OBIT

OBIT

          A documentary on the obituary department of the New York Times hardly seems the sort of thing that would shake the walls of the multiplexes, but the new movie Obit deserves some of the same attention and praise lavished on the latest computer assisted adventures of the latest comic book superhero.  Despite its ostensibly unpromising subject, the movie provides a fascinating glimpse into the daily workings of the department, its people, and their conception of their job.

          Proceeding in the tried and true technique of contemporary documentary (though here generally justified by the subject), the director employs a series of talking head interviews with the several writers in the department, who describe the challenges of the job, their methods, and their attitudes toward dealing with death.  The director, Vanessa Gould, also interrupts the narrative with old newspaper headlines and articles—the Times morgue keeper, incidentally, deserves his own film—photographs, and film clips showing moments from the lives of the people the writers memorialize.  The ongoing montage enlivens the story, but also suggests some of the meaning and importance of those lives, in short, the reasons for their deaths receiving a full article in that section of the revered New York Times.

She also follows the day-long progress of one writer, Bruce Weber, on the obituary of someone most people probably never heard of, William Wilson, the first person to serve as the television consultant for a presidential campaign.  After calling the widow for the essential information that the Times demands—cause of death, age, survivors, etc.—he starts the process of research and writing, not all that different from any scholar’s work.  The investigation opens up a window on the past, showing clips of the first presidential debate, the historic confrontation of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, orchestrated largely by Wilson; that debate, Kennedy claimed, won him the election. 

Weber begins the day on the telephone, proceeds through research on his subject, and finishes a long and satisfactory essay just in time to meet his deadline in the late afternoon.  Like any writer, he stalls and stumbles, tries several beginnings, overcomes an array of familiar obstacles, and ends with a work he happily regards as successful.  As he and his colleagues point out, they write a kind of history in uncovering the lives of people who achieved enough to earn an obituary in the newspaper.  They not only record the lives of the famous and distinguished, however, they also often remember the forgotten, those who have slipped away from fame, dropped out of the public gaze, reminding us all that for both the celebrated and the obscure the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Inevitably, the writers also find that their work brings them into a consideration of death, of their own ends, intimations of their own mortality.  In the process of recording the lives of so many so often, they inevitably confront the notion of the obituary that awaits each of them.  Like Prospero at the end of The Tempest they realize that “every third thought shall be (their) grave.”  Obit may remind us all of that reality.

KING ARTHUR

KING ARTHUR

          Since Shakespeare wrote it and his theatrical company performed it, Hamlet has undergone innumerable interpretations and transformations, from the literal to the bizarre; yet the play, in all its messy brilliance, remains a universally acknowledged masterpiece.  In a similar manner, the great English myth, the story of King Arthur, appears in innumerable incarnations throughout the ages, including dozens of films, from adventure stories to comedies and musicals.  Like the prince of Denmark, the king survives them all, and he will no doubt survive his latest version, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Guy Ritchie, who directed the new movie, turned the immortal story into yet another summer spectacular, with a gaggle of monsters, including some pachyderm type beasts and a trio of reptilian women, gobs of magic, and of course, a plethora of computer generated imagery.  His Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) pulls Excalibur from the stone as expected and in fact demanded, but proves reluctant to assume the responsibility of ruling the land now under the control of the evil Vortigern (Jude Law), who controls his people with the assistance of some supernatural powers.  After a long period of preparation and training, Arthur leads an army against Vortigern and, after much slaughter and other assorted difficulties, defeats him.  He ends the film knighting his faithful followers and creating the famous Round Table, a piece of furniture that initially puzzles his knights, and which suggests a sequel as well.

Despite all the spectacular effects, the film adds little to the great legend beyond a number of comical anachronisms.  Arthur speaks of being “proactive,” for instance, a term that I think was not terribly common back in the Middle Ages, along with his use of “razzle dazzle” and another knight’s mistaking the table for a carousel.  Hardly a commanding or charismatic figure, Charlie Hunnam seems flat and dull compared to his adversary, whose character actually dominates most of the action.  On the upside, Arthur introduces the modern concept of diversity to the Round Table, with an African knight, Bedivere, played by Djimon Hounson, and an Asian knight, Kung Fu George, played by Tom Wu.  King Arthur: Legend of the Sword otherwise ranks quite low on the long list of Arthuriads in fiction and film; the great story, always worth retelling, deserves a better incarnation, possibly with some sense of character and action and absent all the magic of contemporary cinema.  It is, after all, a long, long way from Camelot to Avalon.

