Flashback, 1981: 'Absence of Malice'

This post is the second in my "Flashback 1981" series: viewings and responses to films released as close to thirty years ago as possible. The first, on Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City, was posted on this blog in late August.

Why 1981, one might ask? Two reasons, both of them mostly arbitrary. The first is that I have often neglected films of the 1980s and early 1990s much more than any other historical era—while I've enthusiastically explored silent film, classics of the early sound era to the mid-twentieth century, and developing New Waves and changes in international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, I for some reason have been mostly uninterested in films of the 80s and 90s, until now. Secondly, I was born in 1984 and did not really start paying attention to movies as a social art form until the late 1990s, so I feel like it will be interesting to further explore and chart the changing cultural climate of the era into which I was born. 

Absence of Malice   116m., R, USA

Release Date   November 19, 1981

Distributors   Columbia Pictures

Director   Sydney Pollack

Writer   Kurt Luedtke (uncredited: David Rayfiel)

Producers   Sydney Pollack & Ronald L. Schwary

Music   Dave Grusin

Cinematography   Owen Roizman

Editor   Sheldon Kahn

Production Design   Terence Marsh

Cast   Paul Newman, Sally Field, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Luther Adler,  Barry Primus, Josef Sommer, John Harkins, Don Hood, Wilford Brimley, Arnie Ross, Anne Marie Napoles, Shelley Spurlock

Originally, I had intended to post an entry in this "Flashback 1981" series about twice a month, hoping that by keeping tabs on successive releases in late 1981 I could get a very general sense of filmmaking trends and styles of the time. There were a few films I was especially looking forward to watching or revisiting: the Walter Hill actioner Southern Comfort (scored by Ry Cooder), released on September 21, 1981; My Dinner with Andre (October 11), which I saw about ten years ago and, I would expect, might appreciate a little more fully this time around; Shock Treatment (October 31), the semi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which might have made a fine, excessively-80s addition to my hungover Halloween weekend movie marathon; and Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (November 6), which hardly needs an excuse to be rewatched.

I'll be honest: much of the reason I didn't rewatch or write about any of these movies was a hefty work schedule, and the fact that there were plenty of new releases in theaters that I decided to catch up on instead. But another reason is that a surprising number of movies from the early 1980s—even those which might be considered classics, or at least fondly-remembered—are surprisingly difficult to find on DVD. I could only find Southern Comfort, for example, in a shoddy version posted on YouTube, and The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I assumed would be one of those overly stately "literary" movies available on a bare-bones "Special Edition" reissue DVD, was nowhere to be found. This makes me wonder if early-80s movies occupy a no-man's-land of past releases that have been given the cold shoulder by studios when deciding which of their holdings to reissue (though I suppose this is true of past releases from any period—it only makes sense that studios would give their attention to titles that have the greatest name recognition).

In any case, it's somewhat fitting that my second post in this Flashback series addresses Sydney Pollack's Absence of Malice, as it would make a nifty double-feature with Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City. Both movies are about rampant corruption and the almost-inevitable loss of honor and morality in modern social institutions. Prince of the City's undercover narcotics officer is torn apart by guilt and self-loathing after he starts turning evidence over to an Internal Affairs investigation—he feels like he's betrayed his coworkers and friends and, what's worse, violated the unwritten code of honor among lawmen. Meanwhile, Absence of Malice's Megan (Sally Field), a journalist who begins investigating a liquor distributor for possible ties to the mob, compromises her integrity and destroys the lives of those around her with sensational stories that value tawdry gossip over the truth. Both movies even feature Bob Balaban in practically the exact same role: a weaselly government agent who, in his dogged efforts to advance his own career, cares little about what actually happens to the people he exploits.    

Between the two movies, Prince of the City is unquestionably leagues beyond Absence of Malice. Lumet's film is an epic, troubling account of how law, big business, the drug trade, and the federal government intersect in ways more symbiotic than antagonistic, ultimately shattering the lives of more than a few people. Its atmosphere of greed and self-compromise seemed particularly attuned to the economic state of the U.S. in the early 1980s, when urban drug trafficking was escalating at an alarming pace and Ronald Reagan's corporate-friendly government made the lower and upper classes drastically stratified. Absence of Malice, on the other hand, doesn't really seem to consider the specific sociopolitical climate of its story; it's a general (even cliched) take on the old journalistic cautionary tale about writers valuing "the scoop" over the actual lives of the people involved. Although Paul Newman did admit in a 1983 interview that the film was a direct attack on the New York Post's sordid "Page Six" gossip column, similar subject matter had been tackled in Billy Wilder's 1950 film Ace in the Hole and is even more pertinent today. In other words, Absence of Malice could have taken place anywhere at any time; Megan's lack of journalistic integrity has more to do with her own ambition and her romantic relationships than with any kind of external pressure from a corrupt industry or government. (Not that this character-based approach is less valid than a sociopolitical one; in the context of Absence of Malice, though, it's certainly less interesting.)

What the movie has to say about journalism and letting your emotions distort your occupational duty is simple, trite, and uninteresting, but Absence of Malice does feature some performances that lend the film a tough, compassionate humanism, giving it a much greater sense of gravity than might be expected. Field handles the vulnerability of her character more ably than her steely resourcefulness (for a character who's supposed to be so singlemindedly ambitious, she seems remarkably passive a lot of the time), but it's nice to see her in a semi-serious dramatic role in what was arguably the prime of her career (two years after her Oscar nomination for Norma Rae). She's someone I've always wanted to see more of, and Absence of Malice is a nice indication of her unique onscreen presence. 

But the movie really belongs to Paul Newman and, in a significant supporting role, Melinda Dillon. Newman plays Michael Gallagher, the liquor distributor who, after he's slandered in Megan's article and unduly investigated by slimy federal prosecutors, plots his devious (and too-convoluted) revenge against the public institutions that vilified him. Absence of Malice is ultimately a revenge story posing as a morality play, but at least that revenge is given sophistication and quiet, burning anger by Newman. In what might be deemed the middle period of his career (after the youthful vigor of movies like Hud, yet before the twilight irascibility of, say, Nobody's Fool), Newman is still quietly heroic, world-weary and stoic but restraining untold feelings. His Gallagher is an iconic Hollywood prototype (the cynical, intense crusader who's always one step ahead of everyone else) in a movie that's supposed to reflect real life, but that's what makes him so interesting and appealing to watch; rather than him seeming out-of-place, it's as though the movie strives yet fails to reach the same level of energy and bravado that he displays. Gallagher is granted one emotional breakdown: a suitably unsettling scene in which he claws at Megan, hissing furiously at her until he literally throws her onto a dirty warehouse floor. It's a pivotal and impressive scene, mostly because it unleashes the pent-up hostility of his character and allows some uncomfortable cruelty to sneak into a movie that's otherwise pretty tame (even though it pretends not to be).

Melinda Dillon's character is a bit more simplistic: she's all saintliness and misplaced trust as the Catholic school-worker who's most tragically affected by Megan's dishonorable actions. It's no coincidence her character's name is Teresa. But the movie obviously needs to give a human face to the negative repercussions of Megan's slander, and that face is given sensitivity and a poignant sense of naivete by Dillon (another actress whose late '70s/early '80s work I need to catch up on). The best moment in the whole movie, in fact, is her resigned, matter-of-fact attempt to suppress a shocking revelation about her (printed in another of Megan's articles) by walking up and down her block and stealing all of the newspapers from her neighbors' front lawns.

Stylistically the movie is even less distinctive than Prince of the City; Lumet and Pollack both come from television backgrounds, which lent them both a concise, uncomplicated style that could be either powerfully compact or lifelessly dull. With Absence of Malice, Pollack is content primarily to point and shoot, although he has the good sense to evoke both the sun and squalor of the Miami setting, and to let the characters dominate the storytelling. If those characters sometimes seem a little one-note, not to mention in the service of disseminating overly trite moral lessons, then at least they are given occasionally-exciting life by at least three actors who were all working at the top of their game. 

