It’s Got Vision: Blackthorn

Among the many hilarious moments in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of my favorites comes just after the infamous outlaws have fled the United States. Arriving in a train station that is nothing more than a gutted building with pigs hanging around out back, the duo has successfully landed in Bolivia, a mysterious country to the south that Butch has romanticized as some exotic retirement paradise for on-the-lam stick-up artists without ever seeing it. Needless to say, the first impression leaves something to be desired, but Butch remains optimistic. “All of Bolivia can’t look like this,” he reasons. Yet Sundance isn’t so sure: “How do you know? This might be the garden spot of the whole country.” Mateo Gil’s Blackthorn clarifies that it isn’t. Set in 1927, almost 20 years after Butch and Sundance were reported dead in the kind of massive shootout that was so memorably depicted in George Roy Hill’s Western bromance, Blackthorn finds Butch very much alive, comfortably holed up in a small cabin tucked into the fold of a verdant mountain range – still in Bolivia but far from view. Indeed, this must be the garden spot, but it isn’t the limit of the country’s rugged beauty. Not even close.

I Hope That Something Better Comes Along: The Muppets

Jason Segel's The Muppets has tremendous reverence for the Jim Henson era, and it unfolds with great joy. But all too often, the Muppets are either left out of the spotlight or confined to retro appeal. As a follow-up to my video essay, "Searching for the Muppets," my review of The Muppets is available at Press Play.

Infinite Sadness: Melancholia

The opening shot of Melancholia is a microcosm of what’s to come – a juxtaposition of beauty and suffering. It begins as nothing more than a tight close-up of Kirsten Dunst’s striking face, locked in an expression of wet, worn-out misery, her hair fluttering slightly in a state of not-quite-suspended animation. Then come the birds. Dead birds, falling from the sky beyond Dunst’s shoulder. From there, this eight-and-a-half-minute prologue expands to include images of the surreal (Dunst in a wedding dress, walking through the woods with vines clinging to her legs), the disastrous (Charlotte Gainsbourg holding a child, running in fear from a mysterious unrelenting cataclysm, her feet sinking into the ground with each step) and the astronomical (a huge blue planet slowly approaching Earth, dwarfing it until it subsumes it). A few of the latter shots can’t help but spark memories of the long creation sequence from this summer’s The Tree of Life, but whereas Terrence Malick’s film goes to space to marvel at the awesomeness of creation, Lars von Trier goes there to suggest the massiveness of doom and despair.

Melancholia is about severe depression. The main character, no doubt a stand-in for the director, is Dunst’s Justine. After the prologue, the film finds Justine on her wedding day, playfully laughing at the difficulty that her limousine driver is having trying to navigate the winding roadway up to the castle-like mansion where the reception is being held. The bride and groom are late, but they don’t seem to care. In the back of the limo, they giggle and kiss. And when they arrive for the reception and get lectured by the hosts and proprietors, who happen to be her sister Claire (Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland), it doesn’t faze them. They’re in love, and it’s their day, and nothing else matters. Or so it seems. A few drinks and awkward toasts later, the bubbly bride is gone, replaced by a woman incapable of propriety for propriety’s sake. She’s cranky, tired, disinterested and very, very distant. In love? Justine hardly seems aware of her husband. Heck, she hardly seems to be aware of anything, except maybe the void she feels between herself and her inattentive father or the bite of her mother’s acute perception of her. It’s her wedding day, and Justine knows how she’s supposed to feel, and what everyone expects her to feel, but she just doesn’t feel that way, no matter how hard she tries. That’s depression.

Searching for the Muppets

As premiered yesterday over at Press Play, I'm pleased to present my second video essay, "Searching for the Muppets." As you can see above, it's available in two parts. The total running time will require about 20 minutes of your life, but it's packed with Muppet clips, so you can thank Jim Henson for keeping it interesting.

Real Human Beings: Into the Abyss

One of the reasons I’m fond of the documentary format is because, having written my share of news stories and features, I can relate to it. I have no concept of what it would be like to hold the tips of my thumbs and index fingers together and gaze through a rectangle made out of my hands while determining how to block an epic fight sequence, but I do know what it’s like to pore over vast amounts of data and try to bring the key points to the surface, and what it’s like to try to arrange that data in a way that’s compelling and propulsive, and what it’s like to interview people and try to get them to open up and articulate their feelings in an interesting way. The latter task can be especially challenging, but the great ones make it look easy. Werner Herzog is one of the great ones. People open up to him. They might not speak the truth exactly, but they reveal themselves honestly. As a documentary filmmaker, that’s Herzog’s gift. Unfortunately, sometimes honesty isn’t enough for Herzog. That’s his biggest weakness.

Herzog’s indulgences with truth are fairly well known among cinephiles, even if they’re often hidden within his films and infrequently dissected outside of them. Critics tend to assist Herzog in covering up his manipulations, even after he cops to them, by romanticizing his quest for “ecstatic truth,” which when you get down to it is Herzog’s term for “stuff that isn’t actually the truth but makes for a better story,” which when you get down to it is the kind of stuff that can get a newspaper journalist fired. A particularly egregious example would be in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, the 1997 documentary about a soldier who was held in a Vietnamese prison camp until he escaped, who is shown repeatedly opening and closing his front door to ensure it’s unlocked, which Herzog positions as evidence of the man’s imprisonment trauma when in reality it’s an “ecstatic” fabrication. If Into the Abyss, Herzog’s latest film, contains such deceits, I couldn’t spot them, but there are a handful of times when Herzog is guilty of leading the witness, putting words into the mouths of his subjects in an effort to make their stories more dramatic or poignant than they would be otherwise. The difference this time is that Herzog’s manipulations are blatant: we can hear Herzog guiding his subjects, articulating the memories he wishes they’d share. Into the Abyss isn’t among Herzog’s greatest documentaries, but in this respect and others it’s one of his most transparent.