T2 TRAINSPOTTING

T2 TRAINSPOTTING

          Sometime in the 1950s the British discovered their working class as more than, well, workers, happily content, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, with chapel and beer. The postwar expansion of higher education, the introduction of social services, the general sense of new beginnings that accompanied the end of a long period of Tory control, and a whole generation that had suffered disproportionately through the war combined with a long history of oppression and denial to create the group of writers known as The Angry Young Men.  The title derives from Look Back in Anger, a play by John Osborne, one of their number, which also included such writers as Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain, David Storey, Keith Waterhouse, and Alan Sillito. 

Aside from awakening the culture to some new insights, their writings inspired a number of lively, relevant films during one of the rare bright periods in the generally dismal history of British cinema.  Those films featured a new generation of actors, many of whom differed from their predecessors in class background, appearance, and accent (always a primary point in England).  Actors like Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, David Warner, Richard Harris, Michael Caine, and, yes, Sean Connery, with strong regional accents and simply, a different look challenged the classically trained theater veterans who’d dominated the Shakespeare, Shaw, Coward material of the English stage. 

One of the best and most entertaining cinematic demonstrations of that transformation occurs in Sleuth (1972), in which Laurence Olivier plays a wealthy, aristocratic mystery novelist and Michael Caine the hairdresser lover of the writer’s wife.  The gap between the working class Milo Tyndle and the snobbish, superior Andrew Wyke opens immediately when with a sneer, Wyke asks Tyndle  if he lives above, below, or behind his shop; on the other hand, the Italian-English Tyndle suggests that Wyke’s wife appreciates the hairdresser’s greater virility, the usual source of insecurity for the upper classes.  They spar, exchange insults, and embark on a preposterous and complicated game created by the writer that ends in a somewhat ambiguous and inconclusive surprise.  The contest of the movie reflects not only the class distinctions between the two characters, but also the change in generations, as a new kind of actor appears opposite one of the most honored performers of his time, a kind of summation of the revolution that occurred in British cinema in the last two decades.

In addition to the films based on or inspired by the works of the Angry Young Men, several of those sharp and entertaining Ealing Studio comedies of the 1950s dealt with some of the same issues.  Those whimsical, witty movies that introduced a troupe of fine, mostly comic actors to the public often revolved around social realities and a few, like I’m All Right, Jack and The Man in the White Suit, for example, suggested the changes in political and economic thinking in the new, postwar Great Britain.  Almost all of them satirized elements of the class system in one way or another, and many combined that with something of the anarchic humor of many American movies.

Unfortunately, that revolution, like so many revolutions, ultimately fostered its own particular meaningless and distressing responses to the culture and perhaps to itself.  The importation and reinterpretation of rock music from the United States fed first a new exuberance and another example of creativity welling up from the lower classes rather than seeping down from the cultured upper classes.  That music metastasized into other forms, including punk rock, which employed a strong sense of social upheaval and, once again, anarchy.  Names like Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten efficiently sum up the attitudes, along with band names like The Sex Pistols and The Sniveling Shits (I am not making this up).  Ultimately, I think, the decadence that in the past tended to trickle down, shall we say, from the effete elites eventually to some degree bubbled up from the depths, a result of the same energy that initially galvanized the new culture.

This long, possibly accurate, and I hope, not too boring preliminary leads to the latest British film import, T2 Trainspotting, a sequel to the original of twenty years ago.  The director, Danny Boyle, ingeniously brought back the same principals from that movie to play the same characters, now of course twenty years older themselves.  Though times have changed and the actors and their characters have aged, everything else seems depressingly familiar.  Renton (Ewan McGregor), the nearest thing to a protagonist, returns to his old home town in Scotland and his crew of druggies and criminals to find everything different but somehow the same.  Although one member of the gang dies on a treadmill to open the film, the rest of the crew remains.  The psychopath Begbie (Robert Carlyle) begins the action in prison; the junkie Spud (Ewen Bremner) fights an intermittent battle against his addiction; and Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) runs a blackmail racket involving his girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) and a strap-on dildo (don’t ask).

