Bright Star

In the Very Temple of Delight

2009 // UK - Australia - France // Jane Campion // September 27, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A- - Jane Campion's new film, Bright Star, is positively swollen with exquisite sorrow. Unabashed and yet sober in her embrace of the romantic, Campion exhibits a shrewd talent for blending personal and cultural understandings of love, and Bright Star is further, devastating proof of her instincts. In presenting the tale of the relationship between seamstress Fanny Brawne and the English poet John Keats, Bright Star relies on the viewer's own romantic reference points as well as their understanding of generic tropes. The film slathers on the components of a textbook romantic tragedy: a soul in creative torment, attraction concealed behind bickering, social barriers that suffocate the lovers, a meddlesome third party, emotions that quickly veer from ecstatic to distraught, and a world that seems almost malevolent to love. Campion assembles these well-worn elements into a whole that is not only deeply affecting, but also visually and aurally compelling. Bright Star does not ask for our indulgence. It earns it, by sweeping us along into a world where poetry expresses what blunt declarations, and even physical intimacies, cannot. It operates much like poetry itself. To borrow a phrase from Campion's masterpiece, The Piano, it is not so much an account of a chaste love affair as it is a mood that passes through you.

The characters of Bright Star do not know what we know, of course. They are unaware that John Keats would perish of tuberculosis at age twenty-five, and that he would one day be regarded as a titan among the English romantic poets. Campion presents Keats (Ben Wishaw) as an admired figure within a small literary circle, but a penniless man, supported by friends, frequently excoriated by contemporary critics. Campion is not attempting anything so banal as a biopic, however, and so the film observes Keats primarily from the perspective of the true protagonist, Fanny (Abbie Cornish), whose family knows the poet and eventually rents half of the country house where Keats and his friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider) live. Fanny has a quick wit and is renowned for the exquisite clothing she designs and sews herself. In the curious social landscape of early nineteenth century England, she seems to be of a higher station than Keats, a mere starving artist with no prospects. Keats is troubled, roiled by a witch's brew of existential terror, as personified by his ill brother, and professional insecurity. He is charming and brilliant as both a creator and a theorist, but failure haunts him.

Fanny has little interest in poetry, yet there is something in Keats that pulls at her, despite (or perhaps due to) the shadows that seem to trail behind him. She is a modern woman, thoroughly unconcerned with gossip and proud of her own craft. She works her way into Keats' life with gestures that are simultaneously transparent and genuine: she bakes his ailing brother biscuits, makes him a pillow slip, invites him to Christmas dinner, and asks for instruction in poetry appreciation. The exact moment when their relationship evolves from friendship to love is uncertain, but after they share a few gentle kisses in the woods, their demeanor around each other changes. In one of the film's most lovely shots, they follow Fannie's young sister, Margaret (Edie Marten), stealing kisses and holding hands when her back is turned, freezing comically when she glances at them. Campion magnificently conveys the sense of two people who revel in the presence of one another, but probably could not explain precisely why they find such delight there. That Fannie and Keats were so often denied this simple pleasure makes their story all the more bittersweet.

Fanny's family never stands in her way, but her mother (Kerry Fox) is concerned for her daughter's future. Campion and her performers convey as much though glances and body language as through words, establishing all that we need to know about the personalities of the Brawne family. Little brother Samuel (Thomas Sanster) barely speaks, but his loyalty to both his mother and Fanny, and the way those loyalties rend him, is in stark evidence. The most active antagonist in the tale is Brown, who endeavors to drive Fanny away with sheer cruelty, motivated almost certainly by jealously (perhaps sexual). Doom coils through the film, and not merely because of the death that we know is looming. The lovers are boxed in by financial and social realities, and they cannot envision an escape. Their hopes for the future are limited to their next meeting. When Keats moves to the Isle of Wight for a summer to write, their correspondence is filled with rapturous highs and despairing lows. Fanny waits expectantly for the postman, and on days when no letter comes, she is inconsolable.

