"A Most Violent Year"

From the increasing reverence that has characterized mainstream media outlets’ reception of each new J. C. Chandor film, you’d think he was one of contemporary American cinema’s greatest artists. After Margin Call’s Oscar-nominated screenplay wowed enough critics with its sympathetic insider’s perspective on a broken financial system to make them overlook its formal inadequacies, All Is Lost’s novel blend of humanism (symbolized by the ingenious casting of all-American liberal icon Robert Redford) and vaguely Herzogian nihilism proved Chandor to possess an indisputable degree of talent that doesn’t always rise above his given objectives. An assessment that his most recent film, 2014’s A Most Violent Year, confirms even as it evidences continued progress in the visual implementation of his ideas.

All three of J. C. Chandor’s feature films share a common attempt at examining the myth of American individualism by pitting its representatives against the unseen and uncontrollable forces of an all-powerful system. In each case, the individual in question’s own hubris is largely responsible for bringing them in the heart of the storm. In A Most Violent Year, that person is Abel Morales, owner of a growing oil supply business only a million and a half dollars away from being truly independent. Conscientious, scrupulous and earnest to a fault, his commitment to being a late 20^th-century model of the American Dream is exactly what keeps holding him back from responding effectively to the mysterious assaults and hijackings of his truck drivers. As played by Oscar Isaac, he recalls Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone from The Godfather, calmly doing his utmost to play by the rules in a system that demands he break them to survive and prosper.

A most appropriate model that’s one of many Chandor conjures in the hope of aligning his film with the great American crime dramas of the 1970s: Godfather-esque interiors lit with heavy yellow or beige colours – including a restaurant scene that plays out like a cross between the first movie’s restaurant scene and the meeting of the Five Families, a cold and inhospitable New York reminiscent of Serpico, a late car chase whose tightening spaces and dirty industrial areas evokes The French Connection until a combination of dark tunnels and red lights turn it into a nightmare… There’s a myriad of visual and structural callbacks that suggest an ambition on Chandor’s part to align his story with many other films that used organized street crime narratives – often based on true stories – to interrogate American identity. The last notable film of such a kind was Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers, which tried to create a modern Jewish tragedy by linking assimilation to crime as a means to secure a rite of passage into adulthood. Although pertinent at times, it yielded mixed results.

A Most Violent Year, whose gently pressuring Hasidic landlords serve a purpose similar to that of the orthodox patriarchs in Holly Rollers, does a better job of laying out its characters’ conflicting desires but similarly falls short of its lofty ambitions. The blame goes partly to Chandor’s unsteady, occasionally shallow direction; he’s certainly grown more adventurous since Margin Call, but he’s retained his penchant for making his composition and framing choices speak over his actors rather than in concordance with them. Scenes of Abel’s wife Anna (the ever talented Jessica Chastain) pressuring him to conform to the image of a traditional American patriarch – armed, ready to use violence and get his hands dirty to protect his family/property – have the workings of classic American gangster tragedy (think White Heat or Mystic River) but, good as his actors’ performances may individually be, Chandor seems to have trouble bringing out their driving impulses in a truly significant way. When the climax sees Anna use an unsuspected last-resort measure to pull her husband out of trouble, the effect should be one of shocking triple revelations – of her actions, of herself and of the couple’s marriage; what we get instead amounts, emotionally speaking, to little more than a deus ex machina.

J. C. Chandor is evidently an intelligent and thoughtful filmmaker who knows and understands his references. As always, he directs his actors very well – even though many here, such as David Oyelowo as a sympathetic but inflexible D. A., are underused – and scenes such as Abel’s discussion with the sister of a fugitive truck driver prove that he can succeed at taking his audience and characters to the exact emotional places they need to be. But it’s perhaps quite telling that his only effective dissection of the myth of rugged American individualism so far has been a metaphorical one, whose spaces diminished as the stakes increased.

"SPECTRE"

 

Three years ago, Skyfall accomplished a miracle. Coming on the heels of the troubled mess that was Quantum Of Solace, it successfully followed through on the promises made by Casino Royale and reinvigorated a franchise that seemed at a dead end. In and of itself, this was already a praiseworthy achievement, but Skyfall did more than that: It managed to hit every single required note with perfect accuracy all while managing to be more than just a James Bond film. In the hands of Sam Mendes, and with the recruitment of John Logan to the Purvis-Wade screenwriting team, Skyfall became a genuinely moving tragedy of revenge, contrition and transition, bolstered by an absolutely stellar oedipal duel courtesy of Judi Dench and Javier Bardem.