Though sometimes comic, the action mostly depends on the same old violence and thievery.  Begbie escapes from prison and seeks to kill his former pals, who have betrayed him; the pathetic Spud ultimately kicks his habit; after a wild fight, Renton and Simon collaborate on a scheme to swindle a grant to make a pub into a tourist spot.  Maintaining some continuity with the original, the director frequently employs shots of trains as transitions between scenes and sequences, and rather overdoing it, shows Renton’s childhood bedroom decorated with railroad train wallpaper.

The movie provides fewer shocks and fewer disgusting images than its predecessor, and even hints at a modicum of sentiment.  Perhaps the best scene involves Renton and Simon improvising to save their lives on a stage in a pub where the patrons still celebrate a famous battle in that bloody history of Protestants versus Catholics in the British Isles, and customers must perform.  After rifling the wallets of the drinkers and dancers they sing a celebratory song about the conflict, with the chorus, “No more Catholics left,” which completely enchants the crowd, who happily join in, dancing and rejoicing in that long ago victory, while the thieves manage to slip away. 

Although perhaps not quite so squalid and repulsive as the original, T2 Trainspotting provides some convincing insights into ordinary life in today’s United Kingdom.  It also provides a nicely opposing glimpse of a world far removed from those genteel dramas so beloved of Anglophiles and public television.  This picture reminds us that Ye Olde Merrie England consists of more than Upstairs, Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, and Downton Abbey.  An occasionally incomprehensible Scottish burr replaces the refined accents of the upper classes, booze and cocaine replace tea and crumpets, and a woman armed with a dildo replaces the polite courtship of the upper classes: rule Britannia.

KING KONG

KING KONG

          To begin with, the grand original King Kong , released in 1933, ranks high on my list of ace favorites; I may have seen it more times than any other film, and I have taught it as an outstanding example of horror film (monster variety) and a brilliant display of the sorts of special effects pioneered in Hollywood many decades ago.  Rich in thematic meaning and relevance, like so many films of its era it reflects some important truths about the condition of America and the world in the 1930s. 

          The Empire State Building, constructed in something like eleven months by workers who knew in those dark days of the Great Depression that they would be jobless once they finished, was completed in 1931; in 1933 King Kong climbed it, holding Fay Wray in his arms, regarding her, in Jack Kerouac’s words, with huge eyes of tender love.  The great ape, the lovely woman, the wonderful building created one of the most enduring and symbolic film images of that time or any time.  The beast in the jungle finally perished in the urban jungle of the big city, where his adventures on Manhattan Island closely echo those on Skull Island.  In a moment of absolute but quite wonderful corniness, Robert Armstrong utters his epitaph, “Beauty killed the Beast.”

And who could forget the lovely Fay Wray, the first and greatest of all the scream queens?  She developed her vocal cords and perfected her running style in The Most Dangerous Game, which prepared her for King Kong, where she also looked most desirable in the brief swimming scene, when she suffered a wardrobe malfunction and revealed a bit more than usual in those pre-Code days.  (The actual monster was only three feet, six inches tall, and was moved through painstaking stop motion photography; in the scenes where the ape holds her, she only occupies a huge hand on an arm that slid out on wheels.  Appropriately, she titled her autobiography On the Other Hand.)     

Although the new version, the sixth or seventh remake, cannot match the original, Kong: Skull Island displays the latest in computer generated images, showing just how far the art of cinematic special effects has developed.  Kong himself is massive, easily the largest of all the giant apes in all the giant ape movies, big enough to swat helicopters out of the sky, big enough to make waves like ocean surf in the island’s lake.  Like his ancestors, he battles a number of monsters, including a multi-tentacled water dweller, and vicious creatures that combine the lizard and the snake into a sort of dragon; as the scientist John Goodman) who leads the expedition says, Skull Island is a place that God didn’t finish.

