Wednesday, July 30, 2014

A Most Wanted Man

Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man is a pure John Le Carre spy thriller, but it’s profoundly propelled by the posthumous performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Indeed the very title points to both the Chechen Muslim Issa, who’s the focus of the film’s central hunt, and Hoffman, the actor whose suicide leaves us wanting him so much, for the values this performance demonstrates. Even one who goes for the Le Carre will be gripped by the Hoffman. Rarely does an actor’s persona so movingly deepen a performance.
Hoffman plays Gunther Bachmann, a contemporary German version of LeCarre’s British hero, Smiley.  He’s a shrewd, principled Outsider even in the world of Outsider spies. He’s the Outsider’s Outsider, usually neglected until he has to come clean up the mess. Though the focus is Germany, as in Le Carre’s British-centered spy films the intelligence work is complicated and even thwarted by the tensions between the allies, especially the dread Americans. 
Gunther tries to sustain honour and human trust in his risky job. Nimbly, he shifts from following Issa to follow his money for a larger prey. He sets up Issa’s donation to the legitimate Moslem community in order to catch the illegal siphoning of charitable funds for terrorist uses. In return he promises to protect the tortured Issa by getting him political refugee status in Germany. Gunther tries to save the German lawyer Richter (Rachel McAdams) from dangerous engagement. He wants to save the Imam, whose son has been Bachmann’s protected informer, from destruction by recruiting him as informer.
Those honourable intentions — and any resultant intelligence benefits — are thwarted when the American agent conspires with the German officials to steal both Issa and the imam, to parade them as their counter-espionage successes. That should compensate for the shame of the 9/11 attacks, which were planned in Homburg. As Le Carre updates his setting from the Cold War, Europe is uncomfortably Islamified and there is poor prevention of the funding of terrorists.  
As we know from the genre, the pressures, importance and dangers of Gunther’s 24/7 job drive him to the relief of booze, cigarettes — and too rarely a spell of Bach at the piano. When he kisses his loyal aide as a ploy to prevent suspicion, her reaction suggests the well of passionate engagement he is denying them both. 
Perhaps our first sense of Gunther is the opening shot, a stone wall solid against the thrashing tide of dirty water from which Issa rises. The young man is at once a terrorist threat and an innocent, idealistic victim of both an evil father and real-life stereotyping (aka ethnic profiling). 
Gunther’s emotionally drained state, his alcoholic numbing and his smoking stimulation, and most of all his deep dead eyes gain power from our knowledge of Hoffman’s suicidal overdose. Nowhere is there a better example of Rene Clair’s observation that cinema shows us people dying. Usually we see the actors frozen and preserved in an earlier state, the state they leave as they live and move towards off-screen death. Here we see Hoffman literally played out. He’s a solid wall but he has suffered too many sullied waves.
In this plot Gunther replays his defeat in Lebanon. The Americans mess up the situation and Gunther carries the can. Gunther’s integrity and the value of his commitments to people are betrayed by the impersonal, narrower interests of the larger machine. His German nemesis wears the thin lips and wire glasses of the classic officious Nazi. The American betrayer is more appealingly packaged as the efficient executive (Robin Wright)  but she’s equally unprincipled, self-serving and disastrous. Gunther’s reaction to the betrayal, which violates his promises and integrity and as well frustrates his plans for continuing intelligence, is a scream that would do Munch proud. 
  The last shot works powerfully on both the plot and persona levels. In the plot, Gunther stomps off in anger and frustration, out of the frame. We’re left to wonder if this new betrayal will drive him out of the game. Yes, if the honourable man has taken too many assaults on his honour. No, if he’s as addicted to the adrenalin of his work as he is to his benumbing. The Le Carre hero is dedicated to achieving whatever honest service he can manage in the cold system. 
In the persona, the film closes on a shot of a taxi’s front seat, focused on the steering wheel. The cab driver, that Gunther was pretending to be, is gone. Gunther is gone. Worse, the actor Hoffman is gone. The shot speaks of vacancy, that began with Gunther’s eyes and has now removed not just him but Hoffman entirely. As the pounded wall represented Gunther in the first shot, absence defines him (and Hoffman) in the last. 
