Not So Jolly: Cinematic Carnality and Corruption

Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in Shame

Profoundly damaged men are the focus of two new films with one-word titles and bleaker-than-bleak outlooks. Just in time for the holidays! In Shame, the troubled New York City protagonist is Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender), addicted to anonymous and increasingly rough, grim sex. The central character in Rampart, Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), is a longtime Los Angeles cop whose lies, brutality and arrogance have begun to erode his very being. Joy to the world!

While both movies are hard to watch, Shame provides some measure of compassion for the handsome Brandon as he navigates between his upscale office job and a secret life of compulsive seduction, masturbation, hookers and porn. Director Steve McQueen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Abi Morgan and gives the dire proceedings a deceptively stylish look, does not provide any examination of what early experiences might have dragged a person into such self-destructive lower depths.

Steve Jobs: Turn It Off

Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs in Steve Jobs.

In Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, released a couple of months ago, you can feel the documentarian Alex Gibney struggling to find a shape for the story of this icon – a way of bridging the gap between his narcissism and callousness and the heroic status he occupies in the minds of millions of people. And the impossibility of building that bridge becomes the focus; the tone of the doc is as quizzical as it is critical and astonished. I found the movie’s ambling approach a little frustrating, but mostly I admired its refusal to pretend to have worked out a finished portrait of Jobs, and the material Gibney comes up with is fascinating. By contrast, the dramatic feature Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin (based on Walter Isaacson’s biography) and directed by Danny Boyle, exudes an air of gleaming confidence and it has a carefully groomed look – I’d say vellum-bound. (The production design is by Guy Hendrix Dyas and the cinematography is by Alwin Küchler; Elliot Graham edited it.) But these two A-list filmmakers and their A-list star, Michael Fassbender, don’t even get close to creating a convincing portrait of Jobs or of the empire he created, was exiled from, and eventually returned to as its reigning monarch.

Gods & Monsters – Alien: Covenant & the Enigma of Ridley Scott

Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant.

I find Ridley Scott’s career as a filmmaker endlessly fascinating, and endlessly confusing. Who else in popular cinema has made such a name for himself yet squandered that artistic reputation with as many misfires and disappointments? I don’t think the man has made a really good movie since Black Hawk Down in 2001, and even that endorsement comes with its own list of qualifications and asterisks. It’s gotten to the point where I’m viewing his back catalogue, full of films that were personal touchstones in my cinematic education, with sudden suspicion. Has he ever actually made a truly great movie?

There’s only one Ridley Scott film that, no matter how many times I put it through the ringer, always comes out clean on the other side. So if he can be said to have made a perfect movie, an unassailable jewel of form and function, it’s Alien. It can be incredibly frustrating to face down yet another entry in the Alien franchise when it’s still unclear why exactly we would want or need one, after the purity and simplicity of that slasher flick in space from 1979. With the benefit of hindsight, I guess it’s easy to identify Scott’s insistence on returning to this material as a fervent need to recapture the magic that launched his career in the first place (not to mention a need to cash in on his prior success and good will after so many failed attempts at trying something different). But I believe Scott’s capable of much more than that, and his refusal – even at this late-career stage – to capitalize on that potential has worn very thin indeed.

Macbeth: Doom and Gloom

Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in Macbeth, directed by Justin Kurzel. (Photo: Jonathan Olley)

In the late eighties I saw an incoherent production of Macbeth with Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson that looked as if the actors were making it up as they went along. As my friends and I high-tailed it to the street at intermission, never to return, I theorized that if you’d stopped the play at any point and asked the actors what they were playing, no one on stage would have been able to come up with an answer. Throughout its pre-Broadway tour the show had been shuffling off directors like a snake sheds skin: three had departed by the time we saw it, none of them memorialized by so much as a credit in the playbill. Unsurprisingly, it never opened in New York.