Campion ushers us into Fanny's story after she and Keats have already become acquainted, as attraction starts to take root and grow into something more. The exclusion of a portentous first encounter is telling. While Bright Star has the veneer of a conventional romantic narrative, Campion is more focused on permitting her viewers' minds to settle over the emotional curvatures of her characters. The process of romance, the little physical and emotional events that accumulate into something ineffable, is secondary to the sensation of romance, a mood that powers the film's dynamos. Perhaps more than any other English-language film-maker who tackles matters of the heart, Campion understands the strength of her chosen medium. Her film gazes lovingly as the seasons slip by, but there is more than rough symbolism at work in her use of blossoms, leaves, and snow. Campion appreciates the relationship between place, time, and feeling, and the way that memories we cherish are so often bound to the sensations that cascade over us in that moment. Thus the feeling when a lover first touched our hand is linked inextricably with Christmas tea and a roaring hearth. As with The Piano, Campion presents images that are both aesthetically arresting and emotionally resonant, establishing a pensive, almost nostalgic intimacy between audience and character. Her cinematic approach is always balanced just on the edge of metaphor without, amazingly enough, ever succumbing to glibness. It's not that love is like sitting in a room filled with butterflies, or that grief is like walking through a gray, snowbound forest. Rather, by presenting Fanny in such situations, the film finds expression for emotional states that resist more cerebral scrutiny.

Bright Star is not free of missteps. The whipsaw character of Fanny's mood backfires at times, as when she goes from euphoric to suicidal in a single cut, and as a result the viewer's empathy for her plight starts to dry up. The film plods in its final twenty or thirty minutes, as Keats' miserable demise looms closer and his relationship with Fanny seems to become more static, all in the misguided attempt to wring as much anguish as possible from tragedy. Yet Campion's film is still a potent illustration of how uniquely suited cinema is to telling stories that rely on the interaction between the senses and the heart. This is not a film about John Keats, or about Fanny Brawne, or about life in nineteenth century England. It's about love and death, and how much it hurts that life has to contain both.

Ponyo

A Fish That Dreamed It Was a Girl

2008 // Japan // Hayao Miyazaki // September 17, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A- - Japanese animated film-maker Hayao Miyazaki has an unusual talent for telling stories that are visually and emotionally compelling despite the admittedly murky character of his fantasy worlds. In films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, one gets the sense that fidelity to a coherent mythology is, at best, an afterthought. Miyazaki's works operate on the senses and the heart. That's not a backhanded complement, but a truism that, once embraced, leads to an appreciation for his unusual and rewarding films. Ponyo is no exception to this principle. Trying to decipher every jot of this weird, wild aquatic fantasy is an exercise in futility. Better to sit back and absorb it, revel in it, and let it weave its enchantments. As with all of Miyazaki's films, and in contrast to most works of animated kiddie fare, Ponyo lingers on both the intimate and epic while examining the intersection of the mundane and the fantastic. Indeed, consistent with the animistic thread that runs throughout the director's work, Ponyo presents the worlds of flesh and spirit as tightly entwined and ultimately interdependent. This is underlined not merely through exposition—which is sparing and on-the-nose—but also through the rhythm and emphasis of the film's scenes. The steeping of noodles in hot water receives as much attention as a titanic sea goddess drifting through the ocean depths. Such is the way of Miyazaki, who sees the human magic within the banal details of life and connects them to unrealities that possess a mythic tinge.

His latest film is the story of a magical goldfish, the eponymous Ponyo (Noah Lindsey Cyrus), who yearns to be human. The daughter of a sea wizard, Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), Ponyo has the cherubic face of a little girl, complete with a shock of red hair. Such a strange creature should be grotesque, but Japanese animation excels at making the repulsive appear adorable, and Ponyo is distinctly adorable. Ponyo's curiosity draws her to a little boy, Sosuke (Frankie Jonas), who dwells in a seaside bungalow. Their interaction sets into motion events that threaten the balance between land and sea, which Fujimoto desperately attempts to restore. Crucial to the tale is Sosuke's mother, Lisa (Tina Fey), who works at a local nursing home, looks after her son, and waits restlessly for her husband's fishing ship to return from long hitches at sea. While Fujimoto and his oceanic minions can be frightening, there are no true villains in this story. Ponyo is a story of mishaps, misunderstandings, and unexamined emotions that lead characters into unfortunate circumstances.

There is much to the narrative that defies rational understanding: a tsunami of golden fish, an underwater garden in a luminous bubble, and a toy boat that magically transforms into a seaworthy vessel. Little is explained to the satisfaction of a nitpick-prone viewer, and what we are shown often only raises further questions. No matter. Part of Ponyo's charm is simply witnessing the imagination of Miyazaki as it runs wild under the sea. Just as Mononoke is a film that practically smells of the forest, Ponyo is the director's Ocean Film. His vision of the underwater landscape is rooted in the living things of the real world, but with a fantastical twist. Jellyfish float amid waves of shimmering color, and crabs scuttle through the rooms of undersea cottages. Ponyo's oceanic world is at once familiar and uncanny, flabbergasting and just a little bit scary. Fujomoto is more cartoonish, looking like a Dickensian heavy by way of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, but perhaps that's because he was once human. His eccentricities seem to be the traits of a man who is acting the way he imagines an immortal sea wizard would act.