NEXT: Warren Beatty's Reds (Dec. 4)

New Releases: 'Drive'

Drive
100 minutes, R, USA
Release Date   September 16, 2011
Distributor   FilmDistrict
Director   Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by   Hossein Amini, based on the book by James Sallis
Producers   David Lancaster, Bill Lischak, Michel Litvak, Linda McDonough, John Palermo, Marc Platt, Gigi Pritzker, Adam Siegel, Jeffrey Stott, Gary Michael Walters
Music   Cliff Martinez
Cinematography   Newton Thomas Sigel
Editing   Mat Newman
Production Design   Beth Mickle
Art Direction   Christopher Tandon

Cast   Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Kaden Leos, Jeff Wolfe, James Biberi, Russ Tamblyn, Joey Bucaro, Tiara Parker

In his recent appraisal of the Dardenne Brothers’ The Kid with a Bike, Jonathan Rosenbaum laments what he sees as “the most detestable [single trend] in contemporary commercial filmmaking...: exploitation movies that go out into the world as ‘serious’ art movies.” As an example of the moral hypocrisy, the underhanded audience-pandering, that would have extreme violence standing in for sensitivity and seriousness and depth, Rosenbaum cites Drive as an example. He’s right—Drive is the most extreme example in recent (or even distant) memory of a movie that so badly wants to have it both ways. It wants to eat its cake and have it too, to use an outworn aphorism; or more accurately, it wants to shove some nasty dessert in our faces, smearing it roughly into the mouths/eyes of audiences distanced by irony and detachment, but the movie also wants to pretend to gently offer us such desserts on a gleaming silver platter. Is it a disgusting badass exploitation flick or a sensitive existential character study? The movie doesn’t know, and it doesn’t ask or expect us to decide. Some critics have graciously labeled the movie “ambiguous,” but that seems like an overreaching way to say that the movie can’t decide what it wants to be (thematically, conceptually) because it has nothing on its mind. This leaves us with a movie that is unquestionably well-made—it builds and maintains an astonishing level of dread and stoic misery with impressive formal exactness—but insultingly fake about its own pretensions. 

The director, Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s made some fascinating movies before, especially 2008’s Bronson), has offered an excuse for Drive’s bipolar nature in interviews: he is interested, he says, in the duality of macho action heroes, whose (typically) rigid black-and-white moral decisions mask an unsettling aggression and a penchant for snapping into brutal violence instantaneously. If he’s trying to deconstruct action movies’ typical characterization of their protagonists, he’s in some good company: this duality has also been on the mind of directors such as Robert Aldrich, Sam Peckinpah, Kathryn Bigelow, and David Cronenberg (whose A History of Violence may be the textbook example of this kind of morally-shaded deconstruction). Those directors, to varying degrees, all tackle the emotional drives, the external circumstances, and/or the latent psychological neuroses that lead their action heroes to commit acts that could be reasonably deemed either selflessly heroic or viciously bloodthirsty. Movies like Kiss Me Deadly, Straw Dogs, Point Break, or A History of Violence don’t attempt to tidily explain their characters’ proclivity to violence, but they do at least try to explore it, to place the characters in such a world and to convey their actions in such a way that might suggest why they’re so willing to do such awful things.

What seems self-defeating about Drive is that Refn is operating on a different wavelength here: this movie’s style is more reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville than of, say, Peckinpah. Melville’s cool, distanced observations of professional lawmen and criminals at odds seemed so stripped-down that they avoided fleshing out their characters at all. Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, for example, primarily seemed to observe their stoic characters going through the motions, filling their preordained roles of policeman or thief almost obligatorily, seeming to know that they were already caught up in a web of fate that would kill them in the end. It doesn’t seem off-base to call such films existential because the characters are defined almost exclusively by their actions; like Meursault in Albert Camus' novel The Stranger, Melville’s characters often seem resigned to the fact that they have no free will, that a series of causes and effects have led them to carry out their actions, and that emotional or psychological reactions to the world around them would not in any way influence their behavior. Camus’ writing in The Stranger is deceptively simple: he does not psychologize or appraise his main character, but at the same time there are a wealth of interpretations that the reader may reflect back on to Meursault. (Why does he kill the nameless Arab? Camus’ unwillingness to even ponder this question forces us to question why we do anything in our lives, just as Melville’s films sometimes seem like tauntingly cryptic observations of human specimens trapped in a cage.)     

Drive, apparently, is meant to be a similarly existentialist observation of a character switching robotically back and forth between sensitive self-sacrifice and god-awful brutality. The Driver (Ryan Gosling), as he’s known, spends his time working in a garage and performing stunts for Hollywood action movies. By night, he hires himself out as a professional driver for thieves, hitmen, disreputable businessmen, whoever—his only stipulation is that he’s given a five-minute window to pick up the loot or the henchmen, anything beyond that window is not his responsibility. He doesn’t know what to do when he’s not driving; early in the movie, he returns home for less than a minute, dejectedly looks around his apartment, and immediately leaves again, aimlessly driving around Los Angeles. This robotic state of being—just keep moving until the ride is over—is meant to be a stripped-down representation of human existence. Melville's influence is all over the beginning of this movie, especially in a meticulously-planned opening heist that reveals the one and only pleasure the Driver feels in his life: knowing that he’s good at what he does.

But the Driver’s clocklike existence is impeded, burst apart, by a random meeting with a next-door neighbor, adorable Irene (Carey Mulligan). She has a young son named Benicio, whose father is in prison for undisclosed (but easily-guessed) reasons. The Driver and Irene almost involuntarily become attracted to each other—they fall into the other’s company, they smile and flirt awkwardly, tenuously. Gosling and Mulligan are so good that we believe in their mutual attraction; each fleeting glimpse and touch suggests characters who don’t want to feel anything for each other (she’s still married, after all; he lives his life based on a principle of austere isolation) but do so anyway, against their will.

A week later, Irene’s husband, Standard, is released from prison. We think we know where the movie’s going here—a tense confrontation in a hallway makes it apparent that Standard distrusts the friendship between his wife and the Driver—but there are no altercations between the two, and only the slightest antagonism. In fact, after Standard is mercilessly beaten by a couple thugs in a parking garage, the Driver hesitatingly, and foolishly, offers assistance to Standard. In order for Irene and Benicio to remain safe, Standard must pull off (wait for it…) One Last Heist, for which the Driver will act as accomplice. We know the heist will go horribly awry, but when it does it still catches us off guard: Drive takes its time getting to its lower depths, spending nearly an hour with drawn-out, quiet scenes of mounting dread before the bodies start piling up. And after such a long stretch of quiet intensity, the blood splatters—a head, literally, explodes—and the movie smacks us awake with its aggressive contradictions. Sensitivity and slaughter—all, apparently, in the name of jerking around the audience.

The movie is so well-made that I wanted to believe it had more to say, that there was a reason for its attention-grabbing nastiness. But the Best Director prize that Refn won at the Cannes Film Festival (where audiences reportedly stood up and cheered at the exploding-head scene) was, all evidence indicates, a reward for a well-brought-off prank, essentially congratulating the director on making artifice look substantial. I’m willing to admit that the exploding-head scene is incredibly powerful—it does viscerally reflect the movie’s conflicting states of mind, and allows the slowly mounting tension to erupt, with disgusting liquescence, at just the right time—but things get worse from there (in terms of gore as well as in terms of phoniness). 

