The Night of the Hunter

1955 // USA // Charles Laughton // October 12, 2010 // DVD - MGM (2000)

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

Screening Charles Laughton's eccentric Southern gothic nightmare—remarkably, the first and only film he directed—has become something of an October tradition for me. I suppose it isn't exactly a horror film, but the struggle of wills between young John Harper and the "Reverend" Harry Powell is one of the great Good-versus-Evil cinematic matches of all time. (As far as I'm concerned, it's up there with Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West in terms of its mythic purity.) For that, and its potent aura of physical and spiritual menace, it always seems a good fit for the run-up to Halloween.

The influence of German expressionism on Laughton's style and Robert Mitchum's disturbing portrayal of the Reverend receive the lion's share of critical attention, but what was on my mind on this occasion was how ambiguous the film is in its stance towards children. The way that Laughton presents the story's sentimental moralizing seems authentic, and yet it always has a bit of sadness and uneasiness squirming underneath its phantasmagorical surface. The Reverend seems so ominous partly because the film paints John and Pearl as unblemished souls. John safeguards the secret of the money out of enduring loyalty to his Pa, not because he cares about the cache's value, and Pearl is so untainted by the world's ugliness she makes paper dolls out of the bills. However, Laughton's camera always seems a little apprehensive when it regards the children, as if they are strange and unknowable creatures whose purity intimidates as much as it beguiles. Adding to the dissonance is the fact that Sally Jane Bruce, who plays Pearl, is a damn creepy-looking little girl.

The film is unequivocally a creature of the Hays code era, what with the Reverend's sudden and strangely off-handed downfall, not to mention the entire character of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish, effortlessly endearing), the sort of saintly caregiver and protector who fits right into the film's fairy tale vision of Depression America. Still, when Rachel muses on the dual character of children—their simultaneous fragility and endurance—it doesn't feel like syrupy sentiment, but a melancholy statement of bewilderment. In fact, an aura of bewilderment characterizes the entire film: at the Reverend's unfathomable malevolence, at others' blindness to his evil designs, at the capricious cruelty of the world, and at the impenetrable nature of God's will.

Incidentally, after ten years on a no-frills MGM disc, the film is finally getting an overdue Criterion Collection treatment on DVD and Blu-ray next month.

Buried

Man in a Box

2010 // Spain // Rodrigo Cortés // October 7, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20)

B - Now here's a wholly unexpected and welcome shock, if a grim one. Beneath the fiendishly straightforward premise of Rodrigo Cortés' Buried, beneath even the nasty thrill of the claustrophobic agonies inflicted on its hapless protagonist (and the audience) via its 6'x3'x2' setting, lies one of the best films yet made about the Iraq War, second only to the Armando Iannucci's black comic masterstroke, In the Loop. If one expects any word to describe a 95-minute film set entirely inside a coffin and featuring a single on-screen actor, it would be "simple." However, the remarkable thing about Cortés' high-concept tale is that, although it succeeds spectacularly well strictly as a white-knuckle thriller about an unthinkable situation, it possesses a richness of subtext that permits examination from manifold angles. Turn it this way and you can see a stark allegory for America's seven-year embroilment in the Middle East. Flip it that way and you might discover a miserable, sweat-stained absurdism, one part Kafka and one part Coen brothers. However, the film never indulges in sermonizing or surreal digression, and it is Cortés' commitment to Buried's elemental parameters that renders it a triumphant, merciless vice of tension.

Following a title sequence that evokes Saul Bass—and therefore Hitchcock, and not incidentally—the film presents an opening premise that is as austere as they come. Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) awakens in pitch darkness, bound and gagged. At first we can only hear his breathing and sense his dawning awareness that something is very, very wrong. By the flame from the Zippo lighter that has been placed in his hand, he quickly ascertains that he has been sealed into a coffin and buried. In addition to the lighter, he discovers on his person a half-charged cell phone that shows only Arabic characters. For the next hour and a half, Cortés' camera never leaves the coffin, and the scenes are lit only by the light to which Paul himself has access (chiefly, his guttering Zippo and ghostly-green cellphone screen).

Buried contains the seeds for a slightly different film than it turns out to be. Cortes and screenwriter Chris Sparling could have chosen to emphasize the mystery aspect of Paul's horrifying predicament, placing him six feet under without any knowledge of where he is or what has happened to him. That isn't the case. As Paul relates in a panic to any person he can reach on the cell phone, he works a truck driver for a Halliburton analogue in Iraq in 2006. The last thing he recalls is his convoy being attacked by insurgents, and he fairly quickly tumbles to the fact that he is likely being held captive. This becomes crystal clear when his kidnappers call him, whispering in a menacing croak that he has only a few hours to convince the American embassy to pay them $5 million for his life. Buried is therefore primarily a thriller about a seemingly unsolvable problem—a pit sans pendulum, if you will—and is equally fascinated by the tangible details of Paul's captivity and by the psychological toll that his plight wreaks on him.

