarmed container ship Maersk Alabama, commanded by Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks). The two men lock wills 145 miles off the Somali coast, until the US marines sail in for the rescue. The greater suspense kicks in during the navy’s rescue of Phillips, when they pit three large ships, a drone and the famous air-dropped Seals against the lifeboat where the pirates still have Phillips hostage.  

Questions to consider:

1. Do the Americans keep their promises? Does it matter?
2. Why was this film made now? That is, how is it about Now instead of Then, or in Aristotle’s terms, fiction not history.
3. The real Richard Phillips’ crew members have rejected this film for its inaccurate glorification of their captain, who did not offer himself up and rather blundered them into that mess. The film is based on the captain’s book. Does that matter?
4. How is the film different/fresh/suggestive in its characterization of the villain, Muse? Why is he named Muse? Alas, it’s pronounced Musey.
5. On the thematic level, why does Muse call Phillips “Irish”?
6. What’s the point in the references to the professions (e.g., fisherman, captain, businessman), especially the fisherman? Is identity perhaps a larger issue here?
7. How does the film play on our shifting sympathies? How does the Underdog status change?
8. Compare the two  captains’ body types and images. No points for “One of them’s black.”
9. What metaphors lurk here:
-- we first see Muse asleep
-- Muse and Phillips first lock eyes through their dueling binoculars
--the implausibly resourceful Phillips survives drenched in the pirates’ blood 
10.How are Muse and Phillips parallel in their strategies? Different?
11. What’s the purpose of the opening family scenes?
12. How does the film fit into director Paul Greengrass’s canon? He directed Bloody Sunday (about the Irish civil rights protest) and  United 93 (about the 9/11 hijacked plane) between The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.
13. What -- other than our nausea -- is the point of the handheld camera? 
14. The $30,000 taken from the safe seems to have disappeared. The pirates had it, one was captured, the others killed. So where did the cash go? Does it matter? Why is this question omitted from the film?



Consider the significance of the following quotes:

1.Captain Phillips: Listen up, we have been boarded by armed pirates. If they find you, remember, you know this ship, they don't. Stick together and we'll be alright. Good luck.

2.Captain P: There's got to be something other than being a fisherman or kidnapping people. 
Muse: Maybe in America, Irish, maybe in America. 

3.Captain P: You're not just a fisherman! You're not just a fisherman!.... You said you were a business man! Is this how you do business?

4.Muse: Look at me.
Phillips: Sure.
Muse: Look at me.
Phillips: Sure.
Muse: I'm the captain now.

5. “The world is changing.”
6. “I’ll have two beer and a bucket full of sin, please.”
7. “I may be skinny but I’m not a coward. The coward is the first one in the grave.”
8. “What am I? Do I look like a beggar?”
9. “America! Yes!”
10. “This game isn‘t for the weak.”
11. “Rich countries like to help Somalia. They come and take all our fish so we have nothing.”
12. “It was supposed to be easy.”
13. “You think you have the power here?”
14.“We all have bosses.”
15.“You’re going to America.”