The undersea marvels contribute to the memorable texture of the film, and lend it an otherworldly allure. However, consistent with Miyazaki's other works, the spectacle of Ponyo is less vital than its emotional currents, which are painfully authentic and rooted in a deep appreciation for the fundamental innocence of children. Distilled to its essence, Ponyo's story is typical of a thousand myths and folk tales: an animal yearns to be human, and the love of a human spurs the animal to pursue that yearning. Miyazaki has discarded the sexual elements that often accompany such stories, presenting us with a five-year-old boy and his unconditional love for a fish. The fact of Sosuke's love is utterly uncontroversial. Here the tension flows from the ache of separation: of Sosuke from Ponyo, of Fujimoto from Ponyo, of Sosuke's parents from each other, and, most vitally to the journey that comprises the final act of the film, of Sosuke from his mother. Ecological concerns provide a backdrop for Miyazaki's tale, but the themes of the film are not in any sense political. Ponyo is, after a fashion, about all the transitions in life that are simultaneously exquisite and agonizing: growing up, falling in love, moving out, getting married, having children, growing old. The metaphor is simple and grand. To leave the sea, to become human, is a natural thing. When confronted with the impossibility that Ponyo has transformed from goldfish to girl, Lisa marvels, "Life is mysterious and amazing."  In any other film, this might have been a ridiculous line, but Miyazaki lends it a tone of genuine wonder. I presumed that Coraline would not have any competition this year as the perfect film for a parent and child to share. Ponyo proved me wrong.

Tetro

Family Matters

2009 // USA - Italy - Argentina // Francis Ford Coppola // September 8, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - There's a searing line in Michael Chabon's hardboiled / speculative history novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, from a scene where half-Jewish, half-Tlingit police detective Berko Shemets confronts his estranged father. "It has nothing to do with religion," he howls, "It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers!" With a slight adjustment, this could be the tagline of Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro, a film fashioned from equal parts unabashed passion and tightly-wound bitterness. In it we are introduced to the Tetrocinis, a clan for whom literature, film, dance, and especially music are sustenance. Tetro isn't really about art, however; it's about fathers. Coppola himself is the son of the composer Carmine Coppola, and his family is perhaps the most renowned tribe in cinema, comprising daughter Sofia, sister Talia Shire, and nephews Nicholas Cage and Jason Schwartzman, to name a few. While it's not particularly illuminating to psychoanalyze a director through his work, it's probably a safe bet that the operatic and yet mischievous Tetro is Coppola's most personal work in years. In those places where the film stumbles, it's due to tonal awkwardness and narrative silliness. Nonetheless, Tetro's visuals are sumptuous, its audacity invigorating, and its pathos deeply felt.

Much of the film takes place in Argentina, which Coppola and cinematographer Mahai Malaimare Jr. shoot in sumptuous black-and-white, evoking the joyfulness and slightly forlorn qualities of Fellini's Italy. The just-shy-of-eighteen Bennie Tetrocini (Alden Ehrenreich, the finest of Leonardo DiCaprio clones) has come to Buenos Aires to find his older half-brother, Angelo (Vincent Gallo), who left home a decade ago on a writing sabbatical. Bennie discovers his brother living in a sad little apartment with a near-wife, Miranda (Maribel Verdú), who is both loyal and painfully confident in Angelo's genius. Unfortunately, the volatile and suspicious Angelo, who now insists on the name "Tetro," hasn't written anything in years. He spends his time lingering in the orbit of a group of theater oddballs, who are staging a production of Faust that is part poetry-quipping drag spectacle and part burlesque act. Bennie is perplexed and mildly angered at Tetro's situation, given that he has longed to see his brother for years. "You promised you would come and get me," he reminds Tetro. Despite the gulf of years between them, the brothers have a shared misery. Their father, the conductor Carlo Tetrocini, is an arrogant man disposed to acts of baffling cruelty.

