Power corrupts, and absolute power...well, you know how it goes. In the latest film from director Clint Eastwood, a president with a reputation for philandering (Gene Hackman) tries to cover up his responsibility for the death of his latest sexual partner (Melora Hardin), who happens to be the young wife of his political mentor (E.G. Marshall), with the help of his chief of staff (Judy Davis, who comes across as Nicole Kidman on speed) and two secret service agents (Scott Glenn, morally conflicted, and Dennis Haysbert, who just wants to shoot people). Master jewel thief Luther Whitney (played by movie star Clint Eastwood) happened to be robbing the mansion where the crime took place and voyeuristically witnessed it all (hey! just like us in the movie theater!); he soon becomes a target for the conspirators and for the honest cop assigned to the case (Ed Harris).
Though based on a 1996 novel by David Baldacci, the script for this film could have been written by David Brock or one of the other Clinton conspiracists; it's the snuff version of the Paula Jones affair, made even more transparently referential by gratuitous details like the "I Supported Desert Storm" sticker on Eastwood's footlocker, Judy Davis's Watergate address, and (my personal favorite) Scott Glenn's unprompted remark that before he became a secret service agent he had been a state trooper for ten years. In Arkansas, perhaps? The story even ends with a murder represented to the press as a suicide, alluding to right wing accounts of Vince Foster's death. Watching Absolute Power I was reminded of a Watergate-era Doonesbury cartoon, in which a legislator frustrated by presidential stonewalling during the hearings sighs and muses "If only he'd knock over a bank or something." A colleague replies brightly "By george, we'd have him then!" Absolute Power represents the same kind of desire for a smoking gun, some undeniable evidence that would incontrovertibly convict a president whose approval ratings remain unchanged--even improve--despite the efforts of his detractors to unearth scandal after scandal. ("If only he'd accidentally strangle some bimbo." "By george, we'd have him then!") And following the typically naive nature of such fantasies, the film asserts that conspiracy and denial can be overcome by simply telling the truth. Eastwood's character doesn't have to shoot anyone or wreak vengeance--he just has to tell people (his daughter, the police, the victim's husband) what he saw, and justice will inevitably be served.
That Absolute Power is a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the radical Clinton-hating right is only part of its perverse charm For while it salves, in the realm of the imagination, the frustration that the conspiracy cohort must experience in its inability to get the nation interested in its charges--"Where is the outrage?" demanded Bob Dole querulously--Absolute Power and films like it may actually help to create that frustration, by allowing the rest of us to exorcise our doubts about Clinton safely on the cinematic plane. Recent movies about presidential character--Dave (1993), My Fellow Americans (1996), The American President (1995--a liberal apologia that rationalizes the spectacle of the president sleeping with a lobbyist by assuring us that it's really, you see, true love), and doubtless the soon-to-be-released Murder at 1600--all permit us to engage in the imaginary correction of presidential venality and Beltway corruption, concepts that these films simultaneously cement into our cultural vocabulary and remove from our moral consideration beyond the four walls of the multiplex. The Frankfurt School would love these films, the way they titillate us with exaggerated versions of the behavior that we otherwise accept as mundane political business-as-usual and then reassure us with the spurious if just harmony of their neat conclusions, in which the system characterized a few frames earlier as inherently corrupt miraculously repairs and purges itself. Or perhaps, with a nod to the subtext-on-the-surface of Absolute Power, rights itself.
This is not the first time that noted Republican Eastwood has allowed himself to be enlisted into partisan politics; remember the 1988 presidential campaign? But Absolute Power represents an interesting career moment in a couple of other ways as well. First, the former star of spaghetti westerns has achieved critical respectability based on both his longevity (he has been working in cinema and television since 1955, when he led the jet squadron that napalmed the big bug in Tarantula!) and on the seriousness and quality of much of his work, especially in the 1990s. He has been unafraid to thematize the aging of his heroic persona, particularly in the superb Unforgiven and the very good thriller In the Line of Fire; both of those films read like career retrospectives and explore the two genres with which Eastwood has been most closely identified, the western and the urban police drama (often enough an "urban western" in Eastwood's case). In addition, he has a reputation as a director for bringing his films in on time and under budget--a rejection of contemporary extravagance that highbrow critics, parsimonious with their praise, seem particularly keen to appreciate.
One result of this respectability is that Clint occasionally earns a free pass from the critics. Such is the case with Absolute Power, which has been showered with all the adjectives appropriate to a political thriller--"taut", "riveting"--without having really earned them. The plot is not exactly flabby--nowadays Eastwood only tells lean, spare stories--and through the first half of the film the crime with which it begins generates multiple interests and schemes that are finally woven and cross-cut into a scene of great potential and menace. But that scene comes only an hour or so into the movie, and when it ends with a missed gunshot--two of them, actually--from that point on things begin to wander towards a conclusion. Some characters and subplots just disappear, and suddenly Eastwood the character seems to know everything Eastwood the director does about the plot and about the other characters' motives. The plot rides home on the old reliable steed of the Eastwood persona's omnicompetence, this time as an incomparably slick jewel thief, and unsurpassed B&E man, and a master of disguise.
The way the film falls back on the convention of Clint's invincibility leads to a second observation about the current state of Eastwood's career. What else, really, could it do? It's not that Eastwood can't act--it's just that it's virtually impossible to imagine a situation that would allow him to. He tries valiantly in Absolute Power, and frequently succeeds (as he did in Unforgiven) in giving the impression of a man who knows he's growing old--of an Old Timer (as my father used to say), who still has his skills and competencies and a whole peck of accumulated wisdom, but who realizes that he's applying them in a world increasingly strange and foreign and modern. His speech, his gestures, his dress--he's always wearing a hat of some sort--help convey this. But then another character's hypocrisy will evoke from him that old withering Eastwood squint, or the camera will make one of its frequent spelunking expeditions into the crevasses of his magnificent face, and he'll cease to be the character he's working so hard to create and turn back into the persona he's always been for us. It's the curse of the movie star, of course, and it afflicted Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn--but it seems to touch Eastwood more than most. In part that's because, as noted, he tends (boldly, and at the same time very practically) to make the burden of the persona an explicit theme in his latest films. I guess that means he'll have to keep settling for those Best Director Oscars, and let the Best Actor ones go to someone else. Not that he'll be getting one this time.
Classic Misdirection: Air Force One
Last summer's blockbuster Independence Day has returned in 1997 as two films: Contact, which has the aliens, and Air Force One, which has inherited the heroic-president protagonist. And Air Force One is this summer's perfect action film. That's not because it features inspiring heroics, dastardly villains, exciting battles and impressive special effects--though it does have all of those things, including a 747 pinwheeling into the ocean--but rather because it does so well the standard political work of the action film, which is to foreground a distasteful or damning truth about the status quo, recast the ideological issues involved as a personal struggle between hero and villain, and enlist us in cheering the hero's victory--a victory that in the end magically represents both his individual moral rectitude and the ethical and political correctness of his--that is, our--whole way of life. What makes AFO such a terrific example of the genre is its blindingly obvious progress through these steps, and the way in which the choreography of thrilling music, exhilarating action and steely heroic rhetoric so successfully draws our attention away from any twinge of moral discomfort we might be feeling.
At the beginning of AFO, Americans and Russians collaborate to kidnap and imprison a renegade nationalist general who has brought a reign of terror to Kazakstan. Later the American president, James Marshall (played throughout with a look of slightly bewildered resolve by Harrison Ford), gives a stirring speech in Moscow declaring that America will never again negotiate with terrorists (and we really, really mean it this time, because--you could say--there's a new Marshall in town). His plane is promptly hijacked by some of the general's loyal followers, who demand the release of their leader and start executing hostages to secure it. Everyone, including the hijackers, thinks that the president has gotten away in the Apollo-like escape pod--everyone, of course, but the audience, which knows all along that the president is still on board, biding his time, waiting for a chance to counterattack. And he does, killing bad guys, strategizing with Washington on his cell phone, helping the hostages parachute to safety (or into the Caspian Sea--we're not always quite sure where in the air the plane is at any given moment, though no one seems to worry about it), and saving his wife and daughter from the evil Korshunov (Gary Oldman, hauling his Dracula accent out of retirement). In fact, AFO does Independence Day one better--not only are the bad guys vanquished, but this time the First Lady lives!
So far, so good--it's Die Hard on Air Force One (which is probably exactly how it was pitched in Hollywood). But if one listens to this movie while watching it one can see a host of unpleasant truths being disguised or recostumed by the heroic bloodshed happening onscreen. Take Marshall's tough speech, which begins by acknowledging that the United States acted too late in Kazakstan, that "we let the massacre happen" and watched on television while 200,000 people died. That's a clear reference to the war in Bosnia, and it's made clearer by the name of the rebel general--Radek, as in "rhymes with Mladic," a war criminal who has conspicuously not been pursued by NATO forces (though they probably haven't seen this movie yet!). But that's all behind us now, Marshall promises; we're not going to do that anymore. (Oh, sure, later he agrees to Radek's release--but give the guy a break! They had a gun to his daughter's head!)
Then there are the political pronouncements of Oldman's Korshunov, every one of them true: that the U.S. killed a hundred thousand Iraquis "to save a nickel on a gallon of gas," that the president, too, is a killer, who sits behind a desk dispatching a rain of smart bombs. But of course what Korshunov says can't really be true, because he's a glib, sadistic, nationalist fanatic--and besides, we have the evidence of our own eyes that the president is not behind some desk pressing buttons but down in the cargo hold, strangling hijackers.
The film's desire to have it both ways, and to have its way with us, can be seen in that contradiction between the characters' assumption that the president has hightailed it in the escape pod and our knowledge that he's just downstairs, waiting for payback. (Downstairs is clearly American home turf in this film; repeatedly Ford pauses before the glass doors of a cooler filled with Budweiser, Ocean Spray, Minute Maid, Perrier, and Bounty paper towels.) Indeed, the backstory characterization of Marshall--thet he won the Congressional Medal of Honor for flying helicopter rescue missions in Vietnam--is the most perfectly contrived element in the film: the president's prowess at tackling terrorists is explained by his combat experience, though paradoxically he gained that experience saving rather than taking lives. Evidently he's got that compassive-aggressive disorder so common among action-film heroes.
Such an interest in saving lives is an important trait, since the bad guy is never similarly troubled, and it's the essential duty of action films to draw a sharp distinction between heroes and villains who tend to use the same methods. Usually we are vouchsafed this reassurance in a scene in which the villain goads the hero by saying "we're so much alike, you and I--we're both killers; we both use terrifying weapons; we both dismember people." "We're nothing alike," the hero will growl, vowing to bring the bad guy back alive until some unforeseen circumstance forces him to dismember and kill the villain with a terrifying weapon. In AFO this scene takes place between Korshunov (a veteran of Afghanistan, "Russia's Vietnam") and the president's twelve-year-old daughter ("You're nothing like my father--my father is a hero!"). But the issue is a little tricky in this film; since there are both good Russians and bad Russians, the equation of foreign accents with moral depravity can't be applied quite as easily as usual. At the same time, though, even our Russian allies are characterized as a little cruder than their American counterparts; in their elegantly furnished but woefully low-tech situation room, the Russian crisis team lets out a bloodthirsty roar when they learn that General Radek is dead, while in Washington a few seconds later the cheers erupt at the news that Air Force One is once more in American hands. It's a small distinction but a noteworthy one, because it takes its cue from the movie's tag line, delivered a few frames earlier by Marshall as he send the now defeated Korshunov to his death. "Get off my plane," he snarls at the man who had earlier been decrying the way that "the capitalists in the Kremlin" had given his country over to gangsters and prostitutes. Ford utters the line earnestly, with not a hint of Nicholas Cage's over-the-top deadpan delivery of the absurd "Put the bunny in the box" in a similar scene in Con Air. This utterly solemn assertion of possession, ownership, property rights--of a quintessential American feeling--completes our re-education; when Korshunov is ejected from the plane, so are all those terrible (true) things he said about the United States. The movie is not over yet--there's still a MIG attack, a midair rescue, and a traitor-in-our-midst scene--but its work is done.