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Don Jon

In Don Jon writer/director/star Joseph Gordon-Levitt evades the shallows of both romantic comedy and hardcore porn by moving from isolating artifice to a genuine human engagement. His opening clip of a cartoon announces the silliness, flatness and artificiality of hero Jon’s (Gordon-Levitt) life. At the end he and a mature woman have started “to get lost together.” 
Initially Jon and his two buddies indulge adolescent rankings of the women they see and lust after and that Jon has the unfortunate luck to enjoy seriatim. But the other characters are also locked into mechanical behaviour. His father, Jon Sr (Tony Danza), shows where Jon Jr gets his anger, profanity and fear of human connection. Where Junior retreats to porn for fulfillment Dad invests his -- preferred fantasy -- life in his large-screen NFL coverage. He’s too Old School for Tivo. Jon’s mother (Glenne Headly) is locked into her reflex role, submissive housewife yearning to become a submissive granny. In her ultimate revolt she shuts off the macho TV.
Two women shake Jon Jr out of his reliance on porn to complete his hyper-successful but failed sex life. The first, emblematically named Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), manipulates his randiness to bring him to heel. She’s so perverse she wants him to give up cleaning his (and future their) flat: “Because it’s not sexy, that’s why!” Her submission to romantic fantasies parallels his to porn. To his “You’re the most beautiful thing [sic] I’ve ever seen in my life,” she eagerly responds: “Do you like movies?” Both kinds of movies, like the TV ads, exploit a shallow sexuality to desensitizing effect. When she finds he’s still dependent on porn she dumps him. 
Jon’s sister -- who spends every other scene devoted to her iphone -- suddenly springs from her ritual isolation to tell Jon he’s well rid of the woman whose agenda was to control him. 
Jon stumbles into a genuine relationship when he connects to Esther (Julianne Moore), at the night school business class Barbara compelled him to take. Older and both more vulnerable and knowing than Jon, Esther opens him up to exploring someone else, caring for her and trying to make sensitive connections where formerly he performed only ritual responses. Where Barbara’s surname evokes indulgence, the Biblical Esther connotes devotion and care. 
A series of mechanical confessions at church leads Jon finally to question who is hearing his confessions and on what criteria his penances are determined. In his own way the priest is as robotic as the porn stars and addicts. Neither admits a personal connection.
     We’re spared the slapstick of Jon’s family ever meeting Esther. That’s because this relationship is too personal, too serious, too deep to move into conventional labelling. Esther’s husband and son were recently killed in a  car accident -- presumably by someone else who drives with Jon’s rage and danger -- which he also now outgrows. As she brings Jon what he needs to learn he  brings her the joy of life that she needs to recover. They may or may not have a future together. The film refuses us the conventional happy ending, whether the gauzy wedding of Barbara’s genre or the money shot of Jon’s. The point is that each has  brought the other the open honest connection they need now. 
      This is a wonderful, humanizing, thoughtful film -- with some great porn clips.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

A Touch of Sin


Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin is a magnificent, dense, moving, poetic -- okay, bloody heroic -- film about four individuals who revolt against their oppressive lives in contemporary China.  It’s one of those films whose backdrop is so rarely seen and fascinating we’re tempted to ignore the narrative for it. But the stories are too strong to  miss.
In a small northern town a loner in a green coat campaigns against the local politicos who have grown obscenely rich by skimming off the money from their sale of the collectively owned mine. The two main symbols are the Mao statue in the town square, all but ignored now, and the Maserati the boss bought and leaves outside his factory. The hero snaps and guns down everyone in his way to the boss, whom he kills at the Buddhist temple.
The second hero returns home on his motorcycle in a Chicago Bulls cap, to find the region scarred by high rises and the Three Gorges hydroelectric plant. The scenes seem like the usual awkward homecoming, till we learn he’s just killed three men.
In the fourth story a young man leaves his factory job when he’s expected to give his salary to a co-worker who badly injured his hand in a work accident. The boy works as a waiter in a high-priced brothel, where he’s attracted to a young whore who reveals she’s working to provide for her little daughter. Seeing no escape from the web of poverty and corruption the lad kills himself. 
In the third story a sauna receptionist has broken off with her married lover. When a wealthy man flogs her with his bankroll to bully her into sex she kills him and wanders off bloodied and distracted. She returns in an epilogue, rehabilitated, applying for a job in different part of the country. When she watches a street theatre company the lead peers out at the audience and asks: “Do you understand your sin?” But the camera holds on the audience, everyday faces, not the ones whose stories we have stumbled into. The implication is that while we have watched characters driven by ideals and desperation into sin perhaps there is a heavier sin among those prosaic citizens who have quietly put up with everything. If our four heroes have committed “a touch of sin,”  the collective sins of omission weigh heavier still.    
A recurring theme is the distinction between man and animal. Apparently even animals commit suicide. The first hero wraps his rifle in a tiger cloth -- to the roar of the cat -- when he sets out on his vigilante mission. Supposedly holy snakes attend the sauna hostess’s suffering and escape. The waiter and prostitute free a few goldfish in a liberation they are unable to achieve. But the sinners by omission may be like the workhorse the first hero passes, being mercilessly beaten by his master. When the hero kills the tyrant the horse trots off with his load. Unlike workhorses, man has to fight his oppressors himself. Or escape one way or another. 