Bennie eventually uncovers Tetro's unfinished magnum opus, a hodgepodge of coded scrawlings secreted away in a suitcase. The manuscript is, naturally, a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about the elder Tetrocini and all the miseries he has inflicted on his relations. Bennie begins to read, to learn something of the father he barely knows. Coppola uses this as a cue for flashbacks shot in color with a narrower 1:85 aspect ratio, although these sequences may just be Tetro's imaginings of past events. These scenes mostly serve to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that Carlo Tetrocini is an arrogant son of a bitch. When Tetro leaves on his sabbatical, his father acidly mocks him in public, "What will you write about?" Tetro whispers his reply, "This."

Coppola's story has the outlines of a conventional family tragedy, but in its details and mounting it plays more as a fairy tale. At three separate junctures, the film digresses into luscious dance sequences that reflect and reveal aspects of the main storyline. These dance pieces are accented with visual effects that lend them an otherworldly feel, as though they were allegorical pop-up chapters of Tetro's tale. These sequences alone are the most visually arresting thing that Coppola has done since his flirtation with self-consciously fake sets and effects in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Yet the exaggerated aspects of Tetro extend to the narrative details of the primary story as well. The Tetrocinis seem to dwell in an alternate universe of sorts, one where art is more accessible and more vital than in our own. Symphony conductors have rock star reputations and groupies, ragtag theater troupes can waltz into international drama competitions with the right play, and misunderstood, misanthropic geniuses can be found wasting away in asylums. This slightly absurd tone suffuses the film, and even threatens to derail it at the climax, which occurs at a baroque festival where a grande dame of the Argentinean arts holds court. Coppola certainly never asks us to accept his tale as authentic, but Tetro does suffer from excesses even within the confines of its fantastical universe. The blend of grave melodrama and the outlandish never gels into the alluring whole that Coppola is striving for. (In other words, it is further evidence that Apocalypse Now was something like bottled lightning.)

That said, one can't deny the genuine feeling that oozes from the film's pores. Coppola regards even his cartoonish characters seriously, eschewing mockery for humor that relies on cutting remarks and bawdy situations. For a film that is concerned at bottom with familial cruelty and deception, Tetro exhibits little misanthropy. Coppola indicts Carlo Tetrocini for his monstrousness, but he paints the old man as such an unmitigated bastard that the film's thematic thrust obviously goes beyond, "Fathers Fuck Us Up." Coppola is also interested in the way that families respond to destructive influences from within, and why it is that individuals construct different edifices and moral codes to deal with those influences. What's refreshing is that the director doesn't come down in favor of any one path out of familial darkness over any other. Instead he intimates that the deeply personal nature of our struggles with the past should not preclude bonds with others, a surprisingly warm sentiment from a director whose masterworks have relied on the isolating nature of the human experience. It's enough to give one encouragement that, the waning of his cinematic intuition aside, Coppola remains a film-maker committed to exploring new territory in aesthetically compelling ways.

Inglourious Basterds

Now We Are All Sons of Bitches

2009 // USA - Germany - France // Quentin Tarantino // August 21, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A - I really should know better at this point. My reaction upon hearing of an upcoming Quentin Tarantino film is reliably a mixture of excitement and trepidation. When I think about it for more than a moment, however, this response seems disgracefully childish, if completely understandable. I was one of countless thirty-somethings whose early appreciation of independent American film was driven primarily by Tarantino's first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Consequently, my responses to his subsequent films are tinted by an unfortunate reactionary urge, whispering at me to contrast his latest feature with the Real Tarantino on bombastic display in Dogs and Fiction. Of course, this is monstrously unfair. Tarantino has grown significantly as a director in the past fifteen years, parlaying his success as the American wunderkind of thrilling, densely referential cinema into ever more ambitious works. Even as he refined the familiar stylistic trappings that are comfortable for him (the "how," if you will), he has tackled increasingly challenging stories and themes (the "what"). With a little effort, I've shaken off my blinkered way of looking at Tarantino's post-Fiction output. What's more, I've come to regard Kill Bill Volume II and Death Proof as among most vital works of American cinema in the past five years. And so here we are with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino's answer to the World War II film. And damn if it doesn't exhibit every sign of continuing the director's recent arc of daring, socially aware films that triumph as both giddy entertainments and bracing studies of desperately held cultural values.