Thanks to the wonders of contemporary cinema, those monsters surpass the dinosaurs, snakes, and pterodactyls of the original in sheer ugliness.  They include that octopus-like creature that rises out of the water, only to become a meal for Kong; a giant spider whose tree-like legs impale some of the crew; and worst of all, the horrifying reptilian beasts who pose the greatest threat to all the Skull Islanders and manage to munch on quite a few of the explorers.  Aside from their ferocity and their appetites, one of the most distressing results of encounters with the beasts is their propensity to vomit on their human antagonists and, worse, when disemboweled, to spill their viscera all over them (fortunately, no excrement).  Whatever they suffered, Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot never had to deal with those messes.

Set in the waning days of the Vietnam War, the movie also attempts some odd connections to the past, with a whole fleet of helicopter gunships ferrying the scientific expedition and a platoon of soldiers to Skull Island.  The script litters the action with coy allusions to Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, including Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), a slightly nutty pilot whose plane crashed on the island in World War II, combining references to both works.  With the help of some of the expedition survivors of several creature attacks, he completes work on a boat cannibalized from two planes that conveys the group toward the hope of safety, serving in effect as one of the heroes of the film.

On Skull Island Kong is more than a king, he is a god, who actually protects the indigenous people—a small, silent, colorfully painted and apparently kindly tribe—from the hideous animals seeking to devour them.  After losing a goodly number of their members, and over the objections of the war loving colonel (Samuel  L. Jackson) who leads the military contingent, the expedition comes to a grudging understanding of Kong’s importance to them and the island. 

The actors perform their roles serviceably if not with any particular distinction.  A fine actor generally, John Goodman appears tired and bored with his part and somewhat subdued when he becomes a monster’s repast.  Tim Hiddleston, who’s riding high these days (the cover of GQ means something after all), teams with Brie Larson in their versions of the Bruce Cabot-Fay Wray power couple, but contemporary underplaying somehow needs more of the original’s unabashed exaggeration and exuberance.  The new picture ranks as probably the best of all the many remakes and imitations, but nothing will completely replace that great original, which above all provides a rich thematic content, perhaps the most significant void in Kong: Skull Island.

BITTER HARVEST

BITTER HARVEST

          All the contemporary interest in Russian imperialism, that nation’s interference in the presidential election, and the right wing’s pathetic adoration of powerful dictators combine to make a movie about a horrible tragedy in the 1930s surprisingly relevant today.  Bitter Harvest shows, through the experience of one family, the Soviet oppression of Ukraine under the rule of Joseph Stalin, that rough draft (very rough draft) for the current Republican darling, Vladimir Putin.  The picture provides a valuable chapter in twentieth-century history and a distressing lesson in human suffering.

Narrated in part by its protagonist Yuri (Max Irons), Bitter Harvest recounts  yet another instance of the sort of butchery that too often results when one society attempts to dominate or even ultimately exterminate another; history, alas, offers numerous examples, like the systematic attempts at wiping out Native Americans, the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, and of course, the Holocaust.   The movie’s story nicely previews and in a sense, parallels the contemporary Russian incursion into Ukraine, so loudly cheered by the right wing in America, including all the crypto-Russians in the administration.  Back in the 1930s Stalin ordered the forced collectivization of Ukrainian farms and the seizure of their harvest; as the brutal occupation progressed, his troops systematically starved to death an estimated seven to ten million people in an act that in later years came to be known as Holodomor, a kind of pre-Holocaust Holocaust. 

Within the framework of Yuri’s narrative and history the picture shows the particular suffering of his family and his beloved, Natalka (Samantha Banks), which reflects the steady progress of Stalin’s program.  Yuri and his friends, even the devoted Bolsheviks among them, discover that familiar truth of Stalinism, borne out by the notorious purge trials of the decade, that even the dictator’s supporters risk imprisonment, torture, or execution if he thinks they are disloyal.  (Come to think of it, he behaves like an extreme version of several of the bosses I have toiled under).  The rest of the film deals with Yuri’s own victimization and his later involvement with the Ukrainian resistance to the Soviet occupation.

Bitter Harvest perhaps works best as an instructive lesson in the history of Eastern Europe, the history of the Soviet Union, and as something of a background to the present Russian occupation of Ukraine.  It also nicely demonstrates how history indeed repeats itself, providing a commentary on contemporary foreign affairs and the actions of that Republican favorite dictator of the month, Vladimir Putin.  Their spokesmen, the lackeys and lickspittles of hate media, notably that passionate sycophant Sean Hannity, have spoken stridently of their admiration for his iron fist; Bitter Harvest suggests that the fist is larger, heavier, and older than most of us realized.