Sunday, October 20, 2013

12 Years a Slave


Like the whipping scenes we uncomfortably witness, in 12 Years a Slave the sting comes in the tail. The end titles tell us neither the slave pen manager nor Solomon Northup’s kidnappers were punished. Solomon is saved, but that individual justice does not redefine the terrible system. Racism, slavery and savage injustice persist at film’s end. Of course, the point is that even after the Civil War, the freeing of the slaves, the Civil Rights Movement and its legal and societal successes, racism and injustice persist.  Hardly a major daily newspaper passes without a reminder, whether it’s a regressive change in the voters’ rights laws or a Florida bully legally justified in mortally “standing his ground” against the unarmed black kid he hunted. 12 Years a Slave reminds us what contemporary America grew out of and where too much of its roots remain. Slavery, after all, was not limited to the antebellum south. An early shot of the new slaves has the White House righteous in the background.
As Solomon is driven away to his freedom he leaves the slavery a blur behind him. That doesn’t mean it ends. It has embedded its scars on his back and in his mind. When he sees his family, children grown and married, he rues what life he wasted. Slavery remains a campaign he fought until he died -- and even that was in obscurity. The point of British visual artist Steve McQueen’s film is that America has not escaped its racist past. That remains a continuing process. It does not always advance. Electing a black president established not a post-racist America but rather a neo-racist America. Hence Sarah Palin’s coded demand:  “Give us back our America.” That’s why the Republicans just now paralyzed the country in their ostensible attempt to stop Obamacare. Call it Reagancare and they would have fallen all over themselves to register.
McQueen’s film deploys an uncompromising visceral violence that rejects the sentimentality and softened focus of American treatments of that period. It is chilling to see how little control the slaves had in their lives. In that perverse order a black would be punished or even killed if he was found to be literate, not to say uppity. Give him a Harvard degree and there would be screams of outrage and disbelief. There is such violence in the air that steamboat paddles churn up a riot of raucous white water and the boat’s furnaces roar infernal. The Southern swamps have an eerie other-worldliness that sets up the ghosts of slavery past as a still haunting presence. 
Apparently it takes an outsider to cast such an unflinching eye on the subject. To his credit, the physical world and the language seem perfectly realized. No trace of the outsider there, but the work of a director steeped in his subject’s world. Perhaps the only false note is producer Brad Pitt appearing as the Canadian who brings Northup salvation. His performance is fine but he can’t stop registering as Brad Pitt, who gets to make the film’s wisest and most humane and modern speeches. Whether his casting was his or McQueen’s idea, it shivers the film’s verisimilitude and seems self-congratulatory. Pitt's character brings Northup’s story to the North as outside the narrative Pitt helps bring it to the screen.     
But that is a minor cavil about a film that’s courageous, brilliantly written, scored, directed and performed, and as important a statement to America and the world as we have seen this year. 

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Muscle Shoals


  Greg Camalier’s Muscle Shoals is a documentary about Rick Hall, who founded Fame recording studios in the quiet Tennessee River town of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which inspired an incredible host of classic pop singers and songs. The film is a fascinating collection of music clips, stars‘ testimonials and memories, against the background of the turbulent culture and politics of the late 50s-‘70s.
The film’s explicit homage is to the magic of that location. Something in the air, in the murmuring river, in the wailing clack of the railroad, inspired the musicians who made the place legendary. The footage tries to catch that magic. If we believe it we see it.
The main subtext is the surprising fact that the black R’n’B sound behind all those hits was produced by an all-white rhythm section, who became known as the Swampers. We know that white producers propelled much of that black music but the role played by Hall’s young white musicians, all as hip as Wonderbread, is an eye-opener. The film rescues those principals from an unwarranted obscurity. The drama derives from the Swampers’ split from Hall to set up their own studio, his partnership and split from Atlantic honcho Jerry Wexler, and Hall’s brief warm reunion with the Swampers at the end.
Of course, even documentaries open out into metaphor. The singularity the film presents has a wider resonance, which moves it towards Aristotle’s fiction (what happens all the time) and makes it superior to history (which just happened to happen once).
The film represents the power that America used to have and could have. In this America blacks and whites slip into easy friendship and collaboration to make soulful harmonies together. Amid the vicious artifice of segregation whites and blacks connect and grow together. In this America the young and the imaginative get a chance to make something of themselves. This America breaks down barriers -- rockers Lynryd Skynryd even bring in a roadie who’s a classical pianist -- instead of raising and exploiting them (Hello, Tea Party!). The idyllic Muscle Shoals is idyllic America, its frontier wilds and wisdom intact, a past we should look forward to.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Watermark


