Future's So Bright: Tomorrowland

[Note: This post contains major spoilers.]

Tomorrowland, writer-director Brad Bird’s absurdly sincere paean to the techno-utopianism of yesterday, is that rare feature in which the message significantly outshines the surrounding film. It is a miraculously eccentric work, in that a $190 million movie based on a cluster of Disney theme park attractions is just about the last piece of cinema one would expect to reflect the filmmaker’s ethos in such a pronounced fashion. Yet Tomorrowland unmistakably emanates from the same worldview that gave filmgoers The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and the screenplay to the all-but-forgotten *batteries not included. If anything, Bird’s latest film represents a distillation of the wonder, optimism, and humanism that have characterized much of his work, such that their concentrated essence permeates every frame. Given that Tomorrowland positions itself at an antidote to the paralyzing hopelessness that typifies the vast majority of contemporary genre fiction (and much of the news cycle, for that matter), the film’s heart is unquestionably in the right place. The problem is that the actual work of cinema encasing that heart is rife with problems.

Things get off to a rocky start with the framing device, in which a tetchy middle-aged man and an unseen younger female speaker—eventually identified as David Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britte Robertson)—bicker for several minutes about the particular point at which their tale should begin. This conversation, in which Casey cheerfully and repeatedly interrupts the increasingly exasperated Frank, neatly previews the dynamic of their relationship: A world-weary grump is prodded out of his dismal yet comfortable beliefs by the sheer unbridled positivity of an adolescent who reflects his own mindset in earlier, less cynical times. Unfortunately, the exchange is a dreadfully unfunny drag, inclining one to wish that Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof would just get on with the damn story.

Eventually, the narrators settle on David’s childhood as a starting point. It was a time when, as he wistfully observes, “the future was different.” That future was exemplified by the 1964 New York World’s Fair, which is where an excitable and precocious young David (Thomas Robinson) arrives to gawk at the technological marvels of mid-century America. (Not incidentally, the fair was also a showcase for Walt Disney’s revolutionary Audio-Animatronics robotics system, which received its most notable debut in the “It’s a Small World” attraction.) While showing off a quasi-functional jetpack he has built to an unimpressed judge (Hugh Laurie) at an inventor’s competition, David encounters Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a similarly precocious British girl who give him a souvenir pin emblazoned with a “T.” This object eventually admits David into an astonishing, hidden metropolis filled with the kind of science fiction wonders that make the fair’s exhibits look like relics from the Dark Ages. This city is Tomorrowland, and although young David exhibits unabashed delight upon discovering its existence, old David claims that his arrival there ruined his life.

In the present day, the viewer is at last introduced to Casey, a Florida high school senior with a passion for furturism. (Robertson is unconvincing as a teenager, but so exuberant and charming in the role that it doesn't matter.) She also has a nocturnal hobby sabotaging the demolition equipment positioned to tear down the launch pads at Cape Canaveral. From her father (Tim McGraw), a former NASA engineer, she’s plainly inherited a keen interest in science—and in space exploration specifically—but her fannish enthusiasm and forthright sanguinity about tomorrow’s possibilities are all her own. Bombarded in the classroom by glum prophecies of war, riots, disease, famine, drought, and myriad forms of environmental devastation, Casey inquires brightly, “What are we doing to fix it?”

It’s this unflappable attitude that draws the scrutiny of Athena (mysteriously still tweenaged in appearance,) who secretly plants a Tomorrowland pin among Casey's possessions. When the girl later discovers the memento, it is revealed to have properties quite unlike the glorified keycard that David received some five decades earlier. Upon touching the pin, Casey is transported to a sunlit wheat field on the outskirts of Tomorrowland, which gleams in the distance like the proverbial city on a hill. This relocation is temporary, lasting only as long as pin-to-skin contact is maintained. It is also illusory, as Casey quickly determines after cracking her head on a couple of real-world walls while hurrying towards the metropolis. Eventually she gets the hang of the physics and spends several minutes on a dizzying exploration of Tomorrowland’s wonders, which include aerial mass transit, a bustling spaceport, levitating swimming pools, and, naturally, jetpacks complete with auto-deploying, self-inflating safety cushions. At once bleeding-edge fantastic and vaguely anachronistic, the city reflects the kind of retrofuturism that William Gibson described as “the tomorrow that never was”.

In monomyth terms, one can regard the Tomorrowland pin as Casey’s Call to Adventure: a glimpse of a heretofore unseen world that pushes her out the door on a life-changing journey. However, as the viewer eventually learns, Casey’s vision is actually more akin to an advertisement: a glossy, 3-D promotional video designed to entice the recipient to seek out the real Tomorrowland. Serving as both a sanctuary and laboratory, the city is a gathering place where great altruistic minds can develop the solutions to humanity’s problems in relative peace. Unfortunately, Bird and Lindelof’s screenplay takes its sweet time making this clear, and in the interim there’s a great deal of tedious shouting, arguing, running, driving, fisticuffs, and plasma pistol gunplay. This points to what is the film’s most glaring flaw: its penchant for padding out the plot with tiresome quarreling and lackluster action sequences that amount to so much narrative wheel-spinning.

To be clear, the problem is not that Tomorrowland’s dimension-hopping plot is convoluted, or even that it exhibits a typically Lindelof-esque frugality in dribbling out explanations for What the Hell Is Going On. (Both of those things are true, but this writer followed the plot just fine on the first pass. Never mind that Tomorrowland is literal kids’ stuff compared to the likes of Primer, The Fountain, and Inception.) Rather, the film’s stumbles are those of pacing and presentation. One suspects that there is a much more engaging 90-minute movie lurking somewhere in the screenplay, if Bird had had the courage to slice out significant chunks of go-nowhere dialog and wearisome action. The whole film simply feels flabby and clumsy in too many places, in a way that seems utterly inconsistent with Bird’s impressively nimble direction of Ratatouille and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

After taking an inordinately long time to actually get moving, Tomorrowland’s plot eventually starts to snap into focus. To exactly no one’s surprise, the ageless Athena is revealed to be a Tomorrowland android, albeit one who has been disavowed as a rogue unit. The truth is the opposite: Athena hasn’t strayed from her programming, but continues to follow it in both letter and spirit, pursuing her mission long after the masters of Tomorrowland have deemed it a worthless endeavor. Her assignment is to find “dreamers”: brilliant scientific and creative thinkers with an unwavering confidence that the world can be transformed into a better place through human ingenuity.

It was this task, of course, that initially brought Casey to Athena’s attention. Normally, a potential recruit would be left to find their way to Tomorrowland on their own—and thereby prove both their intellect and passion—but the present moment in human history is too critical for such niceties. Accordingly, Athena eventually delivers Casey to the doorstep of the now-grizzled Frank, who has evidently been exiled from Tomorrowland for decades. Holed up in a ramshackle house that resembles a junkyard Batcave, Frank has withdrawn from the world to anxiously monitor an intricate doomsday clock, which indicates a 100% probability of imminent global apocalypse (and apparently has for some time). However, the mere proximity of Casey’s sprightly confidence causes this secular Rapture Index to momentarily flicker to 99.99%, which is sufficient evidence to convince Frank of her super-specialness. This is roughly the moment when a regiment of smiling, plastic-haired Tomorrowland androids arrives to cheerfully vaporize the pair of them.

More forgettable action ensues, and after escaping the Stepford hit squad, rendezvousing with Athena, teleporting to Paris, launching into orbit, and then plunging through a dimensional portal, the group eventually reaches Tomorrowland. They find that the city is startlingly dilapidated and underpopulated, and that the “Plus-Ultra” leadership represented by the contemptuous Governor Nix (Laurie again) has wholly given up on humanity, preferring to hunker down and weather the looming Armageddon from its extra-dimensional perch.

