The reasons why I don’t want to become a film critic
The assumption is that when you write about films, you eventually want to become a film critic. There is evidence to support this idea because unless you are a published author of books about topical subjects in film, the main platform is film criticism. If you are an amateur writer, criticism is really the only thing you can do if want your pieces published in websites, journals or other publications. Then there is other problem in that criticism takes time to perfect and master so somebody getting into writing about film first has to dedicate themselves to years of writing it. Those years of practice and effort convinces the majority to stick with criticism as a profession.
I write criticism, too, but my progress to this point hasn’t been strictly that. When I was a teenager I spent my afternoons listening to music and plotting out what the shots and sets would be for the music video to go along with a song. In the period of two years I believe I did this for over a hundred songs. The drive to focus on shots and production told me at the time I had everything that it would take to become a filmmaker. I believed it. So much so I pushed my high school to offer a course on film and video editing. The first year it was offered I took it with only one other person. We had to be mixed into a different computer class because we were only two people strong. Most people in the class had no clue what we were even doing there.
The hopefulness didn’t pan out to much. After that class and another in community college, I started to focus entirely on writing about film. There were many reasons why. The main reason was that I could not afford the equipment to keep me ahead of the curve and two classes on video editing still left me a dunce with computers. So I decided to try to improve my status as a dunce in writing. I had no clue what I was doing, but a few years of reading criticism and books about film helped me a lot. The world of film was starting to become clear to me. I realized I didn’t know anything about film because I didn’t know the extent of what I didn’t know. At the beginning, for me, film had a history that was short and slim. Then it became long and wide with histories and ideas still left to travel. I’m just grateful because I now know it exists.
Next march it will be nine years. Nine years since I first thought big about film and nine years since Stanley Kubrick died. Both incidents coincidentally went hand in hand for me. Kubrick was my gateway into film and his passing is what got me serious. The first two years of my time with film was study of Stanley Kubrick. I was hard pressed to believe in anyone else. But as first loves go, things change and I discovered the world of film around Stanley Kubrick and moved past him. Instead of basing the success of a given year off how much more I knew about Kubrick. I was doing it for film in general. I wanted to learn so much each year that I didn’t even know the person of the past year. Sometimes that happened.
I’ve come to a point in my life where I no longer look back and see different ideologies or ideas about the art of film. I’ve normalized certain ideas about film I believe will be constant beliefs. These beliefs will continue to be refined and enhanced, but they will consist of the same basic truths. Every person goes through growing pains to find themselves. I’ve found myself and the pressure of life is forcing me to choose what I want as a career. To my own surprise, the last thing I want to be a film critic.
The main reason lays in the question of whether you want to be a critic or a newspaperman. People study the art of film to be critics, but the path to criticism many times isn’t that. Bernard Shaw was asked by a young writer how you become a critic and he said, “Twenty years of writing for a newspaper and the hope you get promoted when the main critic dies or retires.” Examples today also exist. Roger Ebert had no clue his aspirations to become a journalist would lead him to become a lifetime critic of what was only a hobby for him in film. When editors are looking for critics, they are not first looking for experts in the field of film, but manageable writers who know the newspaper business and follow orders.
Then there is the situation of having to appeal to the business interests of the newspaper. It doesn’t matter if you are a highly esteemed critic with good senses about quality, the fact is no editor will allow a film critic to attack every mainstream Hollywood film released. It’s not good business because newspapers are advertising those movies for either local theaters or the studio directly. This situation also explains why there is so much analysis of the business of movies as there are about movies themselves. Articles are written about Hollywood so films and movie stars can be named dropped without any critical souring. The emergence of tabloid interest in Hollywood continues to blur lines of what importance film criticism really has in newspapers and magazines.
The other matter about film criticism is that practice and standards forces critics, if they are going to review fluff Hollywood works, to review them with as much care and thoughtfulness as any other review. When I took a class on journalism in the art of criticism, I was told to follow a strict layout of what parts about each film to comment on and in what order. It didn’t matter what the movie was. I had to pay equal attention to every part of the very worst films. I wasn’t too shocked to see this pattern repeated by most critics around the country. It meant that the same attention to evaluating Transformers should also be given to L’Enfant.