Edward Burtynsky’s and Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Watermark is a celebration of human stupidity. 
The film’s explicit theme is the interdependence of man and water. It shapes us and we shape it. As an organism we’re born in water and we can’t survive without it. It’s the essential bond not just between man and nature but between people. Burtynsky’s whole career has centered on the world we found and how we are changing it. 
But the implicit theme is our folly. In the Vegas desert Bellagio’s stages a magnificent exhibition of dancing, orchestrated fountains. With water. Brilliant that they have the imagination and technology to do that. Gob-smacking idiocy that they so wastefully do so. So too the aerial view of a private swimming pool in a backyard, that draws back to reveal a city full of separate homes with separate pools and separate marinas.
Every twelve years 35,000,000 Indians make a pilgrimage to the Ganges, where they wash away their sins by washing their clothes, bathing, and filling their plastic water bottles in the -- may we surmise ‘unclean’ ? -- river. That they survive until the next festival measures out their imperviousness to logic and to care. We cut to the Western equivalent: a massive crowd gathered on the shore for the US Open surfboard competition. So many cultures, so many gods. 
To Burtynsky’s credit he doesn’t explicitly comment on these follies. They speak for themselves. 
Of course water gives us a chance to show our worth. A community of abalone-fishers link their nets and operations to help each other. They confirm their interdependence (unlike the community with as many pools as families). But the fishermen know their plenteous preserve is only for the while before it dies. As will their community. 
     In Greenland scientists plunge down through millennia of ice to draw up analyses of historic climate readings. But having fine scientists doesn’t mean we’re not stupid enough to ignore them. As the filmmakers doubtless know, the Canadian government of Stephen Harper has been systematically throttling its scientists, both physical and social, reducing funds and freedom for their research, suppressing their findings, preventing any possibility of their science countering the government’s ideology. 
Perhaps the film’s signature shot is the massive dam. It embodies man’s ability to build something so much larger than himself, with the arrogance of presuming thereby to conquer nature. The dam shrinks the human workers to ants, but when it serves its purpose it only damages nature further. The American irrigation system accesses nine Lake Hurons of underground water but has already sapped a third of it, irreplaceably. Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness because it keeps us from respecting and serving the nature that preceded but may not survive us.
The film is framed by two sequences of water flowing. The first seems to be a tumultuous avalanche until we zoom in on a huge eruption of water, released from a dam. That will be defined as the violence done nature by our exploitation. The film ends by sailing along a curving clear river, the energy and velocity all being natural and we’re just following its lines, drawing closer until we’re finally immersed in it. But even this optimistic end, this serenity, is shadowed by the fact that on the banks it’s autumn. The colours are radiant but the season says the deep freeze is nigh.
Like Burtynsky’s epic still photographs the film’s images abound with explicit poetry. The Mexican woman’s face is as brown and carved as the parched desert around her, the old once fish-full river now dead and gone. A sickly green dead river with its dry tributaries spreading along the ground paradoxically evokes the Tree of Life. In wishful thinking a reverse action time lapse sequence shows a dried land recovering the life and waters it lost. The reversal makes the effects of time feel bearable, hiding the death in a pretense to resurrection. 