In an obviously audience-directed monologue, Nix laments humankind’s refusal to take decisive action even when given ample evidence of impending calamities, speculating that people actually prefer dystopia, at least when the alternative is getting off their behinds and doing something. After sending out warnings both overt and subliminal for decades, the masters of Tomorrowland have thrown up their hands. It is, naturally, Casey who points out that conveying an incessant message of approaching catastrophe for years on end is likely to have crushed humanity’s hope, paradoxically ensuring that no action is taken to save the future. However, Nix isn’t interested in any last-minute gambits to forestall the apocalypse the Plus-Ultras’ calculations indicate to be just weeks away. And so a climactic escape and struggle ensues, with an outcome that is predictable but nonetheless agreeably rosy.

It’s challenging to recall a recent film as overtly message-oriented as Tomorrowland, which is the cinematic equivalent of a flashing Time Square advertisement written in hundred-foot, neon orange letters. It is not subtle in the least, but the film’s Popular Science optimism feels like a welcome breath of fresh air, given the ubiquity of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction in contemporary pop culture. So earnest are Tomorrowland’s pleas for hope and so intense are its ambitions for a lustrous tomorrow, defensive aficionados of more dismal scenarios will likely regard the film as interminably naïve, or worse yet as a scornful, schoolmarmish admonishment.

That would be a shame, for despite its narrative and formal defects, Tomorrowland is a much-needed corrective to the glut of urban hellscapes and ashen wastelands that have swamped the imagery of the future. Regardless of how much stock one puts in the film’s Mickey Mouse pop psychology—All You Need Is Hope!—it’s undeniable that a great swath of speculative fiction has become distressingly lazy and repetitive. Conceits and designs that were once innovative in features like Dawn of the Dead, The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, and Brazil have become de rigueur. What was formerly a radical reaction to the perceived squeaky-clean utopianism of the science fiction genre has itself become conventional, the dominant ideology of the future, so to speak.

In this landscape, even the aesthetics of Tomorrowland seem weirdly transgressive. Combining elements of Streamline Moderne and Googie design—with a hefty dose of glossy, friendly simplicity one might term “iBlanco”—the film's future is a safe, spotless, orderly place, where toil and struggle are replaced with leisure and discovery. It is not unlike Disney's theme parks in this respect, highlighting a curious correspondence: The Tomorrowland pin fulfills much the same function as Walt Disney World's Epcot, in that both constitute glorified commercials for an idealized, inspirational future. (Epcot, it should be recalled, was originally an abbreviation for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and was initially conceived by Walt Disney as a model city that would prod America into tackling the most intractable challenges of modern living.)

In one respect, Tomorrowland is a resounding success: While its elementally a Brad Bird film, it's also the first Disney feature in ages that feels as though it reflects the outlook of old Walt himself, who was an outspoken modernist and futurist. One needn't assume a blithely credulous stance toward the Disney conception of tomorrow---and all its attendant capitalist, imperialist, racist, and sexist baggage---to acknowledge the veracity of Tomorrowland's fundamental observation: that ceaseless visions of despair can create despair, and despair can create paralysis. The tribal disbelievers and professional dissemblers who deny the reality of global problems are justly seen as the primary enemies of progress, but the film proposes that misanthropic fatalism is a more insidious obstacle.

Despite Bird's supposed (and mostly groundless) notoriety for sprinkling Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy into his films, Tomorrowland's villains aren't the putative witless, mediocre masses who refuse to save their own skins. Rather, the antagonists are the Plus-Ultras like Nix, who first inundated the world with their frantic alarmism, and then disdainfully threw in the towel when the world preferred to wallow in the inevitability of destruction. Indeed, the crumbling Tomorrowland glimpsed in the film's present-day sequences can be regarded as an acidic satire of Galt's Gulch from Atlas Shrugged: a sanctuary where Earth's best and brightest withdrew to create a utopia, and instead ended up building little more than a cushy scenic viewpoint for the End Times. (In this, Tomorrowland the city bears some resemblance to the scathing depictions of a collapsed Objectivist paradise in the video game Bioshock.)  It's a far cry from the egalitarian, multi-ethnic Shangri-la that Casey's vision promised.

Fortunately, the film's epilogue illustrates the can-do response that this discrepancy provokes. Freshly in command of Tomorrowland's destiny, Casey and Frank dispatch a new batch of androids to Earth, bestowing each with a set of pins and orders to find the dreamers that are needed to right the city and the future. The candidates that the robots are shown selecting pointedly represent a broad range of nationalities and ethnicities, as well as numerous disciplines: not only scientists and engineers, but artists, activists, and caretakers. The street musician, the film posits, is just as essential to tomorrow's innovations as the geochemist. A cynic might argue that this notion represents self-flattering myopia. However, in Tomorrowland's final moments, as the music swells and dozens of starry-eyed, prospective Plus-Ultras simultaneously reach for that “T” pin and, by extension, for a more luminous future, it's almost impossible to remain in a cynical frame of mind.

The Play's the Thing: Clouds of Sils Maria

[Updated 11/19/15.]

It's tempting to regard French filmmaker Olivier Assayas' latest feature, the numinous Clouds of Sils Maria, primarily as an exhibition for the talents of its lead actresses, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart, and to a lesser extent for the film's artful, multi-layered screenplay, penned as usual by Assayas himself. Although it arguably fits Clouds, that dreadful descriptor, “actor's movie,” has always seemed like a bit of a backhanded compliment, hinting that a film's direction is blandly functional or devoid of stylistic imprint. This is not a critique that one can seriously level at Assayas' latest work, which illustrates the director's mature command of the mise-en-scène, as well as a few of his curious signature flourishes. (In particular, Clouds is a showcase for the Assayasian abrupt fade to black, concluding scenes a beat earlier than a more formulaic editing approach might suggest.) Still, Clouds is ultimately a film in which the actresses—and it is overwhelmingly, fundamentally a story about women—take center stage. Rather that crowding them with formal floridness, Assayas gives his performers the space to uncover the endless, twisting corridors that snake through his dialog.

Set primarily in the breathtaking, crystalline landscape of the Swiss Alps, the film focuses on the travails of Maria Enders (Binoche), a renowned French actress of stage and screen. When the viewer first meets Maria and her harried yet resourceful American assistant Valentine (Stewart), the pair are bound for Zürich, where the actress is scheduled to accept an award on behalf of Swiss playwright Wilhelm Melchior, a long-time friend of Maria's and now a virtual recluse. It was Wilhelm's lesbian romantic tragedy Maloja Snake that first catapulted Maria to international fame: When she was just 18 years old, Maria famously portrayed Sigrid, the tale's brazen young office assistant, first on the stage and then in a film adaptation. In the play, the character of Sigrid seduces and then discards the company's middle-aged president, Helena, eventually driving the older woman to an apparent suicide.

Unfortunately, while en route to the awards ceremony, Maria and Val receive word that Wilhelm has died. The subsequent celebration of the playwright's work thus takes on a funereal tone, and Maria's slim enthusiasm for the whole affair slips into grief-fueled doubt. Nonetheless, the actress puts on her red carpet smile and endures the proceedings, despite the distraction of her ongoing divorce and the hovering presence of a despised ex-lover (Hanns Zischler). The post-awards dinner providers her with some face time with celebrated theater director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who has been courting Maria to star in a new production of Maloja Snake, this time in the role of Helena. For the new Sigrid, Klaus confirms that he has been seeking Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), a volatile American film actress who is presently straddling the line between It Girl and D-list punch line. Maria had previously been cool to the notion of revisiting the play, but after discussing the project with Klaus she is more receptive.