The epitome (or the nadir, depending on how you look at it) of this “sensitively violent” hypocrisy comes in a scene set in an elevator: the Driver and Irene share a long, slow ride to the ground floor, with the Driver trying to make amends to her for hiding the truth about his partnership with her husband. (I’m not kidding when I say that, after Irene slaps him in the previous scene, the Driver sheds a single, lugubrious tear.) An admittedly gorgeous slow-motion shot—set to an opulent techno-synth love song, with the fluorescent lights of the elevator flickering grandly—has the Driver sweeping Irene to the corner of the elevator and kissing her passionately (here we have a relief of the prolonged sexual tension that mirrors the aforementioned relief of the film’s mounting threat of violence; both moments are technically faultless). But there’s another man in the elevator with them—a villainous hitman, which the Driver detects when he spots a handgun bulging from the man’s jacket. (Why would Irene and the Driver passionately make out in an elevator next to a total stranger? Because it would make a good scene…that’s all that really matters here.) The elevator reaches the bottom floor and violence erupts: the Driver pushes Irene out of the opening door; he proceeds to kill the bodyguard in outrageously violent fashion, essentially crushing his skull by stomping on it incessantly. (Refn reportedly asked Gaspar Noé for advice on how to make the head-stomping scene more visceral and disturbing. You know you’re heading in the wrong direction when you’re asking him for filmmaking advice.) Though the scene was shortened so that the film could receive an R rating, we’re still not spared grisly images revealing the full extent of the victim’s mutilation. Irene backs out of the elevator in horror, as the Driver gapes back at her, wordlessly, bloodstained. We’re sickened…but isn’t it all in the name of love?

How susceptible does Refn think the audience is? I understand that that’s precisely what he’s trying to challenge—our willingness to believe that action movie heroes behave virtuously and rightly, despite the violence they perpetrate—but by pairing his characters’ emotions and their violent atrocities so intimately, he makes them both seem ridiculous. The gore, the brutality, seem like little more than ploys in order to make us sit up and pay attention because they serve the fatuous notion that the Driver is committing them out of love, out of selflessness. Concurrently, the tenderness he feels towards Irene and Benicio just seems like a pose to inject some humanism into an aggressively heartless affair. Cynicism and artifice posing as compassion is the worst kind of anti-humanism imaginable.

How are we supposed to feel about the Driver? It would be fine, maybe even commendable, if the movie didn’t ultimately try to answer that question, instead forcing us to decide. But Drive does ultimately provide an answer for us. Refn goes to great lengths to convey the Driver’s rugged emotionalism, his man-of-few-words vulnerability; he may crush skulls with his feet and force a bullet down a man’s throat with the claw of a hammer, but really he’s just misunderstood and lonely. Swooping slow-motion shots of Irene and the Driver walking down hallways, set to melancholy yet romantic music, as Irene quietly takes in Gosling’s chiseled profile reveal just how enamored we’re supposed to be of his gruff manliness. And even though he’s (at times) maniacally violent, he’s better than the movie’s real villains—a loudmouthed gangster (Ron Perlman) who sets the plot in motion by sending his goons to beat the shit out of Standard; a conniving businessman (Albert Brooks) who emotionlessly stabs a man in the eye with a fork, then repeatedly plunges a butcher’s knife into his throat. The final showdown, in fact, is between one of these villains and the Driver, and when the latter character seems to prevail, driving off into the sunset while undergoing extreme blood loss, there’s no question that we’re supposed to take satisfaction in his victory. (This final showdown is filmed almost entirely in shadow, with sharp objects sticking out of bodies in silhouette—an approach that you might think would be preferable, since it doesn’t indulge in hollowly shocking violence, but which may be just as off-putting by acting infinitely more serious than anything in this movie deserves.) There’s no moral ambiguity here; there are heroes and villains like always, it’s just that the former act more violently than they usually do (or, at least, that violence is shown to us more unflinchingly). 

The majority of critics have been duped by Drive’s sleek style, by its initial patience and its quietness, by sensitive performances in the service of paper-thin characters. Make no mistake, to the extent that Drive works beyond its style, it’s almost entirely because of the cast. Gosling is fascinating to watch whether he’s in sad-eyed sensitive mode or psychotic bloodlust mode—the contradiction inherent in his character would seem much more juvenile in another actor’s bloodied hands. Mulligan is miscast but we can’t help but care for her, and their chemistry is remarkable. In supporting roles, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, and Ron Perlman may not make their characters seem like actual human beings (Cranston fares best of all), but at least they make them charismatic and interesting to watch. Like practically everything in Drive, the performances are technically proficient and well-honed, but they disguise an underlying attitude towards the world (and the audience) that is seriously deluded, hypocritical, and condescending.

Why condescending? Because the movie assumes we’ll take its aesthetic at face value: that open ending, those artsy compositions and lighting, the meticulousness of the framing, they all must mean that the movie is serious and deep and extraordinary. But it gives us nothing beyond its style to merit such faux-profundity. Nobody in the movie is deep or interesting enough to warrant Drive’s self-seriousness. The film’s makers assume that audiences today are so cynical and ironic and detached from actual emotion that we’ll take a semblance of emotion for the real thing—in other words, that caring about characters (or, by extension, about human beings) is now just a matter of images and surface appearances, that all it takes is good cinematography to convince us of the movie’s sincerity. More than any Quentin Tarantino movie, Drive antes up the violence and the grittiness of earlier exploitation movies and asks us to believe that they stand for innovation and intelligence. There’s more sincerity in any one scene of Jackie Brown than in all of Drive.

Classics: 'A Matter of Life and Death' (1946)

A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)
104 minutes, PG, UK
Release Date   December 25, 1946
Distributor   Universal Pictures
Directors   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Written by   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Producers   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Music   Allan Gray
Cinematography   Jack Cardiff
Editing   Reginald Mills
Production Design   Alfred Junge
Special Effects   Henry Harris and Douglas Woolsey
Cast   David Niven, Kim Hunter, Robert Coote, Kathleen Byron, Richard Attenborough, Bonor Colleano, Joan Maude, Marius Goring, Roger Livesey, Robert Atkins, Bob Roberts, Edwin Max, Betty Potter, Abraham Sofaer, Raymond Massey

You’re sucked in to A Matter of Life and Death (or Stairway to Heaven, as it was known by its American title) before the end of the opening credits, which are etched into an impossibly blue background that soon segues into the lush expanse of the cosmos. Stars and planets shimmer in this animated effects shot, which pans across infinity until it finally alights on earth and dissolves into the story proper. Over this fantastic first shot, the words of a narrator can be heard: “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” One of the overwhelming feats that the movie accomplishes is that it convinces us of both the universe’s immensity and of individual humans’ significant role in it: there may be an infinity of things we don’t know, questions we’ll never be able to answer, principles of reality we’re not even minutely aware of, but that doesn’t make us less important in the grand scheme of things. In a particularly romantic and extravagant mood, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger convince us that the universe would stop functioning if humanity was relentlessly violent and murderous towards one another; that, in other words, it’s humanly love that keeps the wheels of heaven and the cosmos rolling—a nakedly sentimental lesson that aches with the sense of urgency bestowed by World War II (A Matter of Life and Death was released in 1946).

If you’re engrossed in A Matter of Life and Death by the end of the second minute, you’re completely entranced by it before the end of the fifth, and maybe around the fifteenth or so you’re bowled over, speechless, enamored. How could you not be? Technicolor has never seemed to pop as much as in Jack Cardiff’s cinematography for Powell and Pressburger films, and of those, never as much as it does here. The oranges and yellows of a burning wreck, the greens of an idyllic garden, the deep red of Kim Hunter’s lipstick—they’re all impossibly lush, as though the color is throbbing, realer than reality. (Here is a movie that incontrovertibly disproves the theory that the more fantastic is a film’s premise, the less immersive that movie’s evocation of reality will be.) The vibrancy of the colors is accentuated because half of the film—the half set in heaven—is shot in silky black-and-white, while all the earthbound scenes dazzle with their color. (The color process is even mentioned by name in one surprisingly self-reflexive line of dialogue, as an angel laments the lack of Technicolor in the heavens.) The color scheme is clever and exquisitely done (every dissolve from black-and-white to color will likely leave you awestruck), but it also perfectly complements what the movie’s about: between eternal heaven and an earthly life in which you’ve found true love, the more magical, hopeful, and blissful of the two worlds is undeniably the latter.