Lightning rarely strikes twice in a row, so to expect SPECTRE to match, let alone surpass Skyfall’s near-perfection was almost bound to yield disappointment. It is therefore a testament to Mendes and his creative team’s strong committed grasp on their material that SPECTRE’s ability to surprise and draw us in its ever-expanding universe is hindered neither by its screenplay’s occasional lapses in judgment nor by its intermittently uneven pacing. Not content with letting Skyfall’s argument for James Bond’s continued cultural relevance stand alone, SPECTRE expands on that idea’s connection to a somewhat naive nostalgia for a “cleaner”, up-close-and-personal approach to espionage and defense in reaction to today’s murky, depersonalized system of drones and mass surveillance.

In his scathing review of the film, the estimable Bob Chipman pointed out how SPECTRE’s central plot – a shadowy international crime syndicate using surveillance culture to infiltrate the government and hijack international intelligence and defense systems for its own ends – is almost identical to the HYDRA scheme that served as Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s critique of post-9/11 defense and espionage policies, which it linked to the American Superhero genre’s inherent temptation towards authoritarianism. This, along with the Craig-era Bond saga’s perceived dependence upon current successful franchises as sources of inspiration, is an entirely valid and reasonable criticism. I would argue, however, that the long history and wide-ranging cultural influence of the James Bond saga not only gives SPECTRE’s use of these plot elements more resonance, it justifies it as a logical development in Bond’s prolonged enterprise of re-adaptation and renewal. Old-school purists may understandably long for the escapist extravaganzas of the Connery-Lazenby-Moore years, but I find Craig-era Bond’s constant confrontation with changing cultural and geopolitical realities to be one of the rebooted franchise’s most fascinating aspects.

Part of that confrontation involves Bond’s archetypically masculine characteristics, which are here half-glamourized, half-identified as toxic, without that identification ever quite turning into outright criticism. The slick walking liquor ad model of yesteryear has evolved into a casual alcoholic whose response to his leading lady turning down his advances is to spend the night in a drunken stupor until he stumbles upon an important discovery. His predatory sexuality, once treated with chortling “boys-will-be-boys” indulgence, becomes acknowledged for what it is in a memorable seduction scene where Bond corners the woman he deliberately widowed against a mirrored wall and begins kissing and caressing her like a sensuous boa constrictor, as her half-closed eyes and intonations waver between intimidation and lust without letting us know which one she’s settling on.

Of course, this is James Bond, so all of these scenes are scripted, staged and shot in such a way that he never stops being cool and charismatic while doing all these things but the difference with Goldfinger and Thunderball’s light-hearted treatment of scenes that come across today as little more than rape is quite palpable. Key to this delicate balance of glamour and distance is Daniel Craig’s performance. At this point, he embodies James Bond as a distinct, fully-rounded character with as little visible effort as breathing, yet you cannot help but marvel at how easy he makes it look. Moving in every frame like a bulked-up panther surveying its domain, he imbues every gesture, smile and glance with an underlying sense of danger. In fight scenes, his controlled savagery suggests violence to be less of a grim unpleasant necessity than it is an opportunity to bring out pent-up issues whose alternative means of expression he has trained himself to forget. With Craig’s justifiable weariness with the role now being common knowledge, concerns over any negative impact on his performance appear without merit; if anything, his fatigue seems to have come in handy for his more comical moments, in which Bond uses his legendary wit to express annoyance at unexpected setbacks. Every line and facial movement is perfectly-timed deadpan. The contrast with the less-sophisticated boyish brute of Casino Royale is remarkable, and one of the unqualified triumphs of the rebooted franchise: in spite of its missteps and troubles, not only has James Bond himself retained a consistent identity whose development remains steady and unfettered, so has the world he evolves in.

A shame that the same development cannot be observed on SPECTRE’s female characters; as the series’ portrayal of Bond has grown in complexity, its portrayal of Bond girls has been slowly but distinctly regressing ever since Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd blew the competition out of the water. Competently played by Léa Seydoux, Madeleine Swann is an especially frustrating example: Set up as an intelligent, independent woman trying to escape her father’s criminal shadow, Madeleine is systematically robbed of agency and spends most of her time on screen following Bond from place to place, getting kidnapped and getting rescued, with her rare active moments feeling like lazy token efforts to maintain a shallow illusion of empowerment. Moneypenny, whose relationship with Bond in Skyfall was one of equals specialized in different domains, only gets a few nicely-written moments in the first half hour before getting sidelined – a waste of perfectly good Naomie Harris.