It wasn’t always like this. In the 1930s and 40s, film critics would use only a paragraph or two for each movie. Sometimes a description of the plot wasn’t even given, but instead just a comment about the general art (or lack of) of the movie. Critics would only write larger pieces on films that inspired them to do so. Film criticism wasn’t yet considered a true discipline to have the standards we see today. It was a low tier job for a newspaperman to write criticism about an art that was still just entertainment only for most people. Because of that most newspapers didn’t have film critics and only the best newspapers or magazines had quality film critics. Critics like James Agee and Otis Ferguson weren’t the standard, but the exceptions.
Today the film critic has to struggle through every bad movie. Anything that they just want to stamp as shit has to be given full attention in the name of ethics and professionalism. The consequences of this is that since so few good films are released; the taste of the critic begins to wither away. An average film will be applauded as good and a good film will be heralded as great. Many times these movies aren’t as good as the critic says. It just shows the exhausting task of having to see every movie released. Even the people who like to go to movies aren’t forced to dedicate 1000 words to the movies that stupefy and disgust them.
So, I don’t know. Film criticism doesn’t appeal to me. There only exist a few places out there that give true freedom to the critic. They are in specific magazines. The critic will be allowed time to focus on one film and spend a good amount of time on it since magazine output can be few and far between. The fact is that newspapers represent all kinds of difficulties. I think the hardest job has to be the New York Times theater critic. Since the standards of the paper are so high, he or she has to write an excellent piece in a short amount of time. Sometimes it is less than a day because theater companies will only allow critics to attend opening night performances instead of dress rehearsals and the review would be due the next day. It’s an impossible situation. Film critics have the luxury of a little more time, but numerous more films to review every week.
The current track I am following would see me as a Professor of Film Studies at a college somewhere. It never was my dream to follow this path, but the career represents many luxuries. First I would be able to teach and be surrounded with a continuing education in film. The second is that I could get medical benefits where a career in criticism would have truly humble beginnings that my current health can’t afford to go through. The third reason is that I could write books about subjects I am passionate about. I don’t care to be just another commentator on the latest academic trend in film. I want to write about people and subjects in film I truly care about and feel people have ignored. I want to personalize my work. Lately I’ve been big into Christopher Hitchens. His ideology aside, he has a wonderful system of writing small books about large subjects but always done with a personal context or approach. He has issues and people he cares about. I feel the same way in film.
There is also the likelihood I wouldn’t have been a good critic anyways. I must give critics their due respect because they can analyze different filmmakers and cinemas and have a good general comment about everything. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that. Part of me will always be ignorant to something so that’s why I want to stick close to personal subjects. My favorite film professor endeared me to him when he admitted he knew little about Korean Cinema to comment on it. Other professors around him wouldn’t give into that submission and instead would be horribly wrong about many things.
Do I still want to make original films? I don’t know. I’m beginning an original script right now but I do know my drive and passion is currently in writing about films. Though I think I could write a good original script, I could be wrong and my best form of writing could be in the discussion of films instead of creation of them. I don’t know. George Orwell is known as an author, but his reputation as an essayist is much better than as a novelist. I think he knew he was limited in the latter field even though he really wanted to excel at it. I’ll find out my fate soon enough. But for now I’m still trying. It may end up that I’ll always be trying.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Certain Traditions
Why David Mamet’s Spartan is the most important thriller of the last ten years
David Mamet’s next film will be Redbelt, the first film to be made about the new phenomenon, Mixed Martial Arts. Mamet, an enthusiast of boxing and the like only in interviews, has never made a film or written a script that has come close to the subject of a brutal contact sport. Some people are already saying that Mamet has exhausted his film genre of choice, the con genre (he did three films in House of Games, Spanish Prisoner and Heist) and is now roaming subjects that will launch him back to the forefront of the film world. Redbelt, because of the popularity of the subject, could be his first hit in years.
