SLIFF 2011: Pig

2011 // USA // Henry Barrial // November 13, 2011 // Theatrical HDCAM (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The intrinsic grittiness of low-budget independent film-making ultimately contributes to the uncanny mood of the conceptually ambitious thriller Pig. Writer-director Henry Barrial’s script lays out a scenario with echoes of other noir-tinted puzzle-box films such as The Game, Oldboy, and Memento. However, in its cinematic execution, the story discovers a disorienting, dream-like aura that places it in the hinterlands of David Lynch country. A Man (Rudolph Martin) awakens hooded and bound in the desert with no memory of his identity. He carries only a scrap of paper scrawled with a name: “Manny Elder.” After collapsing from exhaustion, he finds himself in the care of a beautiful widow, Isabel (Heather Ankeny), who entices him to stay with her and her young son at their remote desert home. However, the confounding visions that flash through the Man’s mind compel him to search for his identity, leading him into Los Angeles and through a succession of strange encounters. By the end of the first act, the story has undergone a drastic realignment that deepens the narrative mystery even as it narrows the film’s potential. From that moment on, it’s apparent that Pig’s story must necessarily rest on a dream, a science-fiction conceit, or a malevolent conspiracy of epic proportions. (Or all three).

There’s a streak of faintly dissatisfying conservatism to Pig’s final scenes, but it has less to do with the film’s message or style than with the inherent limitations of genre storytelling. No explanation that the film might offer for its strange events could realistically maintain the narrative’s internal integrity and also preserve the unsettling mood that pervades the bulk of its scenes. A splendidly crafted but radically different style is on display in a particular film-within-the-film sequence, suggesting that the atmosphere that pervades Pig elsewhere represents an adroit utilization of the baseline indie aesthetic. The Los Angeles of the film is kin to the weird, diabolical metropolis of Lynch’s doppelganger triptych (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE). It’s a sunny-yet-ominous place full of offhandedly eccentric moments, vaguely sinister spaces, and banal and often anachronistic objects that seem to roil with significance. In the final analysis, the film is more invested in presenting a story that glistens with philosophical relevance for our current age than in exploiting the horrifying potential of its disorienting atmospherics. Still, while it lasts, Pig is disarming stuff, the kind of sly little genre experiment that reveals the parched cinematic imagination that characterizes most studio thrillers.

SLIFF 2011: Shame

2011 // UK // Steve McQueen // November 12, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

With his sophomore feature film, Shame, director Steve McQueen once again ruthlessly observes as Michael Fassbender subjects himself to a hideous regimen of self-annihilation. However, whereas McQueen's stunning 2008 debut, Hunger, depicted an IRA true believer forgoing food as an act of political protest, the director's new film focuses on a man utterly dominated by sexual compulsions. Brandon (Fassbender) leads a quintessential lonely New York City bachelor life, one bounded by a successful New-New Economy career and aseptic one-bedroom apartment, but defined by the relentless pursuit of orgasm. "Libido" seems too feeble a word to describe Brandon's drives, which are akin to a yawning, ravenous void that he fills with an endless succession of one-night-stands and call girls (not to mention habitual wanks in the office restroom). Into this frenzied pit of sexual need tumbles Brandon's little sister, Cissy (Carey Mulligan), a struggling torch-singer who crashes on his couch when she finds herself back in New York and between lovers. Needless to say, Cissy's presence sets Brandon on edge, not only because of their sharp personality clashes, but because Baby Sis throws a monkey-wrench into his sexual routine.

Regardless of whether Brandon's disengaged, hypersexual behavior truly constitutes “sexual addiction,” (or whether such an affliction even exists), the man is plainly engaged in a fearsome cycle that is spiraling slowly and inevitably downward, a cycle he seems to find personally repugnant and yet is unable to halt. There's no denying that Shame is a psychologically ugly film, repugnant in a way that even Hunger never managed. The latter film at least grapples with the alleged moral purity of self-destruction for ideological reasons, even if it never fully embraces such a view. By comparison, Brandon's carnal pursuits contain not a hint of joyful hedonism, just a slack inertia and a whopping dose of self-hatred. In the main, the film relies on Fassbender's exceedingly raw performance to convey the foulness of Brandon's rutting, rather than on seedy style or production design. To wit: There is a extended threesome scene late in the film that is lovingly shot in golden hues, scored with rapturous strings, and edited to take the viewer sleekly from one position and act to the next. And yet Fassbender's face contains all the evidence necessary to illustrate that this erotic marathon is an act of supreme unhappiness and loathing.