And then there’s the twist. Just like Star Trek Into Darkness, the creative team has seen fit to bring back the series’ most iconic villain and disguise his return by lying to the public despite every sign (including the film’s own title!) contradicting them. Unlike Star Trek Into Darkness, the archenemy’s reintroduction makes a certain kind of sense within the series’ narrative arc and is executed functionally well. It’s some of the specifics involved that make this return a botched one. While the idea of making Ernst Stavro Blofeld a childhood friend of Bond’s may be corny on paper, it isn't an inherently bad idea. His position as chief mastermind behind the events of Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace makes sense but the retconning of Skyfall’s Raoul Silva as a SPECTRE agent completely contradicts the latter’s lack of grand vision and purely personal motive, which were precisely what made him such a unique and compelling Bond villain. Worse, the framing of these events as Bond’s punishment for hijacking his father’s affection, aside from unintentionally evoking Austin Powers In Goldmember, makes Blofeld look more like a petty teenager than a criminal mastermind with a tragic background. To Christoph Waltz’s credit, his off-kilter charm – kept in check here, unlike in Big Eyes – considerably downplays the fundamental silliness of his character’s motivation.

In a lesser action-adventure, these problems would derail the entire film, undermining all the goodwill amassed by the first two acts. In SPECTRE, they are, at worst, like irksome little flies interrupting a pleasant outside meal. For all its flaws, the screenplay¹ builds Bond and the MI6 team with care and skill, picking them where they left off in Skyfall and working further on their comradeship and differences. Ben Whishaw’s Q in particular gets to shine as Bond’s reluctant accomplice, with many of the film’s funniest moments resulting from the two men’s conflictual chemistry. Filling in Judi Dench’s prestigious shoes, Ralph Fiennes draws most of his strength from his horn-bucking with Andrew Scott’s wonderfully smug bureaucrat Denbigh.

Conducting this cast with dexterous confidence is Sam Mendes, whose contribution to the maturation of the James Bond franchise cannot be overstated. He doesn’t just bring out the absolute best in his actors. He doesn’t just put the story back on track whenever its mistakes threaten to derail it. He creates a veritable, tangible new world of flesh, blood, light and colour for the James Bond universe to dwell in. As photographed by Hoyte Van Hoytema, car chases, train fights and pre-coital embraces take on a hot, visceral character that sublimates Bond’s impulses like no other film in the series’ history has before. As staged by Mendes, they offer an exhilarating multiplicity of styles, moods and visual ideas. Consider the pre-credits sequence, which opens with an impeccably-executed Touch Of Evil-esque tracking shot, follows on with a short series of stunts worthy of Buster Keaton, then climaxes to an exceptionally intense fight scene on a low-altitude helicopter. In this sequence, as in every action scene, Mendes’s command of perspective, composition, space and timing is on full display; whether Bond is driving a decomposing plane down a snowy slope or throwing every available projectile on the seemingly indomitable Mr. Hinx (a mostly silent, twinkle-eyed Dave Bautista), the camera always knows exactly what to put in and out of the frame and for how long. Even among the good Marvel movies, there is not a single action scene that can compare with anything shot by Sam Mendes featuring Daniel Craig.

If nothing else, SPECTRE is remarkable proof of how resilient the creative team behind the James Bond reboot has shown itself to be and how well its efforts have paid off. Not as accomplished as the franchise’s finest pieces – From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Licence To Kill, GoldenEye, Casino Royale and Skyfall – but executed with inspiring aplomb, it continues to carve an interesting and promising path for a cultural icon whose staying power appears inexhaustible.

¹Credited to four writers: The Purvis-Wade-Logan trio behind Skyfall and franchise newcomer Jez Butterworth.

"Margin Call"

Making films about the financial world presents the especially tricky challenge of investing viewers into a world where rich men in expensive suits engage with money as an immaterial, almost non-existent entity, in a difficultly decipherable financial jargon whose purpose appears to be the translation of nothingness into wide-ranging real-world results. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street circumvented the problem by using this world of abstractions as a stage for a fairly routine Greek tragedy. Martin Scorsese’s more successful Wolf Of Wall Street took a more outrageous route, using his unparalleled musicality to connect the toxic masculine impulse for instant sexual gratification to the entitlement culture that plagues capitalism.