Despite his fratboy smirk and sculpted abs (or perhaps because of them), Reynolds' charisma functions best in nastier roles, whether he's in Jack Torrance mode in the underrated remake of The Amityville Horror or adding repugnant staining to his too-cool-for-school swagger in Adventureland. While Buried is essentially a one-man show, the film would lose its potency if Paul were too replete with tics and crevasses. The story works by permitting the viewer to lie alongside Paul in the coffin and imagine how they would react to such terrifying circumstances. It's a role that requires a certain Everyman blankness, and it's absolutely not a slap to Reynolds to say that he delivers on this score. His performance is exactly what the film needs: a careful equilibrium between distinctive characterization and receptiveness to audience projection, with his emotions and actions presented as utterly believable. Paul is, in a way, the perfect protagonist for horror-cinema-as-formalist-stunt.

This not to say that what Cortés achieves with Buried is a mere carnival trick, bereft of significance after the curtain falls. While Paul's dire predicament is characterized by a series of escalating physical crises—a knothole that provide access for an unwanted trespasser, sand that seeps in with maddening alacrity—the most resonant aspects of his plight are eerily familiar in our everyday experience. He finds himself stymied by spotty cell reception, pens that won't write, a flashlight that flickers (a horror movie tradition, that), and a succession of clueless, unsympathetic, and misleading voices on the other end of his phone. (When anyone picks up at all; this, more than anything, decisively marks Buried as a creature of its time.) Paul futilely professes his insignificance and neutrality in the Iraq War to his captors ("I'm just a contractor!"), but they're the least of his problems compared to skeptical bureaucrats, shifty government agents, a peeved sister-in-law, and a human resources department that seems determined, even in his present circumstances, to screw him out of his benefits.

Buried therefore serves as a bald-faced commentary on the never-ending neo-colonial clusterfuck in the Middle East, with Paul figuratively and literally entombed by nefarious forces—neoconservative, corporate, and jihadist—that he cannot confront. More broadly, the film rumbles with the horror-cum-hilarity of the modern American experience: the futile search for help in the digital wilderness, our dependence on our technological talismans, and the barrage of casual malice and authoritarian lies that we swallow out of desperation. (Paul might as well be jobless with an underwater mortgage and expiring unemployment benefits, thanks to politicians who self-righteously scold him to just dig himself out.) While such metaphorical approaches to Buried are quite caustic and patently unconcealed, Cortés never elevates such political or cultural statements above the simple, masochistic joys of a brutal thriller. Buried is constructed with a diligence that should come as no shock given the micro scale of his setting, and watching it unfold is like reading a story by Poe, an exercise in swelling dread and looming finality. The unexpected textures that the film offers are merely the cockroach icing on a delectably vicious cake.

The Social Network

You Like This

2010 // USA // David Fincher // October 4, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B+ - The tumultuous story of the founding of the social networking site Facebook is the sort of tale that seems ripe for grandiose declarations about How Everything Is Different Now. Leave it to David Fincher to find a much more fascinating approach, one that acknowledges the revolutionary nature of Web 2.0 while maintaining a plaintive distance (and without striking the pose of a Luddite killjoy). Curiously simple in its broad outlines, but gratifyingly intricate in the particulars of its construction, The Social Network is partly a hoary tragedy of betrayal, and partly a jittery, uncertain assessment of where we find ourselves, culturally speaking, in the twenty-first century. Much like the two works that established the director as an invigorating visual storyteller—Se7en and Fight Club—the new film is firmly grounded within Fincherverse, a (slightly) Bizarro cousin of our contemporary world, awash in the greasy shadows of dissipation and despair. Never mind that The Social Network's environs roam from the burnished walnut and brass of the Harvard campus to the frosted glass and Aeron Chairs of Palo Alto. Fincherverse is conspicuously fast, cheap, and out-of-control, to borrow a phrase. Here, underneath the slick metal casing of a multi-billion-dollar rocket ship of an idea, one finds a toxic cocktail of crass misogyny, petty resentments, class jealously, and jaw-dropping arrogance. And damn if it isn't entertaining to watch that witch's brew roil.