The eponymous Basterds are a squad of eight Jewish-American soldiers who, under the command of Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt with mustache and comical Tennessee drawl), are recruited to conduct a campaign of terror against Nazis in German-occupied France. Among their number are Donny Donowitz, the "Jewish Bear" (an overwrought Eli Roth), who spatters Hun brains with a baseball bat, and Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), an officer-fragging anti-Nazi German solider whom the unit rescues and recruits. Tarantino presents the Basterds as avenging angels, vessels of Jewish and American wish fulfillment and a fantastical "What If" correction to history. They take no prisoners, just scalps. Most captives are summarily executed, but a few are released... after Raine carves a swastika in their forehead with his enormous Bowie knife. (Already thinking ahead to the assimilation of former National Socialists into post-war Germany, the lieutenant explains, "I'm gonna give you somethin' you can't take off.") Tarantino doesn't shy away from the grisly, brutal quality of the Basterds' mission, which at bottom is nothing more than behind-enemy-lines terrorism, all with the intent of demoralizing the Reich's war machine.

Consistent with Tarantino's approach to violence in his previous films, Basterds takes a conflicted stance towards its gruesome, often stomach-churning bloodshed. In the main, the film glories in its violence, drinking deeply from it in a kind of adolescent crimson haze. Nazis are, of course, the last group on which it is socially acceptable to visit atrocious violence in fiction, but rarely has a film so thoroughly and unashamedly exploited this principle. There is a theory that Raiders of the Lost Ark might have begun as George Lucas' homage to the pulp serials of the early twentieth century, but Steven Spielberg lent it the tone of a childhood revenge fantasy against the Third Reich. Basterds embraces this function much more explicitly than Raiders ever did, reveling in vicarious vengeance with a giddiness that invokes the exploitation tradition that Tarantino adores. (Basterds' subtitle might as well be Die Screaming, Adolf!) However, as with Kill Bill's bloodbaths and Death Proof's manglings, Basterds' violence is tightly enmeshed with the film's thematic explorations.

Ah, but I need to back up a bit and clarify that Inglourious Basterds regards the righteous killers of its title as mere secondary characters. The film's marketing, as is typical for Tarantino's features, is amusingly deceptive, in that the film is not principally focused on Raine's unit. In fact, the protagonist of Basterds is Shosanna, a French Jewess played to wary, smoldering perfection by Mélanie Laurent. If one were inclined to affix a label to a Tarantino film (a questionable enterprise), Basterds is not so much a "war film" as it is a thriller about survival and revenge. Tarantino divides his film into five acts, and, Pitt's top billing notwithstanding, the Basterds don't even appear until the second. The first act, which tells the story of Shosanna's terrifying encounter with the SS while hiding in rural France, is a slow-burn genre slice of heaven all on its own. Tarantino is rarely credited for his phenomenal skill as a writer-director of thriller sequences, for which he has few equals among American filmmakers. Every aspect of the first act ratchets the tension up another notch: the texture and arrangement of furnishings within a cramped farmhouse, the pauses and glances of the characters, and a script that tightens with the inevitability of a noose. (Another tense standoff, set in a basement bar, is the film's other high point.) Christoph Waltz, as the malevolent "Jew-Hunter" Colonel Hans Landa, provides oily slatherings of menace to these scenes, helped along by Tarantino's customary doting regard for his performers. None of it is remotely authentic, but, as with the director's previous films, Basterds seduces you and sweeps you along, rather than coldly manipulating you. Tarantino's features are always compelling entertainments in their bones, and Basterds is no exception.

However, Tarantino has also striven to wed pure cinematic delight to more sophisticated concerns, albeit in a manner that is always exceedingly slippery. Thus, like a stage magician, Tarantino draws the eye with badass gangsters, ninja clans, and car chases, while with his other hand he tackles our unexamined notions swirling around aging (Jackie Brown), identity (Kill Bill), and the intersection of gender, sex, and violence (Death Proof). With Basterds, it's not until after we've been introduced to Shosanna and to Raine's Nazi-hunters that Tarantino begins to reveal his deeper purpose: to explore the role of film in providing a shared history, cultural identity, and cathartic reconciliation of our desires with reality. Four years after she slipped through Landa's grasp, Shosanna is living incognito in Paris, where she owns and manages a movie house. Joseph Goebbels' newest propaganda star, a German soldier (Daniel Brühl) who plays himself in a jingoist war picture, becomes smitten with Shosanna. He uses his newfound clout to move the film's premiere to her theater, where she will be expected to roll out the red carpet for the luminaries of the Reich. This brings the Basterds into the picture, as they have a scheme for the premiere that involves a German starlet (Diane Kruger) and a lot of dynamite. However, Shosanna and her projectionist lover (Jacky Ido) have a plan of their own, one so joyfully, deliciously murderous that it might give even the Basterds pause. Appropriately, Shosanna intends to use both physical film prints and the projected image itself to deliver her overdue message of vengeance, with the result quite intentionally evoking The Wizard of Oz.