J. C. Chandor’s feature-length début Margin Call takes a more sober approach altogether, retaining Wall Street’s tragic codes but applying them to a decidedly more relevant aspect of Wall Street culture; namely, the knowledge that, no matter what they do, somebody, somewhere is going to be negatively affected by their calculations and speculations. When promising young risk analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) gets entrusted with sensitive data by his just-fired boss Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the disturbing reality of what his work entails hits home in more ways than one. Caught in the impossible dilemma of saving either their already-embattled firm or the economy, he and his coworkers effectively come across as modern Greek gods, conscientiously measuring and juggling the fates of untold millions with barely any acknowledgment that they exist, all from the comfort of their steel-and-glass Olympus.

It is certainly an impressive pantheon that Chandor has assembled: Between Quinto’s wide-eyed Sullivan and his friend Seth (Penn Badgley), Paul Bettany’s pragmatic head trader Will Emerson acts as a cynical Hermes, mentoring his less experienced juniors and conveying bad news to both characters and viewers alike. Towering above them like a falsely benevolent Zeus is Jeremy Irons as CEO John Tuld, who expertly sugarcoats his self-serving greed with the bearing of a genial old uncle. Standing out as this colourful group’s voice of conscience is sales head Sam Rogers, through whom Kevin Spacey subverts the ruthless shark-toothed persona he built throughout his career playing similarly-positioned men with a weary and understated performance that blends in quietly until explicitly called upon to take the spotlight.

His performance, while not the film’s best (that honour belongs to Bettany), does a more consistent job of bringing a human face to the people behind the 2007-2008 financial crisis than most of the film does. Chandor displays a good eye for composition and colour that lends an almost dreamlike quality to the long night during which the world economy’s fate is sealed. The particular emphasis he places on the blue screens and dark shadows that permeate the firm’s offices is so efficient it almost distracts from the uneven staging and editing, the latter of which is particularly disconcerting during the many dialogue scenes. Often the shots answer each other with a drab monotony that undermines the dialogue’s electric potential, and rarely engage with the environment in any meaningful way. Half the time, it looks more like an exceptionally well-lit and well-acted (save a typically wooden Demi Moore) TV movie with occasional cinematic flourishes, the best being a montage during which soundbites of Emerson knowingly selling junk to unsuspecting buyers is played over sped-up footage of busy trading offices interspersed with exterior shots of New York City.

This disappointing lack of kinesis undermines Margin Call’s moments of human insight, best exemplified when Dale movingly contrasts idealized capitalist philanthropy with the system’s reality by wistfully recalling a bridge he helped build and the estimated thousands of years of life its users saved from being “wasted in a fucking car”. There are many such monologues and speeches scattered across the film in which each character defends their conception of capitalism and finance. Unfortunately, their written qualities only further expose the film’s visual shortcomings. Chandor, the son of an investment banker, knows how to convey the situation’s direness without dumbing anything down, but his style lacks the necessary spark to truly share his insider’s gaze with his audience. We remain, despite occasional breakthroughs, stuck on the other side of the shop’s window, watching helplessly as owners stab customers and each other in the back with varying degrees of consent.

"The Martian"

Ridley Scott’s career has been a long, bumpy and sometimes frustrating one, continually demonstrating firm discipline worthy of such master artisans as Michael Curtiz or Robert Wise but rarely tuning it to the consistent personal vision achieved by artists like John Ford or David Lean. A classical yet versatile filmmaker, Scott reaches greatness in sporadic bursts, like a cinematic Halley’s Comet that would otherwise be visible only through a telescope.

The Martian is one of the comet's brightest appearances. Not great so much as exceptional in its balance of craftsmanship and heart, it surpasses above-average crowd-pleasing fare like Apollo 13 by making its own impeccable show of remarkable expertise across the board – acting, direction, cinematography, editing, score – a note-perfect reflection of the solidary ingenuity displayed by the screenplay’s characters. That sounds ridiculously self-evident; of course the entire cast and crew need to be on their A-game for the movie to work, otherwise why even bother? Thing is, inventiveness, competence and teamwork are at the forefront of the story’s main themes. In the hands of a competent but mostly unimaginative director like Ron Howard, these themes are illustrated to produce agreeable sentiment. In the hands of someone like Ridley Scott on the top of his form, these ideas become part of the film’s formal and dramatic structure, and function as its very lifeblood, the electricity that keeps its pace steady and regular.