Silent Scream: Alien Resurrection
In one of those coincidences that makes cultural critics kneel down and give thanks to the gods they profess not to believe in, the birth of the McCaughey septuplets in Des Moines--a real-life horror story about reproductive technology gone mad--occurred on the same day that Alien Resurrection--a science-fiction horror story about reproductive technology gone mad--opened in theaters nationwide. Not that the septuplets' arrival played as horror--if anything, it was more thoroughly sentimentalized than anything Hollywood would dare to produce in this ironic decade. Behind all the emblems of good feeling, however--the beaming grandfather, the small-town chorus of welcome, the corporate donations of vans and diapers and baby food--there were also anxious whispers about the darker side of this blessed, assisted event: the cost of fertility treatments and extended neonatal care; the likelihood of developmental and physical problems typical of premature babies; the psychological impact on the septs' sister Mikayla (doomed, paradoxically, to be a freak in her own family--a tragic singlet); the likely mushroom effect and increased recourse to reproductive technologies that often create as many problems as they solve; even the crippling mental and physical fatigue that awaits the septs' parents in the rosiest of scenarios (something I can attest to personally as the father of twins, who require only 28% of the attention needed by septuplets). In the eeriest episode, the surviving Dionne quintuplets came out of their relative seclusion to remind the world that they had been taken away from their parents by a 1934 act of parliament and put on display at "Quintland": the consequence of being deemed "national treasures" is an immediate and utter loss of that privacy that governments are usually thought of as protecting.
All of these anxieties, in fictionalized and sometimes campy form, are on display in Alien Resurrection, which to its credit examines them much less sentimentally than CNN handled the McCaugheys. At the end of Alien3, you may remember, our hero Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) committed a spectacular and fiery suicide to destroy the alien queen gestating inside her. Well, she's back, through the movie magic of cloning (another "top story" of 1997, you may recall); though the malevolent Company responsible for the horrors of the first two films is no more--we're 200 years into the future of the future by now--the military has taken up the misguided hobby of raising aliens for fun and profit. Ripley has been cloned so that the alien queen--also cloned, illogically if necessarily--can be extracted and induced to breed for the R&D department. Thus the film begins with a series of birth images--the Ripley clone in her amniotic cylinder, the baby queen being delivered, like the McCaughey children, by Caesarean section--and the motif extends throughout the film as various characters break through membranes and swim through flooded rooms and suffer symbolic (and bloody) penetrations. In one chilling scene Ripley discovers the cloning lab where seven previous attempts to resurrect her went awry, leaving seven deformed, incomplete, alien/human hybrids on display in a kind of Museum of Thalidomide; Ripley gets to reenact her suicide as euthanasia, in what psychoanalysis would probably call abreaction.
The surviving Ripley is something of a hybrid herself--she's preternaturally strong and her blood, though red, burns like the acid that runs in the aliens' veins--and she's given to enigmatic smiles and unreadable expressions. She recognizes her in-between state and knows that this time she's the source of the horror--"I'm the monster's mother," she says to one of the film's few innocent bystanders at one point--though she still steps naturally into the leadership role for the survivors desperately trying to get off the infected (infested?) research vessel. Once the aliens get loose--did anyone really think they wouldn't?--the film turns into the kind of get-out-or-get-eaten pursuit we've seen before with this franchise, which is not a bad thing; Alien Resurrection may not be able to make the aliens as scary as they once were, but they can still be as dangerous.
"I'm the monster's mother": themes of maternity and reproduction have always been part of this series, and the latest entry is the darkest and most sophisticated meditation on those issues yet. A kind of male parthenogenesis--reproduction without women--has been a favorite topic of science fiction as far back as Frankenstein (or, if you like, the Book of Genesis), and here it's no surprise that all the scientists overseeing the breeding experiments are men (or mannish); the computer that controls the spaceship is nicknamed "Father." (Genesis it is, then.) And it's no surprise that such unnatural experiments always go awry, and that the spawn turns against its maker (though it is interesting that here male scientists can only seem to make female creatures--Ripley, the alien queen--who then give birth to male drones). Moreover, the motherly instincts Ripley exhibited in Aliens, battling that alien queen over the little girl Newt, are here evoked in Ripley's eroticized maternal relationship with Call (Winona Ryder), an android--in fact, an android built by androids, an "auton" who has declared her independence by burning out her modem but who is driven by her humane programming into a state that paradoxically makes her more human than anyone else in the film, from the mad scientists who raise the queen to the amoral mercenaries who supply live human bodies in stasis to be implanted with aliens (in a kind of involuntary surrogacy).
That includes the half-breed Ripley, who has moved beyond self-hate into something like a misanthropic equilibrium. "How can you stand to be what you are?" asks Call at one point, and Ripley shrugs and responds, "Not much choice." But there's more to this scene than Ripley's stoic resignation. Consider that it takes place in a chapel, and presents us with a tableau in which two women (more or less) sit in the shadow a futuristic cross discussing the concept of choice. One of them--Call--has just used her android circuitry to permanently disable an invisible but omnipresent computer called "Father." Call also has a large hole in her abdomen (she'd been shot in the previous scene); Ripley gently ministers to her while she bleeds that milky white fluid that passes for android blood, and Call gives full vent to her feelings of self-loathing. "Look at me--I'm disgusting," she says. This scene, as far removed as it can be from the labs and operating rooms and alien nursery cells elsewhere on the ship, refers to the one reproductive technology not yet represented in the film: abortion.
The truth of this is confirmed in the last sequence of the film, which confronts us with one last, unusual monster. Ripley, it seems, has not just gained something, physically, from the aliens--she's given them something as well. The alien queen has evolved a semi-human reproductive system, thanks to Ripley's genes (or whatever), and ultimately it gives birth to another hybrid, an alien with human eyes and teeth and breasts, a skull-like brow, and a tongue where that second set of jaws usually is. It's butt-ugly and dangerous, but it's also childlike and confused, because after it instinctively decapitates its alien mother it seeks out its sister/grandmother Ripley and shares some affectionate caresses, whimpering contentedly. But it's a monstrous birth too, and it must be destroyed, and when it is sucked out into space (the fate of all Final Aliens), the movie finally comes to its point. This time the creature is sucked out--suctioned out, rather--through a hole the size of a half-dollar; its body is crushed and liquefied by the force of the vacuum, it screams an almost-human scream, and the normally stoic Ripley tearfully whispers "I'm sorry" as her misshapen descendant--who like the rest of us never asked to born, after all--suffers the cinematic equivalent of a partial-birth abortion.
Ripley's words are a sign of the film's final ambivalence, and a measure of its resistance to the sentimentalized heroism typical of an action-adventure finale. What they suggest is that in the reproductive realm, the exercise of choice is not the clear, clean, empowering opposite of involuntary surrender to technology. More simply, choice creates the possibility of regret: relying on "Father" and his mad scientist minions may inevitably bring blood, death, and disaster, and may produce "children" downright malevolent towards their parents, but the alternative presented here offers scarcely happier results. Ripley's "grandchild" may feel filial affection, but that does not make it beloved, or beautiful, or any less doomed.
To return to earth: Alien Resurrection represents in science-fictionalized form the same storm of high-tech intervention and individual volition that swirled around the McCaugheys. Whenever fertility treatments result in a large number of fetuses--and seven is a very large number--doctors recommend a "selective reduction" of their number, to increase the odds for the few that would remain. Staunch Baptists, the McCaugheys rejected this option out of hand, leaving it all up to their God; depending on the ideological stripe of the pundit, they were then either lauded for having allowed God to perform a miracle (an odd way to put it, really) or quietly chided for having condemned their children to an uncertain future (a condition not unique to septuplets, of course). But surely the problem here is not their particular choice, but that any parent--anyone--should be offered such a choice in the first place? And that such a choice should have become a matter of course in the brave new world of reproductive technology? It may be that there are no slavering, acid-blooded giant insects menacing us every time we step outside--but that doesn't mean we're not living in a sci-fi world. And the best of all possible worlds it's not.
A Perfect Murder Dir. Andrew Davis 6/3/98
There are two ways to respond to A Perfect Murder. You can judge it on its own merits as a thriller about infidelity, greed and jealousy, or you can consider it as a remake of Dial M for Murder, the 1954 Hitchcock film based on Frederick Knott's stageplay, a pedigree that the film's promotional material foregrounds eagerly.
Let's take the latter first. Hitchcock purists will hate it. (Less fanatical Hitchcock admirers will probably be more charitable, figuring that a remake of any Hitchcock film has to offer a better night out than Godzilla.) The familiar elements are there, slightly rearranged--a vindictive husband bribes, cajoles and blackmails someone into murdering his wife, devising what he thinks is a foolproof plan. But the film is terribly unsubtle; for example, an unlikely murder weapon fills the whole screen in one shot a few minutes before it's used, leaving us no doubt about the fact that it's going to be used. And the film quickly forfeits the claustrophobic quality of Dial M for Murder, which reveals its stage roots by having eighty percent of the action take place in the living room of one apartment; A Perfect Murder uses about fifteen locations in and around New York, along with generous establishing shots, to let us know that some money was spent on this film, and the cinematography lovingly showcases the luxurious appointments and accoutrements of the upper-class Manhattan lives of the principals. Finally, Gwyneth Paltrow is, of course, no Grace Kelly, but more importantly Michael Douglas is no Ray Milland; he's about as urbane as a crumpled five-dollar bill.
On its own A Perfect Murder is a serviceable thriller, and it updates Hitchcock well enough: pay phones are replaced by cell phones>
netic boxes, and Paltrow, as the unfaithful wife and target of husband Douglas's murderous schemes, gets to figure out a number of things that were left up to the police in the original, which is a progressive (if in her hands not quite believable) change. Viggo Mortenson plays her lover, a brooding artist who may also be a Merry Widow murderer (more Hitchcock!); he's got the long hair, cleft chin, and five o'clock shadow that are the defining features of the passionate lover in every direct-to-cable erotic thriller on Showtime. The compelling thing about this sort of story is the plot, not only how it's laid but how it unravels, and how the desperate characters try to knit it back up again by lying and improvising and lying some more. What this ought to produce is suspense, and sometimes it does; sometimes, though, it produces impatience--at least in me--which suggests that director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive, Chain Reaction) hasn't quite managed the trick of getting through things without an explosion or two. In fact, test audiences were evidently unhappy enough with the original ending of the film that Paltrow and Douglas had to reshoot some scenes in early May. Think Fatal Attraction.