ALL THAT GLITTERS

ALL THAT GLITTERS

          Greed may be good, as we have been told by the financial wheelers and dealers who inform us of the benefits of that incentive to capitalism, though ignoring much of its consequences.  Greed also apparently inspires the film industry, not only in its own quest for profits, but as the subject of a number of recent films.  The two versions of Wall Street, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short all displayed several aspects of the process by which people who essentially perform no real job beyond making money make money.

Gold, the latest venture into that process, once again loosely based on an actual story, shows the ups and downs of a complicated operation to mine gold from the jungles of Indonesia.  The son of a former prospector in the American West, Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey), after undergoing a boom and a bust in his business, learns of the exploits of a skilled mining engineer, Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), who searches for valuable metals.  He hocks all his valuables to fly to Indonesia and enlist Acosta in a gold mining operation, which occupies most of the movie’s action.  For some time, predictably, the miners find no gold, they run out of money to pay their workers, and the corrupt government intervenes; the partners have to give the president’s son a piece of the action to sustain their enterprise.

Once the scheme begins to pay off, however, a major Wall Street firm offers to buy into what may turn out to be the biggest gold strike in history.  Kenny Wells becomes the major player in the gold market, a hero of the industry, and a greedy consumer of the benefits of sudden wealth.  Naturally, for complicated reasons, the whole business collapses, a number of high rollers find themselves broke, and legal questions bring in the FBI.

The real point of the film, apart from its familiar salutary lessons in the dangers of unbridled lust for wealth, belongs with the person of the star, who appears in almost every scene.  Apparently bent on stretching himself in many directions, in Gold Matthew McConaughey assumes a very different look and persona from his previous roles.  After playing the emaciated cowboy of Dallas Buyers Club, the soft-spoken psychopath of Killer Joe, even the smooth dude of those Lincoln commercials, for the part of Kenny Wells he added what looks like at least 50 pounds, took off a lot of hair, and adopted some ugly prosthetic dentures.  (The sacrifices one makes for art!) 

Although possibly authentic, those transformations and McConaughey’s excessively enthusiastic performance hardly turn Kenny Wells into a charismatic salesman for his golden cause.  The frequent closeups of his sweating, puffy face and unfortunate teeth become something less than inspirational as the picture progresses.  The scenes of this corpulent man wandering around with his protruding belly looming over his tighty whiteys or emerging from a hot tub stark raving naked are not entirely pleasant to look upon.

Aside from the sometimes excessive energy McConaughey pours into his role and his willingness to appear somewhat less than attractive, the movie mostly works best when it shows the large mining operation in Indonesia, the actual work of the people, and the lush jungles that provide the setting.  Its ambiguous and puzzling conclusion tends to subvert its exploration of its popular and relevant subject, its motivations and consequences.  As it turns out, greed triumphs once again.  

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

          Several years ago an entertainment reporter from a newspaper (in Texas I think), called me up to ask about recent trends in film.  I inferred that he wanted me to say something about explosions, rocket blasts, car chases, superheroes, computer generated images, and all the other gimmickry that so many people mistake for movie making.  Instead,  I  told him that American pictures now and then showed signs of waking up to the heritage of literary works like Winesburg, Ohio, examining something of  the dreariness, loneliness, and emptiness of small towns and small lives, the drab underside of American life that seldom appears in the glossiness of Hollywood cinema.  (Of course, that conclusion ignores all those flicks about young people straying into some little Southern town inhabited by inbred cannibals eager for new, preferably college educated nourishment).  Surprisingly, he seemed uninterested after that.