At Harvard in 2003, undergrad computer science whiz kid Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, magnificently cast), having just been abruptly (and perhaps wisely) dumped by his girlfriend, proceeds to drunkenly slander her on his blog. He then stays up all night coding a crude "Who's Hotter" site that pulls photos off the "facebooks" of the university's houses and clubs, with help from his programmer roommates and his best friend, economics prodigy Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). The glut of Internet traffic Zuckerberg's trifle generates catches the attention of both the campus IT staff and Harvard's more elite student circles. In the latter category are identical twin rowing stars Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, portraying both brothers) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who offer Zuckerberg a job programming a new college social site called ConnectU. Before you can say "handshake agreement," Zuckerberg has launched his own social site, The Facebook, with seed money from Saverin, all the while running interference against the Winklevosses. The Facebook explodes on the Harvard campus, turning both Zuckerberg and Saverin into small-pond nerd rock stars (complete with groupies), and sending the Winklevosses into gentlemanly fits of apoplectic rage. Dispel any illusions, however, that this is a fist-pumping real-world Revenge of the Nerds story.

Zuckerbeg sets his sights on expanding The Facebook to other campuses while insisting on the necessity of preserving its hip image, even as Saverin frets about the necessity of bringing in advertising dollars. Saverin's fate is sealed, however, with the appearance of Napster creator Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). Charming, enthusiastic, and slick as owl shit, Parker tells Zuckerberg everything he wants to hear and seduces the undergrad to move Facebook's base of operations to Silicon Valley. Suffice to say that the rest of the tale if full of acrimony and treachery, not so much because the narrative trajectory of The Social Network strongly signals it (although it does), but because the bulk of the story is told in flashback, as Zuckerberg gives deposition in two multi-million dollar lawsuits: one launched by the Winklevosses and one by Saverin himself. This "Tell Us What Happened" structure gives Fincher and editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall the space to deliver some of the most exhilarating cross-cut storytelling in the director's oeuvre, surpassing even that of Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. To be sure, it's an approach that's chock full of landmines and occasions for uninspired laziness. Exhibit A: In the deposition scenes, a lawyer will ask, "And what did he say?," followed by a cut that reveals what was said. Yet Fincher not only makes such exchanges dramatic, he makes them cinematic. The persuasive performances, the chiaroscuro photography by Fight Club alum Jeff Cronenweth, and the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose all cohere to establish the film's curious aura of electric expectation veined with defeated desolation.

The mode that Fincher has adopted keeps the viewer conscious of the looming fiscal and personal eruptions (whether one knows the Facebook story or not), and of the intrinsic unreliability of the perhaps self-serving recollections that comprise most of the film's action. This is Greek tragedy, sans the cosmic meddling and with a double shot of human hubris, although here the tale ends not in collapse but with billions in assets and nagging questions about what has been (and is being) accomplished. Despite its thrills (and laughs), The Social Network is not an easy film to cozy up to. It is a story that simmers with mistrust, almost to the point of thematic fixation. The Winklevosses and Saverin fail to appreciate Zuckerberg's cold ambition. Saverin is crippled by odd suspicions, but doesn't see the locomotive of perfidy speeding towards him. Zuckerberg constantly parses others' words for slights, even as his vanity and callousness alienate everyone around him. Friendships and relationships erode and then give way like muddy riverbanks, while others explode suddenly in a combustible cloud of duplicity (real and imagined). Zuckerberg asserts that he wants to replicate the social experience of college online, but Facebook's genesis seems to throw everyone involved into a scumpool of high school nastiness. There's nothing smugly celebratory about Fincher's cynical conception of human nature, just resignation and bemusement, coupled with cool uneasiness about how such stories will play out in a future of digital pseudo-connectedness.