Apt Pupil dir. Bryan Singer 10/27/98
Stephen King's Different Seasons, a 1982 collection of four novellas, has been the source of three different movies: Stand By Me (1986), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and now Apt Pupil. It's not surprising that Apt Pupil took the longest to come to the screen, since it is the one with the most troubling premise: a Southern California high school boy, fascinated by the Holocaust, discovers that an aged neighbor is really a former concentration camp commandant, and blackmails the man into telling him all about it--"everything they're afraid to tell us in school," as young Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) puts it. For King, of course, Todd's attraction leads inexorably towards violence, but director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) and screenwriter Brandon Boyce have made a much less bloody, and thus more subtly unsettling film out of King's materials, in part because they seem to have realized that the story is not about the Holocaust per se. There are some disturbing images of the camps and their inmates, but they are mostly represented in floating montage; likewise Kurt Dussander's (Ian McKellen) reminiscences are chilling not because of their hyperbole but because of their banality--for instance, his description of the sound made by a pile of bodies as it settles. Moreover, Todd's peculiar enthusiasm is stipulated instead of explained; though he is given some typically affluent and clueless parents, the film is less interested in how an A-student and baseball star could develop this compulsion than it is in the fact that this one already has.
Thus the film is not really about the nature of the evil that could precipitate a Holocaust, either. Rather, it's about blackmail: not power over life and death but power over someone's darkest, most closely guarded secrets. Todd is seduced by this power, but it's soon clear that both characters have secrets; Dussander may be a Nazi war criminal in hiding, but soon enough Todd Bowen becomes something of an accomplice after the fact, not only perpetuating Dussander's deception but also satisfying his own bizarre desires. The novella is more explicit in connecting Todd's horrific interests with his awakening sexuality (it's sort of Carrie-for-boys), but it's clear enough in the film that his relationship with Dussander is a perverse romance--at one point Todd supplies him with a costume-shop Nazi uniform and forces him to march around in it like it was some sort of erotic lingerie, and at the end of the scene Dussander is sweaty and out of breath. Apt Pupil is in one sense the darkest possible version of Love and Death on Long Island, another film that pairs a much older British actor with a young American heartthrob (as will the forthcoming Gods and Monsters, with McKellen and Brendan Fraser).
Renfro, who played the young Brad Pitt in Sleepers, is entirely adequate here, breathless and boyish at the beginning and increasingly mean and profane as time goes on. McKellen never forgets that he's playing an old man as well as an old Nazi, someone whose experience has left him both sophisticated and utterly corrupt. And David Schwimmer has a small part as Todd's guidance counselor, Mr. French, whose role is much changed from the source. He may or may not have a secret of his own, and the film ends audaciously by implying that Dussander's secret and Mr. French's may be morally equivalent in our culture--since it seems like the bad seed Todd will be able to exploit both of them. At the end of King's novella, Todd becomes a freeway sniper, but the bleak and impressive Apt Pupil eschews such sensationalism and instead takes us to a much more disturbing place--the house next door.
The Big Hit Dir. Che-Kirk Wong 4/29/98
The professional hit man--or hit person--has somehow become the film hero of the decade, both at home (The Replacement Killers, Grosse Point Blank, Assassins, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Point of No Return, The Professioonal, Pulp Fiction) and abroad (La Femme Nikita, Black Cat, Woo's The Killer). Cinematic Shanes and Sam Spades have been succeeded by a new generation of honorable loners, amoral and efficient killers who know that to live outside the law, you must be honest. What gives? Why is Hollywood (and Hong Kong) drawn to this dangerous, ruthless, and inevitably stylish figure? It muat have something to do with work: at a time and in a culture in which we are defined more and more by our jobs or careers, there's something essential and unembellished about the hitter's job: they kill for money, while the rest of us can only hope to cause collateral damage.
Speaking of collateral damage, The Big Hit is the latest addition to the hit man library, an "action comedy" about a trio of killers, Mel (Mark Wahlberg), Cisco (Lou Diamond Phillips), and Crunch (Bokeem Woodbine), who try a little freelance kidnapping one weekend and end up accidentally snatching the goddaughter of their boss (Avery Brooks). Though it lacks the black-humored wit of Grosse Point Blank, The Big Hit does supply plenty of kinetic action. Director Wong has a Hong Kong pedigree and can frame things quite inventively: in one striking crane shot, Mel blasts away as he essentially break-dances on the floor; later he makes an acrobatic bannister move that evokes Chow Yun-Fat. The story is a broad, caricature-driven comedy, from Brooks purring menacingly about "trust, honor, loyalty" to Phillips' over-the-top, gold-toothed, profane Cisco; the blandly appealing Wahlberg is the center of things as a sweet, trusting, eager-to-please professional killer (an assassin who just wants to be liked--get it?) who must deal not only with the consequences of the abduction gone awry but also with his gold-digging girlfriend (Lela Rochon) and the visiting parents of his Jewish American princess fiancee, Pam (Christina Applegate).
The style of The Big Hit is pure MTV; the tone is hipper-than-thou; the world it depicts is pure tongue-in-cheek fantasy, dozens of killings but no cops. China Chow, the model who plays kidnapping victim Keiko, will probably get the biggest career bounce out of all this, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that she spends the entire film in her schoolgirl plaid skirt and white blouse. Indeed, sometimes the film makes it hard to tell the difference between cliche (Lainie Kazan as Pam's stereotypical, goyim-hating mother) and fetish ("Crunch" spends most of the movie touting masturbation as an inexpensive and efficient solution to Mel's relationship problems). If you find the premise of a hit man with a medecine cabinet full of Maalox self-evidently funny, or if you'd like to get a glimpse of the buff pecs of Wahlberg, Woodbine, et. al., check out The Big Hit. If, on the other hand, you find the very idea of a comedy about killers morally repugnant--but you still crave the pecs--there's always Tarzan and the Lost City.
Bourne Again: The Bourne Identity
The Bourne Identity is one of those films populated by characters who’ve apparently never been to the movies. I mean, consider the situation Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) finds himself in at the start of the film: he’s found floating unconscious in the Mediterranean with two bullets in his back, no memory of who he is, and the number for a Swiss bank account surgically implanted in his hip, and when he’s rescued and cleaned up by some fishermen and gets himself to the bank, he discovers a safe deposit box containing wads of cash, a gun, and five passports from five different countries, with five different names, all bearing photos of his face. If you’ve ever seen a movie before, this is the point at which you say to yourself, "Wow! I’m some kind of secret agent!" Bourne, however, just looks puzzled.
It turns out, of course, that he is some kind of secret agent, a CIA assassin who has failed in his most recent mission and who has now become the target of other deadly operatives dispatched by his boss, Ted Conklin (Chris Cooper), who’s anxious that the unauthorized operation might come to light. The plot of The Bourne Identity, derived from a Robert Ludlum novel, follows Bourne as he fends off cops and assassins while trying to discover his identity; in this quest he is aided by Franka Potente, who plays Marie, The Woman Chosen Apparently At Random When The Hero Needs A Car But With Whom A Romance Inevitably Develops. And though he may not know who he is, he quickly finds out what he can do: rousted by two Swiss policemen for sleeping on a park bench, he disarms and disables them with a speed that would make Steven Seagal sit up and take notice. The BourneIdentity thus bears a strange kinship to this summer’s blockbuster Spider-Man, another film based on the appealing fantasy that a nondescript young man might suddenly discovers that he’s got super powers. There’s even a scene where Bourne climbs carefully down the side of a building.
What it’s really about, though—what all "amnesia" plots are finally about—is repression, and it turns out that there’s plenty to repress. In fact Bourne’s original mission is based on that principle; he was assigned to assassinate deposed African warlord Nykwana Wombosi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who was blackmailing the CIA by threatening to reveal the sordid details of their role in his rise to power, details that CIA boss Conklin would prefer remained buried. And of course Bourne has repressed—I mean, forgotten—the details of both his failure and his life as an assassin, a life that, when it all finally begins to come back to him, he decides that he’d rather not lead. "I don’t want to do this anymore," he says to Conklin in their climactic confrontation, and in good American action-film style—think Total Recall—when Conklin asks him what side he’s on, he declares that he wants to be on his own side.
Thus the explicit lesson of the film and its little psychological journey of self-discovery seems to be that you don’t have to work for the Man, you don’t have to be loyal to the institution or the system, because the work is wrong and because once you realize that fact they will try to dispose of you—terminate you, literally--at their earliest convenience, discarding an asset that’s no longer valuable. But—and here’s the depressingly amoral side of this whole amoral technothriller genre—don’t be fooled into thinking that throwing off your shackles and turning your back on the institution or the Agency or the Company is going to make any difference: the work is still going to get done by somebody else. Halfway through the film, Wombosi is assassinated by another CIA operative, the Professor (Clive Owen), in a scene which we are invited to take as a sign of the Agency’s ruthless, methodical efficiency. Now, Wombosi has been played in all his brief appearances as a megalomaniacal braggart, so his death at this point seems like no great loss to the world. But at the end of the film, when Bourne finally remembers everything, he remembers why he failed in his attempt to assassinate Wombosi: he came upon his target sleeping with his three young children, and found that he couldn’t pull the trigger and kill their father in front of them. (This attack of compassion is "foreshadowed" while Bourne is still on the run and takes the necessary steps to secure the safety of the children in the country house where he’s hiding.) Now presumably the bombastic Wombosi killed in his house in Paris is the same paternal Wombosi Bourne discovered asleep with his children on his boat, but through the cinematic magic of plot-versus-story, we don’t get to see him as a family man until he’s already dead. Thus we are spared the work of repression ourselves, and we get to be complicit in both Bourne’s compassion and the Professor’s ruthlessness on the level of character, and on the level of plot in both the CIA’s guilt (Wombosi is a beloved father, so his accusations against the agency must be true) and its efforts to hide that guilt (Wombosi is a dangerous loose cannon, anti-American to boot, and he must be eliminated)—the whole cinematic nine yards. The film’s two final scenes are a lady-or-the-tiger juxtaposition between Bourne’s romantic reunion with Marie and the utterly mendacious testimony of Conklin’s boss, Ward Abbott (Brian Cox),before a Senate oversight committee, in which he denies that the mayhem involving Bourne was ever anything but a training scenario. Hollywood, evidently, can only save us from ourselves one agent at a time, and in the meanwhile the dirty work must go on. Now there’s something worth repressing.
Chain Reaction takes its cue from its flawed but undeniably successful predecessor in the chase-and-conspiracy genre, The Fugitive; not only does it start out in Chicago, but the two Chicago cops who were so eager to take down Harrison Ford in that film make a cameo appearance here as--you'll never guess--a pair of Chicago cops eager to catch star Keanu Reeves. They don't have as many lines this time, so fans of that south Side accent will be disappointed.
The plot involves the sabotage of a secret hydrogen-fusion project funded by a mysterious foundation headed by an ambiguous Morgan Freeman; the young innocents pursued by the ultimately benign FBI and the ultimately outwitted foundation's thugs are played by the blandly competent Reeves and a bright Brit physicist played by Rachel Weisz, who is given little to do but run and fret. Fred Ward, as the chief FBI man, mimics but does not match Tommy Lee Jones's energetic irascibility from The Fugitive; Brian Cox shows off his "sinister gentleman" Virginia drawl as the chief villain (In a way, it's a movie about accents--and Reeves doesn't have one). The most fun--aside from the explosions--comes in trying to figure out whether Morgan Freeman is a good guy, a bad guy, something in between, or something above both good and bad. It's not quite Henry Fonda playing against type in Once Upon a Time in the West, and even when he's trying to be menacing Freeman is all sweet reasonableness. But it could presage more varied and interesting roles in the future.