That’s the key to the lasting appeal of Powell and Pressburger’s films: technically masterful though they are, they impress most of all because of their aching humanity, the intense empathy with which they view their characters. At times the vivid emotionalism of their stories, their larger-than-life dramas, can date awkwardly, as they do with Black Narcissus's repressed nuns or The Red Shoes' non-ballet sequences. A Matter of Life and Death, though, carries out a sublime balancing act: as technically innovative as it is achingly sincere, it's the work of humanists as well as stylists.

The movie is about a cosmic oversight: RAF pilot Peter Carter is supposed to die. We meet him at the tail end of a failed air strike sometime during World War II, desperately trying to radio back to land while his wrecked aircraft struggles to remain in the air. He contacts an American radio operator named June and, improbably (but charmingly), they fall in love over the airwaves. Carter quotes classical poetry to her before he leaps from his plane without a parachute—here's a movie so stylized and so unabashedly romantic that quoting Marvell and Sir Walter Raleigh doesn't seem out of place.

Carter is scheduled to die on this night, but he doesn't: the heavenly transporter assigned to retrieve him cannot see him through the dense fog (occasioning a wry joke about typical British weather). So Carter washes ashore and almost immediately finds June bicycling down the beach, a coincidence that would seem contrived if the movie wasn't already operating on such a cosmically-charmed, magically-predestined wavelength. We cut from the gorgeous Technicolor greenery on earth to the black-and-white (though opulently stylized) bureaucracy in heaven, where the angelic transporter responsible for Carter is being reprimanded for his mistake. He's called Conductor 71, but apparently was a French aristocrat beheaded during the Reign of Terror.

Sent back to earth to reclaim Carter's soul, Conductor 71 freezes time as Carter and June canoodle in the forest (the kind dotted with impossibly bright colors) and tries to convince Carter to cede himself to the heavens, thus righting the cosmic balance. Carter unsurprisingly refuses and proposes a trial: he will defend himself in a heavenly court, using June's and his own love as evidence, and argue for the right to continue living.

As usual in fantastic stories like this, we have a parallel storyline that could propose a rational explanation: June suspects that Carter's visions are hallucinations brought on by brain trauma, and enlists the help of her friend, Doctor Reeves, in diagnosing him. The relationship between Reeves and Carter is fascinating to watch, a burgeoning friendship built out of mutual respect and a reckoning with unexplainable laws of the universe that they can't hope to fathom. (David Niven and Roger Livesey, as Carter and Reeves respectively, make their friendship a moving one; neither actor has ever given as sensitive a performance as they do here.) Reeves believes that Carter's hallucinations and faltering health are the result of a concussion, the effects of which may be alleviated by brain surgery. The entire climax of Carter's heavenly trial, then, may be nothing more than Carter's own anesthetized brink-of-death vision, a parallel fantasy in which he's allowed to plead for the right to go on living.

Released in the immediate aftermath of World War II, A Matter of Life and Death's impassioned plea for love and brotherhood is honest, direct. The movie tells us, adamantly and sweetly, that love is its own heaven on earth—preferable, in any case, to the legions of G.I.s that we see filling the heavens in A Matter of Life and Death. The message seems less cloying when we consider it as a desperately hopeful response to the ravages of war.

A Matter of Life and Death's cosmic courtroom

Late in the film, a showdown occurs during Carter's heavenly trial between the prosecutor—an American named Abraham Farlan, who was killed by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War—and Carter's British defense counsel, a semi-major character whose death I won't give away here. A surprisingly long sequence (maybe fifteen minutes in all) consists of their proud, vitriolic back-and-forth, a dialogue reflecting fraught British-US tensions at the time. (After the war, much of the British public was resentful of the lingering presence of US soldiers in some of their cities.) The debate turns increasingly towards the merits and injustices of each respective culture—even a dull British cricket match and a grating American pop tune are used as detrimental “evidence” against each other. The argument goes deeper, addressing values, crimes against humanity—slavery, the exploitation of foreign cultures, invasion. An all-American jury is eventually proposed to act as demonstration of the country's sense of justice and honor—a jury that contains a multicultural assortment of Americans, reflecting both a nod to American “melting pot” eclecticism and a criticism of the United States' takeover of cultures. (An all-black regiment of the American army seated in the audience at this heavenly trial—as well as the appearance of numerous slaves in heaven—offer potent visual illustrations of American racial inequality.) For a long stretch, the movie turns away from Carter altogether, instead focusing on British-American antagonism. The move at first seems bold and disorienting, and definitely adds unexpected folds into the fabric of the narrative, but really the whole film could be described as “about” British-American relations—considering that June is British and Carter American. In the end, then, the love between June and Carter offers a union between both the man and the woman and between the US and the UK—hopeful in every way. While the lengthy dialogue between the American and British counsellors come off as slightly didactic or transparent, this should be seen as an admirably direct and earnest address to the audience—propaganda, in a way, but with the most beneficial aims in mind. Like Chaplin's climactic speech in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), we're directly asked to consider war a massive injustice, an inhumane crime committed by states against multitudes of citizens; the speeches in both films may be didactic, but only because war is the catalyst and social dialogue the aim.

A Matter of Life and Death fascinates beyond its sociopolitical subtext. It seems to hit upon a new idea suddenly, in the middle of a scene, yet somehow incorporate it naturally into the movie as a whole. We are introduced to Dr. Reeves as he is operating a camera obscura in his attic, essentially allowing him a godlike reflection of everything going on in his village in the immediate vicinity. The images his camera obscura offers us are gorgeous, fuzzy, dreamlike—Dr. Reeves' elaborate mirror setup acts as a parallel to the film camera, offering us visual access to worlds we otherwise would not know. This brief introduction to Dr. Reeves doesn't seem to have much of a point beyond allowing Powell (who typically addressed the directing duties, as Pressburger concentrated on the screenplay) and Jack Cardiff an excuse to experiment with perspective and framing and indulge in their visual inclinations. But it also seems like a natural diversion somehow, and warmly suggests Dr. Reeves as an inquisitive, playful, enthusiastic innovator—a scientist who stands in contrast to Carter's flights of fancy. Or, later, consider a brief cutaway to a group of British soldiers rehearsing a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream—a moment partially played for comedy, but also an appropriate allusion for a film that's somewhat about the knotty relationship between gods and mortals. In short, the movie is lively, intuitive, and incredibly fast-paced, fascinating for the unexpected directions in which the agile narrative takes us.

The special effects are rightfully celebrated as some of the most innovative and beautiful of the time (or ever), and there's no question that the vast expanse of the heavens—the seemingly endless staircase, flanked by immense statues, that stretches into infinity; the massive courtroom, a sort of floating coliseum, somehow surrounded by blankets of wispy clouds and shimmering sky—are astonishing in their vastness, their meticulousness. The sets themselves are elaborate blends of matte paintings, models, and enormous locales with seemingly hundreds of extras—a fantastic visualization of an impossibly beautiful heaven. (Heaven in this movie seems remarkably like our typical image of the afterlife from fables and myths—which makes you wonder if its portrayal in the movie reflected popular culture's conception of heaven or if it helped to entrench it in our cultural collective.) The most awe-inspiring shot in the whole movie begins in Technicolor in an emergency room, tilts down and slowly dissolves into a serious of bubbles erupting in liquid, dazzling in color (an influence for the opening of Kwaidan?), until the image dissolves to black-and-white, tilting further down over the milky, cloudy expanse of heaven to introduce us to the first image of the courtroom—an endpoint that is an immense composition in itself.

But A Matter of Life and Death is also a “movie movie”—meaning its splendor, its unique power, can't be encapsulated by words. It's the kind of thing you have to see to believe, an appraisal which, I would suggest, is appropriate for all masterful cinema. The foregoing paragraphs have not, I'm sure, come close to the bewildering effect of this movie's stunning color or precise compositions, or the bleeding sincerity, the charming rosy-eyed optimism, that it offers.