It's this kind of bold upending of expectations—and the refusal to indulge in cinematic laziness—that makes McQueen's film-making approach so invigorating, no matter how unpleasant the subject matter. The director's use of anamorphic widescreen is, if anything more striking here than in Hunger, and his camera placement and use of long takes are just as thrilling. Returning cinematographer Sean Bobbitt presents a cool, gorgeous urban landscape that glints with a distinctly Gotham atmosphere. Meanwhile, the film's look also subtly complements its deep aura of twenty-first century despair, with all the directionless anxiety that implies. Buried deep in the script is a suggestion that family abuse is at the root of Brandon and Cissy's problems, but Shame isn't particularly interested in excavating the siblings' deeply scarified psyches in search of personal demons to exorcise. This is gruesome portraiture, pure and simple, executed largely without the pleasure of a redemptive narrative arc. The film simply wants us to look unflinchingly at Brandon and consider how such an outwardly functional but inwardly broken person could be created and sustained.

SLIFF 2011: A Dangerous Method

2011 // Canada // David Cronenberg // November 11, 2011 // Theatrical Projection (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

For a film that ostensibly concerns itself with the relationship between pioneering psychiatrists Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), A Dangerous Method offers little insight into the ways in which these men transformed one another, personally and professionally. That isn't so much a criticism as an observation that that while film is quite invested in charting the emotional topography between the two men, each is hunkered down in a bunker constructed of their particular intellectual and emotional idiosyncrasies. Much is made of their contrasts: Swiss and Austrian, Gentile and Jew, young and old. Director David Cronenberg and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (who adapted the film from his own stage play, The Talking Cure, which is in turn based on David Kerr's book A Most Dangerous Method) don't allow either man to change much over the course of the film, particularly Freud, who is more professionally settled, more risk-averse, and deeply entrenched in the correctness of his theories. (There is a suggestion that if the pair had been closer contemporaries, their professional dynamic would have been vastly different.) The film presents both men as ahead-of-their-time giants, each naturally attracted to flame of the other's intellect, and each quietly harboring a remarkably liberated worldview. The story of A Dangerous Method is in large part about how these men went from enthusiastic professional colleagues with deep, mutual admiration—Freud even comments at one point that Jung is his de facto successor—to frosty rivals who barely speak to one another.

It is the film's third primary character who is granted a genuine arc. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is a Russian Jewess with severe mental scars, but who nonetheless has ambitions to become a psychiatrist herself. When the film opens, Spielrein is shown to be barely functional, suffering from debilitating psycho-sexual fits elicited by feelings of humiliation and other stimuli. She is brought into Jung's care at his hospital in Zurich, and over the course of the film's eight or so years, she undergoes a transformation from psychic cripple to one of the first female psychoanalysts in the world. Spielrein's case serves as a validation of Jung's ambitions to actually cure patients of their unresolved psychological ailments, but the film posits a far more pivotal role for the woman in this erotic-medical-professional triangle. As Jung dryly observes, Spielrein is “something of a catalyst” on those around her. Her presence (and her nascent psychiatric theories) open up Jung to repressed sexual urges of his own, and before long the two are engaged in an intense, sadomasochistic-flavored affair. Ultimately, the acrid aftermath of Jung and Speilrein's relationship reverberates through the psychoanalytical community, and--in perhaps the film's most fictional leap--splits open the divisions between Jung and Freud that had already been forming. There is a quiet suggestion, through all of this academic turmoil, that Jung and Speilrein would have been an excellent match, but that circumstances (and Jung's cowardice and self-righteousness) precluded a future for the couple. The film keeps this romantic tragedy element admirably understated without muting it entirely, such that when Jung admits late in the film that his adoration for Speilrein will never diminish, it's a genuinely affecting moment.

