New Releases: 'The Deep Blue Sea'

The Deep Blue Sea
98 minutes, R, UK/USA
Release Date March 23 2012
Distributor Music Box Films
Director Terence Davies
Screenplay Terence Davies, based on the play by Terence Rattigan
Producers Katherine Butler, Sean O'Connor, Kate Ogborn, Lisa Marie Russo
Cinematography Florian Hoffmeister
Editor David Charap
Production Designer James Merifield
Art Director David Hindle
Costume Designer Ruth Myers
Cast Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale, Ann Mitchell, Jolyon Coy, Karl Johnson, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sarah Kants, Oliver Ford Davies, Barbara Jefford, Mark Tandy, Stuart McLoughlin, Nicolas Amer

The ravishing new film from Terence Davies is maybe the lushest movie you'll see (and hear) all year: a "cinematic opera," as Sight & Sound's Jonathan Romney termed it, that reaches deliriously vivid heights of melodrama and aching emotion. Set "around 1950," The Deep Blue Sea is set in that dreary postwar London familiar to us from British classics of the '40s and '50s (Brief Encounter, It Always Rains on Sunday), not to mention Davies' own earlier films (Distant Voices, Still Lives from 1988, The Long Day Closes from 1992). Rubble litters the cobblestone streets; everything is washed in pale browns and grays, with smatterings of color. Davies, a director thrillingly consumed by attention to detail, recreates the setting with visceral immediacy: every ad beaming from brick walls, every cigarette pack and storefront display, immerses us in this time and place. Movies can be time travel machines, and The Deep Blue Sea achieves an overwhelming transplantation.

Terence Rattigan, the celebrated playwright who would have turned 100 this year (he died in 1977), wrote the play on which The Deep Blue Sea is based: a quietly tragic story of a love affair between a cavalier, insecure war veteran (Hiddleston) and a self-sacrificing woman (Weisz) married to a gentle but stolid judge (Beale). For his adaptation, Davies excised heaps of expositional dialogue and a few additional characters from Rattigan's play, preferring instead to suggest the characters' histories and psychologies through brief glances, through dexterous crosscutting, through images that pop with color and light and a dynamic use of sound versus silence. Davies' boyhood love of going to the movies in postwar Liverpool (musicals especially) seemingly bestowed a keen understanding of what makes movies cinematic, of how to manipulate sound and image for maximum effect (André Bazin, whose essay "The Stylistics of Robert Bresson" addressed the art of adapting literary or theatrical texts to parallel cinematic terrain, likely would have appreciated Davies' work).

The movie wows us viscerally from its first image, a swooping crane shot that climbs leisurely up to the second-story window from which Hester Collyer (Weisz's character) gazes ardently. The music on the soundtrack is Samuel Barber's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, a piece which actually continues over the ensuing ten-minute prologue, a montage of brief though telling episodes that tell us all we need to know: Collyer's docile though empty relationship with her upper-class husband; her irresistible attraction to the cocky, roguish ex-RAF pilot, Freddie; the passionate onset of their relationship; the dissolution of her marriage. The story itself — what happens after this prologue — is merely what happens throughout the course of one day between Hester and the people revolving around her. ("Merely" is a somewhat misleading word here, since these interactions take on the scope perhaps not of Greek tragedy, but at least of exuberant melodrama.) The immediate employment of such overt editing and cinematographical techniques, all of them set to music that's similarly operatic in its emotion, pulls back the curtains to set the stage in an appropriately fervent way: here's a larger-than-life stage play, ordinary and extraordinary, restaged for the camera's eye.

The legacy of war makes its appearance in surprisingly cryptic ways. Most overt is a gorgeous flashback sequence instigated by Hester's desperate escape to a barren nighttime subway platform. Hester has already attempted suicide once earlier in the film; it's possible she's fled underground in order to throw herself in front of an oncoming train, a fate from which she's saved by the vision she soon experiences. A sublime single tracking shot passes slowly along a group of Londoners who have sought refuge from German firebombs. One man on the subway platform sings "Molly Malone," the mid-19th century Irish ballad. Debris floats to the ground as thunderous booms erupt overhead. The tracking shot ends with Hester embracing the man she will soon marry, the esteemed judge Sir William Collyer. There is tenderness in their embrace, but more the sort between a father and daughter than between husband and wife. This foreshadows the anguish Hester will feel later in life, when she's discovered that her youthful passion (perhaps even the morbid thrill of looming mortality provided by the war) has given way to soul-crushing inertia. This meticulous and powerful one-shot sequence may be the movie's most awe-inspiring moment — a tricky claim to make for a movie filled with them.

The gaping craters bestowed by wartime bombings make another appearance later in the film; in fact, one such image closes the film. In a final shot that mirrors the movie's opening scene, the camera cranes away from the window at which Hester stands, past some children singing a playground song and jumping rope on the rubble-littered street, to an ominous maw that lies at the end of the street, replacing the building that once stood there with bleak, seemingly inevitable emptiness. This ending becomes even more ambiguous when we consider that, in terms of the narrative and Hester's character, it actually ends with a semblance of hope for the future, of moving on with one's life. Maybe, then, the ending of The Deep Blue Sea equates Hester's tumultuous personal traumas with the violence recently undergone by England as a whole: moving perpetually closer towards the abyss, yet somehow climbing through it, finding self-reckoning through the terror.

Despite Hester's name, The Deep Blue Sea is no Scarlett Letter-ish reprobation of a married woman's disastrous yet passionate affair with another man. We understand what Hester is going through, to a certain extent; the movie aligns us so intimately to Hester's perspective that we seem to glean some understanding from her quiet suffering, from her equivocal glances at the world around her. At times Hester seems too good for either of these men: too passionate, too mercurial, for her meek and gentle husband, too self-sacrificing and understanding for the cad who neglects and berates her. But it also seems as though her sacrifices invigorate her, help define herself in her own eyes; in a desperate bid to find passion in a world that's been discombobulated, maybe she does so by leaping headlong into relationships that don't befit her. In any case, Hester's occasionally inexplicable behavior resembles the fragile volatility of humanity more than the cerebral ambiguity of art films — despite Davies' alchemical skill with operatic cinematic style, he's always used elaborate sounds and images to bring himself closer to the people and the world around him, rather than further away.

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.