The new movie version of Macbeth with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, directed by Justin Kurzel (whose only previous feature-length credit is something called The Snowtown Murders), isn’t as bad as the Plummer-Jackson version – and, aside from praising the cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, that’s the single comment I can offer in its favor. It’s punishing. The entire cast, which includes David Thewlis as Duncan and Paddy Considine as Banquo, is stuck on the same lugubrious note. Until the Macbeths ascend the Scottish throne and throw a celebratory feast, everyone wears black, and the bagpipes in Jed Kurzel’s mournful score sound almost cheerful by comparison with the line readings. When Duncan informs Macbeth, whom he has just promoted to Thane of Cawdor in honor of his courage in battle, that he’ll be paying the Macbeth castle a visit, Fassbender responds as if he’d just been asked to make funeral arrangements for the traitor whose title he’s inherited. When Banquo talks to his little boy Fleance (Lochlann Harris), from whom he’s been separated by war, father and son don’t even smile at one another. It’s not enough to say that the characters have been stripped of all their complexities; they’re not playing characters at all, just harbingers of doom and gloom. When the actor cast as Macbeth reads the lines “To know my deed, ‘t were best not know myself” and “Is this a dagger that I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” exactly the same way, it’s obvious that something is getting lost in translation: meaning.

You Can Never Go Home: John Maclean's Slow West

Michael Fassbender and Kodi-Smit McPhee in Slow West.

The mythic loner of the Western has always reflected that split in the psyche of the American character where the hopes of nationhood are continually set against the rights of the individual. The Founding Fathers dreamed up a nation with a standing promise to create a country built on equality and true governance. But the hero of the Western, the one who stood tall to wrest nationhood from the anarchy of the outlaws, best supported D.H. Lawrence's idea that "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." All of which explains why the gunslinger who brings about the law that creates governance doesn't really get to benefit from it. He never comes to live in the home he helps create. Unlike the gangster figure of the Depression Era who chose to live outside the law, and expressed what Robert Warshow described as "that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself," the hero of the Western always sought Americanism, and permanent roots, even though, deep down, he knew he'd never have them.

For someone like John Wayne, the idea of home became downright elusive if not an illusion. Despite leading an obsessive search for his niece kidnapped by Comanches in The Searchers (1956), Wayne's Ethan Edwards eventually delivered her home and alive, but Ethan didn't get to share the spoils of residence, instead he's left framed outside the door against the vast country that spawned him. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), his Tom Doniphon, in a drunken rage, burns down the home he was building for the woman (Vera Miles) he silently loved when he discovered that she had fallen instead for the lawyer (James Stewart) who taught her to read and to dream of a country she could become a citizen of. But Tom Doniphon can't share in that dream of citizenry, he can only exist in its shadow, secretly and silently saving Stewart from the superior gunman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). He has to lurk in a dark alley with his rifle aimed at this vicious killer with the purpose of preserving the rule of law so that it will triumph over the brutal vigilantism of Liberty Valance.

X-Ceptional – X-Men: Days of Future Past

In my review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I made a point of mentioning I was a fan of the X-Men series, and it should also be noted that I’ve enjoyed the X-Men film franchise since its fresh-faced beginnings in 2000. It’s a series that seems to be improving with age, recovering from severe stumbles like X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) to finally hit its stride only, what – six, seven films in? Except for the excellent X-Men: First Class (2011), I think the strongest of the franchise were the original two films, both directed by Bryan Singer. Singer returns to the helm for the latest installment, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and I think with all this bearing in mind, it’s safe to say that on entirely its own merits, X-Men: DoFP is a fine superhero action film, and in the context of its own series, it’s nothing short of brilliant.

The Snowman: Deep Freeze

Michael Fassbender as Harry Hole in The Snowman. 

The images in The Snowman, Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of one of the Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole thrillers, are alternately crystalline and misted over. Alfredson, too, is Scandinavian (he was born in Stockholm), and his movie, set in what feels like endless winter, gets the feel of a country embedded in deep freeze. In visual terms the film is about winter as a state of mind, as an objective correlative for psyches that have been chilled by bitter experience, as a landscape for the dead. The snowmen that the serial killer being stalked by Hole (Michael Fassbender) and his young partner Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson) leaves as signposts to murder have sinister, hollowed-out faces and their clumsy stick arms suggest primitive atrocities. I can’t think of another movie that does more lyrically with the ghostliness of the season. Beneath the snowfall, Alfredson and his cinematographer Dion Beebe suggest, are frozen hearts and damaged souls who haunt the country like the undead.

