"The Tall Man"

When I first saw The Tall Man, my reaction was one of scorn, ridicule and dismissal. I turned my nose up at its rural small-town America stereotypes, gaped in disbelief at its mind-boggling plot twists and by the time the end credits rolled and the entire societal vision behind these twists had fully unraveled, I sat flabbergasted, incredulous that a horror thriller could display such abysmal stupidity with such barefaced pretention.

Admittedly, the fact that I watched it in its French dub may have predisposed me to a negative reception; though I understand the necessity to keep French voice actors employed, I am a firm opponent of the practice. When you hear a foreign voice coming out of an actor’s mouth and speaking lines that are mere translated copies of their original words, you are effectively witnessing usurpation. Outside forces take possession of the dialogue and actors to replace half of each with somebody else’s words and performance, and the entire filmmaking process’s artifice is revealed for all to see.

Perhaps it is a petty reason to be biased against a movie, but its negative influence on my viewing experience has been fairly consistent. So watching The Tall Man again, in its original English, proved a doubly rewarding experience: It made me appreciate both writer/director Pascal Laugier’s games with his audience’s unconscious base assumptions in the film’s first act, as well as Jessica Biel’s genuinely committed central performance. Its dramatic twists and genre swerves, rather than the gratuitous rug-pulling that they initially seemed to be, emerge on second viewing as conscientiously-planned, diabolical calculations that make us re-evaluate previous scenes. And yet, while their structure and raison d’être is clearer to me, they still do not quite gel together.

At first, it seems to be a straightforward mystery chiller, with the titular boogeyman figure being blamed for a wave of child abductions in a small town that’s been in depression ever since the main source of its economy – its mine – shut down. Widowed nurse Julia Denning (Jessica Biel) – introduced as the town’s maternal figure by her delivery of a young woman’s baby – seems, like most horror protagonists, initially skeptical until her own son is suddenly kidnapped by a hooded black figure, leading to extended chase and exploration scenes that look directly Xeroxed from Silent Hill games and only stop to reveal the first of many unexpected twists.

This is one of the primary flaws that prevent The Tall Man from being the engrossing, thought-provoking Fincheresque thriller it aspires to be. While it sets up later revelations with subtle dexterity, the first half of the film does not build its world and characters sufficiently enough to make these revelations truly matter. The townspeople remain mostly one-dimensional stereotypes and, with the notable exception of seemingly insane grieving mother Mrs. Johnson (Colleen Wheeler), not enough time is spent with them to make them seem anything more than puppets used to advance the plot at Laugier’s convenience. The protracted sequence in which Julia runs after the Tall Man, fights him, escapes him and runs after him again lacks any real tension or fear (for all the hushed whispers and drawings he inspires, a guy wearing a black hood, jacket and trousers looks no scarier than your average burglar) and the earlier mother-son bonding moments are too saccharine to be genuinely convincing. Perhaps Laugier deliberately wrote and directed these scenes to be trite and artificial as an early indicator that the boy is not in fact Julia’s son, but their failure to invite surreptitious questioning or involve us in their relationship nips any such intent in the bud.

Once the first twist unmasks its characters’ true identities, the change in tone and plot is so jarring that the aforementioned earlier fight-and-flight scenes during which Jessica Biel repeatedly falls over and picks herself up, rather than gain rewatch value, are exposed as misleading padding. Rather than marvel at how well Laugier has fooled us, we feel annoyance at having had our time wasted.

The new developments revealing Julia as the true mastermind behind the wave of kidnappings and the hooded figure as the boy’s true biological mother are similarly botched by Laugier’s misjudged reuse of a storytelling technique from his polarizing 2008 shocker Martyrs. Not content with shedding a whole new light on what he has shown the viewer up to this point, he needs to make it the result of a large-scale conspiracy working for a supposedly grand and noble cause, and then spend the entire third act demonstrating how and why it operates. In the case of Martyrs, the torture endured by one of the film’s heroines was overseen by a secret cult convinced that women pushed to the very limits of pain could achieve a state of “martyrdom” that would grant them a window into what happens after death. Like Whiplash, Martyrs walked a thin line between understanding and outright endorsing the idea of achieving greatness through pain and debasement, and its morally ambiguous ending – helped by the unexpected compassion that permeated the entire film – kept it from the precipice of pretension.

This narrative translates very poorly here: Unlike Martyrs, whose impeccably-structured pacing and dual protagonists – one damaged, the other ostensibly sane – offered alternating points of view and interpretations from the get-go, The Tall Man spends the vast majority of its running time fully endorsing Julia’s perspective and never allowing any doubt as to its validity. So when, in what is admittedly Jessica Biel’s acting highlight, she justifies her actions by blaming the global economic system for creating conditions that make poor children’s happiness impossible unless they are whisked away to “happier” (i. e. wealthier, higher-class) family units, everything we have seen up until this point backs her up and encourages us to agree with her.