If that philosophy is true then his last film, Spartan, came out a few years too early. It was Mamet’s first endeavor into the world of Special Ops. In 2001, the world warmed to the Special Ops because of the personality of Jason Bourne in the sleeper hit, The Bourne Identity. Now in 2007, the world has Jack Bauer as the most popular figure on television and Jason Bourne a bigger star than ever before. People also have reading material galore that tells them the one of most important concentration of forces overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan is Special Forces. Channels like The National Geographic Channel have already produced specials about this new avenue of military warfare. A television show about Special Forces called The Unit (Which Mamet coincidentally created and serves as Executive Producer) is a major hit. Ratings in all avenues suggest that the public is fascinated. The fact David Mamet made a film about Special Ops in 2004 and went under the radar isn’t too surprising, but The Bourne Identity too went under the radar and later found a resurgence. Why not Spartan too?
Spartan stars Val Kilmer as a Special Op assigned in the rescue of the President’s daughter. In a Secret Service protection screw up, she is left alone, kidnapped and sent overseas in a human trading business. The transportation is for a prostitution ring. The kidnappers have no clue that she actually is the President’s daughter and it’s up to Val Kilmer to rescue her before they do. In the tracking of her whereabouts, Kilmer has little mercy for potential aides in the abduction. He bullies and interrogates them without being forced to identify himself as an officer or official. Even agency officials in charge of the investigation look to him with a sense of mystery. Kilmer has no formal gear. He takes different uniforms and clothes to adapt to each new scenario that is presented.
Mamet takes on a subject that deals with harshness and realities of modern day life. Some filmmakers and writers would adjust the film to suit the realities of the story. The critic would ask that permissive content be applied to the story so the film could resonate with the experience of our world. The Bourne series continues to get more realistic with the violence and scenarios as it goes along. Critics have appreciated every regard filmmakers have taken to notch up the reality. The fact the Bourne Ultimatum made some audience members squeamish is actually a good thing for these critics. The difference in Spartan is these tricks to capture realism aren’t taken. Not only does Mamet keep the filmmaking classical to old methods of editing and framing, but also inflicts his dialogue style in the characters. People had a fun time making fun of how often characters in Spartan repeated the line “Where’s the girl?” Gene Siskel once said if he began to repeat himself, he would know he was either getting senile or was in a Mamet play.
The condemnation of Spartan goes further than its dialogue. Many have attacked the film for sporting a contrived plot with twists that send the story too far off the rails of realism to be considered sincere or objective. In a sense, Spartan is being criticized for being too much of a movie. To an extent, there is truth in these criticisms. The first half of the film is about is chase for the perpetrators of the kidnapping. Each time the feds get close to catching them they run into a road block that keeps them from finding the girl. Each new scenario to locate her seems to be an excuse to be more inventive than the last. In one scene, Kilmer dresses up as a security guard and talks to her boyfriend in a coaxing manner that gets the truth out without getting him to think something is wrong. In a later scene, Kilmer pretends to be a criminal holding up a gas station. He kills the attendant and a police officer. The dead officer was transporting criminals. One of them has a connection to the suspected kidnappers. Kilmer puts on a show for him to convince him he is an outlaw who can be trusted and is now granting him his freedom. The charade is to sneak Kilmer into the inside world of the foreign sex trade. Both scenarios are theoretical realities, but they look and feel more like Mamet con plots.
The second half of the film forces even more suspension of belief. In the inability to rescue the President’s daughter heartbreaking news comes that she wasnt kidnapped but was off with her Professor on a yacht and turned up dead in the water. This new scenario turns to be a cover up by the White House. She really was kidnapped but because she was threatening to expose her father’s sexual liaisons with other women (a late development in the plot) the White House decided to let her stay kidnapped instead of rescue her and risk her exposing her father and costing him the re-election in November. The President and his wife are clueless to this situation and Kilmer goes on the mission alone to rescue her. He’s convinced to do so by a senior member of Secret Service. She makes a desperate plea to Kilmer that she raised the girl and is the only one who loves her. Sound a little out there? It kind of is. The critics looked at this subplot as a comment by Mamet about politics and the nature of power. They were right about to criticize that angle of the story. In anything Mamet has ever done that was political, this idea satisfies the least.
David Mamet is still a notable filmmaker. The film world hasn’t truly dropped off from appreciating his talent, but the reasons why Spartan went under the radar are telling. The lack of realism in the story is the first mark against the film. The question is has Mamet ever made a truly realistic film? Every film he’s done had the mark of genre or fabricated structure. Mamet’s philosophy of film is that it is a melodramatic art form. Mamet is guided by the the long history genre has played in film. The first competent movie made was The Great Train Robbery. It had every identity we identify in a movie with clear cutting and an added on musical score to guide the action. It was also was a thriller. Love it or not, film started with genres and evolved from there.
