DAVID BOWIE

 

DAVID BOWIE

 

            For some time now the documentary dealing with the life and work of a singer, musician, actor, band, or member of Andy Warhol’s cult has become something rather like a genre all its own.  Like all other movies, of course, these differ in style and certainly in quality, but most of them follow a familiar pattern.  They usually provide some chronological information, reflecting the subject’s childhood, family, background, and so forth; making the filmmaker’s job fairly easy, in our time these people, like most of us, appear in innumerable photographs, home movies, and videos.  Of course, since the figures also spend their time in the public eye, a good deal of film showing performances and various appearances in the media already exists for exploitation, so much of the productions consist, in a sense, of archival recovery, the visual records of a familiar past.

            The new biography of David Bowie, Moonage Daydream, follows a mostly predictable pattern, though like too many of its ilk, leaves out information that might enhance the subject and instruct the audience.  The film itself at times appears to be its own subject, a showcase for the director’s ingenuity; it serves as a kind of anthology of clips and scenes from scores of other movies, from many of the singer’s professional appearances, a kaleidoscopic presentation of colors and images only vaguely related to its central figure.  The scenes and sequences that appear in the movie tend strongly toward science fiction, horror, and shock, with repeated visual references to Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis, but with little connection to the narrative of the singer’s career, little apparent relevance to any particular period in his life; several others feature some of the films in which the singer himself acted.

            The career itself mostly appears in a series of concerts where Bowie performs before some enormous and enthusiastic crowds.  Going back and forth in time, and interrupting those moments in no particular chronological order, the film includes several scenes of the singer being questioned and sometimes baited on one of those dreadful English interview shows; unlike most of the interviewees, he dresses in full drag, with lipstick, makeup, and extreme shoes, which catch the interviewer’s eye and inspire his questions.  Despite Bowie’s success, his apparent talent, and of course his groundbreaking creation of various onstage personalities and styles, the whole business smacks of the decadence spawned by rock musicians these days.

            In a couple of repeated sequences, a camera follows the singer through the streets of some city in what seems to be Southeast Asia—Vietnam? Cambodia? Laos?—where he undergoes some sort of initiation or baptism in some Eastern faith (Buddhist? Hindu? Tao? Shinto? ) from an apparent religious figure.  The process, almost obligatory for contemporary rock stars, really seems a holdover from the days of empire, when moneyed Brits sampled the customs of the Orient, now translated into spiritual enlightenment or something similar.

 

            Aside from the various triumphant scenes from a rich and varied career, the movie dwells only momentarily on the singer’s personal life.  The director shows a glimpse of a woman, apparently a wife, and children, then later, another woman who also apparently became his second wife.  The film never reveals the progress of a career in any sort of chronological order; one photo of the young David Jones with his parents pretty much sums up the whole of his past; whatever else the movie provides, we actually never learn how David Bowie became David Bowie, probably the major disappointment of Moonage Daydream.

 

 

 

Whodunit

 

WHODUNIT

 

          In a famous essay, the crime novelist Raymond Chandler remarked of the classic British detective story, “it has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”  The form, as Chandler suggested, remains fixed, stuck in the grip of conventions so often repeated that its readers—I am one of them—know what to expect and are perfectly happy about it.  Almost any imitation of the great days of the past, the Golden Age of detective fiction, qualifies as self-referential, as they say in the literary racket.

  Agatha Christie of course dominates all the innumerable practitioners of the form, which underlines the appropriateness of the allusions to her work and, fleetingly, her presence in See How They Run.  Directed by Tom George, the movie confronts and essentially discusses the conventions and traditions of the (mostly) English mystery.  In a voiceover narrative Adrien Brody, playing a wiseass American film director, Leo Kopernick, comments on the story, explaining the differences between two approaches to detective fiction, the British and the American, and pretty much disparaging the form that unfolds before us.  Set in 1953, the action opens with a celebration by cast and crew of the one hundredth performance of Agatha Christie’s most famous work, The Mousetrap, which in fact seems likely to run for a hundred years. 

Kopernick wants to make a movie based on the play, only with sex, nudity, and violence, following in the great American tradition.  He discovers that he can’t get the rights for film until the play finishes its run, not knowing of course at that time that it actually might run forever.  Although he appears several times in flashbacks and his voiceover continues through much of the movie, he actually becomes the victim whose murder must be solved.

Instead of the usual brilliant amateur, the investigation depends upon the work of two Scotland yard officers, Detective Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and Constable Stalker (Saorise Ronan), whose names suggest some of the in jokes in this essentially comic work.  A far cry from the tight lipped professionalism of the Yard, Stoppard is a drunk who muddles through his work, barely escaping the censure of the commissioner; Stalker is an eager beaver rookie who jots down everything she notices and everything Stoppard says, not always a wise or useful practice.