     Finally, this film makes Anton Corbijn an emerging auteur to follow. He graduated from music videos to Control (2007) a dramatization of Joy Division’s complicated singer Ian Curtis and his suicide at 23.  In The American (2010) George Clooney plays a master assassin whose last assignment, to Italy, tempts him to a possibly fatal life change. Corbijn appears drawn to high-risk torn figures whose success fails to serve their human needs.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The Planet of the Apes franchise is so clearly established that it can be inflected for current issues. Each new version mirrors its time.
Matt Reeves’s Dawn of the PA makes our first identification with the apes, not the humans. The first episode bares the savagery in nature, as apes hunt down deer and fight off a grizzly. This is nature, red in tooth and claw and redder in 3-D. Still, we also get our first sense of the apes’ humanity, in their leader Caesar’s sensitivity to his son and his gratitude to the ape who kills the bear. The human father/son story feels undeveloped beside this one.
When the humans are introduced they’re intruders in that ape world. A thoughtless rifle shot suggests they might be even more murderous than the apes. As the two forces are defined the gap between animal and human narrows. The wise old orangutan (properly named Maurice) can read and teaches the young to read. He also conveys a morality that makes these apes superior to most of these humans: “Ape does not kill ape.”  When the villain ape Koba does, he forces Caesar to one of the two key lines of the film: “I didn’t realize how much like us [the humans] are.” Caesar’s assumption of his species’ moral superiority is undermined by his rival’s evil.
The other key line is Caesar’s warning to good human Malcolm: The humans won’t forgive the apes for the war Koba started. Caesar forgave Koba his first insurrection, which only encouraged the second. Their world in ruins, Caesar disqualifies Koba — “You are not ape.” — so he can drop him to his death. But the humans’ inability to forgive augurs a continuing cycle of violence, murder and destruction — i.e., on the brighter side, a few sequels; but in real life, the end of civilization as we knew it.
Certainly Koba’s cunning shows him superior to the drinking arrogant guards he tricks. As the humans note, the apes are not as dependent as the humans upon outside power sources. They’re stronger and they have genetically evolved. On both sides there are are good and there are bad characters. But in the post-plague world, in which humanity has shrunk to small bands of isolated survivors, the apes seem to be starting evolution all over again. Win or lose these apes expose the failure of humanity.
     Those three key lines make the film a clear reflection upon the present human landscape. All over the world, humans are killing humans. That is, they lack these apes’ principle. They also deny their kinship to their victims, how alike they are, how trivial their mortal differences. And worse: they don’t forgive. Wherever humans are killing humans these days you find inhumanity in action and long-festering differences magnified to justify slaughter. The apes’ dawn is our miserable midnight. 

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Immigrant

In the opening shot of James Gray’s The Immigrant, the camera pulls slowly back from the soft focus Statue of Liberty. We assume it’s the perspective of the immigrants approaching Ellis Island in 1921. But as they approach it we withdraw. The ensuing melodrama takes a critical view of that emblem of America and its open-hearted promises to the huddled masses who seek her refuge. 
The two orphan sisters who flee to America find nothing like the land of welcome and opportunity. Magda is sidelined with disease, set for deportation.  Eva is so committed to save her that she drifts into prostitution and abetting a murderer. 
If the film feels like another Perils of Pauline — and, alas, it does — that coheres with its period setting and the dramas and early films of its time. But I suspect writer/director Gray has more serious fish to fry. His immigrant’s tribulations develop our sympathy perhaps with the purpose of making us more understanding and supportive of today’s problem refugees. 
It’s easier to present a contemporary lesson if it’s set in another time and place. Then we don’t feel hectored, our guard drops, and we might — just might — find ourselves feeling differently about the issue in our time. Perhaps even a little more humane. 
     Change the Poles to Mexicans and the other elements stay constant: the confusing, arbitrary and inflexible bureaucracy, the corruption and bribery that permeate the system, the seductive parasites that play the margins to exploit the helpless, the general climate of bigotry that betrays the promise of freedom and equality. When the cops beat up and rob “the kike” the only justice is the poetic done the guy who has greased his way through. The strippers’ show purports to celebrate the world but it’s all a tease. And Eva’s romantic rescuer is an illusion as much as an illusionist.