New Releases: 'Another Earth'

So far it's been a strong year for movies both American and otherwise, but we're never safe from grating pseudo-profound parables about tragic destiny and redemptive second chances—a lesson drearily reiterated by Another Earth. The movie won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, where it reportedly received a standing ovation (according to Variety), and was almost immediately picked up by major indie distributor Fox Searchlight—all of which suggest that some audiences are still taking one-note, morose performances, grainy handheld cinematography, and head-smackingly obvious metaphors as signs of profundity and creativity. Really, though, the only sign of uniqueness to be found anywhere in Another Earth is in its basic premise, and even this shard of originality is limited to a few luminescent shots of the titular earth doppelganger suspended in the sky.

Brit Marling (also credited as producer and cowriter) stars as Rhoda Williams, a promising 17-year-old astrophysics student who has just been accepted to MIT. On the night of her high school graduation, Rhoda celebrates excessively at a house party that's shown to us in obnoxious two-second snippets—director/editor Mike Cahill employs the laziest brand of "naturalism" imaginable, cutting so restlessly that we can only assume a longer stretch of continuity would reveal how unsuccessful he is at conveying human behavior (this is a conclusion we'll come to sooner or later anyway). Driving home, Rhoda hears a news story on the radio about the discovery of another planet: a second earth, suddenly discovered just outside of our own earth's atmosphere, with unknown physical properties. Drunkenly, Rhoda cranes her head out the car window and gazes at the parallel planet, majestic against the night sky. She crashes head-on into another car; a woman and her young son are killed instantly, while the man in the driver's seat is put into a coma. It's a sign of the movie's laziness that the family is blissfully chatting away about the name of the toy in the young boy's hands immediately before he's killed; this isn't just your average nuclear family, this is something so blissfully perfect it's destined for cruel annihilation at the hands of a sadistic Higher Being and an overly calculating writer/director.

Rhoda is sent to prison for four years for driving while intoxicated and vehicular manslaughter; when she's released, Brit Marling's dead-eyed stare (conveyed via shaky, grubby-looking shots of her character staring out of train windows while an aggressively somber score drones on the soundtrack—courtesy of a band named Fall On Your Sword, whose music is as bad as their name) tells us that Rhoda is, you know, sad. (Marling has been lauded for her performance, which is baffling—she operates on one unchanging wavelength for the entire movie. That's why we can't take her plight seriously—a performance that only aims for soul-crushing guilt can't even approach believability or empathy.) Rhoda takes a dreary janitorial job at a high school and eventually approaches the man whose life she ruined four years ago—the driver of the car she hit, a former composer named John Burroughs (William Mapother), who used to teach composition at Yale University. Another Earth is obviously concerned with the depression and hopelessness we all go through as everyday human beings, given that its two protagonists are once-promising intellectuals attached to MIT and Yale—does the movie assume we would be less interested in their difficult situations if they were just two hardworking nobodies, toiling away at nine-to-five jobs?

Anyway, Rhoda shows up at the home of Dr. Burroughs. She's rehearsed her apology, a confession that she hopes will alleviate some of her debilitating guilt. Suddenly face-to-face with the man whose wife and son she killed, though—he's now an alcoholic oaf in a refuse-stained bathrobe, a figure we might expect to see in an Off-Off-Off Broadway play about 1930s tenement dwellers—she pretends to be a consultant for a cleaning agency and offers to pick up his deteriorating home, free of charge. He accepts halfheartedly. She keeps on coming back, cleaning his house (get it, she cleans up his life!) and tearing up the checks he gives her afterwards. They develop an attachment somewhere between helpless desperation and genuine attachment, a relationship punctuated by clunky visual metaphors like one of Burroughs' deceased son's old T-shirts, which Rhoda absentmindedly sends through the wash, predictably instigating a feverish (but, needless to say, oh-so-humanly-imperfect) rant by Burroughs replete with twitching histrionics. This is the kind of movie in which no relationship can exist without a prop department's worth of meaningful things.

Four years after the discovery of that parallel planet, it's still unexplored when Rhoda is released from prison. Communications sent to Earth 2 have gone unanswered; no evidence has suggested that the planet is habitable, and it's never explained how or why the planet simply popped up right next door to ours'. (The whims of a lazy pair of melodramatists are the most likely explanation.) Actually, this vaguely sci-fi setup, which almost inadvertently raises a slew of metaphysical questions the movie never begins to explore, remains compelling for a while. Beyond its potency as a dreamy visual accent, the existence of Earth 2 makes you believe (or, at least, hope) that the movie is going in some promising directions. The best scene in Another Earth is a televised radio transmission from one of "our" NASA officials to a seemingly abandoned control center on Earth 2; suddenly, though, this official's radio call is answered—astonishingly, by her parallel self, her doppelganger, in this alternate universe. It's a tense, mysterious, unpretentious moment, and if the movie had at least touched upon some of the quandaries raised by this bizarre metaphysical moment, it would have at least been interesting.

But it becomes apparent almost immediately after this suspenseful scene that the ominous parallelism of Earth 2 simply exists as an allegory for the lame existential crises experienced by Rhoda and John. Rhoda is obsessed with the parallel planet; desperate for escape, and clinging to the possibility that, on Earth 2, her "other self" never drunkenly killed a woman and young boy, she enters a contest in which the winners will be chosen to join the first civilian excursion to Earth 2. Some of these parallelisms would have been intriguing if the movie had handled them with any dexterity, insight, compassion, or grace, but these are concepts that Cahill is apparently unaware of. Will Rhoda win the essay contest, in which she professes her guilt and asks, self-loathingly, for a second chance? How will the outcome of this affect her relationship with John? Will she have an epiphany and realize the true emotional value of the tragedy that she has undergone—a realization complete with a frenzied scene in which Rhoda runs at breakneck speed at the side of the road to overcome her guilt, a scene which surely must have had Cahill shedding a single tear behind the camera? Since the movie won esteem at the Sundance Film Festival, the answers to all of those questions should be easy to guess.

Levity, spontaneity, originality—these are things that Another Earth is unconcerned with. It's so desperate to prove itself as something deep, something real, something important that it ends up as something diametrically opposite. This is a common tendency among first time directors (Another Earth is Cahill's first feature film), but at least sometimes we can acknowledge and understand this tendency (the attempt to make a mark in a film industry that's dauntingly hard to break in to) and recognize the natural skills, technical or otherwise, of the woman or man behind the camera. Not so in this case: judging from Another Earth, Cahill has no promising tricks or ideas or sentiments in his arsenal.

Am I being too hard on him, and on Another Earth? The movie is bad, but after all, it's just a typical American indie drama, one of many trite, lifeless, self-involved, precious cinematic dirges that find success at Sundance or Tribeca—no better or worse than most. The answer is yes, I am being too hard on the movie and on Cahill—because my frustration should be directed towards American independent cinema in general, not primarily at the filmmakers but, just as importantly, at the distributors and film programmers and industry "pundits" and scenesters and marketers who take this as something valuable, who give it a standing ovation, who put this forward as something we should celebrate as emblematic of American independent moviemaking. Give Cahill and Another Earth's crew credit for one thing: they've made an industry believe they're seeing something new and enlightening. This means the shame should be placed on the movers and shakers (the ones who decide which movies are picked up for distribution—which movies American audiences will see) who have bought into Another Earth's dog-and-pony show. They see grainy handheld cinematography, vacant and morose stares from attractive newcomers, and stories revolving around a distinctly non-humanistic pain and suffering and, desperate to pitch ticket-buyers that new underdog success story, see something worth selling. At least Hollywood knows what it's selling: brand merchandise that may not give consumers nutrition but, a lot of the time, gives them entertainment. Indie distributors like Fox Searchlight (which, needless to say, operates at the behest of 20th Century Fox—about as far from independent as you can get) pitch us gourmet organic food and then regurgitate slop onto movie screens.  