In Con Air a bunch of violent convicts led by John Malkovich and Ving Rhames hijack the plane that's carrying them to a new super-maximum-security prsion; they're foiled by Nicholas Cage, who has just been paroled and is hitching a ride home on the first flight available. About two-thrids of the way through the film, Steve Buscemi (who plays a deranged but wittily philosophical serial killer--and we might pause for a minute to ask just where that stereotype came from) gestures towards the front of the plane, where several of the now escaped cons are dancing to a tape of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," and says, essentially, "Here's a definition of irony: a bunch of cons escaping on a hijacked plane singing along to a tune made famous by a band most of whom died in a plane crash." It's a pretty funny remark, in that way that plane crash jokes are funny, but what's most striking about it is the way that it's so utterly contrived. That is, there's no particular reason that the men should be celebrating with that song: though some of them are certainly redneck types none of them are, as far as we know, from Alabama; the plane is not going to Alabama (or if it was, it ain't now); Alabama hasn't even come up before this. The only reason we're hearing that song is so Buscemi can make that joke. And that's the way it is in the movies, in the summertime: things are staged and arranged and confected exactly the way they need to be for them to turn out the way they do, and the idea if you're making a movie is to make the coincidences and contrivances outlandish but not preposterous--to suspend disbelief but not, in most cases, to suspend the laws of physics. Audiences collaborate in this project by lowering their standards in the summertime (as if they could get any lower); after all, the bottom line for Batman and Robin is going to be "Could this plausibly have happened in a comic book?" Thus, a good summer adventure movie--a good rollercoaster ride, to use the reviewers' favorite metaphor--assumes that you will charitably accept its premise and rewards you by not showing too many seams and rivets.
Con Air, when held to this standard, comes off as pretty entertaining. Of course it's absurd to think that Cage's character, a decorated Army Ranger who kills a man defending himself and his wife from a drunken attack, would spend any time behind bars, much less the seven or eight years he supposedly serves. And when, determined to take back control of the plane, he offers himself up as proof of God's existence, you can hear St. Anselm turning over in his grave. But Malkovich, as the brains behind the operation, is perfectly plausible (according to the new, relaxed standard); if Colm Meaney is annoying as a blustering DEA man, John Cusack, filling out his action resume, does just fine as an articulate U.S. Marshal. There are stunts, fights, explosions; women who are threatened with rape don't get raped, and children who cross Buscemi's path aren't hurt, though the film exacts a cheap and perverse thrill in both instances. Sleeveless t-shirts abound. Downtown Vegas gets laid waste. And the bad guys really, really get it in the end. Well, almost all of them--one of them gets away. See if you can guess who it is.
Dead Man on Campus dir. Alan Cohn **/**/**
So who do you think will have bragging rights at the next Saved by the Bell cast reunion? Will it be Tiffani-Amber Thiessen (Kelli), for her succession of TV vixens and victims? Elizabeth Berkley (Jessie), for giving it up in Showgirls? Or will it be Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Zach), star of the inane new college comedy Dead Man on Campus? At least Gosselaar stays mostly clothed as party-mad Cooper ("College is our last chance to go crazy"), who introduces his studious, "fun is a dead end" roommate Josh (Tom Everett Scott, That Thing You Do) to the three temptations of college life: getting drunk, getting stoned, and getting laid. As finals approach both realize that they're facing academic armageddon; seizing upon an obscure codicil in the college charter that mandates straight A's for the roommates of students who commit suicide, they scour the campus for likely candidates to bring into their suite and push over the brink. Hilarious misadventures were apparently intended to ensue, though most have evidently been misplaced; there are some intermittent laughs, but the uneven DMOC lacks the consistent zaniness of Animal House (my personal touchstone for this genre) and the exaggerated proletarian bite of Back to School.
At the same time, to be offended by the film's stereotypical motifs--its portrayal of Catholic high school grads as ferociously oversexed; its trivialization of young-adult anxieties; its smirking deployment of the rumor that Coop and Josh are gay lovers because they've been spending so much time together--to be offended is simply to misrecognize your role, and the film's assumption about you as a viewer: you're a white, college-age, heterosexual male, after all. Isn't everybody?
One thing the film does have going for it is its timing: this is back-to-school weekend at a lot of colleges nationwide. Though personally I might be a little worried if my new roommates suggested that we all go out and see it together.
Exit Wounds Dir. Andrzej Bartkowiak
According to the 2000
census, Detroit is now the most segregated city in America, having overtaken
rival Gary, Indiana: "Detroit secures top spot," read a recent
headline in the Detroit Free Press. At the very least, then, the city is going to need some
extensive public relations help to repair its image, regardless of any work
that is actually undertaken to repair the racial divide. Perhaps they could turn to the firm of
(Steven) Seagal and (Joel) Silver, whose latest collaboration, the urban action
film Exit Wounds, offers us a Detroit that is completely integrated,
having achieved through the magic of cinema a perfect balance between black
villains and white villains and black heroes and white heroes. In good genre-film fashion, Exit
Wounds replaces a real-word racial divide with a melodramatic moral scheme:
not black and white, but good and bad (realized stylistically, of course, as
cool and cruel). And the film
applies its moral grid with admirable thoroughness: it seems like every
character with more than five seconds of screen time is ultimately revealed to
be either completely corrupt or on the
side of the angels, and
even people who appear to be innocent bystanders or passersby or extras turn
out to be deeply implicated in the film's plots and secrets. Of course, it has to be noted that in
the film the role of "Detroit" is actually played by downtown
Toronto, but then that's what acting is all about.
Exit Wounds is
a film that, unsurprisingly, rewards low expectations; this fact is made clear
via the opening sequence, in which city cop Orin Boyd (Seagal) singlehandedly
and quite messily saves the Vice President from an assassination attempt. The
plot is attributed to "some Michigan militant [sic] group"; the VP
had just given a speech in which he had lamented the flood of illegal handguns
plaguing the nation. You might be
tempted to think that this sort of Zeitgeist referencing is designed to give
some indication of the film's likely plot, but you would be utterly wrong; the
episode exists solely so that Officer Boyd can earn the wrath of the police
brass for having saved the day so indecorously, and so that they can exile him
to the city's worst precinct, where the actual plot--which involves, and I am
not making this up, shipments of t-shirts impregnated with heroin--can begin to
unfold. It's not just that the
opening, typically the scene in which the hero establishes for the audience his
supercompetent and ultraviolent credentials, is a red herring in this
film--it's like a scene from a totally different movie (thematically it recalls
Seagal's 1998 direct-to-video offering The Patriot).
Once condemned to the
hopeless 15th precinct, Boyd steadily uncovers layer upon layer of corruption (and
beats up its various representatives); every dirty white cop has an
African-American counterpart, just as every Caucasian hero is matched with a
virtuous black companion. There
are, evidently, only four or five Asians in "Detroit," who appear
briefly when they try to boost Seagal/Boyd's truck, with predictable
results. And there is an important
if entirely preposterous role for Jill Hennessy, best known as Assistant
District Attorney Claire Kincaid on Law and Order (after Richard Brooks,
before Carey Lowell). Hennessy
plays the Commander of Boyd's precinct, and seems to be in the film not so much
to provide a romantic partner for Boyd--sparks simply cannot fly in the
presence of the congenitally inert Seagal--but to provide some normative
reassurance for the audience that all of the sadomasochistic, bare-chested
posturing in the police weight room (indistinguishable from the exercise-yard
weight rooms of so many prison films) is just macho fun and games and not in
the least homoerotic; accordingly Hennessy occasionally pokes her head into the
men's locker room, widens her eyes, and snaps off an order or two. Once Seagal meets up with his real
partner in the film--more on that in a moment--Hennessy's character is rather
brutally and suddenly dispatched. Let's hope that Angie Harmon--who has
announced that she, too, is leaving Law and Order--will be able to step
right into juicy film roles like this.
Five years ago Seagal
made The Glimmer Man with Keenen Ivory Wayans, and at the time I took it
as a sign of Seagal's realization that he was no longer able to carry a film on
his own without the help of either a charismatic villain (e.g., Tommy Lee Jones
in Under Siege) or a co-star who could help the film appeal to a
crossover (i.e., African-American) audience. The Glimmer Man was the furthest thing from a
blockbuster, but apparently the idea made sense to someone, because in Exit
Wounds Seagal is paired with the hip-hop artist DMX (who appeared in
director Bartkowiak's previous film, the Jet-Li vehicle Romeo Must Die). Paired, but not partnered: DMX plays
the mysterious high-roller Latrell Walker, who appears to be deeply involved in
the drug-smuggling plot that Seagal's character is investigating. Of course, he
appears implicated only to those members of the audience who have never seen a
film like this before; it's clear from many hints that he's not a bad
bad guy, but someone who is Up To Something. One tipoff is that when he and Seagal tussle, as they
inevitably do, DMX actually gets to hit Seagal, whose
screen characters are
typically not vulnerable to the blows of anyone whose name appears below the
title during the opening credits.
The crossover
strategy has certainly worked as far as the bottom line is concerned; Exit
Wounds earned $18.5 million on its opening weekend, by far the best a
Seagal film has ever done, and as of this writing it had grossed $49 million,
which puts it in his top three or four.
Narratively, of course, DMX's role works about as well as anything else
in the film; "Latrell Walker" really turns out to be Leon Rollins, a dot-com
"gazillionaire" who "bailed out just before the bubble
burst" ("see how up-to-date I am?" the film asks pleadingly) and
who is now using his vast wealth and technical expertise to prove that his
younger brother, now in prison, was framed by the dirty cops in Seagal's new
precinct. The plan is to document
all the corruption with high-tech surveillance equipment--digital cameras the
size of collar buttons and that sort of thing--and then broadcast it all over
the internet. The revolution
evidently will be televised, as well as underwritten by Gen-X millionaires: the
fantasy character played by DMX is equal parts Bruce Wayne and Woodward and
Bernstein, and is in turn underwritten by the assumption that the New Economy
is a post-racial one (an assumption that, right or wrong, suggests an
interesting analogy between internet-based wealth and the success generated by
DMX's real career as a hip-hop star).
Just as the business
cycle has burst the internet bubble, however, so the brute fact of America's
racist cultural history intrudes, unbidden, on the film's harmonious
conclusion. After Latrell/Leon has
taken Boyd back to the Batcave, as it were, and revealed his secret identity,
the two team up to put down (and in a couple of cases impale) the bad
guys. Boyd's one (white) friend at
headquarters, Daniels (Bruce McGill), turns out to be a villain and tries to
betray him; the (black) chief who has been persecuting Boyd throughout the
film, Hinges (Bill Duke), turns out to be one of the good guys (and shoots
Daniels). After the carnage,
Latrell/Leon approaches Chief Hinges with his plan to present the evidence of
his brother's innocence, and the chief announces that he has already ordered
the brother released, because the courts don't care about tapes. The evidence convinces him--after all,
he's just seen the corrupt cops in action (surrounded by their t-shirts)--but
it wouldn't necessarily convince the courts: in one sentence, Hinges (played by
an African-American actor/director who is well known as a mentor to younger
black actors) exposes the distance between the film's fantasy of a color-blind,
morally intelligible universe, and a real world in which names like Rodney King
and Reginald Denny still come instantly to mind--and not because they're
dot-com tycoons. Maybe Detroit
should look elsewhere for help after all.