The aforementioned events essentially constitute an extended prologue: The bulk of the film unfolds some weeks later, as Maria and Val arrive at Wilhelm's hideaway in east Switzerland, near the village of Sils Maria. Overwhelmed by the memories that permeate the place, the playwright's widow Rosa (Angela Winkler) vacates the house and hands the keys to Maria so that the actress can rehearse in peace for her upcoming role in the revival of Maloja Snake. During the subsequent weeks, Maria and Val run lines amid the placid alpine surroundings, at least partly under the theory that the place Wilhelm chose as his sanctuary from the outside world might provide some inspiration. Besides rehearsing the play, the women wander the misty mountain trails, swim in the frigid lakes, and make infrequent forays into the nearby village. On one occasion, they meet with Maria's co-star Jo-Ann and her novelist boyfriend (Johnny Flynn) at a posh local hotel. Having seen the American actress in a dreadful superhero film and perused her tabloid exploits online, Maria is disarmed by Jo-Ann's poise and magnanimity. (“Of course you liked them,” Val snarks at her employer with a grin, “They spent the whole night flattering you.”)

Such detours aside, however, the lengthy middle section of Clouds functions as a sort of cabin fever drama, one focused on the mounting strain that the situation puts on Maria and Val's ambiguous bond. Val's lack of theatrical training notwithstanding, she dutifully plays the part of Sigrid to Maria's Helena, rehearsing the play's emotionally fraught scenes over and over. Although Val is loyal and accommodating, she doesn't keep her opinions to herself, freely offering Maria criticism and even insight into the subtleties of the play. Meanwhile, the older woman grows increasingly frustrated with the role of Helena, a character she finds pathetic and alienating. Both women smoke relentlessly to relieve the tension; the frustrated search for a misplaced package of cigarettes becomes a recurring motif. When not rehearsing, the pair discuss the play's meaning and the motives of its characters, with occasional digressions into related matters, such as the ups and downs of Jo-Ann's career, or the artistic worth of Hollywood blockbusters. In this way, the play and everything adjacent to it begin to consume Maria and Val, stirring up discomfiting undercurrents and revealing fissures in their ostensibly professional relationship.

The contrasts between the lead actresses and their performances are an essential aspect of Clouds. Binoche has gravitated toward a distinct type of character since reaching middle age, but it's a consistently engaging one: the outspoken, put-upon, slightly frazzled professional woman who nonetheless harbors profound self-doubt. (The quintessential Binoche moment is one in which she hurriedly juggles multiple tasks while pleading with pursed lips into a cell phone, “No, no, no, no!,” inevitably at some self-important male listener.) Maria is yet another version of this same ur-woman, whose incarnations have previously appeared in films such as Caché, Flight of the Red Balloon, Summer Hours, Certified Copy, and the otherwise forgettable Elles. Binoche is characteristically ferocious in the role, which highlights how distinct her style is from Stewart's. The younger actress' approach is casual and almost detached, befitting a character who has subsumed her will to the ego of a larger-than-life celebrity. Yet Stewart portrays Val as a woman who is self-aware and comfortable in her own skin in a manner that Maria could never hope to be. While some of Val's Maloja Snake line readings have a tossed-off slackness—befitting a non-actor who is just trying to get through them—at crucial moments she delivers them with matter-of-fact bluntness, and the effect is like a wet towel snapping Maria on the nose.

What's most impressive about Clouds is how Assayas and his performers create multiple levels of conflict within the narratively simple scenario of “Maria and Val rehearse a play." At the proximate level, there is the play-within-the-film drama of the Helena and Sigrid's passionate affair and their inevitable, blistering breakup. The viewer is only permitted scattered glimpses of this story, and Assayas pointedly never shows any scenes in Klaus' final production of Maloja Snake, but the broad strokes are apparent. Despite the straightforward outline—girl meets girl, girl loses girl, girl kills herself—everyone in Clouds seems to have a different interpretation of the play, with each individual perceiving a novel pattern of culpability and weakness in the main characters.

At the same time, Maria's grappling with her role functions as a drama about the actress' discomfort with aging, loneliness, and death. Early in the film, Maria insists that she is Sigrid, and that she has always been Sigrid, ever since the play's original premiere. That fact that middle-aged Maria continues to identify with a character she portrayed as an adolescent reveals a vain denial of time's passage, as does her inability to relate to a more vulnerable older character. Her reaction is pitiable but also wholly understandable. The margins of Clouds are scrawled with the particular indignities faced by actresses as they age, from cruel verdicts of sexual undesirability to wholesale exile from the sort of leading roles that are routinely bestowed on their male peers. Moreover, Wilhelm's death—actually a suicide, as Rosa reveals solely to Maria—has quite naturally nudged the actress into a morbid frame of mind. At one point Maria observes that the performer that first created the role of Helena perished in a car accident not long after the original film was complete. Maria brings up this fact in order to brush it off as a source of superstitious fear, but it's clear that her mortality is weighing on her as much as professional and romantic obsolescence.

On another level, and a bit unexpectedly, the erotic obsession that Helena feels towards Sigrid serves as a proxy for Maria's convoluted feelings bout Val. The intense scenes that they rehearse together gradually become thick with deeper meaning, often conveying emotions that neither woman seems able to confront in other contexts. Maria's dependency on Val is not just that of an overwhelmed celebrity who needs assistance in navigating photo shoots and press tours. Val represents a portal to a generation that Maria simultaneously disregards, disdains, and envies, as much for its youth as for its tastes and affinities. It is Val who gives her employer the lowdown on the celebrity gossip about Jo-Ann, and Val who keeps up with banalities outside the glamorous bubble of Maria's personal affairs. When Val leaves one night to visit a man in a neighboring village, Maria doesn't seem to know what to do with herself, wandering the house aimlessly just as Wilhelm's widow Rosa might have. There is also a subtle but potent sensual component to the women's interactions. Neither Binoche or Stewart overplay it, but it is there, in the way that the women sit and stand in relation to each other, in the touches that occur from living in such close proximity, and in the giggly flirting that seems to emerge once they've had a few drinks. When the pair take a dip in a freezing lake, Maria sheds all of her clothing, while Val leaves on her underwear, a detail that reflects their nationalities but also says much about their perceptions of (and hopes for) the relationship.

As if all these emotional nooks and crannies weren't enough, there is another, metatextual layer to Clouds' drama. It's no accident that Binoche is playing a character whose biography resembles her own in many respects, nor that Jo-Ann—the ingenue-turned-scandal-magnet whose acting abilities are widely questioned—bears some similarity to a younger Stewart. Indeed, much of the dialog in Clouds concerning performance and celebrity has a particular resonance in light of the actresses who are delivering it. Val often finds herself arguing in favor of the culture of contemporary pop entertainment, in light of Maria's vociferous scorn for everything Hollywood. When Maria snorts derisively at big-budget features about werewolves or mutants, it's all too easy to imagine it as a catty, elitist swipe at Stewart's own filmography. When Val advocates for Jo-Ann's point-blank, modernist acting style and for the virtues of her rough-edged public persona in a sea of Hollywood phoniness, it's tantalizing to imagine that Stewart is defending herself against critics and cultural tongue cluckers. While this meta dimension to the film is unmistakable, Assayas refrains from presenting it with the sort of arch knowingness that might have eventually rendered it insufferable. Instead, it glides over the surface of the drama, providing another level of substance but never threatening to overwhelm the story.

As one might surmise, Clouds of Sils Maria is an incredibly dense work of drama, in which every line seems to have a double, triple, or even quadruple meaning. There is even a bit of reflexiveness to be found in the film's script. An argument over the ambiguity of Helena's fate at the conclusion of Maloja Snake foreshadows Clouds' most conspicuous mystery: Late in the film, a character abruptly vanishes from the story, similar to the sudden evaporation of Rita in Mulholland Drive. While there are mundane if eccentric reasons that this disappearance may have occurred, the event has a weird-fiction uncanniness that's hard to shake, particularly given that it corresponds to the appearance of the Maloja Snake referenced in Wilhelm's play: a rare atmospheric phenomenon in which low clouds drift in meandering coils through the high alpine valleys near Sils Maria.

Despite its myriad dramatic strata, Clouds consistently retains a powerful sense of humane immediacy, in that the tale of Maria and Val never gets lost in a snarl of too-clever-by-half curlicues. This, ultimately, is the film's standout achievement: its elegant conjuration of an almost literary-like complexity of meaning within a relatively straightforward, character-driven drama. It's the film's unflinching lead performances and Assayas' terrifically fecund script that enable Clouds to work so effectively in this respect.