Like Cronengberg's other post-Spider films, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, there's a rigorous realism to A Dangerous Method, but not necessarily a discordance with the director's other work. Going all the way back to Shivers, Cronenberg has long had a fascination with individuals who plunge headlong into perilous physical, psychological, and sexual realms. While his latest film is in many ways his most staid and accessible, there's an undeniable thrill in seeing some of his favored themes brought to the forefront and discussed openly by historical figures. Even in a film that consists mostly of jargon-laden conversations and letter-writing, Cronenberg still finds those moments that speak to his perennial fascination with body and machine. These include Spielrein's absent-minded fingering of her virginal bloodstain on a sheet; the pointed (yet restrained) presence of Freud's cigar, with its lengthening ash and damp, chewed end; and the tender way that the film lingers on Jung's wetting of his wife's hands before hooking her to a kind of Edwardian polygraph. Spielrein herself becomes a kind of vessel for the distinguishing “Cronenbergian” deformations of the flesh and mind, through both her grotesque physical contortions and her bizarre sexual confessions. Indeed, one of the film's creepiest moments involves Knightley's description of a wet, questing “mollusc” that she recalls visiting her in her sleep. Both Fassbender and Mortensen do suitable work with their relatively static roles, but the film really belongs to Knightley (and isn't that a suprise). Her madness-induced paroxysms early in the film are so over-the-top that they're almost laughable, but once Speilrein begins to emerge from her shell, Knightley truly shines. She does a stunning job of holding on to a remnant of Spielrein's queasy, unhinged quality, gradually tamping it down as the film's years roll on without ever obliterating it entirely. It's an astounding illusion to watch.

SLIFF 2011: The Artist

2011 // France // Michel Hazanavicius // November 10, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The Artist is enamored with the glamour and thrills of cinema’s silent era and, to an extent, of the early Golden Age that followed it. The film plainly expects that the viewer will find its deliberately anachronistic evocation of this period to be endearing. And, truth be told, it’s challenging to actively dislike a feature as wistful and fluffy as writer-director Michel Hazanavicius’ shamelessly nostalgic film. In it, he spins the entwined tales of dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and newly-minted It-Girl Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), the latter ascending just as the former is fading away. Beyond presenting the film in black-and-white with era-appropriate intertitles, orchestral score, and 1.33:1 aspect ratio, Hazanavicius employs a plethora of touches to recall a time when Hollywood studios first began to embrace sound technology. These touches include not only formal flourishes such as filter effects and cranked-up frame rates in some scenes, but also pointedly creaky archetypes and visual gags. There’s an artistic conservatism to the use of these stylistic elements that isn’t found in the contemporary silent works of Guy Maddin, but they serve their purpose here.

Dujardin, who has previously collaborated with Hazanavicius as the titular, clueless secret agent in the director’s OSS 17 spy satires, channels Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Errol Flynn while adding a marvelous slathering of vintage comic sensibility. He’s a pleasure to watch, as is the spritely Bejo, who blends Rebecca Hall’s blinding smile and willowy profile with the cheekiness of a Depression-era film damsel. Inasmuch as the story has a conflict, it hinges on Valentin’s sudden and demeaning exile from Hollywood due to his prideful refusal to make talkies. Hazanavicius portrays the transition from silent to sound as a slow-motion tragedy, and Valentin’s fall as pitiable. The story necessarily recalls Singin' in the Rain, if it were shot through with dark Looney Tunes seizures. (Indeed, one nightmare sequence seems plucked from the feverish experiences of Elmer Fudd or Daffy Duck.) The film serves in part as a facile criticism of show business’ slavish devotion to lowbrow tastes and its pitiless penchant for stampeding off in search of the Next Big Thing. The film underlines that criticism with its old school stylings—What could be more underground in 2011 than a silent film?—but its message lacks bite.