Mamet plays with those genres. He doesnt try to destroy or write outside of them. Every film he’s done has some significance to one genre or another, regardless if it was borrowed from theater. Mamet has found critical success operating in this manner. This has also made him a classicalist. When experimenting with digital video is fashionable, he sticks to film. When acquiring tons of coverage for a scene with multiple cameras is now a standard, he sticks to regimented shooting plans that require the smallest number of cameras possible. He edits his films to ideas in books that are so old the books would collect dust on any young filmmaker’s shelf.
But when Mamet took on Spartan, he took on the largest genre in the film world. He also took on the genre that has been most perceptible to change over the years. During the golden age of Hollywood all movies were beholden to censors and limitations. The 60s brought about change in the commonplace level of violence and nudity in Hollywood. Genres like the Western, Noir and the Musical died out before they could truly see change. War movies survived and got much more violent, but just as many as War movies are made today that revere the past. World War II is still the common subject for war and many filmmakers want to make films that are nods to old war movies. Some comedies got much more graphic, but it’s still a genre dominated by hokey-made-for-older-women affair.
What is unique about the thriller is that it grew into different popular genres and subgenres. The action film owes its basic essence to what the thriller has created. Other subjects like dramas and even war films are beginning to take on thriller structures. Bryan Singer’s upcoming Valkyrie, about the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, is going to be told within the confines of a thriller. Stanley Kubrick’s planned contribution to the subject of World War II was the adaptation of a novel that had great truths but was nothing more than a basic thriller. The fact is that the thriller is becoming the standard story in which to cross over to the darker side of life. It has a structure that allows every particle of our fears and pains to be enveloped into a simple structure and tucked nicely into a Hollywood exploit. The popularity of the Bourne series is the thriller currently speaking for our interest and fears in the international realm. The world is at war and Jason Bourne is our confused psyche going against a big bad United States that has no end to its potential for corruption.
The reasons these emotions clicked in the audience goes back to the realism factors in the second two movies. The realism challenged filmgoers to remind themselves of the worst moments they've seen on the news. The director Paul Greengrass, a foreign born filmmaker, started his career with challenging and stark dramas like Bloody Sunday and The Theory of Flight. When he went to Hollywood he didn't abandon the style that put him on the map. Instead he developed it be tougher and more daring and forced Hollywood and Middle America to love it. Not only did this make general thrillers look more authentic, but it did do some good for the world of the thrillers. The ancient and pedestrian Bond franchise updated its storytelling to be more realistic so it didn't look dated in a Post-Bourne world. This was a true revolution of the genre because for the first time the Bond series changed and adapted to be better instead of worse. Even when The French Connection won an Oscar the Bond series still carried on happily with silly fluff movies.
But for all the reasons that make Spartan less noteworthy in the topical sphere, I still am choosing it over The Bourne Ultimatum. In an age where you want filmmakers to make comments about the headlines of the day in their films, the last place you want to see those comments being made are in the limited plots of movies like The Bourne Ultimatum. Spartan has little quality for deft comment itself, but it has all the right elements that make a thriller stand out. The best way to illustrate the strengths of Spartan is to compare it The Bourne Supremacy.
The most drastic difference between the two films is in the filmmaking, especially the editing and composition of the scenes. The Bourne Ultimatum is based mostly on hand held camera work and a lot of coverage of a scene with numerous cameras. A simple scene of Bourne walking into a train terminal will be cut into four shots from four different cameras and each shot seemingly comes from a different perspective. Greengrass has said that he allowed technicians on his films to make up a lot of the vantage points of the camera because the story was so tied to the action scenes. This has allowed the film to be less readable for style and design because often the stunts dictate the filmmaking. Expansive action films like City of God had a lot of readable style tendencies and references. The director there took more control of the filming of the scenes. The purpose in Bourne Ultimatum is to guide the action effectively and bring the audience closer to the action and make the experience of Bourne’s chase to discover himself feel more authentic.