A Thousand Words: The Salt of the Earth

[Updated 5/16/15.]

A documentary about a photographer faces a novel challenge, one that emerges from the filmmaker's understandable desire to convey the artistic merit of their subject's work. A director who gushingly foregrounds the aesthetic beauty or political import of an artist’s images may unwittingly neglect the potential of their own medium, and thereby reduce the film to a glorified slideshow. On the other hand, swamping otherwise outstanding photos in a surfeit of flashy cinema does a disservice to the individual who created those images, and can result in a film that feels more impressed with itself than with the photographer. Many documentarians strike a balance between these unwelcome extremes by shifting their focus elsewhere. In Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, for example, Ben Shapiro shrewdly directs his attention to the elaborate process by which the titular photographer crafts his mesmerizing tableaus. In Finding Vivian Meier, meanwhile, co-directors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel zero in on the irresistible mystery of their subject's secret life as a street photographer, as well as her confounding personality.

For The Salt of the Earth, director Wim Wenders' love letter to Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, the method is a more classically biographical one, at least on the surface level. The film uses Salgado's life as its narrative backbone, linking together pivotal events and artistic phases to create the story of an still-unfolding creative journey. To that end, the photographer’s arresting black-and-white images function as a kind of visual log of his professional and personal evolution. This approach is highlighted by scenes in which Wenders and Salgado pore over photos while the latter reminisces about particular projects, in the same manner that other people might page through family albums of faded Kodak prints and Polaroids. Not incidentally, Wenders' co-director on The Salt of the Earth is the photographer's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. In part, the younger Salgado regards the documentary as a means to witness his father's world up close, and thereby familiarize himself with the man who was often absent for long stretches of his childhood. [For the sake of clarity, this post will hereafter refer to the Salgados by their first names.]

Wenders and Juliano’s strategy proves remarkably effective and elegant. On the one hand, the photos are undeniably the visual centerpiece of the film. If The Salt of the Earth does nothing else, it serves as an absorbing introduction to the sheer power of Sebastião's work, which captures subjects as diverse as industrial laborers, refugee camps, obscure cultures, war-torn landscapes, and pristine natural beauty. Through both talking-head monologues and voiceover narration, the photographer provides enlightening context and memorable details about individual shots. Some of the first photos presented in the film are the artists' renowned images of Brazil's open-pit Serra Pelada gold mine, where tens of thousands of miners dug by hand in the hopes of striking the mother lode. The imagery of the countless muddy terraces and swarming bodies is instantly riveting, but it would be much the same on the pages of a coffee table book. What makes The Salt of the Earth's presentation distinctive is Sebastião's vivid verbal description of his original reaction to the mine, which he compares to the great construction enterprises of antiquity, such as the Pyramids at Giza.

Meanwhile, the photos also function as observation windows into Sebastião's story, which the directors plainly find just as fascinating as the images he captured. Indeed, the arc of the artist’s life is a straightforward but captivating one. Abandoning a promising career as an economist in 1973, Sebastião turned to photography, first on assignment for news organizations and then as a documentary artist. He developed ambitious long-term projects with his wife Lélia, bringing his camera to unseen and forgotten corners of world and then publishing the resulting photos in impressively hefty volumes such as Workers and Migrations. However, the years spent documenting starvation, disease, and death in misery epicenters such as the Balkans and central Africa took their toll on Sebastião’s psychological vigor, driving him to disillusionment. (The Rwandan genocide and the multiple refugee crises that followed in its wake seem to have been particular breaking points for the photographer.)

Fortunately, Sebastião appears to have found a spiritual balm in his own backyard, quite literally. After years in self-imposed exile, the photographer and his wife returned to Brazil in the 1990s to take over the desiccated remains of the Salgado family cattle ranch. Faced with uncontrolled erosion and a dusty landscape that in no way resembled the lush domain of Sebastião’s childhood, Lélia hit upon a simple but radical notion: Why not just replant the subtropical forest that once grew on the Salgados’ doorstep? The resulting program of environmental restoration, Instituto Terra, not only succeeded in returning the region into a more natural and sustainable state, but also appears to have re-invigorated Sebastião’s artistic purpose. His subsequent project, Genesis, documented the planet’s most Edenic natural locales, and functioned as a sort of visual riposte to the industrial and post-colonial ugliness of the photographer’s earlier work.

Apart from his personal fondness for the photographer’s images, Wenders clearly regards Sebastião’s life as an admirable one. The Salt of the Earth practically glows with esteem for the artist’s physical and political fearlessness, and nods with understanding as Sebastião describes the anguish of bearing witness to so much human suffering. Lingering on the photographer’s late-career immersion in environmental activism isn’t just a matter of factual accuracy: The new direction rescues the viewer from the hopelessness of all the preceding images of dead-eyed exiles and fly-dotted corpses, much as it saved Sebastião himself. It ultimately proves to be a humane stratagem, and one that Wenders and Juliano apply in a manner that evinces integrity. Rather than glibly tossing aside the darkness that Sebastião has documented, the directors integrate it with the light, depicting both woe and wonder as parts of the same continuum. Sebastião's own words underline this stance, for while he speaks contemptuously of humanity’s boundless capacity for evil, he also acknowledges that our species is an integral part of the natural world.

There is an earnest passion at work in The Salt of the Earth, not only for Sebastião’s talents as an artist, but also for the guarded optimism that the photographer has discovered in his later years. The film’s narrative trajectory is crucial in this respect: Sebastião’s tale resembles a descent into an Inferno where every imaginable form of suffering can be cataloged, followed by a much-needed ascent into purifying sunlight. Given the horrors that the photographer has seen, his hopefulness cannot be construed as naïve. Rather, it is a hardened sort of optimism, tested and tempered by fire. This is comfortable territory for Wenders, who often explores the human condition through the lives of extraordinary individuals, particularly artists (Lightning Over Water, Tokyo-Ga, Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Buena Vista Social Club, The Soul of a Man, Pina). In The Salt of the Earth, the filmmaker has the good fortune to work with a subject who is astute, eloquent, and possessed of a singular set of world-spanning experiences.

Nothing Makes Sense: Dissecting the Worst Avengers: Age of Ultron Review in the World

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

As a general rule, my approach to criticism is textual. My preference is to engage with films primarily as standalone objects, with some measured acknowledgement of both cinematic history and the broader political and cultural context in which those objects exist. Only very rarely do I address the work of other critics. This constraint serves two purposes. First, it maintains my writing’s focus on its raison d'être—the study of cinema—and thereby prevents it from drifting into the arcane back alleys of meta-criticism. Second, it keeps things professional. Too often, in my experience, critical conversations rapidly degenerate into condescending snark, sophomoric name calling, and spiteful assaults on individuals’ character and motives. Most of the time, I have no interest in getting drawn into such knife fights. This is partly because they are a distraction from genuine analysis, and partly because life is short and unpleasant enough as it is.

The above is presented to emphasize the unusual nature of the this post, which is a direct rebuttal to the work of a fellow critic. The piece in question is British writer Mike McCahill’s brief but scornful review of Avengers: Age of Ultron. This post isn't an attempt to punch down at an obscure blogger: McCahill writes for The Scotsman, The Telegraph, and The Guardian, so he's clearly doing something correctly. I'm not offering a blanket condemnation of the man's work. Nor am I making a sweeping endorsement of the Avengers sequel, a film to which my initial reaction was generally lukewarm. However, McCahill’s review almost perfectly embodies the sort of smug, exasperating, and wrong-headed arguments that have been widely leveled against Age of Ultron, and against superhero action features generally. Moreover, his succinct candor regarding what he finds so repellant about the film makes the piece a convenient specimen for dissection.