The screenplay by Aaron Sorkin overflows with the writer's trademarked high-velocity, fussy dialog, but it's fitting to hear it on the lips of Harvard undergrads and Internet moguls, whose minds seem to be whirring at supersonic speeds. In fact, a few ridiculously on-the-nose lines aside, The Social Network proves to be Sorkin's deftest script since his mostly forgotten Hitchcock homage, Malice. The film's casting is uniformly superb (and even a little sardonic in the case of Timberlake as the man who throttled the life from the recording industry), although the performances themselves mostly range from the smoothly functional to the warmly welcome. The exception is Eisenberg, who gives the best performance of his career, easily surpassing any of his recent comedic roles and even topping his breakout turn in The Squid and the Whale. The "Michael Cera's understudy" cracks—which yours truly has been guilty of voicing—should be put away now. Eisenberg conveys Zuckerberg's essential blend of aspiration, bitterness, social gracelessness, and self-aware brilliance with spooky precision. However, there remains something inscrutable in the portrayal, and it is this elusive glimmer of unsettling genius—the sense that he's thinking three steps ahead of us mere mortals—that makes Eisenberg's performance such a feat. Although The Social Network is decisively an ensemble film, Eisenberg's dominance underscores the centrality of Zuckerberg's intellect and ego to the tale of Facebook. While Fincher glibly and not-so-subtly suggests that the man's drive is rooted in his need to impress the Girl That Got Away, such (fictional) psychological speculation is less compelling than the film's broader (but no less glib) narrative of Nixonian resentment. If Zuckerberg the character has an arc at all, it is one characterized primarily by a sudden revelation: exclusivity is no longer a desirable feature. Without a prayer of getting into Harvard's elite social clubs, Zuckerberg founded his own club, made himself president, and (eventually) let the whole world in the door. Now you'll have to excuse me; I need to post this review on Facebook.

The Town

2010 // USA // Ben Affleck // September 29, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

B- - Compared to the narrative eccentricity and mournful pose of his striking directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck's sophomore effort adheres strictly to cops-and-robbers boilerplate, albeit with generous sprinklings of "Bah-stahn" Irish grit. Less arresting and ambitious than its predecessor, The Town spins a cheerless and familiar tale: a golden-hearted bank robber is beset with a loose cannon partner who stymies his efforts to go straight. In this case, the roles are filled by Affleck as a tender, teetotaling lunk and Jeremy Renner as his live-wire, bloody-minded childhood friend. Naturally, there's also a crusading FBI agent (John Hamm) and a gorgeously blank love interest (Rebecca Hall) on hand. The snag is that Affleck's romantic pursuit of the latter occurs after her stint as his blindfolded hostage. The schematic character of the story doesn't seem to register for Affleck, but he nonetheless keeps the class and cultural lines therein gratifyingly stark. The Town grinds down the Beantown romanticism of the director's past projects, with the marvelously unstudied production design conveying an unflattering urban grubbiness without resorting to the grotesque. The look of the thing—and Affleck's facility for tense getaway sequences—are enough to render The Town a worthwhile macho melodrama.

Machete

Vaya Con El Diablo

2010 // USA // Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis // September 6, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B- - Among the fake trailers that played in the theatrical version of the Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino joint Grindhouse, the grainy, tobacco-yellow glimpse of the Mexploitation bloodbath Machete was distinguished by how little it left to the imagination. Directed by Rodriguez himself, the trailer essentially gave us the entire plot of the film: day laborer and former federale Machete (Danny Trejo) is hired as an assassin by an American politician, is subsequently double-crossed, and then proceeds to extract a grisly revenge with his titular weapon of choice. The trailer was punchy and funny, especially the tagline ("They just fucked with the wrong Mexican!"), but it didn't exactly demand to be expanded into a feature-length film. Nonetheless, Rodriguez has done exactly that, heedless that the endeavor undermines the wry cleverness of the whole fake trailer premise. Co-directed by Ethan Maniquis, a veteran of the editing shop at Rodriguez' Troublemaker Studios, Machete necessarily loses some of its jagged pithiness when expanded to 105 minutes. Moreover, there's no getting around the fact that the film is howlingly silly in a manner not seen in any non-Spy Kids Rodriguez venture since From Dusk Till Dawn. Unlike that film, however, Machete is unswerving in its tone: balls-out cheesiness with a slathering of Latino Pride. What sets it apart from slightly more vacuous guilty pleasures (e.g. The Losers) is its languid self-awareness, its cheeky attention to detail, and its crude but timely political consciousness. It also has Michelle Rodriguez in a beret, eye-patch, and bikini top, wielding a big fucking gun. Need I say more?

It's hardly worthwhile to recount the details of the plot, given that Rodriguez characteristically disregards narrative cohesiveness, preferring to giddily string together schlocky set pieces like combo punches in a fighting game. Suffice to say that Machete finds himself targeted by a vast conspiracy encompassing a reactionary Texas state senator (Robert De Niro), his wealthy PR svengali (Jeff Fahey), a border-patrolling vigilante (Don Johnson), and the Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal) that just happens to have slaughtered our hero's family. In Machete's corner are his shotgun-toting priest brother (Cheech Marin), an idealistic ICE agent (Jessica Alba), and the aforementioned Michelle Rodriguez as a taco truck entrepreneur waging a secret guerilla war for illegal immigrants' rights. It's Rodriguez' revolutionary—archly referred to in Guevara-inspired iconography as "She"—who rallies a network of immigrant workers to Machete's side from Texas hotel rooms, restaurant kitchens, and garden tool sheds.

