Eye in the Sky
No movie could possibly be more
relevant to our troubled time than Eye in
the Sky, which confronts with exquisite tension one of the most morally
ambiguous practices of the combat in the Middle East. The movie deals with a single action, the
debate over deploying a drone strike on a single house in Kenya apparently
inhabited by terrorists intent on a suicide bombing mission. That simple situation expands into a number
of actions, technologies, and problems that now result from the unending “war
on terror.”
As part of its progress and as a
visual demonstration of the complexities involved in its ostensibly simple
story, the film shifts constantly among all the people who control the remarkable
technologies that send a missile toward a particular target. Helen Mirren plays a British officer, Colonel
Katherine Powell, in charge of a team of experts tracking the activities of
suspected terrorists in a surveillance operation employing satellites, drones,
and agents on the ground. She wants to
order an American missile strike on the house, but must clear the action through
a committee of English government officials and a general (Alan Rickman), who
sit around a table arguing the pros and cons of the decision.
The officials need a confirmation of
the threat, a process that as the debate goes on grows increasingly complicated
and increasingly dangerous. In addition
to the long range surveillance, the agent in the actual area (Barkhad Abdi)
risks his life to investigate the suspects’ house, controlling small drones—one
a mechanical bird, the other, believe it or not, a mechanical bug (no pun
intended) to spy on the preparations.
The images he sends show the terrorists, apparently preparing for a
suicide mission, packing vests with bombs, which increases the urgency of the
deliberations.
The whole mission pivots on one of
the disturbing moral questions that contemporary, remote-controlled warfare
raises, euphemistically called collateral damage, otherwise known as the
wounding, maiming, and killing of innocent noncombatants. The problem centers on one young girl,
selling bread that her mother bakes in a makeshift booth near the intended
target; she becomes the single human representative of the term and the reason
that so many people agonize over the decision to send a missile into the
terrorists’ house. That tension
escalates with the camera’s constant shifts from the British command center to
the debate of the civilians in charge to the American military personnel who
will fire the missile to the dangerous situation of the agent and his desperate
attempts to save the little girl.
The film also demonstrates some of
the conflicts and consequently, the complex emotions among the various entities
that control the mission—civilians in government, British and American military
personnel, the anguished agent in place—as they debate the pros and cons of the
action they contemplate. For all its
technological wonders and its convincing display of warfare as we now practice
it, Eye in the Sky creates much of
its considerable suspense as much from its examination of the human questions
it raises as from its meticulous representation of the process of locating,
identifying, and attacking an elusive enemy.
Miles Ahead
Written and directed by Don Cheadle,
who also stars as the title character, Miles
Ahead purports to show a difficult period in the life of the great musician
Miles Davis, when he stopped performing, recording, and even playing his
instrument. Most of the movie shows a
most irascible, mercurial artist abusing his wife, arguing with friends, and
fighting a pitched battle with the record company executives attempting to
acquire a tape of a private recording session.
To compensate for the repetitive action, the director uses flashbacks to
show some other aspect of Davis’s life and art.
Wearing a major Afro, Cheadle makes
Miles Davis, whatever his artistry, a most unpleasant person, drinking,
drugging, and alienating most of the people around him. He also invents an entirely bogus plot
revolving around the mysterious tape of the mysterious music. David Brill (Ewan McGregor), a writer from Rolling Stone, joins Davis in a
ridiculous quest to recover the stolen tape from the heartless
businessmen. The two of them engage in
one of those tiresome movie car chases, with Davis firing a revolver with an
apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition, thus turning a presumably well
intentioned biopic into a bogus thriller.
In
fact, despite Cheadle’s impersonation and Davis’s music on the soundtrack
(though not enough of it, to be sure), the entire movie exudes an atmosphere of
fakery. Apparently Cheadle had to invent
a white character in the form of the completely uninteresting McGregor to
obtain financing for the work; the ridiculous plot, such as it is, presumably
derives from Davis’s legitimate, though nonviolent conflicts with record
company executives. The final unraveling
of the mystery of the missing tape provides a disappointing downbeat ending (no
pun intended, jazz fans). I am sure Don Cheadle
could have done a better job, and I believe Miles Davis deserves a better
picture than Miles Ahead.
Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
As a lifelong reader of Ernest
Hemingway’s work, and as both a student and a teacher of his stories and
novels, and creator of a Hemingway seminar, almost anything connected with the
author attracts my interest. His work
and his life obviously also attract the interest of a great many others—the
most famous writer of the twentieth century, his novels and stories have been filmed
many times; he is the subject of innumerable biographies and critical studies; a
character in his own right, he’s also been the subject of several documentaries
and feature films, rare for any writer, especially in America. He appears in Alan Parker’s film, The Moderns, about the artistic life in
Paris in the 1920s, and in Woody Allen’s Midnight
in Paris, which employs the same subject.
Unlike most writers, he led an adventurous, eventful, fascinating life,
which along with the popularity of his fiction, made him a unique phenomenon in
the world of letters.
The latest treatment of the author,
played by Adrian Sparks, based on the reminiscence of a writer named Denne Bart
Petitclerc (I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of him), deals with some of his
time in Cuba in the last years of his life.
Played by Giovanni Ribisi, the young writer, called Ed Myers in the
film, writes a letter to his hero Hemingway, who likes it so much he calls him
up and invites him to Cuba. His first
trip there proves a great success and leads to many more; the film’s plot, in
fact, resolves itself into a series of Myers’s visits to Hemingway’s house in
Cuba, where he becomes one of the entourage of friends and hangers-on who
surround the writer.
The series of visits also turns into
a chronicle of the author’s battles with depression and his angry slide into
madness. Continuing the practice of a
lifetime, he drinks heavily, argues with everyone, abuses his wife Mary (Joely
Richardson), acts out violently, threatens suicide, and insults and alienates
his friends. Perhaps worst of all, he
finds he can no longer write, a circumstance that contributed as much as his
alcoholism and his various head injuries to his suicide, eighteen months after
the events in the movie.
For the most part the film repeats a
many of the known facts of a very public writer’s life, most of them reported
in detail by innumerable biographers.
The script also depends heavily and frankly, embarrassingly, on a whole
catalogue of Hemingway’s statements, most of them taken from his writing and
again, well known to the point of cliché—all that stuff about beginning with
one true sentence, for example, and the comments about drinking, sex, danger, love, etc. , and
all delivered sententiously by Adrian Sparks.
It also tends to create a parody of a man and a writer who, tragically, by
that time had already become something of a parody of himself.
The portrait of Hemingway also
suffers from the performance of Adrian Sparks as the title character. He looks a good deal like the writer in his
later years, but his behavior exaggerates everything about him, taking the
character far over the top and pretty much keeping him up there on one loud,
long, repeated series of actions and utterances. Covering some of the same material, the HBO
movie Hemingway and Gellhorn
accomplishes a significantly fuller and more interesting creation with more
sensitivity and artfulness. The
fascinating man, the great writer, the adventurous life, the tragic ending
still await the script and the film to bring them all fully into existence.