The trouble with these Avengers get-togethers, it transpires, is not just that they’re too big to fail, but that they’re almost certainly too big to function as drama. Swallowing up every last character, actor, and dollar, the franchise has thus far manifested itself as the lumbering ne plus ultra of modern movie gigantism …

Straight away, here’s an example of the logical chicanery that McCahill will rely on again and again: the use of a clever turn of phrase to mask a sweeping generalization or transparently false claim. Describing any film as “too big to fail”—apparently on the basis of a mammoth cast and budget—requires that one ignore the numerous box office flops that Hollywood inevitably churns out. This isn’t ancient cinematic history: Even when adjusted for inflation, two of the biggest bombs of all time were released just a couple of years ago: 47 Ronin ($151 million in the hole) and The Lone Ranger (at least $95 million). It's one thing to predict that a summer tentpole film is going to make a lot of money, especially on its opening weekend. In my own review, I observed that “[l]egions of film-goers are going to see Ultron, no matter what its virtues, flaws, or […] ethics as a work of cinema.” It's quite another thing to assert that a mega-budget feature is guaranteed to turn a profit.

“Too big to function as drama” is a murkier concept, given that dramatic success is a subjective matter. However, if one assumes that settled critical consensus can be a quick-and-dirty proxy for such success, neither a big budget nor a big cast would seem to disqualify a film from achieving quality drama. The most expensive inflation-adjusted film productions tend to skew mixed in their critical reception, but high points abound: Titanic ($294 million, 88% on Rotten Tomatoes), Tangled ($281 million, 90%), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($275 million, 84%), Avatar ($261 million, 83%) Spider-Man 2 ($250 million, 94%), and The Dark Knight Rises ($236 million, 87%). It’s possible that McCahill would characterize all the aforementioned films as dramatic failures, but he doesn’t bother. He just asserts that expensive films can’t function as drama, full stop. And if the drama-defeating gigantism in question refers to an outsized cast, the claim is so flimsy that it can’t withstand a moment’s reflection. (Pulp Fiction? JFK? Magnolia? Do the Right Thing? Nashville? The Thin Red Line?)

The “trouble” with the Avengers films in McCahill’s estimation, then, is that they are big and therefore incapable of flopping at the box office or succeeding as works of dramatic fiction, despite the fact that there are abundant examples of big films doing both. Perhaps Avengers: Age of Ultron is an illustrative exception, but McCahill doesn’t make that case. He simply equates bigness with profit and artistic brokenness.

… [W]hile the Avengers themselves—the hall of superhero fame headed by Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk—remain the safest of bets, covering so many eventualities that their triumph is all but assured.

This sort of forest-for-the-trees kvetching is a warning sign that McCahill’s critiques don’t actually engage with the Avengers films—or, by extension, with the superhero subgenre in general—save in the most offhanded, inattentive manner. His complaint seems to be that because the Avengers boast such a diverse array of super powers, they will always emerge victorious from any crisis, and, as a result, the films have no real stakes. This claim is so misguided regarding how genre films function, it’s hard to know what to make of it.

Sure, if they operated together in perfect harmony and utilized their abilities in seamless coordination, the Avengers could arguably overcome almost any obstacle. They don’t, however. This is because while some of them are godlike, they’re all fallible beings brimming with ego, anger, and fear. This isn’t some incidental stumbling block: It's the ultimate conflict at the heart of the Avengers films! A just-the-facts plot summary of Avengers or Avengers: Age of Ultron would describe Loki’s or Ultron’s schemes for global domination, respectively, and what the team does to foil those plans. Those proximal conflicts, however, don’t really describe the stories that the films are telling, any more than Cries and Whispers can be summed up as “a women dies of cancer”.

The “solo” films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) revolve around internal conflicts: Tony Stark’s blindness to the physical and personal devastation he leaves in his wake; Thor’s puffed-up sense of royal entitlement; Steve Rogers’ confusion when the moral order of his world collapses. The Avengers films, meanwhile, are about a team, and accordingly center on inter-personal conflicts. To say that the group’s triumph is “assured” is to willfully ignore significant chunks of dialog in both films, which repeatedly return to the possible dissolution of the heroes' coalition. (Granted, triumph is assured in the sense that the Good Guys almost always win in Hollywood genre films, but the same could be said of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or any tale of adventure, irrespective of how mighty or feeble the heroes might be.)

None of this is exactly obscure: The main question that hangs over the first Avengers is whether Nick Fury’s crazy-quilt assemblage of soldiers, aliens, and science experiments can actually work, given the personalities and powers involved. Can narcissists like Stark and Thor tolerate the command of a squeaky-clean Boy Scout like Rogers? Can the Hulk’s wrath be controlled in such a way that he does more good than harm? Do elite but human heroes like Natasha and Barton even have a place alongside such gods and monsters? Avengers answered such queries with a tentative “Yes,” but Age of Ultron poses the inevitable follow-up questions: For how long? And to what end?

In pre-release interviews, writer-director Joss Whedon has cited this sequel as the hardest work he's ever done, and you can bet most of that toil went on finding an antagonist capable of making any fight seem fair enough for an audience to reasonably cheer. Here, he's settled on Ultron, which may sound like a brand of dishwasher tablets, but is actually an artificial intelligence (voiced by James Spader) with an army of robots at his disposal.

A super group as powerful as the Avengers naturally need a worthy foe, but McCahill's characterization of Ultron's development is just lazy and flat-out ahistorical. It's fine to beg ignorance regarding the minutiae of Marvel's impossibly dense comic mythology, which requires an almost Talmudic rigor to untangle. However, making a blithe assumption that is easily refuted with ten seconds of Googling is just critical malpractice. Ultron did not spring from Joss Whedon's skull like some fully-formed CGI Athena. He's a well-established character who has spent almost five decades antagonizing the Avengers in the pages of Marvel's comics. His origin and characteristics were revised for the MCU, but Whedon didn't have to “toil” to devise him: Ultron is consistently regarded as one of (if not the) most powerful and durable of the Avengers' nemeses. One could cynically argue that this is exact reason Marvel is regarded as such a valuable creative property: It has a ridiculously deep bench of existing characters with detailed histories, providing easy fodder for screenwriters to churn out countless sequels and spinoffs.

It's superheroes versus supercomputer, then; of human interest, there is-little-to-nothing.

Let’s set aside that fact that Ultron's scheme is to wipe out all organic life on Earth through an artificial meteor strike, and the outcome is therefore somewhat significant to ordinary humans, even if they aren’t participating directly in the conflict. This remarkable assertion—that there is “little-to-nothing” of interest in a story with no mundane human principals—would seem to brand significant swaths of the fantasy and science fiction genres as enormous wastes of time. Is McCahill actually contending that a story about non-human vs. non-human conflict is by definition boring? What about when it’s a time-traveling murder-bot opposed by another time-traveling murder-bot? Mermaid vs. sea witch? Cyborg vs. distributed artificial intelligence? Mouse vs. rat? Gelfling vs. Skeksis? Immortal vs. Immortal? Robot worker vs. sentient spaceship? Lion vs. lion? Android vs. his own sense of inadequacy?

This is Genre Storytelling 101: Non-human characters serve as stand-ins for human desires, fears, and anxieties. Perhaps McCahill doesn’t find the struggle in Age of Ultron particularly compelling for reasons that are specific to that film. That’s not what he states, though: He asserts that because the conflict concerns superheroes fighting an artificial intelligence, it is therefore of no interest. At this point, any fantasy or science fiction fan could be excused for giving McCahill’s review the finger and walking away.

This tussle sends more computer-generated masonry flying than ever, which is an achievement of sorts, but the expensive kit and relentless set-pieces mask a playground-level goodies-vs.-baddies runaround.

Age of Ultron is certainly stuffed chock-full of sound and fury, but to characterize its clashes as "playground-level" is off the mark, betraying a distressing negligence towards what is actually presented on screen. Almost all superhero stories begin with a straightforward delineation between the heroes and villains. The villains are doing bad things—usually for reasons that make perfect sense in their own minds—and the heroes are trying to stop them. If this is bothersome to you, you should probably just stop watching action-oriented genre cinema altogether, because these sharp distinctions are an essential starting point for such films.