In flashbacks and in the course of the investigation, the narrative introduces a variety of eccentric characters, all associated with The Mousetrap , and proceeds through a number of often farcical sequences.  The solution to the mystery, which probably few members of the audience by that time really care about, finally takes place in—where else?—Agatha Christie’s country house, another reference to the tradition of the form.

Although hardly the sort of mystery story that entrances millions of readers, See How They Run manages to sustain a certain level of interest through the  travails of the mostly bumbling and frequently inebriated Inspector Stoppard and the contrasting diligence of Constable Stalker.  Ultimately, I doubt if anyone otherwise finds the puzzle itself satisfactory or its resolution acceptable.  The film works best as a mildly entertaining commentary on its tradition and even on itself.

CRONENBERG

 

Cronenberg’s Dystopia

 

          The history of David Cronenberg’s films frequently demonstrates a fascination with the intersection of the organic and the mechanical, a perfect subject for science fiction and horror, both forms he has explored in the course of his career.  Though the details are hazy, in Crash (1977) people enjoyed a connection between automobile accidents and sex; in Videodrome (1983) as I recall, James Woods has a VHS cassette (remember them?) inserted into his abdomen, though I do not now know exactly why.  In his fine remake of The Fly (1986) he shows the unexpected consequences of the accidental incorporation of an insect into a device for teleportation; as the now famous lines from the movie tell us, “Be afraid, and be very afraid.”  And in the generally abysmal eXistenZ (1999) a character uses a gun made from a human jawbone—it may be some other bone—and shoots the teeth like bullets.  Think about that for a moment.

          His latest work, Crimes of the Future, continues the theme in a perhaps even more bizarre direction, signaled by the opening sequence of a young boy eating the plastic wastebasket in the family bathroom, not an especially auspicious omen.  The future of the title, to begin with, resembles a kind of random assemblage of junkyard material, with apparently foundered ships in some backgrounds, dark streets, shabby offices, and an overwhelming atmosphere of squalor.  The central figure in this dismal, depressing dystopia, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), demonstrates what might be the logical evolution of today’s organ harvesting, with his ability to grow new organs, which his colleague Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes by means of some odd remote control instruments.

          A number of unclear events revolving around the harvest and a number of strange people participate in the whole process, including some odd folks from an organization called the National Organ Registry, whose offices look like something from an abandoned building, and a pair of female automobile mechanics who end up boring holes in a character’s skull with cordless electric drills, for no apparent reason.  Perhaps worst of all, the usually intense and excellent Viggo Mortensen walks around wrapped almost entirely in black, with only his eyes showing, looking rather like an obedient female in Saudi Arabia; he spends a good deal of the movie uttering horrible choking, coughing, gasping sounds, again for no particular reason.  Crimes of the Future may surpass eXistenZ in sheer awfulness, but it’s a close contest, with a winner that most of us wouldn’t care to crown.

 

 

NORTHMANThe Northman To begin with, not too many movies these days feature dialogue in Old Norse and “chapter’ headings in Runic letters, so The Northman initially deserves some special attention, if merely as a curio. My knowledge of ancient languages is limited to Latin and Anglo-Saxon, so the Old Norse of The Northman, to make a bad joke and mix a metaphor, is Greek to me. On the other hand, in a movie where characters hiss, howl, bark, scream, and whisper most of the dialogue, the subtitles for Old Norse, paradoxically, provide most of the clearest and most comprehensible speech in the film. Beyond linguistics, the movie also shows what appears to be an accurate picture of the Vikings, whose power spread all over Northern Europe for something like three centuries, embarking on amphibious landings in the British Isles, conquering an impressive amount of territory. As one would expect, they do a great deal of their traditional raping and pillaging, a Viking specialty, and demonstrate further cruelty when they pack a crowd of their victims into a kind of oversized thatched hut, then burn it down. Most of the plot revolves around their enslaving a number of their captives, who are set to work rowing the long ships, building structures, and suffering. Allegedly and very vaguely a kind of Ur-Hamlet, the film shows a very different protagonist from Shakespeare’s hesitant, indecisive, introspective hero, here named Amlith (Alexander Skarsgård), who also suffers the murder of his father and the betrayal of his mother (Nicole Kidman). After a Viking raid destroys his town and murders most of its inhabitants, he decides to allow himself to be enslaved so he can wreak revenge on his captors and his betrayers. That revenge perfectly suits the general bloodiness of the movie, resulting in a multitude of stabbings, slashings, decapitations, and a quite graphic evisceration, pretty much something for every taste. The general picture of life under Viking conquest in the ninth century seems quite authentic—violent, dirty, dangerous, and generally most uncomfortable, nicely foreshadowing Hobbes’s famous dark judgment of human life as nasty, brutish, and short. It also includes a good deal of puzzlingly extreme behavior, as when characters don wolf and bear skins, growl and shout before attacking, proclaiming that they are the animals whose fur they wear. In another strange scene early in the movie, young Amlith and his father strip naked, crawl in some sort of cave, and drink blood under the direction of a shaman played by Willem Dafoe in his best high hysterical mode. That bizarre and essentially pointless exaggeration, accompanied by its usual screams, grunts, and howls, sums up the general tone of the work. Oddly, for a work grounded in a bleak reality, the movie ends in something like pure myth. With all the action and conflict, however, there is rarely a dull moment in The Northman, but there are a great many unpleasant ones.