This kind of surface distancing is what Shelley had in mind when he declared the poets (that is, fiction writers) to be “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” A period tear-jerker like this just might stir up enough humanity to soften the Republicans’ resistance to immigration reform. Especially when the package is ribboned with Eva’s family values and her determination to make her own way, by whatever means, and eventually to save her soul. 
     In the last shot the two sisters are rowed away from Ellis Island, to seek their future in the nonstop heat of California, while the vile seducer/pimp Bruno Weiss is boxed in helpless to escape his personal Ellis Island, the no-man’s land of a profound sinner who can’t believe in his own one act of generous humanity and grace. Eva learns forgiveness but he is too embittered to feel forgiven. But then he was outside Eva’s confession booth, outside any system of faith and consolation because he’s trying to make it only as the amoral capitalist.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Obvious Child

Obvious Child is the legitimate bouncing daughter of Sarah Silverman and Girls. Like Silverman, heroine Donna is a standup comedian whose schtick is the female genitalia and other bodily functions normal and irregular. Onstage Donna pours out what previous generations were trained to suppress. She carries embarrassing candour to the max. 
From Girls comes the graphic exploration of the contemporary single woman’s anxieties, sexual, personal and social. Only when she’s dumped, drunk and broken-hearted does her performance lose her audience. Otherwise her comic candour endears her to the crowd. The closing of the classic Leftie bookstore is an emblem for the new cultural climate, which replaces the old progressive and collectivist values and securities -- e.g., gender roles, manners -- with the hookup culture. There a guy breaks up with his girlfriend in the bar toilet. Beyond friendships there is no sense of communal responsibility. In a parody of community, Max's new game machine  turns the phone into a video game competition. Girls has supplanted Little Women.
Donna and her one-night stand manage to develop an intimate relationship despite having drunken premature sex, mutual misunderstandings and his unwittingly (How can I put this delicately?) knocking her up. Later they claim to dislike romantic comedies but this is a romantic comedy — with grit, like the coffee/boyfriends the gay MC Sam claims to prefer. The film stretches the classic sterilized comic form to include farts, belches, diarrhea, co-ed urinating al fresco and abortion. Pillow Talk this ain’t. But like Gone With the Wind, which the couple watches for the first time at the end, it traces the independent young woman’s growth from young flippancy into an indomitable survivor. 
Max and Donna may seem like an odd match but they work. He’s a bright, earnest business exec — who shows unusual heft by having read Robert Botero’s The Savage Detectives — but he’s open to sharing her zaniness. He’s smart enough not to be put off by her embarrassing drunken performance — and sensitive enough to deny having seen it. Donna may seem flighty but she is extremely earnest about making her theatre an honest personal expression. The serious guy and playful gal are a reversal of Donna’s separated parents. Her father is a manchild puppet-maker, mom the no-frills business professor.
     This superb film has a remarkably frank script, uniform quality in performance and an honesty and candour about modern “romance” that is most bracing. Writer/director Gillian Robespierre is a new talent to watch.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Borgman

As Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) expressed the dread of Communism turning Western individualists vegetable, the Dutch film Borgman captures the current fear of an insidious invasion by terrorists. Here the terrorist is an outside evil bent upon overthrowing the normal order (domestic here standing in for political) who has no qualms about killing but whose real aim is to increase his power by seducing more adherents. Their first appearance, sleeping in holes under the forest, makes them sleeping cells amid a rich complacency.
The film is extremely unsettling, from the opening bark of the German shepherd (dog) to the periodic atonal assaults. The horror of a family’s subtle invasion is amplified by Marina’s nightmares woven indiscernibly into the narrative. Yet the film carefully denies any racial identification for the threat. The only racial elements are Richard lying to reject a black gardener and Camiel Borgman’s playful rejection of Jesus in his rather unsettling bedtime story that transfixes the children, about “a little white girl” who’s digested by a beast and whose mother begs she be regurgitated for burial. Borgman is otherwise an abstemious figure who denies Marina sex and stiffly adheres to the tasks he has undertaken. In Europe today, of course, especially in Holland and Scandinavia, there is a growing fear of the traditional culture being overwhelmed by radical Islam. The theme of invasion is even more disturbing than those sound effects. Camiel, of course, could be Khamil as readily as Camille. 