 

Flashback, 1981: 'Prince of the City'

This post is the first in a new series I'm starting: viewings and responses to films released as close to thirty years ago as possible. The first entry is Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City, originally released by Orion Pictures and Warner Bros. on August 21, 1981. (Yeah, I'm a little late on this one—I have a busy work week to blame.) I hope these posts will offer a snapshot of the cinematic and social climate in 1981, and will be an interesting way to chart developments and/or innovations in film since then.

Why 1981, one might ask? Two reasons, both of them mostly arbitrary. The first is that I have often neglected films of the 1980s and early 1990s much more than any other historical era—while I've enthusiastically explored silent film, classics of the early sound era to the mid-twentieth century, and developing New Waves and changes in international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, I for some reason have been mostly uninterested in films of the 80s and 90s, until now. Secondly, I was born in 1984 and did not really start paying attention to movies as a social art form until the late 1990s, so I feel like it will be interesting to further explore and chart the changing cultural climate of the era into which I was born.

Prince of the City   167m., R, USA
Release Date   August 21, 1981   
Distributors   Orion Pictures & Warner Bros. Pictures
Director   Sidney Lumet
Writers   Jay Presson Allen and Sidney Lumet, based on the book by Robert Daley
Producers   Jay Presson Allen and Burtt Harris
Music   Paul Chihara
Cinematography   Andrzej Bartkowiak
Editor   John J. Fitzstephens
Production Design   Tony Walton
Cast   Treat Williams, Jerry Orbach, Richard Foronjy, Don Billett, Kenny Marino, Carmine Caridi, Tony Page, Norman Parker, Paul Roebling, Bob Balaban, James Tolkan, Steve Inwood, Lindsay Crouse, Matthew Laurance, Tony Turco, Ron Maccone, Ron Karabatsos, Tony DiBenedetto, Tony Munafo, Robert Christian, Lee Richardson, Lane Smith, Cosmo Allegretti, Bobby Alto, Michael Beckett, Burton Collins

Commercially unsuccessful and middlingly reviewed upon its release (it was deemed inferior to Lumet's 1973 crime drama Serpico), Prince of the City is now generally seen as one of Lumet's strongest hours (or, to be more precise, nearly-three-hours). And that it is, though I don't consider myself one of the director's fans: too often, he oversells visual metaphors with a deadening obviousness, and he sometimes allows his actors to overplay or to encapsulate their characters in broad, simple character traits. While his background in directing TV series and made-for-television movies in the 1950s and '60s can lend his films a swift, tough conciseness, it can also make them overly schematic in their narrative arcs—as though he were still working under the rigorous scheduling and episodic demands of working for a television studio. (This blueprint-following brand of filmmaking especially hampers his 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.)

But it's easy to dismiss such quibbles in the context of Lumet's long career, which undeniably expressed the cohesive style and thematic concerns of an unassuming auteur. The director (who passed away less than five months ago, on April 9th) offered us at least two great films, 12 Angry Men (1957) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and several almost-great ones (Network [1976], The Verdict [1982]). He has been deemed one of the quintessential "New York directors"—not unlike Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen, the director's adopted hometown is a driving character in many of his films. Some of his works would be inconceivable set in another city. He also returned consistently to the theme (which always fascinates me) of how large-scale institutions (television networks, police forces, urban governments, the court system, hospitals and health care) influence the lives of individuals embroiled within that system—and, correspondingly, how individuals may actively resist or refashion those systems.

Prince of the City is one of the finest examples in Lumet's filmography of both of these tendencies. His status as a New York filmmaker has never been more impressively displayed than in this film: the city is an indelible backdrop here, a writhing, squalid creature that instills moral crises in more than a few characters. The aspect of Prince of the City I'll likely remember more vividly than any other is its encapsulation of a pre-Giuliani New York, a snapshot of a city that could not be more foreign to us than the New York we now know. Like the city as seen in Taxi Driver (1976), Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977), or Bette Gordon's Variety (1983), New York here is a grittily evocative contradiction: glittering and disgusting, monumental and festering, impressive and disheartening. Prince of the City is absolutely a product of its time and place, which here should be taken as a thunderstruck compliment rather than a disparagement—it is the most immersive portrayal of New York in its Ed Koch days that I've ever seen.

The film is also a complex, sprawling document of the ways that numerous forces of law and order interacted (and, to an extent, still interact) in the city. The story concerns an esteemed narcotics agent, Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), who undergoes a crisis of conscience (and self-identity) and decides to work with the FBI's Chase Commission in exposing corrupt agents on the New York police force. Like any other undercover narcotics agent at the time, Ciello relies upon addicts and junkies for information, often being forced to supply them with hard drugs in order to get them to cooperate (and, more distressingly, simply to survive). One of the film's strongest scenes is his excursion to the underbelly of Manhattan at three in the morning to console an informant suffering from withdrawal; rescuing the shivering, desperate man from a grimy alleyway during a rainstorm, Ciello drives him from one supplier to another, looking for anything that will placate him (heroin, coke) and keep him in Ciello's good graces. Eventually, Ciello winds up chasing down another junkie named Jose, beating him mercilessly in order to score two bags of coke for his informant. Shortly thereafter, Ciello, in the midst of self-loathing, drives Jose to a decrepit rattrap of an apartment covered with graffiti—then simply watches in helpless horror as Jose beats his girlfriend for getting high off of his stash. Swiftly and unforgettably, Prince of the City evokes a cesspool of a world in which the close relationship between narcs and junkies makes it easy, as Ciello later confesses, to mistake heroes for villains, right for wrong—to commit unspeakable acts and defend them, sometimes self-righteously, as ultimately moral behavior.

It is this blurring of previously absolute moral codes that leads Ciello to provide testimony to federal agents investigating corruption. Initially, he is told that their targets will be the true overlords of the urban drug trade: wealthy suppliers, lawyers, judges, mayors, city officials that are bought off in order to look the other way, or even to facilitate the profitable narcotics industry. Ciello is immediately (and, as it turns out, rightly) distrustful of the agents who approach him, including Rick Cappalino (Norman Parker), a kind, mild-mannered young agent who genuinely respects and empathizes with Ciello but has no way to defend him from the manipulations of the system in which they find themselves. (Parker gives what may be the most sensitive performance in the whole movie, which seems amazing to me—I had never heard of him before, and besides this film he appeared mostly in television series.) Ciello vociferously tells the FBI he will never betray the trust and camaraderie of his partners in narcotics, he will never rat on them, and at first he is told he will never have to. But of course, as powerful corporate and business agents are targeted by the FBI and exposed by Ciello, accusations against him and his squad force him to expose their past indiscretions—confessions which ultimately have deadly, soul-shattering consequences.

The brotherhood between Ciello and his partners—and the antagonism between Ciello and the federal agents who work for the Chase Commission (and, especially, between Ciello and the prosecutors who consider him a corrupt rat but still hypocritically rely on his testimonies)—is powerfully established by a huge and mostly impressive ensemble cast. Countless crime dramas and police stories have been about the unbreakable bond between the partners who work together, but rarely has that bond been as believable as in Prince of the City. Even when Ciello is initially pressured to deliver information about fellow cops, he tells his partners (drunkenly, despondently), and they respond to him with understanding, sensitivity. (An abrupt cut to a low-angle close-up of Ciello on the brink of madness and self-disgust in this scene is devastating.) They still don't believe he could or would ever betray them. The fact that he inevitably does is an indictment not against Ciello but against the system: the faceless, interconnected network of corporate, government, judicial, and police institutions that conspire to exploit one man in order to obtain a conviction, to offer their functionaries promotions, or to protect or dismantle a lucrative criminal enterprise.