 

THE SCOTTISH PLAY

 

          In the course of many years spent in the dark, I have reviewed a considerable number and variety of Shakespeare movies.  If memory serves, I have seen, in no particular order, one Much Ado About Nothing, one Henry V, one Merchant of Venice, two Richard IIIs, one Romeo and Juliet, three Hamlets, one Tempest, and one Titus Andronicus.  Those productions mostly earned praise from critics and a few even deserved it (Shakespeare always makes film reviewers feel intelligent).  Despite their source material, however, the various adaptations achieve a decidedly mixed success.

          Probably since Orson Welles directed Julius Caesar in modern dress, a great many filmmakers (and stage directors for that matter) seem determined to set their productions in a different time from Shakespeare’s, perhaps to allow for unusual interpretations, perhaps to appeal to modern audiences, perhaps to show their ingenuity, maybe just for the hell of it.  The most famous play in the canon, Hamlet, not surprisingly, has undergone the widest and often most unusual adaptations

          After earning embarrassingly ecstatic reviews for his stagey, dull production of Henry V, essentially a filmed play, Kenneth Branagh moved ever upward in what has become a long and successful career.  His Hamlet, in which he played the title character, completely reversed the method of his previous play, setting the action in a 19^th century royal court, with lavish costuming, elegant decoration, and  a cast studded with stars.  At moments, in fact, the play looked as if every actor in Hollywood landed a part, including such surprising choices as Robin Williams and Billy Crystal; when Jack Lemmon appeared I wondered for a moment if he was going to reprise a previous role and do Grumpy Old Danes.

          The most inventive, not always necessarily the best, Shakespeare productions that I reviewed include an extremely varied trio of movies.  Richard Loncraine set his version of Richard III, starring Ian McKellen as the cunning, crippled usurper, in a careful representation of the 1930s, employing the context of a Fascist takeover as the means of Richard’s ascent to power, an excellent modern metaphor.  Perhaps signaling his own update, Baz Luhrmann abbreviated the title of Shakespeare’s most famous romantic tragedy slightly to Romeo & Juliet, setting it in the contemporary world, with all sorts of ingenious ways of dealing with the transformation.  Partly because of its urgent pace, partly because of its young cast, the interpretation bubbled with color and youthful energy.  The most daring and unlikely Shakespeare production of them all, however, must be Julie Taymor’s remarkable Titus, a special version of the violent, bloody Titus Andronicus, complete with rape, murders, mutilations, and cannibalism: what’s not to like?  Of all the plays, I would bet the mortgage that this one at least will never be filmed again.

          The strangest of the Hamlet films I’ve reviewed must be the one set in contemporary New York City, directed, with some ingenuity at least, by Michael Almereyda.  Denmark now becomes the Denmark Corporation, whose CEO has died, leaving the familiar problems after his demise.  Like all the other adaptations of the play, this one features a cast of well-known names, including Liev Schreiber, Sam Shepard, Casey Affleck, and Bill Murray.  Murray plays the ghost, who seems to materialize from and then disappear into a Pepsi machine in a corridor of the Denmark headquarters, suggesting a new meaning to the sentry’s line, “For this relief, much thanks.”   The quirkiest touch of all, however, belongs to Ethan Hawke, who spends most of the movie wearing one of those Peruvian (?) woolen ski hats, looking not so much like Hamlet the Dane as Hamlet the Dork.

          The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel Coen’s latest movie, which he both wrote and directed, represents the latest foray into Shakespeare country, a journey from which he emerges, shall we say, scathed.  As most directors must, he cuts the play ruthlessly, which tends to reduce it to sheer plot, so the protagonist’s ascension to power moves pretty quickly.  He includes the major events, however, with a clever and quite spooky version of the three witches to kick things off.  Denzel Washington plays the title character with some considerable understatement, best shown in the famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow . . .” lines.  Frances McDormand, on the other hand, no matter her history and credentials, seems horribly miscast as Lady Macbeth.  So successful in the semi-comic, somewhat drably realistic parts she played in Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, she lacks the passion, the presence, and the commanding appearance of the murderess; she roams the battlement draped in a voluminous white sheet, regretting her evil and screaming loudly but unconvincingly.