Solid Weight: J. Edgar

There was a time in this country – and, sadly, some people are still living in it – when homosexuality was considered a character flaw. Thankfully society is more enlightened now, but that enlightenment does no favors for Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. Based on a screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, Eastwood’s film looks at and beyond the professional career of the longtime FBI director to find a man hiding his extra-professional feelings for his right-hand man, Clyde Tolson, not just from the outside world but, in large part, from Tolson and even himself. It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for someone forced to suffer such a repressed emotional existence, especially when his mother tells him – with unblinking awareness – that she’d rather have a dead son than a gay one. And therein lies the problem. One of America’s most notorious figures – a man who enforced the law according to his own prejudices and by circumventing the law whenever it suited him – J. Edgar Hoover is a man many believe deserves no sympathy.

That’s understandable. But then so is Eastwood’s desire to investigate and articulate the man beyond the legend. Alas, as much as we profess to yearn for complex characters on the big screen, whenever a movie gets made about a controversial subject it reveals our fondness for the unambiguousness of black and white. Whether the subject is Hitler or Hoover, when a certain amount of recent historical evil is involved, we tend to get uncomfortable with nuance. Of course, if we’re honest about it, the nuance remains. To absolve or justify the extreme sins of such characters would be reprehensible, but to pretend such complexities don’t exist, simply because they don’t fit the familiar historical caricature, is to avoid facing the truth. So even if someone such as Hoover or Hitler – or Che or Cheney, or Jerry Sandusky – doesn’t deserve to be humanized, what the audience deserves is to be treated like discerning adults who, at our most complex, can respect the intricacies of a monster without losing sight of their monstrousness.

Voices Down the Corridor: Martha Marcy May Marlene

The cult at the center of Martha Marcy May Marlene is everything that Hollywood wants cults to be: menacing, violent, indiscriminately sexual, grungy yet photogenic and not shy about getting naked. Living in seclusion on farmland somewhere in rural New York, they don’t chant in unison or sacrifice animals (at least, not by design), but otherwise they cover all the bases. They are led by a man named Patrick, played by a soft-spoken but forceful John Hawkes, whose scraggly facial hair and wiry frame remind of Charles Manson (he even sings and plays the guitar), and they all happily assume new identities while forgoing any interest in material possessions. There is truth, I suspect, in all of this, but writer/director Sean Durkin doesn’t appear to be aiming at realism. He’s going for atmosphere, and to that end Patrick’s cult is the monster in the dark making things go bump. It’s the stuff of our nightmares.

Why would anyone ever live this way? In observing the shattered psyche of a young woman who is known as Martha in the real world and as Marcy May in Patrick’s cult (except when she answers the phone, in which case, like all the women, she identifies herself as Marlene), Durkin’s film gives us several reasons. A heightened sense of community, fostered by a communal existence within an exclusivist colony, would be one. A strong sense of significance, cultivated by a leader who knows how to look people in the eye and tell them what they need to hear, would be another. But not to be overlooked, at least in Martha’s case, is the steep price of the nonrefundable admission. Don’t misunderstand: Patrick’s cult doesn’t collect dues. It takes from its members something far more expensive: the ability to leave the cult the same people they were when they entered it. Forget about name changes, forget about severed family ties. Once you’ve been the victim of ritualistic sexual assault, or an accomplice to it, you aren’t who you were. Why stay? Because you can’t really go back.

The Edge of Art: The Mill and the Cross

In The Mill and the Cross a vast landscape and a vast canvas are one and the same. Director Lech Majewski’s overlong but unforgettable film, based on a book by Michael Francis Gibson, observes Pieter Bruegel as he conceives his 1564 work The Way to Calvary, in which the Passion is reimagined in a valley in Flanders, with Spanish soldiers doling out the abuse normally ascribed to Romans. As the movie opens, Bruegel stands in front of a panorama of not-quite-still activity that represents either what the painting will be or what it is already. Dozens of live figures – mostly humans, but also horses, cows and so on – stand as if posing, and Bruegel looks upon them as if examining an instant in time. The Way to Calvary doesn’t come to life in this film so much as life becomes The Way to Calvary. The film follows Bruegel, played by Rutger Hauer, as he walks through his hometown and finds inspiration to put into his painting, or it follows him as he metaphorically walks through his painting and sees his community within it. Maybe both. It’s difficult to tell where the real ends and the imagined begins.

That’s the joy of The Mill and the Cross, which at its best demonstrates that paintings, while static, aren’t inanimate. Majewski’s film both burrows within the painting and explores beyond its frame. We enter the rocky precipice wherein the miller lives and works with his family, before ultimately standing like God above the activity below. We enter the home of a modest couple who share their living space with a cow. We enter a forest where a tree is being felled, eventually to become an apparatus for torture. These vignettes aren’t at the core of the visual narrative depicted in The Way to Calvary, but they are part of its apparent overall message: Bruegel’s painting suggests that the cruelty of the powerful and the apathy of the masses that must have been present in Jesus Christ’s bloody walk to Golgotha could be found in his own era, too. And not unlike the way Bruegel enlivened the Passion through a modernization of setting, Majewski enlivens The Way to Calvary through a modernization of form, as an inert painting becomes animated cinema.