However, unless the discussion is limited to fare created for toddlers, almost every superhero tale these days grapples at some point with the fact that, costuming aside, it can be difficult to distinguish heroes from villains in a complex world. The heroes themselves inevitably fall victim to doubts about whether they’re doing the right thing for the right reasons, or whether they still want to do the right thing. The point highlighted above stands: Although providing spectacle is one of the functions of superhero tales, fisticuffs and explosions aren’t what such stories are about. Moral fission and self-reflection have been the norm in superhero films for some time, just as they’ve been the norm in superhero comics for decades. Writers aren’t stupid: Leaving things at the smash-bang-zap “playground-level” gets tedious pretty quickly. McCahill is complaining about something that hasn’t been a significant factor since the gee-whiz Golden Age of comics—and arguably not even then, where gray-area vigilante characters like Batman and the Spirit were concerned.

Granted, there’s a problem with Age of Ultron’s action, but it’s one of essence and execution. One of the ever-more-conspicuous weaknesses of the MCU features is their reliance on a bland, pre-fab pacing model that requires a violent climax roughly every fifteen to twenty minutes. Regarding Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron specifically, one of my main objections to these crossover films is that the action sequences, while serviceable, are unimaginative and unworthy of an alleged assemblage of “Earth’s mightiest heroes.” There’s something backwards when the most outrageous stunts and jaw-dropping exploits are unfolding in a film two screens down the hall at the multiplex, a movie in which everyone is human and the villain’s motive is good old-fashioned revenge. If your film's character roster includes Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and Ultron, you damn well better do something extraordinary with your action sequences, something that no other film has done before.

Proper actors are brought in to bolster the beef/cheesecake, yet the two-second appearance of arthouse muse Julie Delpy doing nothing is both a jolting incongruity and a suggestion that all resistance to this behemoth cinema might be futile. They can’t claim the script attracted them: Whedon’s drama is banal, his wisecracks composed of deadening snark.

First of all, on behalf of Scarlet Johansson, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and any other cast members who qualify as beef/cheesecake in McCahill’s estimation: Fuck you. Seriously. “Proper actors”?

I actually agree with McCahill’s assessment of Age of Ultron’s witticisms: The quips are just not as funny as they were in Avengers, and many of them often land with a pained thud that’s wholly uncharacteristic of Whedon’s usual work. Reasonable people can differ on whether the inter-personal Avenger-on-Avenger struggles—or Ultron’s serious daddy issues—are “banal” or not, but at least here McCahill isn’t suggesting that the characters are intrinsically uninteresting just because they’re super-powered.

The sticking point in this passage is the implication that there can’t be any legitimate reason for Julie Delpy’s brief appearance as Black Widow Ops headmistress Madame B other than surrender to the Marvel machine. In Age of Ultron—and in MCU television series Agent Carter, but let’s stick to the film—it’s established that the Black Widow Ops program once educated select Russian girls in the arts of spycraft and assassination, all under the guise of ballet instruction. Sublimation of the girls' individual desires and morals to the program’s rigorous training were paramount, to the point that “graduation” from the project’s Red Room consisted of forced sterilization (the better to avoid future emotional entanglements).

The choice of Delpy for this blink-and-you'll-miss-it role—and recall that a fleeting presence in the MCU is practically a guarantee of future, meatier appearances—evokes intriguing associations based on her prior work. One of Delpy’s most prominent early roles was in Agnieszka Holland’s epic Eastern European WWII drama Europa Europa. In that film, the actress played an ardent Nazi determined to give up her unborn child to the SS’s notorious Lebensborn program, through which it would be raised in a pure Aryan household. More recently, Delpy directed and starred in The Countess, dramatizing the life of Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer Elizabeth Báthory. The film depicts Báthory’s young life as bleak and cruel, culminating in her unintended teen pregnancy, her lover’s gruesome execution, and the vanishing of the child. Later, Báthory develops a delusion that bathing in the blood of virgin girls will give her eternal youth, and to that end commands her retainers to kidnap and murder countless victims.

The relevance of these meta-textual correspondences to the Black Widow Ops program should be obvious, but we needn’t range that far afield. Perhaps something about Delpy’s look just seemed right: a compartmentalized weariness has always seemed to hang on her characters, highlighted by those heavy eyelids and an inevitable snarl of frizzy blonde hair threatening escape. Regardless, why would one assume that there is no artistic rationale for slipping Delpy into a five-second cameo, unless one’s intent is to facilely indict corporate blockbuster filmmaking for… something? Devouring all the “proper” actors, maybe?

By all means claim Age of Ultron as fun, but it looks very much like the kind of fun the suits want you to have—an utterly impersonal, corporate triumph.

This is what’s known as “stating the obvious.” Yes, the experience of watching Age of Ultron is intended to be broadly entertaining, and yes, Marvel and Disney want as many people as possible to watch it, because that will make them truckloads of money via the sale of tickets, DVDs/Blu-rays, merchandise, and so on. And? What does it mean that the film “looks like” capitalist-approved fun? Is there some secret visual signature embedded in the action that betrays it as a corporate diversion? McCahill doesn’t say. Certainly, Age of Ultron is impersonal in the sense that it’s a finely-calibrated corporate product, designed to appeal to as many people as possible, rather than the work of an auteur’s uncompromising vision. This isn’t exactly an original observation. You don’t get critical brownie points for calling attention to the corporate nature of a $280 million film, except perhaps from politically allied readers who lap up such banal statements as if they constituted brave truth-telling.

Watching these logo-simple characters (the starred shield, the arm-and-hammer, the not-so-jolly green giant), I wondered whether we weren’t meant to be cheering for the likes of Marvel, Disney, Google, Apple, and Coca-Cola as they boosted their global market share.

It’s hard to imagine a snarky swipe at the superhero genre more fatuous than one directed at the supposed simplicity of the character designs. When superheroes first rose to popularity in comics’ Golden Age, bold and distinctive visual design utilizing primary colors was a virtue from both an aesthetic and technical viewpoint. (Bear in mind that comics were one of the most cheaply produced printed mediums, and therefore every dot of ink mattered.) Moreover, a stark, simple look for a character is a convenient means of orienting the reader in graphic storytelling. As the eye moves from panel to panel, a bright, distinctive costume—say, Superman’s red-and-blue garb with the stylized “S”—serves as a landmark that makes it easier for the brain to interpolate the action that occurs between the static images. (This is elementary stuff; children understand it intuitively, but an adult like McCahill can always turn to Scott McCloud’s celebrated Understanding Comics.)

In part, the art direction of superhero films is a legacy of the genre’s comic roots, but "logo-simplicity" still has a practical purpose in cinema. A brightly-colored costume or distinguishing device—Captain America's shield or Thor’s hammer, for example—is a handy visual marker even in a moving image, particularly amid the chaos of a super-powered throwdown. (This is one reason I’m increasingly annoyed by the cinematic trend of turning boldly-colored heroes into desaturated blobs of gray.) Moreover, the iconographic function of colors and symbols can have a mythic dimension. As is commonly observed, what are superheroes if not the modern era’s gods and goddesses? Hulk is green for the same reason that Krishna is blue: so you know him when you see him. Complaining that Cap’s shield is “logo-simple” is like lodging the same gripe about Zeus’ thunderbolt, or the Christian cross, for that matter. By definition, a symbol should be easily identifiable; ridiculing it for simplicity is just a tautology.