Rodriguez' persistent limitations as a filmmaker are unfortunately evident in Machete. The film harbors the customary groan-worthy dialog and disharmonious, slapdash storytelling that has been the director's stock and trade for some time. The latter is all the more apparent here, as Machete bears the often harsh seams of a film written around the scenes and one-liners established in the original trailer. Nonetheless, Rodriguez remains inimitable in his ability to strike a frantic pose directly on the thin line between the satirical and the legitimately ludicrous. Machete is clearly a winking enterprise overall, but how exactly are we to take the sight of Lindsay Lohan as a revolver-packing nun, sneering out the line, "In the name of the Father—I forget the rest"? Is it intended to invite a snort of disbelief or a guffaw of guilty delight? Perhaps both?

Cheese though it might be, Machete is an unabashedly populist film, in the rough manner of the exploitation films of yore. Its politics are hardly sophisticated stuff, manifesting primarily as fist-pumping affection for the Latino underdog in the face of racist cracker bogeymen. Rodriguez makes his villains easy to hate, his heroes easy to like, and puts all the lusciously hot women in the latter category. It would be crass as hell if it weren't so lip-smackingly mindful of its crassness, or so pointedly unconcerned with gravitas. Simply put, the film doesn't contain a jot of sobriety. Even a dreadful speech from Alba that shamelessly riffs on Malcolm X is played primarily for its intrinsic goofiness.

With his sun-cracked leather visage and wildcat manner—the solid physical presence, drowsy menace, and spitting fury when riled—Trejo seems born to play Machete, even if the character proves to be little more than a badass Mystery Man. Fahey and the achingly sexy-tough Rodriguez are also highlights, but let's not perpetuate the misconception that fine acting is the primary draw here. Machete is a film about a guy who kills people with machetes (and Bowie knives, and meat cleavers, and surgical saws...), and the fact that it's executed with vitality and brazenness doesn't mitigate its inherently lowbrow nature. Indeed, there's something invigorating about a film that's such stupid-fun and also boasts so many cunning flourishes. These include subtle touches like the green-brown bruises on Lohan's forearms, as well as screamingly obvious metaphors like the crucifix built from closed-circuit security monitors. Perhaps Machete's most cutting gesture is that every character—including the film's bigoted villains—is seen wolfing down Tex-Mex cuisine with gusto, suggesting that those who rail against a cross-border incursion are already a tad behind the curve.

The Red Shoes

1948 // UK // Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger // September 5, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. The Red Shoes was screened on September 3-5, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' Dance on Film feature.]

"Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on."  Another inexcusable blind spot in my cinema literacy, rectified at long last. Much has been written about the film's Technicolor glories, and about its surreal central ballet performance. I don't have much to add at the moment, other than to observe that while technically tame compared to, say, a contemporary show-stopper from Julie Taymor, The Red Shoes' ballet represents a far more daring gambit, narratively speaking. It takes a certain creative courage to drop a trippy, fantastical fifteen-minute ballet sequence into a film that is otherwise poised between a bubbling "Life Backstage" melodrama and an archetypal romantic tragedy.

Moira Shearer's flaming tresses (and perfectly freckled bosom) aside, the most compelling aspect of the film for me is unquestionably Anton Walbrook's for-the-ages portrayal of Mephistophelean producer Boris Lermontov. He's a domineering monster at heart, but there's nonetheless something pitiable in Walbrook's performance that suggests genuine artistic torment. The ambiguity of what's going on behind that perfectly collected and groomed façade, the uncertainty about what exactly motivates Lermontov, is what makes him such a delicious character. Walbrook himself was gay, and Powell and Pressburger seem to have conceived of the character as gay, which is fortunate, given that mere sexual craving for Vickie wouldn't be half as interesting as the hazy gestalt of possessiveness, paternalism, resentment, entitlement, and artistic idealism that seems to animate Lermontov.

One complaint: Setting aside the notorious plot hole on display in the final scenes—Why the heck is Vickie wearing the red shoes before the show even starts?—the post-suicide coda strikes me as largely unnecessary. Much of it feels emotionally leaden or just downright silly, especially after the fiendish crescendo of the dressing room confrontation: Lermontov's choked-up announcement from the stage, the performance of the ballet sans-lead, and the lingering death scene between Julian and a suspiciously un-mangled Vickie. Far be it from me to re-write a masterpiece, but it would have been more satisfying if the film had concluded shortly after Vickie's fatal leap.