In the film’s key scene the shaken Marina tells husband Richard that she feels a threatening dark shell closing in on them because they are too secure, too affluent. That represents the peak and the nadir of capitalism. That conscience makes her vulnerable to the needy Borgman when he appears on her doorstep, first asking to have a bath, then seeking her sympathy to nurse the wounds from Richard’s assault. The family’s affluence and modernity turn them into the Western civilization that the hungry, marginalized and more ascetic society comes to disdain, to hate (though they enjoy the TV) and to destroy. Nor will the terrorist be mollified or won over by such acts of kindness and empathy. Those virtues rather fire the terrorist;'s sense of his enemy's weakness. 
Marina’s vulnerable virtue is imaged in her voluptuousness and appetite for life. Her fulsome breasts remind us of her maternal nature that, notwithstanding all her love and care, by modern convention she has farmed out to the thin nanny Stine. Marina is also an artist, making extravagantly gestural abstract paintings quite in contrast to the tightness in her domestic bearing. That Borgman’s effect turns into explosions. She is too fleshy and feeling a partner for Richard, whose thinness and tightness rather resemble the shaven Borgman when he returns to be their gardener. But like her lavish, sleek house and furnishings, Marina’s art is meaningless and emotionless. Her art is empty gesture.
Borgman first tests the charity of a large traditional estate, which brusquely denies him. But at the sleek and more isolated modernist house he doesn’t accept his initial rejection. He claims Marina nursed him in a hospital, a lie which proves prophetic when he does seduce her into nursing his wounds and providing food and shelter. The preternatural stranger seems to sense the moral vulnerability of the modernist, unsupported by the old abandoned traditions in values as in architecture.
Borgman takes a mysterious hold on the innocent, especially the three children,. So, too, his henchman Pascal seduces Stine when her soldier boyfriend is visiting for dinner. Borgman’s hold on young Isolde is especially striking when she calmly kills the man she found in the forest, a rival gardener. With this power Borgman controls mysterious dogs -- and can use his cell phone underground! When their mental control is confirmed by Ludwig’s implants, the mystery evokes the spread of jihadism into affluent Western societies. In a Hitchcockian flourish, screenwriter/director Alex van Warmerdam himself plays the older surgeon Ludwig who takes physical control over his actor recruits.
Like Ludwig, Borgman’s other henchmen — the fake doctor Brenda, the strong-armed ballerina — prefer murder over seduction when they despatch the gardner and his wife, the family doctor, and ultimately Richard and even Marina. Their upset of the natural order is imaged in their burying their first corpses in the water head down in concrete. More frightening than their murders are their conversions, as they add nanny Stine and the three children — who don’t question their parents’ sudden disappearance — to their ominous cabal. As the troupe moves on, the elegant modern estate has been reduced to a blighted bunker, stripped of life, colour, beauty, modernism reduced to lifelessness. As gardener Camiel destroys the Edenic garden he found.
The troupe's evening performance shows two comical figures leading on (or flaying) a shrouded figure. The climax is the signs “I am” and “We are,” which proceed from solitary self-interest to an acknowledgment of collective responsibility. While that coheres with the fear of terrorism, it also opens into a wider theme, the breakdown of the social contract in Holland and the Scandinavian countries. So the hunted, revolting and ultimately in revolt characters are the Other in a broader social context: the poor, the marginalized, the hopeless, here driven underground and flushed out to our danger.  
Curiously, the film opens with two sinister thugs and a priest gathering with metal spikes to hunt down the mysterious figures living rough in underground holes. We don’t see the three again. The first man seems especially brutish, with his pike, dog, and pickled herring breakfast, so his partnering with the priest after communion is itself unsettling. As we look back on their scene, they are vigilantes but they may be justified by the enormous danger they have discovered. In their assault on Borgman’s refuge the anti-terrorist civilization may seem as brutal as the terrorist. When they disappear the film leaves behind all our familiar moral and social bearings. We turn fascinated to Borgman’s manipulations and the helplessness of the innocence over which he has taken command.