Monday, October 14, 2013

Bastards

Claire Denis’ Bastards is about bastards, alright, specifically bastards who sexually abuse those who are dependent upon them. The theme obviously reflects upon  dysfunctional family relationships and the tacit complicity that allows sexual exploitation to flourish. But in the context of Denis’ other work the domestic sexual dynamic points to a larger, political issue: the victim’s complicity in his/her/their victimization. At a time where there are political uprisings everywhere, where the longtime colonized cry out for their independence, integrity and freedom, Ms Denis‘ point is this: We still need more rebellions. Too many colonizers are clinging to power because their victims let them.
In the film the hero Marco (Vincent Lindon) moves between two mothers and their domineering masters. His sister, to whom he ceded the family’s thriving women’s sexy shoe manufacturing company, watched her husband run the business into bankruptcy. She has also watched him turn their daughter Justine (Lola Creton), whose very name evokes a Sadean symphonic, into a druggie, sex object and suicide. This mother pleads helplessness, blaming everyone -- her brother, her husband, the doctor, the cops, her daughter -- for Justine’s horrid fate, without ever acknowledging her own abdication of parental responsibility. She especially blames her husband’s wealthy powerful partner Laporte (Michel Subor) both for her husband’s suicide and their daughter’s seduction. The latter charge proves imprecise, as the home movies ultimately reveal Laporte only a witness to Justine’s abuse by her father. 
Laporte figures more prominently in the other relationship. He has fathered a son with the beautiful Raphaelle (Chiara Mastroianni), who lives in a lavish apartment Laporte funds in Marco’s apartment building. Whatever his initial motives, Marco finds a genuine passion in his relationship with Raphaelle and affection in her son. In a fugitive hint of incest his lover looks just like his sister but for the former's odd mole.
Marco abandons his seafaring career -- the happy life of the loner, a captain who from his family’s perspective has fled his responsibilities -- in order to save his sister and niece.His involvement with Raphaelle brings him closer to the evil magnate Laporte but at the cost of Raphaelle keeping her son. To serve her vile master she opts to kill her lover Marco instead of him. Thus the colonized kiss the hand that stifles them, or caress the rod that rules them.
The sex scenes run the gamut of abuse, from Laporte ordering Raphaelle’s manual service to his slimy envelop of his son’s small hand, from Justine’s terrible violation in the rustic brothel -- where some dried ears of corn give new meaning to the term ‘kernel knowledge’ -- to her abuse by the pander she loves. Certainly the sexual politics is pertinent enough to our day and age. But so too is its reflection upon the broader authoritarian victimization in world politics. 