Prince of the City is the most thematically complex of Lumet's movies I've seen—there's actually much more to be said about the film's employment of characters emblematic of different social forces and how they respond to and coerce Ciello's behavior. (He's a man who mistakenly believes he's in control of his own fate, his own morality—the movie is tragic partially because he eventually realizes how untrue this is.) It's tempting to claim that a movie like this—so long, so complex, so dark in tone and subject matter, so attuned to character and to societal forces—could no longer be bankrolled by a major studio, but this isn't exactly true: recent epic crime dramas like Zodiac (2007) and The Dark Knight (2008—more allegorical but almost as insightful) remind us that signs of creativity, intelligence, and power can still be found in Hollywood action movies.

What may be peculiarly early-80s about Prince of the City, though (aside from its garish costuming—itself a time-capsule wonder to behold, or bemoan), is its stylistic simplicity, its un-flashiness. Again, this may be largely the result of Lumet's origins in television, which serve the atmosphere and elaborate themes of Prince of the City extremely well. It seems like most crime dramas made today would be distinguished by a certain aesthetic panache: to return to the two examples above, Zodiac abounds in David Fincher's elaborate, sleek, razor-sharp form (though at least there it serves a purpose), and The Dark Knight delivers its themes through operatic superhero machinations. Or we may think of Michael Mann's so-beautiful-they're-hollow digital compositions (in his movies, the overabundance of style is itself a form of substance), or the self-conscious grittiness of movies like Narc (2002) or We Own the Night (2007), with their grainy handheld cinematography.

While Lumet does include a few stylistic flourishes—like cuts to the identification cards of policemen or federal agents accompanied by throbbing electronic music, or quotes from Robert Leuci, the narcotics officer who was the real-life inspiration for Ciello, splayed at the bottom of the screen in bold newspaper-esque lettering—for the most part his aesthetic choices are subtle, careful, well-thought-out. He gives the impression of a documentary-like remove from the material, but his cutting between expanded extreme long shots in wide angle (which make the characters near-microscopic), solid, static medium shots that simply observe groups in conversation, and emphatic close-ups of characters at the height of self-loathing or desperation reveal a sensitive knowledge of the material's emotional and psychological undercurrents. It doesn't seem overblown to claim that Lumet's style here is reminiscent of the precise yet "invisible" style practiced by classical Hollywood masters like William Wyler or Anthony Mann, though the subject matter is considerably (and justifiably) darkened and deepened for its early-1980s setting.

The weakest aspect of the movie, as I see it, is Treat Williams's performance in the lead, though this is something I'm still debating: his performance is either completely original or drastically off-base in its interpretation of Ciello's early moral crisis. There's a manic energy to it that seems miscalculated early on, though this desperation makes more sense as the movie progresses and Ciello becomes increasingly distraught by guilt, moral confusion, and self-disgust. An early scene has Williams shouting to the proverbial rafters, rabidly defending his impending actions to two federal agents, in a long and frankly irritating scene; the point, it seems, is to recognize Ciello's fraught attempts to rationalize his inner conflicts, his bipolar attitude towards the ethical leap and calamitous risk he's about to take, but this could be conveyed in a manner more subtle, more believable, and more in tune with how the character behaves at this early point in the film. I wonder if this style of overacting, of absolute self-abandonment and immersion, is something more common in movies of the late 1970s and 80s—a time, perhaps, when previous theories of Method acting coalesced with the expressive aesthetic techniques of American New Wave directors like Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola. After all, this bombastic acting style also irrevocably harmed Lumet's Serpico—a film that features such an overblown Pacino performance it's impossible to believe in the main character as a real human being (obviously, a quality that does not work well in a character study). In any case, my ambivalence towards Williams's performance corresponds strangely well to the movie's own ambivalence towards the character of Ciello—to the film's credit, it never decides absolutely whether its protagonist is a selfless moral crusader or a self-righteous hypocrite, a moral complexity that is unforgettably envisioned by the final freeze frame.

Classics: 'La Ronde' (1950) and 'The Earrings of Madame de...' (1953)

Max Ophuls

After watching both La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de... over the last week, it seems safe to say that Max Ophüls is one of the greatest stylists that cinema has ever known. Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Robert Altman have claimed him as a major influence, among many others. It does not seem too hyperbolic to claim that every graceful, extended camera movement employing a dolly or crane—especially the kind that floats leisurely through or over an interior space, following an actor's movements—are at least slightly indebted to Ophüls.

The pertinent question, maybe, is whether or not Ophüls' characters, ideas, and emotions are as beautiful as his camera movements—or, really, whether they're more than just beautiful, whether there's some tumult, some crisis, that affects us as powerfully as the aesthetic does. After all, Ophüls' films typically concern absurdly elegant aristocrats existing in a historical period (in La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de..., late-19th and early-20th century Europe), struggling to cope with calamitous affairs of the heart, suffering from love and lust and heartache but ever maintaining a veneer of beauty and untouchability in the process. For Ophüls' detractors, these movies are about dilettantes who modern (especially middle- or lower-class) audiences couldn't care less about—characters defined more by their prettiness than by their emotions. For his legion of avid admirers, though—which included, famously, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris (this may have been the one subject both of them agreed upon)—Ophüls broke through the brittle shell of aristocratic respectability to show the pain and maddening desire that lingered underneath. His always-roaming camera, they argued, patiently observed the possessions and elegant environs of wealthy characters to emphasize the significance of small tokens, tangible things, as they fit into turbulent lives. They were accoutrements for people, but also embellishments for a sort of cosmic cycle of desire, love, and loss—props in a vast and tragic comedy seemingly staged for God's own amusement. The predominance of things and decorations in Ophüls' films also act as juxtapositional foreshadowing: their houses and their belongings may be in order, but everything else (everything inside) is in disarray.

It seems fans of Ophüls are rarely timid in their enthusiasm: many celebrations of the director proclaim him the most beautiful, the most humane, the most sensitive and underappreciated visionary in the history of movies. (Molly Haskell, in this excellent essay, lauds Ophüls as a defender of unassuming heroes and heroines, Stendhalian characters whose freedom and wealth are tenuous and unstable—values that could be forsaken in an instant for love and passion.) I may not go quite so far in my praise for the director, but I am (after seeing these two films, and with fond memories of his 1948 American movie Letter from an Unknown Woman still popping up constantly) unequivocally a fan. His camera movements and his characters may be pretty, but both the style and the characters are hiding something considerably painful underneath.

La Ronde

Admittedly, this may be harder to detect in La Ronde than in either Letter from an Unknown Woman or The Earrings of Madame de.... Ophüls' 1950 film was the first he made back in France after his brief tenure in Hollywood (which wielded a small number of too-little-known gems), and, as Terrence Raferty points out, La Ronde exhibits Ophüls in a playful, unabashedly wry manner that epitomizes his “European” sensibilities. (Usually, that descriptor means nothing and reeks of ethnocentrism, but with Ophüls it actually makes sense: a born German who worked in his home country, France, Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands as well as the U.S., he shared a cosmopolitan world-weariness, the bittersweet displacement of a refugee from his own land, and a sympathetic romantic fatalism with his European countrymen—although the winking self-consciousness displayed in La Ronde is a little closer to American comedies of the time.)

La Ronde is adapted from a notorious Arthur Schnitzler play that was written in 1897, finally performed in Budapest in 1912, and eventually staged in Schnitzler's hometown of Vienna in 1921. The play concerns a sexual merry-go-round, traversed over ten scenes, ingeniously plotted: in the first, a prostitute makes love to a soldier; in the next, the soldier seduces a seemingly naïve young chambermaid (who reveals herself to be more headstrong than we may have assumed); in the next, the chambermaid is taken by her fumbling employer; and so on, until the licentious cycle (“the ring” of the title) completes itself.

Ophüls' film adaptation introduces a new character: an elegantly bemused, disarmingly meta narrator who operates a literal merry-go-round as the sexual cycle rages on around him. In the first scene, this narrator takes us behind the camera, noting the artificiality of the studio set, even pointing out the lighting setups and cameras before the film itself gets underway. Later, Ophüls will cut to this narrator at the exact moment that a young male character (who fancies himself a virile stallion) is unable to perform in bed; after tinkering with the mechanics of the carousel for a minute, however, the narrator is able to kickstart the young man's libido and thrust the carousel back into motion. There's even another scene in which the narrator can be seen cutting an explicit sequence from a strip of celluloid with a pair of scissors—Ophüls finds numerous ways to dance around onscreen sex in this film, with characteristic flair and cleverness.