          Perhaps beginning back with The Last Picture Show, the industry occasionally turns away from the sentimental vision of works like It’s a Wonderful Life, one of my personal nonfavorites, and explores something darker and sadder in movies like All the Real Girls, The Good Girl, Beautiful Girls, Monster’s Ball, Sling Blade, even About Schmidt, which if it strays from the small town, retains some of the great American vision of disillusion and disappointment out there in flyover country.  In the midst of the holiday season, when the multiplexes explode in fireworks and sophisticated technology positively leaps from the screen, a rather modest, low-key film inspired garlands of superlatives and generous sprinklings of exclamation points, and has already won some of those bogus prizes that the industry employs to praise itself.  The movie, Manchester by the Sea, tells a very simple story that reflects an understanding of the sad poetry of ordinary life, the impossible situations we often occupy, the problems we struggle and often fail to solve. 

It uses a series of flashbacks to explain something of its present, but mostly stays within the narrow boundaries of its main character’s life.  Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), who works as the superintendent for a handful of apartment buildings in Quincy, Massachusetts, must handle the difficulties created by the sudden death of his older brother Joe back in his hometown of Manchester by the Sea.  And that’s about it, that’s the whole subject of the film.  Throughout the movie Lee attempts to figure out the next steps in his life and form some sort of relationship with his brother’s sixteen-year-old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges).  In the process those flashbacks reveal the tragedy that in effect chased Lee out of his home town and created the sad emptiness of his present life.  A drunk and a brawler who steadfastly resists even the slightest human connection, whether from a woman in a bar, the mother of his nephew’s girlfriend, or even his ex-wife eager for some communication, Lee excludes anyone who attempts to penetrate the carapace that surrounds his pain and protects him from the world. 

The performances rhyme with the subjects and rhythms of the film, so that the mostly working class people seem completely real, not acting so much as living their mostly drab, awkward, ordinary lives.  Casey Affleck plays Lee Chandler in a remarkable series of understated conversations and odd silences, only occasionally allowing the combustion inside his spirit to flame out in anger and violence.  The whole cast matches him perfectly, especially Lucas Hedges as his nephew Patrick and Michelle Williams as his ex-wife, who shares his tragedies and heartbreak but cannot enter the prison he has constructed for himself.

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, who clearly knows the place and its people, the movie works on every level, so that its frequent establishing shots of the actual town of Manchester by the Sea signal a brief, seamless glimpse of the past or provide a bridge between scenes and sequences.  Perhaps too literal and deliberate at times, it nevertheless creates a world where everyone apparently suffers some terrible loss, some failure of love, some bleak prospect of an unsatisfactory life ahead.  The script offers no solutions and refuses to settle for any easy answers to its problems, some neat closure of its action, which explains how really unusual a film Lonergan has made, a slice of life more authentic than just about every other motion picture now playing.

RULES DON’T APPLY

         As Warren Beatty’s new movie Rules Don’t Apply demonstrates, Donald Trump is not the first loony billionaire to entrance the media; though undoubtedly smarter than the Great Creamsicle, Howard Hughes was also crazier.  Like Trump, however, he advertised his exploits loud and often; the heir to a great industry; he designed and flew airplanes, produced movies, and collected a stable of starlets.   Martin Scorsese’s Aviator dealt with Hughes in his most successful years, when he was a Hollywood legend and dated, among others, Katharine Hepburn.  Beatty’s movie, which stars him as Hughes, concentrates mostly on his later years as his eccentricities declined into insanity.

Despite serving as the central character, Beatty only sporadically appears, mostly as a strange figure in the background of a burgeoning love between one of his drivers detailed to chauffeur one of his aspiring actresses.  Lily Collins plays Marla Mabrey, who comes to Hollywood with her mother (Annette Bening) for a promised screen test.  Hughes supplies her with her own house, her own driver/watcher, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), so she can follow a daily routine that, frustratingly, never actually culminates in the test.  Neither she nor Frank even meets their employer until well into the movie, when they must deal with his manifold idiosyncratic practices and demands.

In addition to the generally insipid relationship between the two young people, the film shows some of Hughes’s general lunacy—paying his gaggle of hopeful performers by dangling envelopes of cash from upper story windows, insisting on flying (and crashing) an untested airplane, his famous wooden flying boat, his purchase of all supplies of banana nut ice cream, his expectation of a ticker tape parade in Washington, where no buildings tall enough for such an event exist, his constant screening of his great hit Hell’s Angels, etc., etc.—which grows less and less interesting as the movie progresses.  Rules Don’t Apply also features a whole constellation of stars of various magnitudes—Matthew Broderick, Paul Sorvino, Amy Madigan, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Oliver Platt (I may have missed a few), possibly all friends of Beatty.