Monday, October 7, 2013

Enough Said


Nicole Holofcener is the woman’s answer to the manboy genre that dominates American film comedy. Judd Apatow represents that cycle at its best, bawdy macho tales about men who haven’t grown up. Where these films respect women by sympathetically marginalizing them, Holofcener makes women her central characters, their psychology her primary interest and their self-realization her main objective. Of course, that makes her films vital viewing for men -- at least, those who want to have a shot at understanding women. Yeah, I guess it’s also good for women to have a voice and a reflection
Enough Said is enough of an improvement over her previous feature Friends with Money (2006) that we can talk about her as a significant auteur. She writes brilliant, offbeat scripts, with prickly, funny dialogue, centered on a circle of close women friends that witness the central woman’s descent and resurrection. Her new heroine, masseuse Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) is an elaboration of Jennifer Aniston’s teacher-turned-maid in Friends with Money, a smart, plucky woman who hasn’t a strong enough sense of herself to take control of her life. The first film would have been stronger had Aniston and Francis McDormand switched roles, ignoring Aniston’s box office clout. Now Holofcener didn’t have to make such compromises. Her blue chip cast is perfectly cast.
In Enough Said the three central women are all in healing professions, but they are not healing themselves. In fact they’re ignoring their own major issues by focusing on the trivial. In addition to masseuse Eva, who heals the body, Sarah (Toni Collette) is a therapist -- healing the mind -- who ignores her marital issues by constantly rearranging the furniture. Marianne (Catherine Keener) is a poet -- healer of the soul -- whose poems speak to the afflicted but she has no interest in the readers who thank her for saving them. Eva is so bored by her self-absorbed clients that she’s jolted when one asks about her Thanksgiving plans. Patients and healers are all self-absorbed.
Eva’s reluctance to grow up is manifest in several ways. She is so dependent on her daughter that even before she loses her to college she tries to replace her with her daughter’s friend Chloe (Tavi Gevinson). Eva tries to cultivate a girl-friend relationship with Chloe, even advising her to give up her virginity. Only at the end does Eva marshall the self-respect to ask a strapping young male client to help her carry her heavy massage table up his steep stairs. 
Primarily, Eva lets her new friend/client Marianne poison her relationship with her new lover Albert (James Gandolfini). Eva lets her ramble on about what a terrible husband her ex was, without admitting that he’s Eva’s current lover. Unable to accept her own feelings for Albert, Eva lets Marianne unwittingly poison her perception of him. Eva buys Marianne’s criticisms of him, however trivial. He swirled the onions out of his guacamole, he was fat, he was messy around the house. When Eva sets up a dinner date to get Sarah’s professional perspective, she gets tipsy and critical and leaves Albert feeling he’s just been on a date with his ex-wife.
Marianne ended her marriage and Eva suspends her affection for Albert for the silliest of reasons. Little peccadillos are ballooned into problems. Like Sarah rearranging the furniture, both woman reject Albert because they demand perfection at the cost of a perfectly fine reality. That’s Holofcener’s message to women: Don’t buy the popular culture’s delusion that you can have a perfect life by getting the material details right and holding out for some dream man. It keeps Desperate Housewives running but it won’t give you a happy life. 
At first Gandolfini’s character seems to have stumbled in from one of those Apatow comedies. But he doesn’t have buddies, he has a strong healthy sense of himself, he is happy with his work as a custodian of culture (working in an archive of classical TV, where Holofcener learned her craft) and he appreciates and understands Eva. He admits he was heart-broken when she let his ex distort her sense of him. Though he seems a boy slob Albert is a sensitive, generous man who quickly dedicates himself to Eva. That’s as ideal as reality can provide. In fact, Albert's self-awareness is what all the women lack. 
When we see the exes -- Marianne’s Albert, Eva’s ex -- it becomes apparent that those marriages could have survived if the women had been open to making genuine compromises. Both men are of decent character. Their lovers could have preferred the character over surface flaws. (Except for Albert’s loud “whispering” at the movies, for which he should of course be shot.) The illusion that a better relationship may lie around the corner drove both women out of their marriages, and almost drove Eva out of Albert. The dinner scene shows Sarah on the verge of similarly casting off her husband, not because he’s bad or inappropriate but because she lets small things about him irritate her. She may have been saved by her maid’s storming out after her mistaken abuse. Like Eva, perhaps Sarah will learn to accept her man’s imperfections when she realizes her own.
But Enough Said. All three healers know what to do, what to advise, what to say. It’s the doing, the putting of those words into sensible, practical action that spoils their contentment and undermines their lives. Perhaps the two freshman daughters will learn better -- be more realistic -- and do better for themselves by accepting that in others less may well be more.     
Gandolfini -- to whom the film is dedicated -- is wonderful. This film shows we have lost much more than Tony Soprano.   