Or perhaps I'm not
being quite fair to Exit Wounds.
I have left out two supporting players: Anthony Anderson, who plays
T.K., Latrell/Leon's noisy, wanna-be player of a sidekick, and Tom Arnold, who
plays a Jerry Springeresque
daytime talk-show host named Henry Wayne, who attaches himself to Seagal's
character at an anger-management class he's been ordered to attend (and which
serves, in the film, as a chance for a couple of cheap therapy jokes and for
Seagal to rip the top off his school desk with his bare hands). Now, Arnold only ever does one
over-the-top thing, playing an impulsive, puppylike hanger-on; if you like that
shtick (and sometimes I do), you might find that it lightens the usual
unrelieved gloom of the Seagal universe.
But the most striking scene played by Arnold and Anderson comes during
the closing credits, in a kind of outtake where it is revealed that the
publicity-hungry T.K has become Henry Wayne's cohost: the two of them riff
rudely (and sometimes very amusingly) for about five minutes about race,
genitalia, medical procedures, and deviant sexual practices. This is the message about race that Exit
Wounds finally leaves us with: that black folks and white folks can find
common ground through crude antifeminist and bodily
humor. Get me the Detroit Free Press!
The Killer and Hard Boiled are the best known of John Woo's Hong Kong films in this country, and in each of those movies there is a scene that foreshadows the preoccupation of Woo's third and latest Hollywood production, Face/Off: what exactly do cop and criminal have in common? In The Killer, cop Danny Lee visits the scene of a shootout in the apartment of hit man Chow Yun-Fat, the object of his obsessive pursuit. He sits in the killer's chair and tries to envision the events that have lest so many bodies and bulletholes on the premises. And for an instant, he does see it: he pushes back the chair, snaps out his gun, and perfectly mimics the moves Chow Yun-Fat had made moments earlier. In Hard Boiled, Tony Leung plays and undercover cop who has squirreled so deeply into a gunrunning gang that he begins to wonder where his true loyalties lie, and in the last climactic battle scene he has to disguise himself as a policeman to convince the bad guys that he's really one of their corrupt cops--and in the process he accidentally shoots a plainclothes detective.
It's no surprise, then, that Woo has continued to produce stories of two men who do the same thing on opposite sides of the law. Broken Arrow, his second American production, featured pilot versus copilot: same skills, same training, very different agendas. And in Face/Off Woo has finally succeeded in making his theme into his plot: FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) and freelance terrorist bad guy Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage), inveterate enemies, actually exchange faces (and thus identities) through the miracle of hokey special-effect laser surgery. What was once metaphorical has become, in the great tradition of chivalric romance, entirely literal. And Woo makes no pretenses about his plot taking precedence over his premise: Archer becomes "Troy" in order to trick the terrorist's imprisoned brother (Pollux Troy, of course) into revealing the location of a hidden bomb, and the younger Troy obliges in about three minutes. It's after this that the schizoid fun begins.
There's still no one who shoots action scenes quite like Woo, and seems to have had a freer (i.e., bloodier) hand this time around; there are four big sequences that won't be equalled by anything else you see this summer. And there are the characteristic Woo touches, familiar from The Killer: heroes and villains striding into the camera in slow motion, face-to-face armed standoffs (with some interesting variations), a boat chase, a church shootout. And Travolta--whether as uptight Archer or insouciant Troy-as-Archer--may be America's answer to Chow Yun-Fat. They both have terrific faces.
One caveat: the shadow of a dead child hangs over this film; Troy's accidental slaying of Archer's son during an assassination attempt six years earlier motivates Archer throughout the movie. If on one level that fact turns Archer versus Troy into Batman versus the Joker--and the hospital scene in which Troy receives Archer's face strongly and eerily echoes Jack Nicholson's hospital scene in Batman--on another level it remains a serious issue, in part because we are shown the boy's death in the opening scene. And it's a wicked piece of work--preparing for the fatal shot, Troy casually sips a cold beverage through a straw--just like we're doing, between bites of popcorn. It can take a lot of the pleasure out of voyeurism, thinking that you might actually be watching yourself.
The Philosophers, Stoned: The Fifth Element
Well, it's here at last--the summer adventure flick that we've all been waiting for. And it's got it all--spectacular action, thrilling chase scenes, exotic settings, stunning digital effects, life-like dinosaurs, great...what's that?...No dinosaurs?....Excuse me, I must be in the wrong theater....
Actually, if it hadn't already been chewed up and spit out by Steven Spielberg's new and improved velociraptors, The Fifth Element would probably be leading the summer parade. It's fast-paced and visually it's close to being overstimulating in the depth of its 23rd-century images (example: traffic in New York has taken to the air, which means that each street and intersection now has about a dozen lanes, stacked vertically and vertiginously one above the other. And you thought a NYC taxi ride nowadays was a heart-in-the-throat adventure...). The comic-book sensibility remarked on by many reviewers means that big guns, body armor, morphing aliens, and Rube-Goldberg household gadgetry attract most of the attention.
That's not to say there's no plot; in fact, the story will make immediate sense to those of you who remember your Empedocles. You know--Love and Hate locked in a perpetual struggle, the one trying to bind the four elements of the universe in harmony, the other trying to drive them apart into chaos. Here four stones representing the elements (earth, air, fire, water) have to be brought into conjunction with the eponymous fifth element (played by Milla Jovovich--don't ask) so that the ultimate evil, which appears every 5000 years, can be defeated. (Have you ever noticed how Evil is never late for these millennial appointments? And how the Ancient Ones who prophesied the Dire Events of the Future using calculators made of granite never put the decimal point in the wrong place?)
Bruce Willis, as a Medal-of-Honor winner turned taxi driver, is charged with finding the stones and saving the universe (that's the difference between Hollywood and Life: actual Medal- of-Honor winner Audie Murphy goes to Hollywood; in Hollywood, fictional winners drive cabs.). He's aided, mostly, by the lithe Jovovich, who has pretty much mastered the English language by the end of the film, and by Ian Holm as a slightly dotty priest of the Chariots-of-the-Gods religion that underlies the plot (and interesting gloss on Holm's role as a member of the Sanhedrin in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth miniseries twenty years ago). Gary Oldman, looking like Hitler and sounding like Ross Perot, plays the villain, arms dealer (I guess) Jean-Batiste Emmanuel Zorg ("Zorg" is always a reliable sci-fi name). Chris Tucker plays Ruby Rhod, a flamboyant radio show host who makes sure that Willis's heroics are broadcast throughout the universe--imagine an androgynous Arsenio Hall on speed and you'll be about halfway there. In fact, just about everyone in this film has an accent or an enunciation problem, except for Willis, who always talks out of the side of his mouth anyway. One reason critics have dismissed the plot may be that it's often just hard to understand what the actors are saying about it.
But of course the main modes of communication in The Fifth Element are shouting and futuristic automatic weapons fire. Paradoxically, though, it turns out to be yet another movie in which "I love you" are the most difficult and most important words for a man to say. A chick flick with explosions? Check it out.
Kentucky Burning: Fire Down Below
A lot of people don't appreciate how fast Steven Seagal really is. I don't mean quickness or hand speed--of course he's fast enough to sidestep those troglodyte movie villains and send them flying through a plate-glass window. I'm talking about speed--fleetness of foot. Look at the facts: at the end of Under Siege II: Dark Territory he outruns a train crash while still on the train. And in his latest adventure, Fire Down Below, not only does he play chicken with a speeding semi (doing Duel one better), he also sprints away unharmed from a collapsing coal mine in one of the film's four climaxes. Now that's fast.
Unfortunately that's about the only thing that moves quickly in Fire Down Below; though the film is set in Kentucky coal country, the more appropriate mineral would be lead: the pace is leaden, the dialogue is usually heavy as lead, and of course Seagal's familiar heavy-lidded imperturbable expression dominates the screen. He plays EPA marshall (?) Jack Taggart, who goes undercover to Jackson. KY (in inconspicuous black leather jacket and ponytail) to investigate the death of a fellow agent and rumors of large-scale toxic waste dumping in the mine. The bad guys--mostly ignorant hillbillies who repeatedly mock Seagal for thinking of them as ignorant hillbillies--are in the service of chief baddie and millionaire businessman Kris Kristofferson, who literally phones in three-quarters of his performance; Marg Helgenberger (with whom Seagal has a--yes--leaden courtship) and Harry Dean Stanton (who can't decide if he's a backwoods savant or the village idiot) round out the interested townsfolk.
The predominant theme throughout is one of unnatural violation; on the level of plot, Kristofferson's high-tech operation deposits numberless barrels of poisonous chemicals in the mine (it's fluorescent green, so we know it must be pretty dangerous stuff); on the level of character there's Helgenberger's pretty town pariah, who is the victim of her older brother's incestuous abuse; rhetorically, the film is awash in references to guns up the butt and EPA agents peering into every bodily orifice and prison rape and "a new meaning to the word 'violation'"--though it's the same old meaning, because these anal penetration insults are a tired staple of macho action pictures (see Lethal Weapon). There's even the obligatory Deliverance joke: Fire Down Below acts as if it is ironizing all those Appalachian cliches, but ultimately it simply reiterates them.
Essentially Fire Down Below is the great-grandchild of Billy Jack: quiet, soft-voiced but deadly Seagal regularly beats up groups of born losers (three pot farmers here, four corrupt cops there, five thugs outside the general store) in the pursuit of justice. The plot serves to string together the violent set-pieces (okay, it's Billy Jack meets 42nd Street), and Fire Down Below has about the minimum requirement of aikido moments for the Seagal fan. Seagal fans, in fact, know not to cringe when he says something like "our current judicial system would not provide sufficient punishment" to justify his strong-arm intimidation of witnesses. Overall, Fire Down Below is the most complete Seagal movie so far: he co-produced the film, and although he did not direct he did write or co-author ten of the songs featured on the sound track. He even plays guitar. And of course his sincere commitment to environmental issues lies behind the story, as with On Deadly Ground. (That may explain why, in a story set in coal-mining country, there are no scenes of actual coal mining--perhaps Seagal the environmentalist prefers cleaner alternatives to coal-fired power plants.) It's a potent if paradoxical fantasy; tree-hugging and karate-chopping come together in Seagal to help us overcome our feeling of powerlessness in the face of environmental degradation and rich, amoral corporations. It's just not a very good movie. For all but die-hard Steven Seagal fans--can you tell I'm one?--it's probably a toxic waste of time.
Firestorm dir. Dean Semler 1/14/98
Jean-Claude Van Damme did it. Dolph Lundgren did it, as did Hulk Hogan and Carl Weathers before him. You could even say that Arnold Schwarzenegger did it, which is probably what inspires everyone else to try. And Brian Bosworth didn't do it, so nowadays his movies go straight to cable, or worse.
All these action-movie stars played the bad guy before they moved on to the hero's role, sharpening their stunt-fighting skills and perfecting that tough-guy glare that heroes need as much as villains. And now Howie Long has joined this illustrious group with the starring role in Firestorm, relatively fresh from his work as John Travolta's right-hand henchman in John Woo's Broken Arrow (1996). Long, a former standout defensive end for the Oakland/LA Raiders and presently co-host of the Fox-NFL Sunday pregame show (i.e., he's got a day job), proved in the latter film that he was big and handsome and had a great smile, and that he could convey a sense of urgency with his acting. He doesn't push that envelope very much in Firestorm, though he does also come across as pleasant, in the way that, say, linebacker coaches can be pleasant.