In effect, the film paints poor lower-class country folk at best as helpless souls who can’t provide their children with basic needs, at worst as ignorant abusive yokels who don’t deserve kids. Either way, Julia is telling us, kids should grow up in comfortable urban households rather than in the sticks. This spectacularly idiotic classism is fully supported by the townsfolk’s paper-thin characterization and only feebly challenged at the end, where mute teenager Jenny (Jodelle Ferland), having discovered Julia’s secret before her arrest, runs away from her abusive household into the arms of the Tall Man (who turns out to be Julia’s not-dead-after-all husband) and eventually a new, wealthy city family, only to turn directly to the audience at the last minute for reassurance that her decision was the right one. But it’s a weak, fallacious attempt at nuance that comes far too late to mean anything. Unlike the other children, none of whom seemed older than ten, Jenny made her own choice.

Inevitably, this twist will recall Ben Affleck’s far superior 2007 feature-length debut Gone Baby Gone – still his best film to date – in which a little girl’s kidnapping turned out to have been orchestrated by elements within the local police department out of concern for her welfare, as her alcoholic, irresponsible single mother was deemed unfit to care for her. While Gone Baby Gone raised similarly uncomfortable class issues, it took more time to flesh out its characters and balance its perspective, so as to make its conclusion truly resonate within the audience.

It’s a crying shame because Pascal Laugier’s command of atmosphere and actors is unquestionable, as is his ability to craft Russian Dolls-like screenplays whose twists have a greater purpose beyond shock and awe. What he seems to lack is a sense of proportion between his lofty philosophical ambitions and his ability to weave them seamlessly in his story. One might recommend that his next film preoccupy itself more with shared human experience – the real source of Martyrs’ poignancy – than with Big Ideas.

"Cannibal Holocaust"

35 years ago, Ruggero Deodato became the first professional filmmaker to be officially taken to court on suspicion of creating a snuff film. In a makeshift behind-the-scenes presentation more surreal than anything he had caught on camera, Deodato did not content himself with producing the main cast before the magistrates in order to confirm that they were still very much alive; he went as far as revealing how he achieved the trick of making a woman seem impaled on a spike, something that no creator in modern history had been compelled to do by court order until then.

The film in question, one that continues to divide critics and audiences even as its cultural and aesthetic impact on horror cinema remains undisputed, is Cannibal Holocaust. What was originally conceived as just another in a series of schlocky cannibal movies churned out by the booming Italian exploitation film industry became an overnight cinematic legend in a very literal sense, the kind of film many people simply could not believe had actually been made. Banned in many countries – including, until 2001, the UK, where it proudly headed the infamous “video nasties” decried by Mary Whitehouse and her moral crusaders – and cited as a major influence by filmmakers as respected as Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone and Nicolas Winding Refn, Cannibal Holocaust didn’t just push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable violence within the horror genre; for many viewers and critics, it blew up previously well-established conventions on where the border between art and exploitation stood, and scattered their remains across the entire blood-soaked landscape. For its defenders, this was additional proof – alongside Wes Craven’s 1972 landmark rape-and-revenge story The Last House On The Left¹ – that grimy, low-budget exploitation horror’s contribution to cinema as an art form could go far beyond practical gore effects. Cannibal Holocaust, they insisted, was more than just a cheap exploitation of westerners’ neocolonial fantasies of cannibalistic tribes for shock value – it was a bold, unflinching critique of audiences’ insatiable lust for screen violence, as well as a meditation on humanity’s innately brutal nature regardless of one’s “civilized” or “savage” surroundings and upbringing.

It would be easy to dismiss such praise as fanciful intellectual gymnastics performed by people afraid that their consumption of trash might harm their respectability, but the truth is that Cannibal Holocaust, in spite of Deodato’s later claims that he never sought to make anything else but a cannibal movie, seems genuinely sincere in its efforts to question its own audience’s presumed bloodlust and at times comes dangerously close to making insightful points, which makes its overall hypocrisy more of a frustrating disappointment than something worthy of righteous indignation.

One of Cannibal Holocaust’s strongest points is its structure: Metatextual from its opening scenes, which use television as the medium through which the missing documentary film crew and anthropologist Harold Monroe’s efforts to discover their fate are introduced to the viewer, it alternates from self-reflexive diegetic storytelling (initially in the form of TV interviews) to what seems like a straightforward journey to the “green inferno” where the crew’s remains and footage are found, then back to self-reflexivity as we make the same journey again, this time from the recorded perspective of those who undertook it, discovering new and progressively more inhuman acts with each new screening.