Sunday, October 6, 2013

The Hunt


Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (2012) ranges far beyond the central plot of a kindergarten teacher’s life being ruined by a little girl’s false charge of molestation. Still, that provides the central emotional force.
The film’s more cerebral address is the ostensibly civilized society’s essentially tribal, predatory nature. Vinterberg examined normal familial savagery in The Celebration (1998) and tribal roots among small-town American adolescents in Dear Wendy (2005). In a small Danish town Vinterberg now examines how fragile the essential community can be when a predatory righteousness bestirs itself. When this hero is persecuted by his community his only support comes from his family.
The first scene -- a rowdy circle of male friends plunging into a freezing pond -- sets the tone of mindless macho camaraderie and bravado. That leads into perhaps the central metaphor -- the compulsion to hunt the innocent. The film is framed by two deer hunts. In the first the hero Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) in his family's tradition bags a deer. In the second his son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrom) is out to kill his first. Both hunts are defined as rites initiating one into manhood. The hunt scenes cast a particular shade on the community’s turning against its popular kindergarten teacher. This is civilization "red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson not Vinterberg). The deer didn't hurt nobody.
The woman in authority is as brutish as the town’s men.  Kindergarten director Grethe (Susse Wold) has her innocent charges‘ interests in mind when she hears little Klara (marvelous Annika Wedderkopp) say Lucas exposed his erection to her. But Grethe’s compulsive persecution of Lucas turns her campaign from defense of the innocent into an attack on an innocent. Ultra vares, she interferes in Lucas’s custody battle with his ex-wife over his son Marcus. Grethe gives Lucas no chance to defend himself. In their predatory zeal Grethe and Klara’s mother ignore Klara’s attempts to recant her lie. 
The interrogation of the other children predictably produces  confirmations of Klara’s lie. The children, after all, reflect their parents’ move from rumour to mad conviction. Klara’s compulsive fear of stepping on a line on the floor or pavement reflects the adult community’s irrationality. Even after the police clear Lucas -- when the consistent details of the children’s stories prove false -- the town persists in persecuting him. He is shot at, banned and beaten in the supermarket, and his dog Fanny is dumped dead on his doorstep. The children’s detailed descriptions of being molested in Lucas’s basement are invalidated: he  has no basement. There is no depth to their charges but he is accused of subterranean evil.
Like Othello, Lucas’s vulnerability lay in his very virtue. He was given to rough-housing with the little boys, going the extra distance to help his best friend Theo’s daughter Klara, responsible enough to deflect her romantic expression, and dedicated enough upon request to wipe a young defecator’s butt. In his helplessness his every action seems only to inflame his persecution. Like Billy Budd, this innocent is helpless.
The town’s persecution of Lucas and his futile self-defense climax in the Christmas Eve church service, which celebrates children and community, featuring Klara in the kindergarten choir. Only when Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen) hears Klara’s sleepy confession does he realize his and the town’s misjudgment of Lucas (spread to his son). Without verbalizing his guilt Theo brings Lucas a Christmas dinner and drink and sits with him. This rite serves to supplant the earlier rite in which the town scapegoated their former friend. As Lucas's best friend, Theo is the central battleground in the community's judgment of Lucas. Larsen plays him as a violent drunk whose face congeals in incomprehension. He has no verbal skills, no grace, just brute reflex, a savage even in comparison with the children.
Eventually the community's recovery proves shallow and fragile. An epilogue, set a year later, shows Lucas restored to his friendships, including his romance with  Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), whom he had thrown out for briefly doubting his innocence. His old friends help celebrate Marcus’s rite of manhood, the deer hunt. Instead of seeing Marcus bag his deer we see someone shoot at Lucas. Our hero still has an enemy among his “friends,” still lives in only an illusion of community. Savagery still trumps justice. 
     In the interests of that insecurity, we and Lucas don’t learn who shot at him. If no-one is blamed anyone can be guilty. We don’t need to know. Suffice it that this community remains rooted in violence and a savage impulsive "justice."
But from fugitive evidence I’d attribute the shot to Klara’s older brother, who relishes macho porn, feels angrily protective of Klara and sits bitterly apart in a scene of general reconciliation. But there I go myself -- so eager to blame someone I’ll leap to a damning conclusion on the strength of desperate evidence. Like Grethe and everyone after her. Mea culpa. But I still think the big-eared kid did it. I'm only human.
 