Eventually, Valentin’s downward spiral into alcoholism and suicidal despair (hi-larious!) is suddenly reversed in a manner that becomes more head-scratching the longer one dwells on it. The film is so attached to its protagonist (and Dujardin such a perfect charming rascal) that once Valentin’s problems are resolved, all seems right in the world. When the sour so abruptly turns sweet in this manner, however, one can’t help but feel a little cheated. There's a narrative sloppiness to the final act, a defect that points to the broader lack of diligence in the construction of the film. Unlike Charles Chaplin’s Limelight, with which it shares some narrative and thematic features, The Artist isn’t so much cloying as it is ramshackle and crudely considered. Hazanavicius blends together cartoonish tropes, lively dance numbers, restrained slapstick, and knowingly purple melodrama. Each component can be (and often is) engaging on its own, but the whole never seems to coalesce into a clear statement or point of view. Then again, perhaps a point of view isn’t necessary in a film so besotted with ephemeral pleasures.

Take Shelter

2011 // USA // Jeff Nichols // October 28, 2011 // Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Jeff Nichols’s riveting new film, Take Shelter, is perhaps the most frightening work of cinema I’ve seen this year, and unquestionably the best new horror film to land in theaters since Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Nichols’ film boasts vivid nightmare sequences and a bit of computer-generated creepiness, but its boogeymen are predominantly creatures of the mind, and therefore all the more plausible and terrifying. Fundamentally, Take Shelter is a film about the deforming qualities of dread itself, and about how it can devour a mind and all the lives that surround it. The fact that the mind in question is perfectly, horribly aware that this all-consuming dread is absurd… well, that just makes the disintegration all the more disturbing.

Curtis (the ever-enthralling Michael Shannon) is a geological driller in rural Ohio, blessed with a lovely, forthright wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and a sweet young daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), whose deafness has only nurtured her parents’ devotion. Their life is simple but gratifying, the kind of existence that Curtis’ partner and friend, Dewart (Shea Whigham), will readily admit to envying once he has a few Friday night beers in him. Curtis, however, has begun to have distressing nightmares about an approaching thunderstorm, a storm that is somehow Different and Wrong. In addition to spawning fierce tornados, this storm unleashes a dark, thick rain resembling motor oil, and drives humans and animals alike to homicidal madness. Confronted with such harrowing visions, Curtis becomes distracted during his waking hours, and increasingly mystified by the omens that he sees in flocks of birds and arcs of lightning. Quietly, he begins to prepare for the apocalyptic storm that haunts his dreams. Frightened and embarrassed in equal measure, he conceals these preparations from his family and friends for as long as possible, while taking steps to evaluate his sanity.

Take Shelter functions chiefly as a character study of a splintering mind, a study presented from its protagonist’s unreliable perspective. It isn’t the first film to utilize this approach, of course. Just last year, Black Swan offered a similar first-person view of a mind losing its grip on reality, a mind trapped in a pitiless vice of rivalry and perfectionism. In contrast, Curtis gives every appearance of being an easy-going family man with no unusual mental strains beyond those common to just about every working-class American household. Therein lies the strength of Nichols’ script, which trenchantly mines the ashen pits of our collective anxieties, be they economic, cultural, religious, medical, or environmental. Eventually, the film reveals that Curtis’ mother suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Although this provides a rationale for his sudden outbreak of apocalyptic visions, it doesn’t diminish the horror of his situation. Indeed, it only serves to heighten Curtis’ most pragmatic fear: That he is hurtling towards a genetic destiny that will transform him from a provider into a shameful burden on his family.

What makes Take Shelter distinctive from previous films about the terror of mental illness is the resounding self-awareness of its protagonist. Curtis understands that his predicament is psychiatric in nature, and yet he is unable to stop planning for the unnatural threat he perceives on the horizon. He calmly (and secretly) takes out a loan to pay for the construction of an elaborate tornado shelter, even as his rational mind screams, “This. Is. CRAZY.” Shannon conveys this contradiction marvelously, providing an anguished and largely shuttered portrait. (When Curtis does finally explode with terror and fury, Shannon plays it utterly unhinged.) Curtis is a man caught between two distinct kinds of dread. On the one hand is the fear of the loss of identity, the terror that one’s own mind has a frantic life of its own that cannot be denied. Then there is the fear of an overwhelming threat that will tear apart the world, a fear that Nichols presents with startling acuity, while never forgetting that it is essentially chimerical.