A Dangerous Method: Analysis as Comedy

Keira Knightley & Michael Fassbender star in A Dangerous Method

In the late 1960s and the 1970s, psychoanalysis, long a staple of thrillers and drawing-room melodramas, found its way into stage and screen comedy. Not only did we gain admittance into the characters’ conversations with their analysts (the therapy session was almost a staple of Paul Mazursky’s early movies) but the protagonists of movies like Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and plays like John Guare’s Bosoms and Neglect spoke naturally in the intricate, unshackled language of the analysand, casting their own chaotic lives and messy relationships in Freudian terms. These movies and plays, which simultaneously satirized analysis as self-involved navel gazing and took it seriously, were intended for literate, sophisticated audiences for whom therapy was as much a part of living in experimental times as leftist politics and smoking pot. David Cronenberg’s marvelous A Dangerous Method, which Christopher Hampton adapted from his play The Talking Cure (based on John Kerr’s book The Most Dangerous Method), is the ultimate analysand comedy. It would have to be, since the characters are Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jung’s most infamous patient (and lover) Sabina Spielrein. It’s an ingenious idea: what better subject is there for comedy than the early days of psychology, when the pioneers made up the rules as they went along and violated them at the same time?

Blunt: Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave

During an interview with American composer Randy Newman on the National Public Radio show Morning Edition in the fall of 2003, host Bob Edwards questioned Newman's motivation for composing "Sail Away," a sweeping and majestic track about the slave trade told from the point of view of the slave trader. In the song, Newman not only steps inside the skin of this flesh merchant, he introduces his African captives to an idea of freedom which turns out to hold the fruits of every horror they will later face as black Americans. But the orchestral arrangement is so majestic, it arouses an eagerness to jump on board in spite of the words you're hearing. Shocked that Newman could write such a beautiful song about such a shocking subject, Edwards pressed on. "What am I supposed to say," Newman replied, "'Slavery is bad?' It's like falling out of an airplane and hitting the ground. It's just too easy. And it has no effect."

Newman could just as easily be describing Steve McQueen's new and highly acclaimed film 12 Years a Slave. If McQueen's first picture, Hunger (2008), boiled a complex situation down to a blunt portrait of one man starving himself to death out of political principle; and his second, Shame (2011), reduced a character's sexual obsession to a prurient judgment of his pathology, 12 Years a Slave, a true story about a free Northern black man, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) sold into slavery, repeatedly tells us – with the impact of a blunt instrument – that 'slavery is bad.' This approach may be too easy, but (judging by the enthusiastic reviews and huge box office) it has apparently been highly effective. McQueen achieves this acclaim by opting for endless scenes of pictorial abasement to whip up the audience's outrage rather than dramatically engaging us in Northup's fate. McQueen's glacial temperament and his freeze-dried painterly style (literally, with its nods here to Goya) treats melodrama as a formal exercise.

Inexcusable – X-Men: Apocalypse

Jennifer Lawrence (in blue) and Oscar Isaac (in gray) in X-Men: Apocalypse.

Batman v Superman made me angry . It was an affront to my sensibilities, both as a nerd who cares about how comic book characters are portrayed, and as a conscious human being who paid real, hard-earned money for my ticket. X-Men Apocalypse, the newest entry in Bryan Singer’s comic book saga, isn’t the kind of bad superhero movie that makes you angry. It’s mostly just the kind that makes you sleepy. Consider it like free time: if you have any plans to make, or philosophical ruminations you’d like to ponder, or quiet meditation to catch up on, or any particularly interesting games to play on your phone, then your screening of X-Men Apocalypse can function as a twelve-dollar relaxation getaway (albeit with a few violent CGI explosions). I think thanks are due Bryan Singer, for giving us all a safe space in which to ignore his crappy movie, and focus on the things that really matter, like what you want to have for dinner that night. Thanks, Bryan!

I gave Singer’s last X-Men film, Days of Future Past, a glowing review. I haven’t seen it since, so perhaps the bloom will have fallen off the rose by now, but I genuinely liked the film at the time, and made a point of referencing the intelligence of its storytelling and how it treated both its source material and its audience with respect. It’s kind of amazing that in two years the situation has totally flipped with this new sequel: Singer has abandoned everything that made his franchise interesting or unique, and I’ve abandoned the franchise as a result. I’m done with this X-Men crap; I’m out. If it’s all going to be the same stuff – the same character relationships that never evolve, the same mutants using the same powers, the same tired origin story beats we’ve seen a million times before – regurgitated with less passion and engagement each time, then there’s nothing these X-Men movies have to offer anymore. I came away from Apocalpyse feeling baffled: it’s boring, bloated, familiar, and pointless.