More broadly, I’m not sure what to make of McCahill’s likening of superheroes to America’s mightiest brands. It feels like an anti-corporate or anti-neocolonial non sequitur rather than an insight. Sure, the Avengers themselves are now corporate symbols in some sense, and their dissemination across the globe on T-shirts, backpacks, and Odin-knows-what does make for a striking illustration of American economic and cultural hegemony. However, equating cheers for the on-screen victory of the Avengers with off-screen economic jingoism is incoherent and kind of insulting. Is the implication that anyone entertained by the Avengers’ triumph over Ultron is, in reality, being subconsciously molded into in unthinking booster for the quarterly corporate “win”? McCahill doesn’t connect the two ideas in any substantive way, but that doesn’t stop him from implicitly casting anyone who is thrilled by super-heroic exploits as a guileless consumer drone.

To an extent, this kind of facetious, scripted commentary masquerading as criticism is galling because there probably is a thought-provoking anti-capitalist dissection of Age of Ultron waiting to be made. A deep Marxist analysis of the film would make for a fascinating read, but that’s not what McCahill presents. He’s just taking hackneyed potshots at an Age of Ultron that exists only in his imagination, while hoping that no one will detect the sleight-of-hand. It’s lazy, it’s boring, and it’s irritating. It’s compelled me to mount a defense of a film I wasn’t that enthusiastic about to begin with, a film that suffers in spots from bad screenwriting, tiresome sexism, uninspired action, and unmistakable executive monkeying. Nonetheless, flawed filmmaking is no excuse for downright shitty criticism.

Detective Work: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

[Note: This post contains very mild spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

The image that opens David and Nathan Zellner’s peculiar, hypnotic new feature, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is distorted and snowy, as though it were recorded on videotape that has since deteriorated. Even through the flurry of tracking errors, however, it's easy to discern the white, all-caps letters on a black background: “THIS IS A TRUE STORY”. Many cinephiles will immediately identify this famous line as the one that introduced Joel and Ethan Coen’s bloody 1996 crime drama cum black comedy Fargo. In Kumiko, a water-damaged VHS copy of the Coens’ film has become an obsession for the eponymous woman (Rinko Kikuchi), a 29-year-old administrative assistant living in Tokyo. Using an antiquated VCR, she scrutinizes every frame of Fargo with the rigor of a forensic analyst. Which raises a question: Does the title card represent Kumiko’s viewpoint, as she crouches in her dark apartment, studying the tape for the 100th time? Or are the Zellners, like the Coens, tweaking the viewer by suggesting that Kumiko is itself a true story, despite its unmistakable aura of fantasy? The answer is likely the same one Kumiko gives when asked whether she is an exchange student or a tourist: “Yes.”

Poor Kumiko shuffles morosely through her life as though deep in a trance. The same dead-eyed slackness attends her as she sits idly at her desk, prepares tea for her boss, and eats her instant noodle meals. Her fellow “office girls” are five or more years her junior, and while they are engrossed with beauty and fashion, Kumiko doesn’t seem to have any interests beyond her dwarf rabbit Bunzo and the aforementioned VHS tape. By day she picks at the holes in her stockings and stares glumly as the world goes by. At night she watches Fargo, over and over and over. Early in the film, she is glimpsed gleaning the cassette from a secret cache in a sea cave, but little is revealed about what led her to such a location, or who placed the tape there and for what purpose. What matters is that Kumiko believes with frightening desperation in the cassette’s significance and in the reality of the events depicted in Fargo.

Specifically, she has faith that a close reading of the film will reveal the location of the nearly $1 million in ransom money that bungling kidnapper Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) buries in the snow near a barbed wire fence. Kumiko pauses the film and traces the spacing between the fence posts, eventually transferring the image via embroidery onto a swatch of fabric. In her mind, that fictional suitcase of bundled bills is a lost New World treasure, and she is like a Spanish conquistador who is fated to unearth and seize it. Setting aside the fictional nature of the film, Kumiko never grapples with the fact that tens of millions of people have seen Fargo, and presumably are therefore also aware of the money. No matter. She insists that the concealed cash is both her discovery and her destiny.

When her boss hands her a corporate credit card to purchase an anniversary gift for his wife, the temptation is too much for Kumiko to resist. Before anyone suspects that something is amiss, she boards a plane bound for the United States, and is soon stepping off the jetway into the Minneapolis airport, a stranger and a strange land. She has only a rudimentary grasp of the English language, no money beyond the pilfered credit card, and a childlike guilelessness that seems more than mere cultural misunderstanding.  Mostly she just points at a single-page map of Minnesota and declares her destination: “Fargo.” This tactic eventually takes her remarkably far. Never mind that Carl actually buried the ransom somewhere between Minneapolis and Brainerd in the film. The word is as much a mystical invocation as a place name, as the Coens themselves recognized. Very little of Fargo’s action takes place in the titular North Dakota city. Rather, it represents a telltale verbal blood spatter, the locale where sad sack Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) exchanged a car for the services of criminals, and thereby sealed his damnation.

The natural query posed by Kumiko is whether a viewer can understand and appreciate the film without having seen Fargo. The answer is a restrained “yes." Certainly, there are several aspects of the former film which hinge on familiarity with the latter, apart from the opening text. The Minnesotans that Kumiko encounters during her quest are mostly cast from the same “aw geez” mold as those that populate the Coens’ feature: decent, diligent folks who take a good-natured interest in strangers. (One can even forgive their provincial cluelessness about Japan, and Asia in general.) In a nod to Fargo’s dogged Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), David Zellner portrays a gentle-hearted county sheriff’s deputy who takes pity on the plainly lost Kumiko and goes above and beyond his duty to aid her. (“I want to help you,” he explains, “I’m just trying to figure out how.”) Kumiko’s Minnesota locales unsurprisingly echo those depicted in the Coens’ film, particularly all the lonely rural highways swathed in windblown snow. Other minor allusions abound, some as subtle as Kumiko’s Lundegaard-esque tendency to turn heel and run when situations go pear-shaped, including one occasion in which she clambers out a window.

However, beyond connecting Fargo’s slightly exaggerated upper Midwestern setting to the same territory that is navigated by Kumiko, most of these links function merely as passing winks to Coen aficionados. Ultimately, Kumiko is a very different sort of film than Fargo. The Coens, as is their wont, craft a tale that is an homage to—and simultaneously a subversion of—crime and detective fiction tropes, ultimately in the service of expansive observations about the absurdity of human behavior. The Zellners, meanwhile, stage Kumiko as a grim, anxious Hero’s Journey, albeit one in which the quest is delusional nonsense. It’s not unlike The Fisher King in this respect, but there the resemblance ends. In Terry Gilliam’s film, mentally troubled Holy Grail seeker Parry pulls disgraced radio shock jock Jack into his Arthurian fantasy, and both men ultimately find something akin to redemption in the quest, its unreality notwithstanding. Kumiko, meanwhile, trudges towards her make-believe treasure in solitude. Good Samaritans come and go during the journey, but no one truly understands her endeavors. The mission is hers alone to endure, and the prize hers alone to claim. As she declares defiantly to her scolding, grandchild-obsessed mother over the phone, she is doing “very, very important work.”

At the surface level, Kumiko works as an unhurried yet nerve-wracking adventure tale in which the heroine’s quest perpetually stands upon the edge of a knife, to borrow Tolkien’s memorable phrasing. There is an unbearable tension inherent in watching Kumiko plod forward through the wintery prairie landscape. She is continuously and perilously exposed, both physically—she is woefully underdressed for the bone-cracking Minnesota wind—and in the sense that as an oddly naïve outsider, she makes easy prey for hucksters and predators. (There don't seem to be many of these creatures in Minnesota, but everyone it the state surely isn't a nice, friendly Lutheran.) As in Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, monetary shortfalls become a fiendish source of sour-gut apprehension. It’s easy to share Kumiko’s icy plunge into panic when a hotel clerk observes that her stolen credit card has been declined, or when a taxi drivers points expectantly at a meter displaying a sum she cannot possibly pay.