The filmmaker’s effortless evocation of the rural Heartland setting is crucial, just as it was in his debut feature, Shotgun Stories, a rattling tale of Biblical retribution in the archetypal Shitty Little Town. In Take Shelter, the setting provides a credible, willfully prosaic substrate for Curtis’ dissolution. The film presents a rare reverse-shot examination of the proverbial Ordinary Guy who just snaps. Nichols’ film proffers that no one “just snaps.” True, Curtis is caught in a whirlwind that begins with his unlucky birthright. However, that whirlwind is fueled by his dumb Midwestern pride and a series of increasingly faulty decisions, each hastily made in the shadow of his waxing terror.

The film’s treatment of fearful conviction and looming Armageddon recalls several exceptional forebears, including Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture, Todd Haynes’ Safe, and Bill Paxton’s Frailty. It shares with those films the phenomenon of “paradigm isolation,” wherein the protagonist is the lonely steward of a fearful, disruptive worldview. Of course, the psychological character of Take Shelter’s central conflict does not lessen the creepshow potency of the film’s nightmare sequences. Those are pants-shitting scary in their own right. The vividness of Take Shelter’s spine-tingling apocalyptic horror is one of the reasons its more down-to-earth chills of eroding sanity are so effective. There is little doubt that Curtis’ nightmares are the progeny of a malfunctioning mind, but those visions are so unsettling that they render his situation all the more pitiable.

Indeed, the film that Take Shelter brings to mind most readily is Night of the Living Dead, as it shares with that film a fear of a destructive reordering of the world into something unrecognizable and savage. Supernatural and science-fiction horror films such as Living Dead embody common human fears within literal monsters, but Nichols’ film seals its monsters within the mind of the hapless Curtis. This is cold comfort to the viewer, who sees what Curtis sees and feels his fear just as acutely as he does. In one of the most memorable shots in any film in recent memory, Nichols summons icy, stomach-flopping terror from little but a character’s slow, dead-eyed half-turn towards a kitchen knife. Cinematic moments don't come much more elemental than that.

Rosemary's Baby

1968 // USA // Roman Polanski // October 2, 2011 // DVD - Paramount (2000)

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Roman Polanski’s most thematically absorbing and persuasive works are what I term his Dupe Films: Stories in which sinister forces manipulate and mislead the protagonist, who plays a central but unwitting role in their Machiavellian plots. In the films that comprise this narrative current—Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ninth Gate, and The Ghost Writer—the hero eventually becomes aware of such exploitation and subsequently challenges their exploiters. However, in each of these films, whatever fleeting successes the protagonist claims are outweighed by the triumph of the puppet-masters in the end. Needless to say, Polanski’s Dupe Films are exceptionally bleak works, especially in aggregate, as they posit a world where the hapless victim of a conspiracy has no realistic hope of outflanking the coldblooded conspirators. The Tenant and The Ghost Writer (and to a lesser extent Rosemary’s Baby) are also secondarily “Dupe” Films in the sense that the hero follows the footsteps of an unfortunate predecessor, down to sleeping in their bed and tracing their route turn-by-turn.

Rosemary’s Baby offers the most uncluttered and successful expression of this narrative framework. It was Polanski’s fourth English-language film in as many years, and yet the script exhibits the kind of straightforward elegance that few native British or American filmmakers ever muster, particularly when it comes to the treacherous realms of supernatural horror. I hesitate to label it the best of the Dupe Films. Chinatown is undoubtedly a more daring and exceptional film overall, and The Tenant’s cracked-mirror reality has a visceral appeal for me, but it’s hard to deny that Rosemary’s Baby is an exemplar of clean-and-simple storytelling when laid alongside the other Dupe Films. No feature with a 136-minute running time can be brisk, but every minute of Rosemary’s Baby feels necessary and proper, like the individual stones in a garden labyrinth spiraling into an ever-tightening circle. Polanski relies on thriller and horror narrative conventions that were familiar even in 1968 (and are now downright mildewy), but somehow the film never seems schematic, even when the viewer can see exactly where it is going.