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Prisoners


The title of Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners obviously refers to the two abducted little girls. More significantly, the other major characters are themselves imprisoned by their own weakness/strength, especially their righteousness. Their faith in their own vision makes them morally weak and dangerous.
In a Georgia city a professional, black family, the Birches, have befriended the less comfortable family of the construction worker Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman). This is Obama’s America, where the old race lines have been altered. The John Birch society has given way to the affluent and accepted Franklin Birch family. But when the Birches, who know better, go along with the white man’s sadistic schemes even the new liberal couple are morally compromised. 
The names are significant. Your Birch is a thin fragile white tree, paradoxically. Jackman’s character combines the Dover of white cliffs with the dark cellar (Keller) where he prepares for some future catastrophe and where he ends up whistling in the dark. Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) seems a low-key contrast to Dover. He bears the name of a Norse god who’s a shape-shifter with associations with snakes and an old woman (anticipating the plot’s resolution).  Clearly this is a thriller with point. Grace Dover (Maria Bello) may seem to have the saving grace of her drugged stupor but she’s as self-absorbed in her retreat as the others are in their deadly righteousness.
The older Jones couple used to be evangelists until their son’s death by cancer cast them from believers into -- not disbelievers, but killers waging war against God. You have to believe in God to wage war against Him; you just believe in your own vision more. By abducting and killing children they intend to drive their victims‘ families away from their faith. The drunken priest Loki interrogates is another fallen believer, an alcoholic sex predator who killed the ex-evangelist to prevent his taking other children. That is, all the religious characters have become vigilantes, killing under the authority of their own judgment but presuming to a higher authority.  
We start with the Dover lads’ perspective as they kill a deer in the winter forest. We meet Detective Loki in a Chinese restaurant, eating alone on Thanksgiving, working through the Chinese horoscope. The tattoos on his neck and knuckles suggest his backstory. An orphan who came out of an institution, he too sought some system of religious belief or cult to give his life order and meaning, like that horoscope. He seems to have matured into a shrewd, disciplined and successful cop. 
Dover seems Loki’s opposite in temperament, a devoted family man who raises his son to kill deer. He prays before killing, to put his evil in God’s service. He hangs crosses and plays Christian radio in his car. But his temper and violence are most unChristian, especially when he unleashes them upon the pathetic man Alex Jones (Paul Dano) with his 10-year-old’s mind. But Loki discovers he is more like Dover than he realized. He erupts at his suspect, enabling him to grab his revolver and kill himself. Both men’s violence imperils the little girls’ survival, not to mention their own soul -- and legal standing. In the last scene, Loki is on the ground and Dover buried in it, an image of a striated unity. Keller Dover is Loki's suppressed Id. We don't hear Loki's first name because he's wholly invested in his social role, Inspector.
Like the religious figures with their sense of mission, Dover is driven by his righteousness. He has absolute confidence in his intuition. That’s how he justifies torturing the helpless Jones . When Loki’s violence erupts he also shows Dover’s dependence upon intuition, which also proves wrong. Thinking he is heading off Dover, Loki races to Dover’s father’s ruined apartment, where he finds the imprisoned Jones. But Dover has discovered Holly Jones’s (Melissa Leo) guilt and has sped there instead. Both men’s righteousness imperils their cause and proves unjust and disastrous. The case is solved despite -- not because of -- the two central male characters‘ different confidence in their respective visions.  
The mazes relate to the righteousness theme because they promise a path, however tortuous, that will lead either in to the center or out to freedom. But the maze on the corpse’s medallion offers no successful path. To get to the center you have to ignore the path -- that is, logic, law, social system, ethical imperatives -- and just leap to the center. That’s the emblem of the righteous. They don’t need to go through or to respect ordinary processes. They have their inner vision and they know they are right. Here that’s the route to disaster -- something like the Tea Party “hearing the people” and shutting down the government, as it happens. (Remember, this is Obama’s America, as viewed by a brilliant Quebec director.) As the maze drawings resemble the snake drawings the cases of snakes evoke the shallow righteousness that  cost man Eden. Out of respect for the maze there are two (obligatory) car chases but the only crash is the van in the forest.
Dover’s motto is “Pray for the best, prepare for the worst.” That seems sensible, but in his practice he places his own intuition -- aka guesswork -- ahead of any moral or legal consideration. That’s more like Satan’s Chaos than Eden. If we don’t see him rescued at the end it’s because his real imprisonment is within his own arrogant will, not in the Jones pit.
After Polytechnique and Incendies, Prisoners confirms that Villeneuve is a brilliant director whose intellectual thrillers anatomize the complexities of contemporary evil.