Long plays Jesse Graves, a Wyoming "smokejumper"--one of those elite firefighters who parachutes right into the middle of forest fires. (That word "elite" is a warning sign that means "B-movie ahead"; in Firestorm it appears on the screen even before the opening credits.) A daring rescue in the opening scene establishes, in a few shorthand strokes, the skill and dedication of the smokejumpers, including Jesse's mentor Wynt Perkins (Scott Glenn); when we fade to "one year later"--more shorthand--we find ourselves in the middle of a forest fire that has been deliberately set as a diversion, to allow the esacpe of a group of state pen inmates who have been pressed into service as a fire crew. The fugitive bad guys are led by Randy Earl Shaye (William Forsythe); they acquire an ornithologist hostage (Suzy Amis), and of course they soon cross paths with Long's character. What ensues--and I hesitate to write this--is "Die Hard in a forest fire," though the drama of the cat-and-mouse game would have been heightened if Forsythe's character hadn't been so keen to dispatch his own subordinates (something about larger shares of hidden booty).
Director Dean Semler, an experienced cinematographer, makes some visually interesting cuts, though he does overdo the panoramic fire-on-the-mountain shots. And Firestorm does have its share of engaging stunts (or, as Joe Bob Briggs would put it, "Chainsaw-fu. Kayak-fu.") and fun facts ( "At 300 degrees, trees explode from their own boiling sap. At 500 degrees, rocks explode!"). But it's essentially a by-the-numbers action film that, despite the fiery effects, can't sustain much excitement: a sort of Lumbering Inferno. A "firestorm" is a conflagration so fierce that it sucks all the available oxygen out of the area. Long before we get to see one, at the end of the film, we start to know what that must feel like.
Batmen Forever: From Dusk till Dawn *** F. Grady
What do you get when you cross Quentin Tarantino with Robert Rodriguez? Sam Raimi. If that joke doesn't make sense to you, you'd probably be better off not seeing From Dusk till Dawn, the last hour of which is filled with what Joe-Bob Briggs would call "exploding vampire-fu." Tarantino directed the first half of the movie, in which the violent bank-robbing Gecko brothers (played by Tarantino himself and George Clooney) flee south across the border, and Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado) directed the second half, in which the fugitives and their hostages (Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, and some kid actor) hole up in a Mexican roadhouse only to find--!que sorpresa!--that it's full of vampires. If "gory" and "funny" don't seem like mutually exclusive adjectives to you, you might want to give From Dusk till Dawn a try; what it does offer is some great scenery-chewing from Clooney, who is simmering, sardonic, volatile, steely, funny, and of course handsome--which bodes well for his debut as the newest Batman later this year.
The Star Trek Millennium: GalaxyQuest, Trekkies, FreeEnterprise
Star Trek and the subculture it spawned have now been around for a generation: the original series premiered over thirty years ago. In fact, as a cultural phenomenon and revenue-generating franchise, Star Trek is only getting bigger; a quick search on Amazon.com turns up over a thousand titles related to Trek, and Lycos.com promises 69,783 web sites. There have been nine movies (five since 1989), and since 1987 there's been at least one, often two, weekly Trek series on television, boldly going where no one has gone before. And this is nothing new: the vocabulary of Trek has long been part of the lexicon--"beam me up, Scotty!"--and when NASA christened the space shuttle prototype "Enterprise" in 1976, it wasn't to honor America's entrepreneurial spirit. So it's only natural that, having achieved a kind of critical mass consciousness, the Trek phenomenon would start to generate the sort of self-reflexive material that has recently appeared: Trekkies, a 1997 documentary about Star Trek fans that passed through St. Louis briefly last spring; Free Enterprise (1998), a fictionalized tale of romance, hero worship, and protracted adolescence among thirtyish Trekkies that was exhibited at the St. Louis Film Festival last fall; and Galaxy Quest, a big budget, full scale parody-cum-homage now playing at a theatre near you. Taken together these films confirm both the mainstreaming of Star Trek, and a sort of midlife crisis for Star Trek fans, who are depicted (and depict themselves) as both perfectly regular folks with an interesting hobby, and delusional cross-dressers with a tenuous grip on reality, people who want to be thought of as normal, responsible, generous citizens, and people who are deeply, seriously strange. The Trek family is large and congenial, but it also has a few uncles and aunts you might want to keep in the basement when company comes over.
Galaxy Quest is a perfect-pitch parody of both Star Trek and the behind-the-scenes world of sci-fi fandom, though its chief sympathies are reserved for the long-suffering actors rather than the fans. In fact the biggest fans of the now-defunct "Galaxy Quest" TV series, off the air for more than a decade, turn out to be real aliens--"Thermians from the Klaatu Nebula"--who have mistaken "Quest" broadcasts for "historical documents" and who have come to earth to ask for help in their own real interstellar war. Of course when they show up at a convention where the underemployed cast is signing autographs, the actual aliens are indistinguishable from the other costumed "Questerians", and the cast treats them with the same wary exasperation they show their human fans.
The actors have all been stereotyped by their appearance on Galaxy Quest, a show that they both need--autograph-signings and small-time promotional appearances are all they have now--and utterly despise for the way it has circumscribed their careers. Especially distressed are Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), condemned to play bleached-blonde bimbo Lieutenant Tawny Madison, whose only job on the show was to repeat what the computer said, and Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman), a classically-trained Brit who went from doing Shakespeare to wearing the prosthetic headpiece of the alien Dr. Lazarus, GalaxyQuest's answer to Mr. Spock. Dane in particular has spent years resenting the genial egotist Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen), a.k.a "Commander Peter Quincy Taggart"--the perfect fictional counterpart to William Shatner's legendarily self-centered and scene-stealing (and, like Taggart, occasionally chest-baring) Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Nesmith convinces Dane and the rest of his ethnically-mixed crew to join him in a real adventure on the Thermian-built, perfect working replica of their TV show starship, with every console and switch and ventilation shaft recreated in loving and operative detail. In the end, rather than breaking free of their constraining roles each of them comes through in the clutch by acting out and fully inhabiting the familiar parts--even Gwen, who faithfully repeats the computer's pronouncements.
So far this is a familar tale of the Three Amigos variety--a film about how the "real world" is just as susceptible to movie tricks and screen bravado as its cinematic shadow. But GQ gives this scenario a very funny edge by adding to the mix the pathetic Guy Fleegman (Sam Rockwell), a Questerian who once had a bit part on a "Galaxy Quest" episode, as a nameless extra who was killed off before the first commercial: a direct descendant of the red-shirted Security drones that Star Trek regularly vaporized or crystallized or sucked the salt out of at the beginning of a show. For Guy, replaying his role brings not professional tedium but existential terror; no one knows his last name because the script doesn't call for him to return next week for further adventures. "I'm the crewman who dies to prove the situation is serious!" moans the increasingly hysterical Fleegman, "Didn't you guys ever watch the show?" After a while his doomsaying infects the others: "Let's get out of here before they kill Guy!" says Gwen at one perilous juncture.
But Galaxy Quest is a comedy, and a gentle one; if Guy's pessimism hints at a philosophical dilemma for fans (that is, if the fantasy were real, it would have real costs), the film's conclusion redeems them, as a group of earthbound teenage Questerians helps save the day with their obscure and previously useless technical knowledge of the ship. Though its parodic efforts are dead-on and will delight anyone who has even seen a couple of episodes of Star Trek (the boulders on an alien planet have that familar papier-mache look), Galaxy Quest is ultimately an affectionate film. And at the end a safer and more likely fantasy is realized: the show is resurrected for new adventures after eighteen years off the air (the span, incidentally, that separates the end of the original Trek in 1969 and the premier of The Next Generation in 1987), and the cast--having embraced their oppression--return to their roles.
The renewal of "Galaxy Quest" resolves the subliminal antagonism between actors and fans in favor of the fans' desire to lock the crew into their roles forever. A one-shot story like Galaxy Quest can thus sidestep the issue of age, which was an explicit concern of the seventh Trek movie, Generations (1994), a film that indulgently represented the passing of the torch from Kirk's original crew to Captain Picard's "Next Generation" gang (Indeed, the original cast is beginning to disappear; both DeForest Kelley, who played Doctor McCoy, and Mark Lenard, who played Spock's father Sarek, have died recently). Free Enterprise, on the other hand, takes up this issue, and inverts it: this time the ones who cling to their roles and refuse to grow up are the fans, specifically Robert (Rafer Weigel) and Mark (Eric McCormack), two LA Trekkies who respond to the approach of Mark's 30th birthday by heading off to Toys-R-Us to check out the new collectible action figures.
Robert and Mark may not look Trekkish--they don't haunt convention hotels in Klingon attire--but they also can't let it go by when someone says "Doctor Spock" instead of "Mister Spock." Their conversation is a pastiche of sci-fi movie tag lines (and in that way Free Enterprise is as much for fans as about them: how many Logan's Run references can you catch, it asks), and Robert in particular has a hard time prioritizing--or rather, an easy time, since for him the question of whether to pay the electric bill or buy a special edition laserdisc of Dawn of the Dead is a no-brainer. Mark, on the other hand, is the responsible one, an aspiring screenwriter with a steady job as the editor of Geek Monthly magazine. The writers, Mark A. Altman and Robert Meyer Burnett (who also directed), have produced the kind of autobiographical fantasy that's not uncommon in the realm of Gen-X indie filmmaking; the names of the characters tend to give it away, as does the wish-fulfillment nature of the romance: Robert picks up Claire (Audie England) with the immortal line, "What if I said I have the Japanese import boxed set of all five Planet of the Apes on laserdisc--letterboxed?" And Mark finds a girl who will paint herself green, like Yvonne Craig in "Whom Gods Destroy" (you know, when Kirk and Spock are trapped in the asylum for the criminally insane?).
The romantic fantasies that Free Enterprise indulges in are necessary, though, to offset the crushing (and very funny) disappointment at the heart of the film. For by chance one day Mark and Robert get to meet their idol, William Shatner--Captain Kirk in the flesh--as he is leafing through a pornographic magazine in the local bookstore. Boozy, lonely, alternately grandiose and pathetic, utterly charmless with women, Shatner turns out to be a complete loser--and he is played by himself, in a terrific self-parodying performance that goes miles beyond the infamous "Get a life!" appearance on Saturday Night Live (and shows where those intentionally awful "Priceline.com" ads are coming from). Shatner's magnificent obsession in Free Enterprise is his idea for a musical version of Julius Caesar, with himself playing all the parts (except for Calpurnia, for whom he envisions Sharon Stone). It's a staggeringly bad idea, which even Robert and Mark realize; they don't remain starstruck for long. But they don't quite realize, as we are meant to, that a musical Julius Caesar is no more inherently preposterous a premise than the "Wagon Train to the stars" idea Gene Roddenberry once sold to NBC. And as with Star Trek, an obsession with the ridiculous can sometimes produce something sublime: here it's the last scene of Free Enterprise, in which Shatner raps out a hip-hop version of the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech that simply has to be seen to be believed. "No Tears for Caesar"--the title of this track--is awe-inspiring, and should turn the already witty and engaging Free Enterprise into a camp classic.