This structure keeps the viewer’s attention by regularly making them re-assess previous information based on new contextual elements. This is widely considered to be the first instance of the “found footage” gimmick in the horror genre, and if it is not the best overall film of its kind, its narrative usage of this device is certainly one of the most ingenious: as we identify with Professor Monroe, rather than the footage’s odious protagonists, the feeling of progressive discovery is greater than if their actions and fates had been revealed through conventional flashbacks, and the consequent detachment brings an additional eeriness to Riz Ortolani’s gorgeous accompanying score (unnecessarily hand-waved in the film as stock music inserted by the editors).

Here, however, end the compliments, as the “found footage” gimmick and resulting detachment are here used as a license to display exceptionally pornographic violence perpetrated by both the cannibals and the documentary crew. The idea is that because we are viewing both recorded and “live” events from the point of view of a moral, enlightened character who repeatedly vocalizes the intended “who’s the real savage?” theme, we are able to see them as the senseless evil that they are. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Inserting the hero’s sickened reaction shots in-between images of a woman being brutally raped with a stone and a nail-ridden mudball is not enough to elevate such a scene above crude exploitation. The fact that most of the worst crimes are recorded by an in-universe camera whose complicity is evident throughout does not make their depiction inherently critical.

For there to be criticism or self-criticism, the camera and its filmed subjects – be they the characters or the events – need to work together, not necessarily in a conscious alliance, but rather as complementary players in the same game. In this case, the many recorded instances of rape – native-on-native, native-on-crewmember and crewmember-on-native – are barren of any narrative contextualization that would justify their depiction, aside from being the easiest, laziest imaginable shorthand for common human depravity. They are entirely gratuitous and carry no political or moral resonance. Unlike the harrowing scene in which the crew threatens an entire tribe at gunpoint to assemble inside a hut they then proceed to burn down – a crime they plan to edit in order to make it look like the work of an enemy tribe – there is no thought, internal logic or greater point to these rape scenes other than the shocking nature of the act itself; in the case of the sole female crewmember’s later gang-rape by cannibals following her comrades’ own gang-rape of one of the tribe’s women, the act is framed as karmic eye-for-an-eye retribution, making its visual recording a tacit affirmation of approval rather than a revelation of any sort.

And then of course, there’s the real, unsimulated killing of animals, carried out by both the natives (whose non-human meal of choice appears to be freshly-picked monkey brains) and the film crew. In one of the film’s most nauseating sequences, the camera follows them in a single take as they capture, behead and disembowel a turtle for later consumption. Because we know this is a real turtle being slaughtered and the camera lovingly lingers on its carcass, severed head and guts, any intended commentary – be it a critique of media glorification of real-life violence or an asinine parallel between animal slaughter and cannibalism – falls flat on its face. Its barbaric and completely unnecessary nature is made all the more blatant by the fact that it was entirely Deodato’s idea; it’s not as if he was accompanying hunters and filming their activities or had accidentally stumbled across these animals being killed. He forced his actors to kill animals live on camera for a film that purports to ask what savagery really is and didn’t see the contradiction until decades later when he expressed regret for these scenes. By emulating his characters’ bloodlust without a hint of self-awareness, Deodato forfeits any claim to a moral high ground.

Compare this lack of thoughtfulness to dark Belgian mockumentary Man Bites Dog² – in which a film crew follows a sociopathic hitman around on his day-to-day jobs, making themselves complicit in his increasingly violent crimes to the point of later participating in a gang-rape. Unlike Cannibal Holocaust, Man Bites Dog uses black comedy to bring attention to the sordid feelings and fantasies that viewers sublimate when watching such material; the physical and sexual violence, which escalates in a distinct yet carefully-paced manner, are never indulged in for their own sake.

And yet, although inarguably superior, Man Bites Dog might not have been conceived without Cannibal Holocaust’s cultural influence. Rémy Belvaux, Benoît Poelvoorde and André Bonzel never cited it as an influence, yet their thematic and narrative similarities cannot be ignored. As shockingly misogynistic and indefensibly hypocritical as Cannibal Holocaust may be, its existence has enriched cinema for the better. Such is the kind of moral paradox art lovers must live with.

¹Itself inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring, which likely served as an additional bridge between “highbrow” art and entertainment generally considered just one step above industrial pornography.

²Known to Francophone audiences as C’Est Arrivé Près De Chez Vous – It Happened Near Your Home in French.

"The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne"

The British appear to have a special gift for romantic melodrama that is not often discussed. Perhaps it’s this image we and other cultures have of us as the country of eloquent yet courteous love, where emotions are either contained or sublimated into something grand and beautiful. The base passions, grandiloquent heartstring-tugging and baroque style so strongly associated with melodramas tends to be viewed, perhaps unconsciously, as something too vulgar to be “properly British”.