Tarantino puts all of these events in motion without any regard for historical accuracy, but that, as they say, is the whole point. Basterds doesn't just twist the facts; it stomps all over them with a stormtrooper's boot. It then remolds the resulting pulp of fact and fiction—a blob of The Diary of Anne Frank here, a chunk of The Dirty Dozen there—into an alternate history that concludes with sweet justice, although not exactly the way we might wish. Basterds' milieu is one where the world didn't turn a blind eye to the Holocaust, where former Nazis didn't vanish into civilian life, and where the righteous wrath of a few tough-as-nails Americans literally brought the war to an end. Yet while Tarantino recognizes the allure of this fantasy and indulges it, he doesn't want us to swallow it uncritically. Basterds is certainly the most "meta" film that the director has ever made, balancing its reverence for the emotional and purgative power of cinema with a palpable trepidation about the sinister potential of that power. It's not a coincidence that Shosanna uses a film to obtain her revenge against the Nazis, just as Tarantino is doing, just as, indeed, nearly every World War II film does. Basterds suggests that the enduring popularity of WWII as a film subject points to our fundamental need to eradicate, again and again, the twentieth century's personification of human evil. Far from exorcising the fascistic currents within our own society, however, this ritual Nazi-slaying only ensures the survival of the Reich in the public consciousness, and runs the risk of establishing nationalistic myths, just as Goebbels' propaganda film does.

Tarantino is deliberately vauge when it comes to how exactly we should feel about his film, which is emblematic of the director's customary tapdance between his love of visceral thrills and his bold, deconstructive urges. He clearly wants the audience to have as much fun as he is having, but he also asks that we examine how that enjoyment implicates us. Certainly, the punishment that the Basterds mete out is more tribal than the personal justice visited on Death Proof's Stuntman Mike. Should we feel remorse for enjoying the sight of humans being mutilated and executed for what they are rather than what they have done (even if what they are is racial supremacists and vicious authoritarians)? Despite all of Pitt's droll wisecracks, plainly intended to elicit cheers from the audience, Tarantino asks what exactly we achieve by visiting these places again and again. In the cineplex, it is always Berlin, 1944. While Inglourious Basterds quenches our longing to annihilate the swastika-adorned boogeyman, it also offers a frantic, sarcastic hope. If we riddle the Nazi elite with a blizzard of bullets, if we burn their corpses to cinders, if we rewrite history so that our victory is complete, what then? Will Hitler finally die for the last time? What, one wonders, would we make films about?

In the Loop

If I Don't Know the Answer, I'll Just Respond, Cleverly

2009 // UK // Armando Iannucci // August 18, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A- - The Hurt Locker seems to be getting some significant accolades as the first truly commendable film about the Iraq War, but as my review from earlier this week contends, this misstates the film's strengths. Kathryn Bigelow's film uses its setting to cannily, viscerally evoke its plainly stated themes. The Hurt Locker is interested in war as an irresistible personal force; the Iraq War itself is a merely a convenient vessel for that exploration. Like Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, The Hurt Locker is as much "about" its milieu as The Iliad is "about" the Trojan War.

It is Armando Iannucci's bracing, sublimely profane farce In the Loop that strikes me as the best film to date to wrestle with the Iraq War as a phenomenon of a specific time and place. Granted, the film's "action" takes place in the corridors of British and American power, rather than on the battlefield. In the Loop operates foremost as a deliriously hideous farce in the squirming comedic form of The Office. (The film, incidentally, is a spin-off of Iannucci's British television series, The Thick of It, which is shot in a vérité style that has become a hallmark of such humor.) However, as magnificent as In the Loop is as a story about horrible people doing horrible things, it is also a devastating snapshot of the utterly dispiriting nature of politics in the twenty-first century. Not to put too fine a point on it, Iannucci has given us a treatise on bullshit, as philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt has succinctly characterized the defining feature of modern society. And what is the Iraq War--never actually name-checked in Iannucci's film--but the blood-soaked progeny of a truly epic accretion of bullshit?