It says something about easy melodrama’s hold on modern visual storytelling when it is noteworthy that characters that are experienced scientists react to occupational hazards and unexpected setbacks with professional self-control¹. When a violent dust storm causes botanist Mark Watney (a never-better Matt Damon) to get knocked out of sight by a satellite dish during an emergency planetary evacuation, the expected last-ditch attempt to find him despite warnings of its futility takes place but without the requisite screaming and bickering. They know he is most likely dead and that circumstances cannot permit them to risk any more lives. All the shock, regret and self-blame is expressed by the actors’ faces and bodies. Likewise, the rescue operations that take place on Earth upon news of his survival keep conventional interpersonal drama to a minimum.

Not that The Martian diverges from mainstream storytelling and dramatic techniques by any means; it simply works harmoniously with its characters to make those techniques matter. There is not a minute of screen-time that does not fill its clearly-defined purpose, not one scene that lasts longer or shorter than it should, and yet the film manages to be more than a simple well-oiled machine. Characters are given enough space within their parameters to rise above their functions and archetypes without disrupting the balance. Watney himself matches his Boy Scout resourcefulness with self-deprecating humour that, in one of Drew Goddard’s screenplay’s more astute touches, is conveyed mostly through video logs ostensibly recorded for whichever rescue team ends up finding him in case of failure. Its true narrative purpose – to explain his actions to the audience and keep them informed on his state of mind – is a refreshing and justified take on the hackneyed old voiceover narration trope that never feels forced, yet unfortunately resists fully exploring the struggle against loneliness that this constant self-accounting implies.

Indeed, the futuristic Robinson Crusoe setting could have provided ample ground to examine our current digital generation’s impulse to monitor and report our every emotion and activity, but The Martian only scratches the surface, choosing instead to lionize science and technology as forces of unity with impressive parallel montages and match-cuts between NASA, Watney and the rest of his expedition, though the resulting connections don’t feel as deep as they did in Interstellar.

What ground Goddard’s screenplay does cover in the e-communication terrain, however, skillfully illuminates modern-day science geek culture: Using sometimes profane humour to neutralize or divert the painful and scary nature of his situations as well as make his scientific work approachable in spite of the technobabble, Watney is the kind of scientist you could very well picture as a Cracked contributor. More than simple American action hero glibness, his attitude evidences the underlying fear most heroes only hint at by bringing it to a more familiar level. This is where Matt Damon’s everyman persona – slightly overshadowed as of late by his off-screen outspokenness – truly shines; a naturally earnest actor, he delivers laughs whose unhappy roots only make them more potent. Think of his famous “Alice Jardine” monologue in Saving Private Ryan, stretched, diced and scattered across two hours of film. Only an actor of his heart-on-sleeve candor could excavate so deeply into such seemingly self-explanatory humour.

In a way, the aesthetic and storytelling choices found in The Martian constitute a response to the implicit paeans to rugged agnostic individualism of such films as 127 Hours, Captain Phillips and Gravity. To the up-close-and-personal realism and acoustic invasiveness that dominate the current trend of survival cinema, Ridley Scott replies with bright colours, inclusive framing and – one of the film’s most delightful surprises – a disco soundtrack. Even Mars itself is filmed with wide sweeping landscape pans and shots that emphasize grandeur and majesty rather than hostility and isolation.

All of these choices beautifully underline the script’s optimistic emphasis on teamwork – teamwork that briefly but noticeably includes God, both in symbolic and referential form (“We’ll take all the help we can get” says Sean Bean’s flight director to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s multi-religious mission director). In doing so, Scott and Goddard also subvert the solipsistic temptation inherent in both the survival subgenre and the use of video logs as a narrative device.

Although this ongoing theme of cooperation is slightly undermined by China’s late entry to the rescue via an uncharacteristically lazy setup – two leading Chinese scientists decide to intervene upon seeing news of one of NASA’s setbacks on TV – that fails to translate blatant market pandering to natural plot development, any suspicious aftertaste is offset by the script’s subsequent compromise of having nerdy young astrodynamicist Rich Purnell (a scene-stealing Donald Glover) come up with the plan that brings about the climax.

Directed with savoir-faire acquired from years of experience, written with unaffected passion for both the science and its characters, and supported by a dynamic cast, The Martian marks one of Ridley Scott’s highlights and a welcome addition to what might become a science-fiction resurgence.

¹Even the excellent Gravity was criticized for what many understandably perceived to be Dr. Stone’s excessive lack of calm and need for reassurance.

"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.