Lurking at the periphery of every scene, however, is the nagging awareness that Kumiko has no hope of locating a treasure that does not exist. Accordingly, the empathy that her successes and misfortunes engender in the viewer always carries an unpleasant bitterness, a growing sensation that Something Bad is going to happen when Kumiko’s fantasy runs headlong into reality. This mutates the film into a sort of slow-motion horror story, which is enhanced by the Zellners' and cinematographer Sean Porter’s flair for bestowing the most banal Midwestern locations with an uncanny atmosphere that feels a bit J-horror in character. The film’s soundtrack by indie electronica group the Octopus Project also contributes to this unsettling aura. Much of the group’s work possesses a plastic, bubbly quality, but in Kumiko their sound veers towards the melancholy, with drones, squeals, and wails providing a dose of otherworldliness.

It’s challenging to shake the impression the one of the film’s primary aims is to make the viewer exceedingly uncomfortable, not only with the immediate events shown on screen, but with the entire scenario. Kumiko is, at bottom, the story of a woman who gives up her life for a lie. If the Coens are philosophers, the Zellners here assume the role of psychologists, implicitly inquiring of the viewer: “Do these events upset you? And, if so, why do you think that is?” Kumiko herself functions as a Rorschach test, if only because the film provides few glimpses of her interior life beyond her Fargo-focused monomania. She makes decisions impulsively, exhibits no ability to make long-term plans, and seems to lack an adult’s understanding of the world. (Reproaching her for tearing the Minnesota map from an atlas in a Tokyo library, a security guard wonders, “Why didn’t you just get it off the Internet?”) Is she mildly autistic? Or perhaps mentally ill? Or just a fuck-up?

Although it’s easy to attribute Kumiko’s tribulations to her own foolishness, or to simply conclude that she must be deeply disturbed, the film’s stance towards its heroine is more ambiguous, even sympathetic. In the early Tokyo scenes, the Zellners take pains to show how unappealing the prospect of a “normal” life might be for a young Japanese woman. The pressures to conform to a mainstream, feminine, heteronormative existence surround Kumiko, like a flock of pestering birds. Her boss chides her for her dour demeanor (i.e., not smiling enough), before bluntly asking if she is a lesbian. The other office girls are fixated on their gossip and primping, and ultimately on finding husbands. Kumiko's own mother nags her about her non-existent love life, reminding her daughter that time is running out to land a man, drop out of the workforce, and start siring children. Reluctantly meeting up with an old schoolmate, Kumiko stares into the eyes of the woman’s toddler son and sees something alien and frightening. Given this assault of repellent expectations, escape into a fantasy where she is a fearless explorer of distant lands seems like a preferable alternative.

One can envision a lesser film that holds up Kumiko as an admirable individual and proffers a saccharine, vacuous message about following one’s dreams at all costs. The Zellners’ film strives for something far more ambitious and complex than a paean to quirky individuality. By portraying their protagonist as an erratic, dyspeptic figure and her goal as a ludicrous misapprehension, the filmmakers reframe the story as a sobering moral conundrum. Is it right for a person to put themselves in peril for the sake of a falsehood that they believe to be true? And, perhaps more significantly, what are the obligations of others with respect to that person? Although Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter doesn’t answer these questions, it achieves something singular simply by posing them. That it also happens to be a visually arresting and narratively absorbing film makes it all the more remarkable.

Alternate Realities: Merchants of Doubt

[Note: Updated 11/19/15.]

There’s a striking demographic truth observable in Robert Kenner’s documentary Merchants of Doubt, one that neatly encapsulates the confounding imbalance at the heart of the anthropogenic climate change debate. The film depicts several global warming “skeptic” events, typically hosted by conservo-libertarian think tanks such as the Koch-funded Heartland Institute. These conferences appear to be attended by an overwhelmingly older, white, and male set—the Fox News fringe, in other words. In one memorable shot, Kenner captures a half-full ballroom where a dour, elderly conferencegoer sits alone. He could be a crank physicist, an apologist media hack, or perhaps just an activist citizen whose contempt for government runs bone-deep. Regardless, the image speaks to the Wonderland character of the climate wars. On one side are thousands of climate scientists and incalculable pages of research, along with dozens of international scientific organizations. On the other are a relative handful of dissemblers and true believers. The former are mostly shills backed by corporate fossil fuel dollars, while the latter are primarily tribally-motivated consumers of right-wing propaganda. As Kenner and his collaborators implicitly and rhetorically ask, how does a such a face off between unevenly matched worldviews constitute a “debate” at all?

Like Kenner’s previous documentary feature, Food, Inc., Merchants of Doubt is progressive agitprop of modest ambitions. The ideal viewer is someone who thinks of climate change as a problem and knows that some sort of controversy exists about it, but it isn’t clear on the details. The film won’t convince any hardcore deniers of the overwhelming evidence for global warming driven by greenhouse gas pollution. Indeed, Kenner and political historian Naomi Oreskes—whose book with Erik M. Conway inspired the film—spend very little of Merchants’ 96 minutes making the case for anthropogenic climate change, per se. As the film points out, almost every peer-reviewed paper on climate science already accepts the phenomenon as a given, and establishing its reality would be akin to laying out the evidence for gravitation or evolution. (Oh, wait ...) Instead, Merchants devotes the bulk of its attention to scrutinizing the professional denialists themselves. In particular, the film establishes their common history as mouthpieces for Big Tobacco, Big Chemical, and other corporate sectors known for their less-than-stellar record of truthfulness regarding threats to public health.

Merchants is therefore a documentary primarily about hucksterism. To drive the point home, the film frames its exposé with snippets of illusionist Jaimy Ian Swiss explaining the principles behind his card tricks. As Swiss articulates, stage magic relies on an unspoken agreement with the audience that the con will be harmless and entertaining. This is not the case with the institutions that peddle uncertainty about health and environmental issues, and seeing the curtain pulled back on such forces makes for an enlightening and somewhat chilling experience. Kenner generally sticks to the "Big Issues" documentary playbook, building his case with a brisk blend of interviews, animation, and stock footage. It’s polished, but formally undistinguished. As with most documentaries where the goal is educational, the film doesn’t demand a second viewing. That said, Merchants skillfully employs its medium to draw lines of connection and create juxtapositions. It’s one thing to state that the same rogue’s gallery of denialists crops up over and over on multiple issues. It’s another to place two cable news clips side by side to show the same shill deriding the lack of evidence connecting smoking to cancer in one instance, and pollution to climate change in another.

The most intriguing question addressed in the film is one of motivation: Why do denialists deny? (And, secondarily, what motivates their audience to accept and hold onto their lies with death-grip fervor?) The obvious answer is, of course, greed, but as Merchants illustrates, most denialists are a more complex species than mere liars for dollars. Physicist and notorious climate skeptic Frederick Singer, for example, is a former Cold War missile scientist, whose objections to environmental regulations appear to be deeply rooted in his anti-communist ideology. When Singer blithely declares that almost all climate scientists are wrong and he is right, it’s hard not to regard his glib, glassy-eyed certainty as a kind of religious (or, ironically, Stalinist) zealotry. More infuriating are pundits like Climate Depot founder Marc Marano, a conservative knife fighter who regards the entire debate as an anti-liberal bloodsport. The cheery Marano rather astonishingly agrees to be interviewed for the film, and he is quite candid about how much “fun” it is to hound climate scientists and obfuscate for polluters on cable news programs.

The film’s most memorable figure, however, is former South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis. A right-wing evangelical and limited government Republican, Inglis is the sort of politician who boasts about his endorsements from the NRA and the National Right to Life Committee. Despite his ideological credentials, however, Inglis had a come-to-Jesus moment on climate change when he was able to meet with scientists investigating ice cores in the Arctic. After his position on global warming shifted from denial to acceptance, however, Inglis was defeated in a landslide by a Tea-Party-backed GOP primary challenger, leaving him dazed and despairing at the direction of American conservatism. Watching Inglis politely and futilely insist, “That’s not true,” as a reactionary radio host rattles off brazenly false talking points is unexpectedly sad. More to the point, it's emblematic of the challenges facing anyone who tries to rise above the denialists’ haze of bullshit.