The film's cast of characters is vast and filled to bursting with clowns of every stripe. On the Old World side of the pond, we are introduced to Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a twerp of a minister with his foot perpetually in his mouth. Terrorizing Simon is Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), a ruthless monster who is Number 10 Downings eyes and ears in the ministry. Rounding things out is Toby (Chris Addison), Simon's new assistant, who is even more gutless than his boss. The setting is deliberately ambiguous, but it becomes clear that the film takes place in a fictional corollary of 2003, as the drumbeat for war with an unnamed Mideast nation reaches deafening levels. Simon has made the apparently grievous mistake of saying on a radio program that war is "unforeseeable," a gaffe that sends Malcolm into apoplectic rage. Then again, apoplectic rage seems to be Malcolm's resting state. Simon's misstep unfortunately intersects with the visit of an American delegation, which includes State Department dove Karen Clarke and her hapless assistant, Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky). Clarke and her Pentagon ally, Lieutenant General George Milller (James Gandolfini) suspect that State hawk Linton Barwick (David Rasche) is convening a secret "war committee," suggesting that negotiation with the Mideast nation is question is a sham.

There are, of course, many, many more characters, and the relationships between them all are politically and emotionally convoluted in a manner befitting any farce of more than passing quality. Suffice to say that the doves' sanctimonious tenacity, the hawks' diabolical maneuvers, and Simon's endless succession of blunders collide in a kind of slow-motion geopolitical clusterfuck. The film builds towards a crucial United Nations vote, with Iannucci and his writers loosely cribbing from the events of February 2003 in particular, when Colin Powell gave his notorious speech before the world body.

While In the Loop is sprinkled with on-the-nose criticism of British and American political realities of the era--one British character, referring to the fresh-faced, no-nothing ideologues that have taken over Washington D.C., notes that "it's like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns"--these are actually less cutting than the film's overall tone of stunned, lightly chuckling despair. Iannucci has crafted a porthole through which the audience may view an environment governed entirely by bullshit. While the motivations that drive the individual players in this tragedy are multitude--vanity, territoriality, sadism, lust, laziness, fear--the currency is pure bullshit, and there's a kind of awful majesty to it. Burn After Reading ventured into similar coal-black territory last year, but the crudity of its message and the slightness of its story lent it a thematic flimsiness. In the Loop is more successful because it ties its central observations about the preeminence of bullshit to a specific, demonstrably horrible real-world outcome.

It's enough to make you weep in anguish, were it not so funny. Not the knee-slapping, belly-laughing kind of funny, really, but the sort that leaves you sitting with your mouth open, barely able to keep up with what you're hearing. Iannucci and his cabal of writers--Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche, and Ian Martin--ensure that every character is thoroughly crapped upon and revealed for the craven twits they truly are. The script is breathless, whirring along on a current of acid observations, discomfiting tension, and breathtaking insults. Irannucci's direction is crisp, dexterous, and deferential to his characters. Far from serving as a stylistic distraction, his handheld, pseudo-documentary method provides an unobtrusive framework that permits the focus to rest on the physicality of his actors, especially their faces.

The performances are all memorable, from Hollander's clueless flailing to Chlumsky's exasperated anxiousness to Rasche's squinting, affable malevolence. Zach Woods is absolutely repugnant (in the best possible way) as a disarmingly creepy State Department dork who takes delight in others' misery. The hands-down show-stealer, however, is Capaldi, whose positively satanic Malcolm Tucker is one of the few characters to migrate directly from The Thick of It. Seemingly perpetually on the verge on an aneurysm, Tucker devours everyone he encounters--allies, subordinates, rivals, passing strangers--with epic torrents of profanity, to rival even high-water marks such as The Big Lebowski and In Bruges. With a Scottish brogue that seems made for vulgarity, Capaldi tears a fearsome path through his every scene, leaving the other characters (and the actors, I suspect) blinking in stunned silence. It's like watching the Tiger Woods of hate. Within a story that brims with so much spin and truthiness, there's something pure about Malcolm's absolute misanthropy. Here at last, he seems to suggest, is something we can count on: the reliability of a colossal asshole.

The Hurt Locker

Let's Be Careful Out There

2008 // USA // Kathryn Bigelow // August 11, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - The Hurt Locker telegraphs its thematic thrust with its opening epigraph, a quotation from Chris Hedges' (somewhat overrated) War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: "War is a drug." The essential cunning of Kathryn Bigelow's gripping Iraq war feature—an "anti-action" action film in the vein of Munich—is its choice of protagonist. In order to establish the fundamentally addictive character of danger in a theater of war, Bigelow chooses not a Working Joe soldier or a Special Forces superman, but an unusual stripe of cowboy: a bomb disposal specialist, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). James is a technician first and foremost, but a damn good one. He dodges when an officer asks how many bombs he has disarmed, but under pressure he confidently replies "873." James is not a straight-arrow professional, however. He is fearless, reckless, and utterly addicted to the thrill of stopping explosions before they happen, the sort of soldier who elicits awe, but not confidence. The man who is supposed to have James' back, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), lays out his dilemma bluntly: he won't stand by while a hot-shit redneck with a death wish gets him and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) killed.