Shatner makes one very brief appearance in Trekkies, a film whose tone is, if anything, even gentler than that of Galaxy Quest or Free Enterprise. But we do get to meet a Star Trek fan who has legally changed his name to "James T. Kirk," a gesture that is emblematic of the implicit preoccupation of this documentary: though the film tries to ask the question "What do Trekkies want?", it keeps helplessly circling back to another question: how well can they distinguish fantasy from reality?
Aptly enough Trekkies is hosted by Denise Crosby; dissatisfied with her role on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Crosby left the show during its first season, only to return again and again for guest appearances, sometimes playing the daughter of her original character (don't ask). In Trekkies, she thus predictably moves from enthusiasm to wariness and back again, sometimes reminiscing pleasantly with her costars and sometimes maintaining a skeptical distance from the fans. And the fans are what make Trekkies worth seeing; though there are more than a dozen interviews with Trek cast members, ranging from a sentimental James Doohan to a very wry Brent Spiner, the bulk of the film is comprised of profiles of the fans and visits to their endless conventions, where used Klingon prosthetic headpieces (like Dr. Lazarus wears) fetch $1400 at auction and vendors who used to work gun shows have found a steadier source of profit in Trek trading cards.
Three themes tend to dominate the fans' self-assessments in Trekkies. The first is their universal belief that Trek fans tend to be of above-average intelligence, a position with which I must agree (without a trace of irony). Second is the emphasis on community service, which the representatives of the various fan organizations repeatedly stress, as if to prove that Trekkies are just another fraternal organization like the Lions' Club, or better, the Shriners. I for one would rather see a group of costumed Ferengi cleaning up a stretch of highway than, say, the Klan. And finally, every Trekkie preaches the gospel of acceptance: fan conventions and fan organizations accept people as they are, with no regard to gender, race, creed, or species. This does not refer to some bland program of science-fictional correctness--one can easily imagine the Kirk camp and the Picard partisans exchanging an occasional harsh word--but to a larger, progressive social ideal.
That ideal, of course, is imbibed directly from the Trek narrative itself: "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," as the Vulcan are said to put it. It's a potent fantasy, and also a paradoxical one, as befits the late-Cold-War era of its birth: the chief proponent of Roddenberry's humane, tolerant, and inclusive utopian social vision is also a rigidly hierarchical military organization, deeply defined by specifically naval conventions of rank and protocol. The ostentatious display of rank, of course, is one of the chief pleasures of a Star Trek convention (indeed, any convention). But in Trekkies--especially after one fan describes the Trek experience as particularly congenial for gay men and lesbian women--the ubiquitous uniforms and costumes make "infinite diversity in infinite combinations" begins to seem like the successful cartoon version of "don't ask, don't tell."
Certainly nobody has to ask in Trekkies; there's no one who hides his phaser under a bushel, as it were. But however much the film tries to paint its subjects as lovable (and loving) eccentrics, questions of balance and proportion insistently and importantly raises itself. For what Trekkies documents, in the most benign way possible, is the friction between the IDIC/Trek fantasy and the real world, a tension that's often visible in the film (as when a posse of costumed Klingons stops in to Hardees for lunch) and always felt by the viewer. To put it another way, in its account of the birds in the Star Trek aviary, Trekkies is constantly asking us to distinguish between a lark--Riverside, Iowa, declaring itself "the official future birthplace of Captain Kirk"--and a loon--"James T. Kirk" our contemporary.
Of course the most memorable parts of Trekkies concern those fans who take things just a little bit too far. For example, there's Denis Bourgiugnon, the Orlando dentist who has turned his office into "Starbase Dental," where he and his hygienists operate in full Starfleet uniform. The boyish Bourguignon and his smiling, clean-cut family could be poster children for the Christian Coalition or the NRA--except that's exactly what they aren't. Then there are the "Spinerfemmes," who have inexplicably concluded that Brent Spiner, Mr. Data on The Next Generation, is the sexiest man alive; one of them displays a photo album so thorough in its documentation that I began to whisper "restraining order" at the screen. And there is the increasingly elaborate Klingon subculture, which has generated its own Klingon language (a sort of dystopian Esperanto) and a Klingon version of Hamlet ("taH pagh taHbe'!--that is the question"). Though as a subscriber to PMLA I should probably be more sympathetic, I find it hard even to conceive of the energy required to produce a Klingon version of Hamlet.
Most of all--worst of all, best of all, strangest of all--there's the case of Barbara Adams. Adams is the 1996 Whitewater jury alternate who wore her Starfleet uniform, tricorder, phaser and comm badge to the proceedings every day, maintaining a "Vulcan-like stoicism" toward the media (until the judge dismissed her from the panel for giving a TV interview). This conjunction of civic duty and Star Trek fanaticism, very much in keeping with the community service theme of Trekkies, is almost too perfect; Adams's cameo in the decade's most sprawling political imbroglio ought to be the perfect sign of the way Trek has moved from the fringes to the center of American life. The problem, though, is that Adams is not exactly the sort of person to whom you'd want to commit the fate of the republic. Trekkies includes interviews with her coworkers at the Arkansas printing shop where she is employed, people who have learned to cheerfully call her "Commander"--her "Starfleet" "rank"--in order to get her full attention, but their careful phrasing when characterizing Adams suggests that there are things they are not saying, would rather not be forced to say. Adams herself is clearly intelligent and articulate, and just as clearly not completely there; when she calmly describes how she straps on her tricorder and comm badge everyday to remind her who she is--an officer in Starfleet--you want to shout at her "But they don't really work! They're just models! And there's no such thing as "Starfleet"--it's just a TV show!" Such an indecorous outburst, I imagine, would probably be met with a blank, pitying stare.
Trekkies thus brings us back around to Galaxy Quest: embrace your role in the movies and you become a hero, but wear your Trek regalia in public and the best you can hope for is a few smirks and a bit part in a quirky documentary. There would be a reassuring neatness in assuming that Adams and her fellow phaser-toting enthusiasts have simply lost track of the boundary between fact and film, between the documentary impulse and the fantastical desires of science fiction. But the borders are not, and have never been, so clear cut, as the allegorical aspects of Galaxy Quest and the autobiographical ones of Free Enterprise should remind us. Not that there's anything particularly postmodern about this permeability between the real world and the reel world; the desire to conform one's life to some inherited narrative, to mold one's experiences into a coherent story, is far older than the movies, older than Renaissance exemplary literature, older than medieval hagiography, older than the gospels. And certainly we have seen more pernicious examples of screen envy than the utopian egalitarianism of Trekkies, who would sooner say "Live long and prosper" than "Make my day" or "Read my lips".
Gladiator is the best
movie about John McCain so far this year. Can the political outsider, the
military man untainted by
the corruption of the
capital, restore the republic to its ancient glory by wresting control away
from the debauched head
of state, the one with the
bizarre sexual appetites and the knack for playing to the mob, who thinks
nothing of resorting
to murder to strengthen his
hold on power? Can he beat the depraved leader at his own game, and win the
crowd to his
side--a crowd hungry for a true
leader, a war hero who will lift them out of their stuporous dependence on
bloody and
spectacular entertainments
towards a new era of civic, nay, national pride--a new millennium?
Okay, so it's not really
about McCain--it's about a Roman general named Maximus (Russell Crowe) and his
struggle with the
evil emperor Commodus (a
whiny, dissipated Joaquin Phoenix). But the plot is pure "insurgent
candidacy," as I've outlined
it above, and if the film is
not actually about the spring 2000 primary season, it only becomes truly
intelligible in the
context of our own imperial
condition, both our professed exhaustion with "inside-the-Beltway"
politics as usual and our
anxious preoccupation with
the effects of what we perceive as our increasingly violent entertainments. Put
these two
worries together, and you
have a sufficiently compelling reason to make such a retro
gladiators-in-the-dust film as this
one. Spend $100 million on
such a film, though, and you end up reproducing the very conflicts you're
trying to expose. That
is, Gladiator proposes that
Commodus is a bad emperor, and that one of the reasons is his eagerness to go
the
bread-and-circuses route
with the people of Rome; he brings back the gladiator conflicts in the Coliseum
that his father,
Marcus Aurelius, had
suspended, and presides over elaborate and gory spectacles. Bad emperor,
pandering to the mob that
way! But of course director
Ridley Scott designs these spectacles to win our admiration and stir our blood,
not to fill us
with disgust at the way the
crowd (i.e., our filmic counterparts) is being manipulated. And some of it is
pretty stirring:
though the opening battle
between Centurions and barbarians in the forests of "Germania" is
spoiled by an over-reliance on
digitized effects that blur,
speed up and slow down the action (plenty of Gauls get divided into three or
more parts,
though), the brightly lit
episodes in the arena show some truly innovative mayhem, and the scene in which
Maximus and some
of his fellows play
"Carthaginians" to a force of "Romans" mounted in chariots
is probably the most exciting action I've
seen this year.
This being a gladiator
film, of course, there are some expectations that must be fulfilled. There's
the scene-stealing head
of the gladiator school,
Proximo (Oliver Reed, in his last role). There's a friend of another race for
the hero (played by
Woody Strode--I mean, Djimon
Hounsou). There's plenty of orotund, almost unspeakably stilted dialogue,
speeches about
liberty and freedom and what
Rome means. And there's the usual triangulation of homoerotic desire across the
body of a
woman; here it's expressed
through Commodus's incestuous desire for his sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen),
who was once and
may still be in love with Maximus,
who is of course coded as rigidly straight, constantly thinking and dreaming
about his
wife and son, conveniently
murdered at Commodus's instigation (Note, by the way, that Commodus combines
the inappropriate
sexual behavior of Bill
Clinton with the imperial descent of George W.). This triangle is politicized
at the beginning of
the film, when the dying
Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) tells Lucilla that she should have been born a
man so that she
might have ruled, since she
is of so much better character than Commodus; Lucilla comes to represent the
republican spirit
of Rome, drawn into
corruption by Commodus but yearning for the heroic Maximus and conspiring with
the virtuous senator
Gracchus played,
predictably, by Derek Jacobi.
But Maximus and Lucilla
can never be together, not because of Maximus's conjugal loyalties but because
it would fatally
compromise his standing as
an outsider, unmarked by the corruption and compromise that characterizes Roman
politics. When
Marcus Aurelius privately
commissions Maximus to restore the republic at the beginning of the
film--bypassing the
legitimate succession of
Commodus in order to elevate his surrogate "son", Maximus--he gives
him an impossible task, since
simply to enter the
political arena is to become irremediably tainted (that outsider standing is
itself as much of a
fiction as two-term
congressman, three-term senator McCain's, of course; it's hard to imagine a
Roman general, right-hand
man of the emperor,
completely innocent of imperial politics.). In Gladiator that "arena"
is fully literalized; betrayed by
Commodus, who orders his
assassination, Maximus survives only to be taken as a slave and trained as a
gladiator. But
rooting for Maximus to win
in the gladiatorial games is part of the problem, not part of the solution;
when his mentor
Proximo tells Maximus that
he must win over the crowd, he supplies a goal that is essentially
indistinguishable from the
goal of Commodus. And when
Commodus steps into the arena to fight Maximus in the film's curiously
anticlimactic, exhausted
finale, it's hard not to
think about Clinton discussing his underwear on MTV, or Alan Keyes in the mosh
pit. In the end,
Gladiator acknowledges that
the only way to win, as it were, is not to play, and that to remain unsullied
and uncorrupted
by politics you have to just
go home--to Elysium, where Maximus runs his hand through what look suspiciously
like amber
waves of grain.