          The most striking elements of the film, however, result from the work of the set designers and cinematographers.  The camera often shows the actors from overhead or poised against the bleak backgrounds of Scotland, emphasizing some of the essential loneliness of the play, of the tragic hero, and perhaps of tragedy itself.  The stark black and white photography is interrupted once, when the soldiers bearing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane cover themselves in branches and greenery before trooping off to battle, with the steady, ominous thump of their march echoing on the sound track.

          The sets reflect a genuine congruity with the cinematography and with the apparent vision of the director.  Austere and empty, lacking decoration and texture, they reduce the action, character, and context to an unusually minimalist state, suggesting a kind of odd purity in the director’s vision.  The castle itself seems stark and abstract, mostly uninhabited, a Cubist construction right out of the Bauhaus, darkly lit, threatening in its shapes and angles and shadows. 

          Coen’s Macbeth, no matter its particular qualities, fits squarely in the long tradition of individuals translating Shakespeare’s plays in all sorts of idiosyncratic manners to the cinema.  As I suggested, that tradition encompasses a wide variety of adaptations, many of them bizarre or simply misguided.  But let’s face it, our greatest poet’s works will survive the strangest, the weirdest, even the worst desecrations, and his plays will continue to enchant audiences and inspire interpreters on stage and screen.  As Dumas remarked, “After God, Shakespeare created the most.”

 

ANOTHER NIGHTMARE

          A remake of a classic film noir that appeared in 1947, and based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, the new version of Nightmare Alley moves the work from a genre flick to what the publicity on the book covers always calls “a major motion picture,” i. e., an expensive, big time Hollywood production.  In the process, the movie has accumulated a crew of new stars and a lush look that the old black and white production naturally lacked.

          Bradley Cooper plays Stan Carlisle, one of those enigmatic drifters with a murky past right out of 1930s tough-guy fiction (see The Postman Always Rings Twice), who wanders into a traveling carnival.  Looking for any kind of employment, he lands a job helping one of the many scam artists on the midway, gradually learning various tricks and cons, and more or less accidentally discovering his talent for figuring people out, which results in his ascent from worker to “mentalist,” a person who reads minds (assisted, of course, by a comely female sidekick).

He and that sidekick, Molly (Rooney Mara), start a collaboration that leads them—after a considerable jump in time—to performing their act in a classier venue, a nightclub where, dressed in formal wear, he reads the minds of gullible people in the audience.  Stan moves from the sordid world of the carnival and the glittering vulgarity of the nightclub to an even higher game when he encounters a snooty psychologist, Lilith Ritter, played by Cate Blanchett; she helps involve him in a major fleecing of a guilt ridden millionaire seeking to contact his long lost love, whose death he had in effect caused. 

Like all con men, Stan of course aspires to make one big score and retire on the riches, and the millionaire looks like the ticket to his dream.  He delves cleverly into the past, conducts some inspired research, and spends a great deal of time and energy on creating just the right effect to snare his sucker, and with Molly’s reluctant assistance, sets it all in motion.  Of course, we all know how that will turn out.

Unlike the original film, a black-and-white noir classic, this Nightmare Alley features splashy color and a series of stunning art deco interiors.  It employs its title in some inventive ways, showing a variety of alleys, some of them those impressively decorated corridors, that Stanton Carlisle walks, and then runs through in various states of desperation, before he finds himself moving from the linear to the circular in his progress.  Despite the presence of his lover and assistant Molly, Stan’s journey appears bracketed between two blondes, one the blowsy, sexually generous Zeena (Toni Collette), a performer in the dusty, sleazy carnival, who first befriends him and teaches him some of the tricks of her own mentalist racket; the other is the icy psychologist Lilith Ritter, who occupies the astonishing art deco offices and whose name alone should have served to warn him.  In addition she creates a nice balance, in effect plying her own trade as a “mentalist” and thus matching both Zeena and Stan in falsehood and fraudulence.

Collecting quite a bit of critical praise, for whatever that’s worth, the movie certainly stands out from the usual swamp of superhero flicks that would ordinarily draw big crowds in a non-COVID season.  Its fascinating and often unpleasant subtext of cons and scams, of suckers and cheaters, might best be summarized in the title of a W. C. Fields classic, “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” a type who, fear not, never appears in Nightmare Alley.  Despite that truth, an admonition implied throughout the work, its dark 1930s ambience, and its bleak ethos, in these difficult times for film companies and movie theaters, it may even make a profit.  Rarely, it may also deserve one.