James is rotated into the bomb disposal unit of Bravo Company with Sanborn and Eldridge after their previous technician (Guy Pearce) is killed during a disarmament mission. The other two men are ticking off the days until their rotation is finished. Sanborn yearns to start a family back home even as he questions the wisdom of doing so, while Eldridge is increasingly bedeviled by existential panic. Bigelow presents the story of the last month and a half of the unit's rotation as a series of linked set pieces depicting isolated missions. Each one starts out more or less the same. The three-man unit receives a call, loads up James' specialized equipment, and rolls out in an armored Humvee to deal with an explosive device. The hazards faced by a civilian bomb squad seem like child's play compared to the working conditions these soldiers face: unholy heat, choking dust, unfamiliar surroundings, and a hostile population. Every minute that James spends trying to disarm a bomb is a minute for locals to gather and gawk, any one of whom could hold a cell phone that will detonate the device.

Bigelow adds texture to the story by varying the events and demands of the missions. Each one is fundamentally the same, yet each possesses unique perils. James and his fellow soldiers must contend with snipers, fires, runaway cars, private contractors, flat tires, goat herds, dehydration, dirty ammunition, poor intelligence, and a reluctant suicide bomber. Compared to a normal infantry unit, James' squad has a routine characterized by discrete tasks and simple goals: disarm the bomb. This lends their work a tone probably familiar to civilian police officers or even utility repairmen, albeit with exponentially higher risks. You get the call, you go to the job, you finish the job, you head back. Sanborn and Eldridge want to keep their heads down, focus on each mission as it comes, and make it out alive on the other end. Try as they might, however, they can't resist mulling over why they do what they do, what it all means, and how the world got so fucked up. James, for all his nonchalant machismo, seems to be searching for something, perhaps a connection to his lethal profession that runs deeper than the titillation of risk. He tries to strike up a jovial friendship with an Iraqi kid who hawks DVDs on the base, but the consequences of this outreach only intensify his doubts.

Bigelow and novice screenwriter Mark Boal don't approach their material with an overtly political tone, at least as one might ordinarily understand it. There are no voices for or against the Iraq war as a political or military action. The Hurt Locker's characters are simply too close to the ground, and if they have any opinions, they keep them close to the chest. Bigelow aligns our sympathies with the soldiers, even as she makes it clear that these are macho blockheads with hefty reserves of racism, rage, and cynicism. While acknowledging these aspects of her characters, Bigelow doesn't sit in judgment. The film's sociological dimensions are broader, more in line with Hedges' thesis about the role of war in structuring the human experience. While Bigelow's exploration of this theme isn't especially intricate—she is directing an action-thriller at bottom, after all—but it is decisively, cleanly, and brilliantly mated to her storytelling. What she presents in The Hurt Locker is a neat little arc about James' emergent awareness that war fulfills him in way that is exclusionary, terrifying, and unsolvable.

What sets The Hurt Locker apart from its fellow travelers in the genre is Bigelow's masterful direction, which really is a revelation. The film's central scenario is designed to elicit tension: James tries desperately to deactivate bombs while Sanborn and Eldridge anxiously stand guard. And indeed, the film is unbearably, thrillingly tense. This is, of course, absolutely necessary for the film's thematic aims, as the viewer must share the illicit rush of dancing on that metaphorical ledge with James. Given the handheld, grainy 16 mm format and rapid cutting that Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd employ, the clarity of the action is stunning. Here is a film that is marvelously articulate in its use of space, never engaging in confused cinematic language in the service of questionable stylistic whims. The Hurt Locker is a devastating rejoinder to the notion that a handheld, naturalistic technique necessarily dooms a film to a muddled, disorienting, seizure-inducing hell.

What emerges from Bigelow's efforts is a stellar action film, almost as vital as The Dark Knight, but its formal antithesis: gritty, straightforward, and uncluttered. It's an achievement, to be sure, and if it seems a touch underwhelming, perhaps that's because war films are expected to be grandiose, as though flabbiness were a cinematic virtue. When a toned, harrowing little marvel like The Hurt Locker comes along, it unbalances and electrifies.