The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship: The Glimmer Man
Before I get started, I just want to make clear-- particularly to Mr. Seagal--that I have seen all of Steven Seagal's movies: the one where he was a cop with Mob relatives, the one where he took on the Jamaican drug gangs terrorizing Chicago's tonier suburbs, the one where he was in a coma, the one where he beat up everybody in the old neighborhood, the one on the ship, the one with the oil wells, the one on the train, and the one where he gets sucked out into the stratosphere halfway through the film and Kurt Russell gets to be the hero. So it should be clear--especially to Mr. Seagal--that anything I have to say in this review is based on the greatest admiration for his career and his projects, and that I would be very grateful if he please wouldn't kill me or break any of my more important bones.
That said, let me offer a few more compliments. Seagal has clearly grasped the Law of Diminishing Box Office Returns and has figured out that he can't just keep playing the imperturbable and invulnerable soft-spoken man who breaks people's arms at the elbow over and over again without losing some market share. Lately he has begun to share the screen, for example with villains Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey in Under Siege and with Russell in Executive Decision, where he played a relatively minor role (albeit the same one as always). And in The Glimmer Man Seagal has branched out into the cop buddy film (in fact, the black/white cop buddy film Lethal Weapon subgenre) by costarring with Keenen Ivory Wayans, who played the emotive (but well-dressed) partner to Seagal's serene juggernaut. It's a good strategy, and it probably would have worked if someone other than Seagal had starred in (and produced)the film. After all, it employs every other hot plot element in the action-film zeitgeist: there's a serial killer who preys exclusively on Catholics (shades of Seven), a Russian Mafia-CIA connection (Maximum Risk, Eraser), an evil rich guy (Bob Gunton--you'll recognize him instantly), and lots of breaking glass. But hard as Wayans tries, it's next to impossible to establish any kind of rapport or even antagonism with Seagal, who plays the same placid, spiritual, calm-but-deadly sleeping bear as always, with the usual herbal remedies (this film is a shoo-in for the Academy Award that goes to the film with the greatest number of deer penis jokes), and the usual mysterious past (CIA, Special Forces, Tibetan Buddhism--the same stuff he regularly trots out for interviews in GQ and Vanity Fair). At one point, when confronted by a handful of Russian Mafia hitters, Seagal observes about his partner that "He's a little bit country, I'm a little bit rock-n-roll." When his puzzled adversary asks what that means, Seagal replies," It doesn't mean anything. It's just an expression." It's the truest line in the film.
This doesn't mean that Seagal fans should give up, however; the very fact that Seagal is trying to push on into new and varied minor subgenres is cause for hope. And at the end of this film he actually bleeds for part of a scene. Unlike some of his peers in the action-film industry--Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme, who just can't wait to show off their corpuscles--Seagal always comes across as invulnerable. Nobody ever even seems to hit him. Well, somebody hits him here--once--and gives him a nasty bloody nose before Seagal kills him. Can Hamlet be far behind? Final note: for those of you who are afraid of finding The Glimmer Man too highbrow, there's always the junior varsity version, Bulletproof, with Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler in the buddy roles.
The latest (la st?) James Bond film seems as if it was made by someone who had only heard verbal descriptions or previous numbers in the series: "Okay, well, there's usually this beautiful but deadly female assassin, see, and the villain always has this huge secret underground installation, and Bond gets all these cool spy gadgets from this old guy named "Q" [and yes, Desmond Llewellyn is still flopping around, appearing in one of the film's most painfully unfunny scenes]. And he wears a tuxedo a lot, and carries a Walther PPK [for stopping rogue hamsters, evidently]. And there's this music that plays whenever something exciting happens..."
In this, the last film produced by the late Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, all the elements are stirred into a bland and ultimately unappetizing soup. The attempts to update things are lame: "M" is now a woman who aptly describes Bond as a sexist dinosaur (one of the film's many attempts to mock its misogyny and have it too) before succumbing to sentiment and asking him to come back alive. The series's poverty is most evident in the plot--the villain this time is Bond's colleague 006, who has apparently embraced the dark side out of dissatisfaction with the poor secret agent pension plan. At least that's what I got--clearly the post-Cold-War world doesn't quite know what to do with its leftover spies, so it sets them against one another.
Pierce Brosnan, who was in line to play Bond before Timothy Dalton but who couldn't get out of the Remington Steele television series, is handsome and dissipated enough for the job, but that's about it. He's been practicing for the role in a series of USA Network TV movies, and that's about the level this production reaches. If you really need a Bond fix, do yourself a favor and rent Dr. No.
Post-Apocalyptic Family Values: Independence Day
When Bob Dole offered us his not-quite-immortal critique of Independence Day last month--"We won. The end. Leadership. America. Good over evil. It's a good movie. Bring your family, too."--what exactly was he praising? (What, indeed, was he saying?)
First of all, he was paying tribute to this summer's blockbuster; in an era in which economics and demographics tend to conspire to permit the emergence of only one real winner from each summer's crowded field of action-film releases (so, in 1993, Jurassic Park, but not Last Action Hero; likewise, last summer, Batman Forever, but not Waterworld, and certainly not Judge Dredd), Independence Day is still playing into September while Escape from L.A. has vanished, Chain Reaction has fizzled, and Eraser has left scarcely a mark (except, obliquely, on IndependenceDay--the silly acronym for which, "ID4", strives to imitate the shorthand success of Schwarzenegger's "T2").
Secondly, Dole was adopting on behalf of his presidential campaign a film already shown to have multiple parents: the attack-of-the-aliens 1950's sci-fi thriller (War of the Worlds with an $80 million budget and computer-assisted special effects); the 1970s disaster films cited by director Roland Emmerich (The Towering Inferno in space," in the words of one viewer); and, again according to Emmerich, ensemble-cast epics like The Longest Day ("We won. The end.").
Finally, Dole was adding his own voice to the chorus if popcorn hermeneuts nationwide: was the film "really" about American immigration anxieties (there goes the neighborhood--literally), or "really" an example of antitechnological paranoia (since the aliens have very sophisticated and destructive machines), or "really" about our faith in technology (since ultimately a few dozen F-16s and an Apple Powerbook save the day)?
As a card-carrying hermeneut (hold the butter, please), I was more than willing to let Dole have his turn. However, in all the notice the film has received there has been little sustained attention paid to the peculiar configuration of "ID4's" ensemble cast. Who is it that offers "Leadership"? who represents "America"? and what constitutes "Good" over against the bug-eyed alien villains?
The answers to these question are rather surprising, and they add up to one more sign (or perhaps one last sign) that the traditional nuclear family no longer functions unironically to represent "America" onscreen. Consider the "Freedom Fighters" of "ID4" (the phrase is used--unironically--in the on-line press kit available at the "ID4" web site). Marine pilot captain Steve Hiller (Will Smith, the artist formerly known as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) is a single man shacking up with single mother/exotic dancer (of course) Jasmine (Vivica Fox); computer genius-nerd David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is divorced from his ambitious wife Constance, the President's press secretary (Margaret Colin), and his closest relationship is with his widowed mensch of a father, Julius (Judd Hirsch), with whom he plays chess in Central Park; single father/alcoholic/Vietnam vet Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) lives in an R.V. with his ethnically mixed children, the oldest of whom is named Miguel. True, at the end of the film Steve and Jasmine are married, David and Constance are reunited, and Russell nobly sacrifices himself in the line of duty--but as noted film critic and close personal friend Carol Clover says, endings don't matter, since all they show is what has to happen. More interesting is the fate of the only traditional nuclear family represented in the film, that of President Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman): when his Hillaryesque wife Marilyn (Mary McDonnell) sticks to her schedule a little too long, she gets caught in the alien attack on LA and is mortally injured, though she does not die until after a brief and presumably poignant reunion with her husband and young daughter.
The America of Independence Day, then, is an America comprised of blacks, Jews, and partially deranged Vietnam veterans, all of whom play vital roles in the WASP president's counterattack. In the postapocalyptic world, ambitious women must either come to their senses (Constance) or die (Marilyn), and while America may have a place for every ethnic group, there is evidently no room for gays (Harvey Fierstein and Harry Connick, Jr., are offed by the invaders), alien-symp scientists (ditto for Brent Spiner's Dr. Okun), or the CIA (who have evidently known about this potential-invasion problem for some time, but wanted to preserve the president's "plausible deniability", in perhaps the film's least memorable but most apposite line). Win some, lose some.
Crises of family values are not new in sci-fi spectacles; after all, the hero of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a divorced doctor who returned to his hometown to find things somehow different. But evidently the more things stay the same, the more they change. "Bring your family, too!"
I Went Down dir. Paddy Breathnach 7/1/98
I Went Down arrives in St. Louis with an impressive pedigree. It's already the highest grossing independent Irish film ever (OK, so we're not talking Titanic grosses here), it won four awards at the 1997 San Sebastian Film Festival, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, and it won the Best Director prize at the 1997 Thessaloniki Film Festival. It's not hard to see why: a black-comic caper film about two unwilling ex-cons trying to pay off a debt in the Dublin underworld, it's well acted and well written, with slyly and sometimes grimly funny dialogue that completely renews the gangster conventions that run through the plot.
I Went Down begins when Git Hynes (Peter MacDonald) is released from prison and immediately annoys local crime boss Tom French (Tony Doyle) by rescuing a friend from a pair of French's goons who are about to collect a gambling debt with a hammer. French decides that in recompense for his interference Git will have to do him a favor: pick up and deliver a former associate, Frank Grogan (Peter Caffrey), who is--or ought to be--in possession of &25,000 of French's money. He teams the inexperienced Git with tough guy Bunny Kelly (Brendan Gleeson), also on French's lease, and the mismatched pair set out for Cork along the backroads in a stolen car.
Bunny's nickname captures his contradictions: he's a fairly competent thug who starts out lording his extensive experience over Git, but we quickly discover that he's got too many ideas in his head to realize that he's not really very smart. He's given to enumerating three reasons for things, though number one and number three are often virtually identical, and he's also full of sagacious mixed metaphors ("Blaming people isn't worth the paper it's written on") and incomprehensible saws ("No goods, no black pudding. I think you know what I'm talking about."). Gleeson, wearing razor-sharp rockabilly sideburns, is brilliant as Bunny, who ends up earning even more of our sympathy than the decent, put-upon Git; any dialogue involving Bunny has a sense of infinite potential, especially when he's trying to engage his laconic partner. Even Bunny is outdone by the garrulous Grogan, however, who keeps up a constant stream of chatter (go ahead, call it blarney) once the deliverymen pick him up. This two-guys-and-their-hostage scenario may sound like Mel Gibson, Danny Glover and Joe Pesci, but it's actually the farthest thing from it.
Throughout the film Breathnach tries to break away from the usual Emerald Isle cliches by setting things in the most unlovely portions of Ireland imaginable: steamy, desolate peat bogs; empty parking lots; dingy pubs that look especially shabby in the daytime. We constantly get the feeling of having arrived at the outskirts of somewhere, somewhere more interesting and prettier than where we are, and the one picturesque forest setting is reserved for the final showdown. Playwright-turned-screenwriter Conor McPherson has produced a script with some telling and charming symmetries that turn up in the most unlikely places, in refused phone calls and performance anxieties both sexual and professional, and of course in the punning title--which you're just going to have to see the movie to figure out.