And yet, joining such illustrious classics as Black Narcissus, Brief Encounter and Room At The Top, The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne brings further evidence that this famous British prim-and-properness is precisely one of the reasons why our melodramas tend to be so good. Jack Clayton, whose aforementioned feature-length début Room At The Top had defied British censors with its uncommonly frank exploration of male lust for sex and power, flips the tables here by telling us a tale of female powerlessness, solitude and self-loathing. If one believes in full circles, it is fitting that this would turn out to be his last film.

Throughout her life Judith Hearne has been a model of Irish Catholicism to a fault, sacrificing her own needs and desires for the sake of her aunt’s – a way of paying her back the kindness she showed her by taking her in after her parents’ untimely deaths. Flashbacks of this past life usually come to her following a moment of weakness or transgression, like a lesson learned to the point of reflex. The very first scene is a reversal of that configuration: 7 year-old Judith attending Mass with her dignified old Aunt D’Arcy. After receiving a sip of Jesus’s blood, she lets out a hiccup that evolves into a contagious giggle. As its transmission to other girls threatens to perturb the ceremony, Aunt D’Arcy grabs her hand and squeezes it tight, cutting off the brief spontaneous connection she formed with those nameless comrades. By the time young Judith’s face has dissolved into that of her older self, the film’s main themes and ideas have all been subversively introduced.

Her eyes and posture seem to pre-emptively apologize on her behalf for any inconvenience she may cause, a stark contrast to her too-sweet landlady Mrs. Rice and her overweight, fair-haired “poet” of a son Bernard, whose silky red gown and high-pitched smarm make him a grotesque caricature of effeteness. Yet we do not yet consciously suspect that there may be more to her meek demeanour than simple good manners and Christian humility. When she first locks eyes with her landlady’s brash, American-accented brother James (the ever magnificent and increasingly missed Bob Hoskins) and listens rapturously as he waxes poetic on the wonders of New York, we are led to believe that this will be a gentle tale of belated love and second chances, told with characteristic British delicacy.

We have no idea.

It starts with a coldly polite allusion to “things that happened”, made by the disapproving mother of one of Judith’s piano students. James violently berating Bernard and the maid after catching them mid-tryst. Then, there’s a pub conversation between James and a drunk “business partner” during which they fantasize about owning a business in Haiti and fetishize native women. Finally, after three dates during which the two seem to grow increasingly close, Mrs. Rice’s cruel dressing-down of James’s New York activities – an insurance scam artist rather than the successful businessman he presented himself as – exposes the would-be couple’s hidden natures through their respective methods of coping with the disaster: Judith succumbs to temptation and relapses into alcoholism. James acts on his lust and rapes the maid in her bed.

From then on, Peter Nelson’s screenplay zeroes in on Judith’s isolation – not only from a household that looks down on her drinking with scorn and from a God that never seems to reward her faith, but also and especially from a society that neither conforms to the upbringing it provided her nor delivers on its promises. “A woman never gives up her hope! “There’s always a Mr. Right” they say!” she sobs after what looked like a last chance at marriage turns out to be a business proposal in disguise.

It’s a seemingly inescapable trap where communication seems all but impossible, and Maggie Smith conveys that struggle with extraordinary precision, making every loss of dignity, every moment Judith dares to hope that she might find happiness for herself, a shocking and heartrending event. As it is with so many melodramas, her strong, compassionate performance is half the reason for the film’s success. One of the more striking examples comes at the climax of Judith’s crisis of faith: An overhead shot of a drunk Judith screaming “I hate you!” at a church altar, followed by medium eye-level shots of her clawing at Heaven’s gates before pulling the altar cloth and candles down in a montage combining both angles, as her cries of “Let me in!” are echoed and repeated. By all rights, it should come across as camp, heavy-handed and overblown. Instead, it’s one of the film’s saddest and most shocking moments. Melodrama at its finest.

Modern viewers may find it difficult not to compare Judith’s crisis of faith – something that, incidentally, seems to only ever be portrayed in fiction as a Catholic thing – to Maurice Bendrix’s “diary of hate” towards God from Neil Jordan’s underrated adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End Of The Affair¹. Indeed, Greene had famously referred to Judith Hearne’s author Brian Moore as his “favourite living novelist”. Both film adaptations work well, but The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne is made especially affecting by the permanent emotional displacement of its protagonist; there seems to be no place for Judith unless she resigns herself to her fate and does not stray from the habits she has accustomed herself to for most of her life. The film’s last shots, in which she makes a sacrificial decision, thus lend themselves to multiple interpretations: Has she finally made a step towards a better life, or is she simply repeating the same pattern until another false hope comes up? Has she truly made peace, or is it mere obedience to societal conditioning? Whatever the answer, the questions linger in our minds long after the credits have ended.

 

¹Previously adapted by Edward Dmytryk in a 1955 film version, unseen by me as of this writing.