The film is an outlier in other ways: It is the only feature among the aforementioned five with a screenplay credited solely to Polanski, and also the only to boast a female protagonist. Needless to say, Rosemary Woodhouse’s (Mia Farrow) femininity (and fecundity) are essential to the film’s story and its thematic preoccupations. Perhaps it’s a little hackneyed that the emotional terrain of Polanski’s most prominent female lead is so thoroughly dominated by the twin motives of fear and protectiveness. Consider that Chinatown’s Jake Gittes, The Ninth Gate’s Dean Corso, and The Ghost Writer’s nameless hero react with bristling resentment at being played for fools, and pursue their manipulators more out of offended pride than anything. (The Tenant’s cringing protagonist, Trelkowski, is the exception that proves the rule, as his malevolent neighbors aim to transform him into his female predecessor.) Still, Rosemary’s personality has a willowy realism that matches Farrow’s physical presence. She's lamentably naive, but also a little unruly, and posseses enough aptitude to ferret out the Satanic conspiracy that has designs for her unborn child. (Although, admittedly, she requires a male character’s posthumous help to point her to a crucial clue.)

Indeed, Rosemary’s Baby may not be a feminist film, but it portrays the social obstacles that women confront with devastating clarity. One quickly loses count of how many times characters patronizingly soothe Rosemary’s fears, or utilize gender-tinted guilt tactics to manipulate her. Ironically, Rosemary isn’t especially threatening to the male-dominated social order (secular or Satanic) that surrounds her. Her rather traditionalist yearning to settle down and have two or three children appears to be genuine, and she exhibits an eager-to-please submission to the demands of her actor husband’s (John Cassavetes) vanity. However, even her tiniest defiances are sins in the eyes of her devil-worshipping tormentors, who ruthlessly quash the influence of the outside world while nudging her in their preferred direction. Polanski tips his hand by having all the male characters react with revulsion to Rosemary’s ultra-short haircut: Stray outside the role assigned to you and you will face scorn.

Such cultural criticisms are consistent with the broader conflict of traditionalism vs. modernism that the film establishes. Following the path of many horror films, Rosemary’s Baby exploits the dichotomy of the old and the new for its thematic ends. However, unlike, say, Night of the Living Dead, the film’s anxieties are directed backwards to the fossilized past rather than forward to an alien future. Fear of aging and the elderly pervades the film, but its terrors are more complex than mere illness and mortality. Rosemary, for all her professions of maternal longing, seems to sense that she will lose something ephemeral (Her freedom? Her hipness?) after she becomes a mother and locks her life into a particular, conformist narrative. The Satanists profess a forward-thinking ideology that rejects Christian moral norms and declares a glorious Year One, but their designs for Rosemary are dreadfully retrograde, a point underlined by the fact that the film’s diabolists are all old enough to be cashing Social Security checks.

Disturbed by all the time her husband is spending with the dotty neighbors forty years his senior, Rosemary at one point proposes a party with their “old” (read: young) friends. It’s telling that once Rosemary’s female peers have a moment to sit down and listen to her miseries, they acknowledge and bolster her fears rather than dismissing them. Neither is it a mistake that Rosemary’s Satanic obstetrician warns her away from the advice of such young women, while urging her to take herbal concoctions rather than modern vitamin pills. The demonic is explicitly connected to the old-fashioned and traditional, down to the the “Anti-Virgin Mary” role that the more pragmatic Satanists have in mind for Rosemary. There’s something gratifyingly audacious about a film in which the gravest threat to a Luciferian cabal is not the Church (which is complicit with Rosemary's demonic rape in her drug-addled dreams), but a few liberated and levelheaded women.