A Dull Captain America; A Thunderous Thor

Growing up, my preference in comic books was always geared towards the Marvel Comics universe and not the D.C. Comics’ one. With the exception of the Justice League of America and Batman, I felt that the adventures of Marvel’s Spider-Man, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk and The Mighty Thor, with their colourful villains, complex protagonists and the grittiness of a thinly disguised Earth, trumped the mostly bland D.C. heroes and heroines. That includes, I must confess, Superman and Wonder Woman. Batman, though, with his dark psychological back story (his parents murdered before his eyes) and its nuanced present (where Gotham City’s attitude towards its costumed protector was profoundly ambivalent) seemed more in line with Marvel's layered complexity. And the first two Batman movies, Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), both directed by Tim Burton, certainly were impressive achievements. So was the masterful Superman 2 (1980) and aspects of Superman (1978). Over the years, however, most of the many Marvel film adaptations, with one notable exception, never quite jelled into fine or memorable movies, though their cinematic ingredients ought to have ensured otherwise.

The exception was Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (2004), which coalesced into a finely acted and directed tale. It perfectly captured Peter Parker’s conflicted nature: a normal teenager trying to balance a work and love life with the responsibility he considered that he owed his late Uncle Ben. In the story, he had to cope with the intense guilt brought on because he failed to use his superpowers to save Ben out of the sheer selfishness of not getting involved in the affairs of man. The rest of the Marvel movies, including the first and third Spider-Man flicks, fell short of that masterpiece. Filmmakers either picked some of the duller Marvel superheroes, Daredevil (2002) and Iron Man (2007), to adapt to the screen, or the directors botched the projects (Fantastic Four (2005)) or both (Iron Man). A few of the movies, the provocative first Hulk (2003), directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Bryan Singer’s well-acted and well-characterized X-Men (2000) and X2 (2003) fell somewhere in the qualitative middle. The summer of 2011 marks a revamp of the X-Men franchise (X-Men: First Class, a prequel to the previous movies, which I have not seen) and the premiere of both Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, which opens today. Despite its faithfulness to its source material, Captain America: The First Avenger is one of the most innocuous and forgettable of all the Marvel movies.

Movies For Adults: A Bigger Splash, Dheepan, Maggie’s Plan, Indignation and Hell or High Water

A scene from A Bigger Splash.

The division between films made for adults and those directed at teenagers and young adults seems to be a perpetual reality in cinema today, but it’s even more apparent in the summer when the tent pole superhero movies, sequels and remakes dominate movie screens. Now, I actually go to some of those films, and I quite liked Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse, typical of the consistently well-made and smart Marvel Comics adaptations – though admittedly their formulas are becoming tiresome. (Not enough real chances are taken with the characters, unlike in the comics’ source material and the generic long fight scene where our heroes end up bruised but not beaten is becoming cliché. But since A-List talents like Robert Downey Jr., James McEvoy and Michael Fassbender, among others, essay those roles, and since skilled directors like Kenneth Branagh often take on those projects, the films do make a dramatic impact.) But I also have to admit that most people over 50, such as the bulk of the students who take my film courses, have no interest in costumed caped crusaders and the like. They prefer films rife with adult situations, firmly grounded in reality and, ideally, not too sentimental in the end. Here then, are five films made just for their demographic, of varying quality, most of which say something about how we live now. (I could include here Whit Stillman’s period film Love & Friendship, which is based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. It’s certainly dialogue driven but it’s also as arid as Stilman’s other movies (Metropolitan, Barcelona) and saddled with uniformly dull, superficial performances, most notably by the film’s titular star Kate Beckinsale, lamely essaying a scheming, duplicitous widow in late 18th century England.)

The Usual Mixed Bag: Summer Movie Roundup

Over the years, the meaning of summer movies has changed. As a teen, I remember that about the only films released in hot weather were the blockbusters, the James Bonds, the Star Wars etc. Then things began to change and serious, foreign language, subtitled movies also were sent out to the populace. Nowadays, it’s a veritable smorgasbord of movies on view, though the biggest box office and attendant media coverage still accrues to tent-pole films like The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. And while it seems like the kids rule the roost because of all the publicity given to the younger skewing  movies (though many adults go to them, too), there really is a choice for all film tastes. Here is a look at some recent summer releases in Toronto, most still in our theatres and probably in yours, as well. It’s the usual mixed bag when it comes to quality.