Although there are melancholy sequences (the best scene in the film is an uneasy dialogue between an aged, wealthy aristocrat and his young, beautiful wife, who realize, through evasive and somewhat defensive testimonies, that they still care for each other after years of sexless marriage), the overall tone of La Ronde is spry and relatively carefree. The film is, of course, about rampant infidelity and unimpeded lust, but the audience never sees any tearful fallouts between lovers because of this disloyalty. We witness instead, as the narrator points out, the familiar machinations of the game of sex: amorous men and women playing off of each other, embodying all manner of lust and flirtation and desire. The central metaphor is, of course, that carousel, but we may also think of a chessboard: one of the movie's prime delights is that we can chart the characters' strategic come-ons and invitations, reveling in the excitement of sex as a game to be played.

This may all sound very icy and hollowly clever, but for all of its lasciviousness, La Ronde is surprisingly sweet. The most charming sequence in the film may also be the most aesthetically impressive: a prolonged flirtation between an awkward young man-of-the-house and his beautiful chambermaid, who bat double entendres back and forth as they circle around each other in a vast drawing room. When their mutual attraction makes itself clear, the camera dazzlingly follows the young man as he half-runs to all of the windows in the room, drawing the shutters closed. (This scene is also incredibly sexy, thanks mostly to Simone Simon as the chambermaid, Marie.) There may not be much to La Ronde besides its effortlessly elegant sense of humor, its dazzling camerawork, and engaging performances by a huge international cast. In other words, it's light as air, but that happens to be enough: Ophüls' enthusiasm for the art of moviemaking as well as for the romantic games people play becomes contagious almost immediately.

The Earrings of Madame de...

If La Ronde is a somewhat lightweight offering from an undeniable master craftsman, then The Earrings of Madame de..., made three years later, is a tremendously powerful film that expands and deepens its creator's sensibility. I may still prefer Letter from an Unknown Woman, which burns with unattainable desire and the passion of mad love, but I have to admit that Madame de... may be the more sensitive film: all three of its main characters are the Stendhalian protagonists that Haskell cited—unheroic people who think they are free and happy, only to realize how trapped and unfulfilled they really are, forsaking everything for a taste of true love and passion.

“There is no happiness in joy,” says a character in another Ophüls film, Le Plaisir—a sentiment that helps to explain the melancholy power of Madame de.... The titular Countess (who remains unnamed throughout the movie—her plight is universal, not confined to the wealthy) sells the earrings that were given to her by her husband on their wedding night. At the beginning of the film, they obviously mean little to her; yet, as the film progresses, they take on greater emotional significance (both for her and for the audience), especially when they are re-gifted to her, through a taunting twist of fate, by a dashing Italian Baron with whom she is helplessly in love. The sequence in which the Countess and the Baron Fabrizio Donati waltz, night after night, falling deeper into the throes of love and passion, is rightfully celebrated as one of the most sublime in the history of movies: a series of dissolves orchestrates the temporal movement of the editing with the spatial movement of the gracefully-waltzing camera, as weeks are compressed into minutes and helpless passion is somehow, miraculously, visualized. The sequence seems effortless, light as air, but was clearly very meticulously planned out. Like the dance numbers in Swing Time or Top Hat—which seem similarly effortless but took months of preparation for Astaire and Rogers to perfect—the ballroom scene in The Earrings of Madame de... makes us believe that it's possible to convey the deepest love onscreen. (Maybe the most gifted composer can suggest passion sonically, and maybe the most brilliant writer can suggest its unequaled beauty, but don't movies seem especially suited to conveying such an inexpressible emotion?)

Lest we assume The Earrings of Madame de... is just a beautiful movie about beautiful people falling in love, it's actually about how impenetrable these characters assume themselves to be, and how perfect they consider their lives to be. At first, admittedly, we may be put off by these characters. The Countess is selfish and manipulative; she knows how to play off of the men around her (including, and especially, her husband), staging fainting fits and flirting publicly with aristocrats, confidently aware of her standing in the Parisian upper class. She's not really vilified—she's simply abiding by the expectations and opportunities afforded to her in 1900 Paris. We sympathize with her inflexible social position and the behavior expected of her, but we also are dismayed by the value she places in material objects (and, maybe, the extent to which she sees other people as material objects). Her husband, an esteemed General, is hardly more likeable: a tyrant who is aware that his wife no longer loves him, the General simply accepts this as a consequence of aristocratic marriage in his society, finding social standing more valuable than intimacy between a husband and wife. All of this changes when the Baron enters the scene, however. Lives of shallow materialism and invincible pride are suddenly revealed to be empty; people and possessions are discovered to have real value. Those telling earrings reveal to the Countess how shallow her life had been; they reveal to the General how powerless he was over his wife, precisely because there was no love between them; and they reveal to the Baron how willing he is to sacrifice everything for a love he knows can never be recognized by society. If Ophüls' films can be accused of a sort of aristocratic aestheticism, The Earrings of Madame de... would seem to absolutely deflate that criticism: all of the beauty and wealth of their lives revealed to be totally meaningless.

Here, the agile camera movements are in the service of the actors, the characters: no stylistic flourish exists for its own sake. The glacially-paced tracking shot that opens the movie, which scans the Countess's jewelry and clothes like an auctioneer appraising goods, reveals how little these possessions mean to her; a remarkably swift camera during the scene in which the Countess and the Baron first meet (at a Parisian customs office) conveys the excitement, the giddiness, that the Baron feels upon first seeing her.

As sensitive as Ophüls is—and as finely tuned as Christian Macras's cinematography is to the movements and sentiments of the characters—the film may ultimately excel because of its cast. Is Danielle Darrieux's Madame de... one of the most romantic, tragic, unexpectedly powerful characters in the history of movies? The smoothness of her features, the deepness of her eyes, define elegance, yet she flawlessly allows traces of her sadness, her despair, her restrained passion, to suggest themselves. I was unsure of how much the movie would affect me emotionally until relatively late in the film, when, at a ball, the Countess is simultaneously spurned by the Baron (who finally discovers the real origins of the earrings he gave her as a gift) and forbidden to wear those earrings by her jilted husband. Darrieux's absolutely deflated performance in this scene is heartbreaking, especially because she so desperately struggles to maintain a semblance of elegance and cool resolve. Charles Boyer, meanwhile, as her husband—the cold, confident, yet not unfeeling General—uses his untroubled demeanor to present a man totally unwilling to believe there are cracks in his hypothetically perfect life. Boyer is no less excellent at allowing fractions of pain and jealousy to sneak into his cool stoicism. (Boyer and Darrieux had played lovers in the 1936 film Mayerling, by Anatole Litvak. It was a huge success, and almost twenty years later, the memory of their onscreen chemistry must surely have affected audiences seeing The Earrings of Madame de...—as though the couple who fell in love in Mayerling would eventually become the distant husband and wife seen in Ophüls' film.) And finally, the great director Vittorio De Sica, incomparably dashing and hopelessly romantic as the Baron, epitomizes one of those aforementioned “small heroes”—a man who has the bravery to simply obey passion, give in to love, though he knows without a doubt that it will destroy him.

The immediate pleasures of Ophüls's filmmaking—the silky, acrobatic black-and-white cinematography, the lush costumes, beautiful actors, opulent set design, meticulous plotting—may bring some viewers to the assumption that its style is more than its substance, that the director's humanity, his characterizations, couldn't possibly compare to his virtuoso aesthetic. Maybe not—but in Letter from an Unknown Woman and The Earrings of Madame de..., they come close. There is no joy in happiness; beauty has never been so sad.