The movie runs quite long, perhaps to accommodate all those players, repeats itself endlessly, and turns a perhaps once interesting personality into a mercurial eccentric who mumbles uninteresting lines and mostly dwells in darkness.  Nobody seems in the least compelling, including the central character, and very little in the film makes it worth watching.  One of the rules that Beatty doesn’t apply is the obligation to make the story, the people, and the action watchable, an obligation he overlooked in Rules Don’t Apply.

         

ARRIVAL

ARRIVAL

          Ever since Stanley Kubrick’s ponderous, pretentious epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, back in 1968, the science fiction film, too often the object of highbrow sneers, acquired a certain dignity.  All those wonderful old B flicks about invaders from outer space and flying saucers manned by hideous creatures from distant planets bent on the destruction of mankind evolved into more, occasionally thoughtful explorations of those popular subjects, alien encounters, robots, time travel, and the future.  Some movies with similar aspirations to high art include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and AI Artificial Intelligence; Steven Spielberg directed all three, and the third derived from a planned Kubrick adaptation.

The concept of the alien encounter, whether in a mission from Earth, as in Aliens, or by extraterrestrial visitors to this planet, provides probably the most important and most common subject for science fiction.  Those visitors vary between the benign and helpful, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still, or much more often, frightening and hostile—The Thing From Another World, Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Puppet Masters, Independence Day, etc., etc., etc.  One of the major problems in that encounter, the difficult process of mere communication, the need to know the intentions of the visitors, forms the central preoccupation of the new science fiction film Arrival.   

Instead of the usual flying saucers (thanks, Roswell, New Mexico) crewed by the little green men beloved by alien abduction veterans, in Arrival the spaceships are huge half domes that hover on edge, twelve of which have landed in various places all over the world.  Their crew—the movie shows only two creatures—resembles gigantic octopuses, though with seven tentacles and no apparent eyes or mouths.  Led by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), the army sets up an expansive military village around the ship, and links up with similar constructions at the other locations in other countries.  Weber enlists Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a professor of linguistics, to find some way of communicating with the visitors.

As usual in science fiction films that deal with alien encounters, the puzzle presented by the visitors creates a dangerous conflict in the reactions of the various countries, including the United States.  While some, in the scientific community of course, want to find out all they can about them—where they came from, how they got here, what do they want, and so on--many frightened government leaders and their military forces want to attack them, even threatening nuclear bombs.  Louise Banks and her physicist colleague Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) naturally want their research to continue as far and as deep as they can conduct it.  That division of interpretation and purpose leads to the most important crisis in the movie.

She and Donnelly undergo the difficult preparations for ascending in a gravity-free tunnel and a possibly poisonous atmosphere inside the space ship to confront the aliens through a transparent wall.  The creatures “speak” by squirting a kind of ink in circular patterns, which through the sort of fascinating process that film shows so well, the linguist manages to decipher.   Whether valid or not, her explorations of possible meanings, the charts she creates, the solutions she reaches all share their own inherent appeal. 

Her own process of enlightenment grows out of the belief that learning a new language actually changes the human brain; as a result, she begins to share some of the thinking of the aliens and to participate in their peculiar sense of nonlinear time.  She even experiences physical changes, some connected to the notion that learning a new language in some way rewires the brain.  Her contact with the extraterrestrials enables her to communicate with other humans in ways she doesn’t even understand.  Through flashbacks and flash forwards, the movie shows the merging of past, present, and future, demonstrating the nonlinear nature of time, so that the linguist in effect paradoxically “remembers” the future.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Arrival succeeds on many levels, fusing the personal history and context of its protagonist with the desperate struggle to avert violence and, best of all, simply to learn as much as possible.  Even in its use of familiar subjects and themes of the genre, the film’s version of the alien encounter presents some entirely new meanings and possibilities, with a refreshing reliance on the intellect and some compelling ideas about linguistics itself.  Along with its intelligent use of some inventive material, its massive space ship, the huge military encampment surrounding it, the extremely unusual creatures, the large cast, the special effects all combine to place it among the most memorable science fiction films.  It may well become a classic.