Mamet sticks close to his training that the individual shot is most meaningful. It means he uses a lot fewer cameras, but he also focuses mise en scene much more. Important information for the plot is tucked into the action of a scene. Only second viewings show all the details that drives the plot in the film. He makes scenes exist for the purpose of moving the plot in the most interesting way and tries to do so with the smallest amount of dialogue necessary. As literary as Mamet is, his filmmaking is classical visual constructions in the strictest sense. In his book, “On Directing Film”, he preaches the strict teachings of Sergei Eisenstein in how to approach filmmaking. He doesn’t waver from asking the philosophical questions of why every scene is purposeful. In an age where every style has become acceptable, Mamet sticks to a classical approach to storytelling. This belief has impacted his filmmaking. After finishing Spartan, Val Kilmer complained that Mamet cut too many good scenes from the final cut and hoped they would appear on the DVD in either deleted scenes or a new cut. Neither happened but this hasn’t been the case for any David Mamet film. It’s not hard to guess why.
Then there is analysis of the dialogue. As for Bourne himself, Ultimatum follows a melodramatic realistic pattern. The pain and anguish Bourne feels toward the past is always on his mind. His departed girlfriend is still a subject in the third film but this sequel also adds a subplot that goes back into his past to further explain his evolution to a super spy. Numerous scenes are of Bourne at the most heartfelt a tough spy can get – sad but removed from the physical showing of pain, like a nerve has been removed in him. This pedigree the filmmakers give to the story really is nothing new. The writers write the most basic dialogue and Matt Damon speaks it in an almost monotone voice to personify Bourne. The other characters are CIA types have an even more limited range than Bourne. Their characters personify the business tone very well and the characters are written appropriately. The characters range from “good” and “bad”, but you wouldn’t tell the difference in their command. New scenarios or personal crises don’t change their tone at all. The only sense of desperation that resides in a character is with Julia Stiles’ who seems to have personal ties with Bourne and allows it to show sometimes.
In Spartan, Mamet follows the similar tonal patterns of Ultimatum, but he plays with it and adds diversity. Like I said before, some pieces of dialogue are repeated through the course of the film. But a lot of the repetition is purposeful to the characters. Take the instances of Kilmer interrogating witnesses on the field. His character will end up repeating what the suspects say to him or what other officials are communicating to him. Kilmer is doing this because he is allowing his brain to work through the tense situation by speaking his thoughts to whomever he is putting the pressure on so nothing is mis-communicated. Not only is this guiding the action, but the element of repetition of dialogue is long standing for Mamet himself. It plays into his repertoire of past characterizations. The other element of the dialogue that also speaks for Mamet is the clever and quotable dialogue. Army personnel do have a distinct style of language, but they likely do not reference Napoleon or speak in offhand philosophies the way characters in Spartan do. This is purely a fictional touch.
The final discerning observation is the identity of genre in each film. Bourne Ultimatum has enough action sequences to qualify as a thriller, but it has as just as many elements to it that are dramatic. The list goes from Greengrass applying the same film techniques he puts in his serious dramas also in the Bourne series. Another is the emotional core that the film tries to apply to Bourne’s past. As I said before, he is a character who carries his pain with him. Then another is that all the performances and characters are written to capture the likeliest portrait of real CIA agents. The Bourne films are thrillers, but are drenched in the qualities that make up a dramatic work. The problem with this coating around the story is that Jason Bourne as a character is as realistic as Jason Voorhees. He is the super spy who cannot be beat. The question isn’t whether he will be killed, but how he will kill everyone else. The greatest questions the film can ask are superficial questions about how he came to be this spy, not who he is as a person.
On the other hand Spartan is fully engulfed in the fictional world of its story. It is highly accurate in small details about the life of a Special Op, but is surrounded by a story and plot that has more to do with the creative hand of David Mamet than anything. The criticisms of its melodramatic nature at the beginning of its essay really are description of its identity. If the film tried to resemble the Bourne series with stabs at realism, none of the witty dialogue or imaginative plot twists would work. Like animation, true genre works take you into another world and enchant you with unrealistic characters within an unrealistic situation. The criticism isn’t how believable the story is, but how imaginative it is. The way Mamet is able to configure his style of writing and filmmaking to perfectly adapt to this world is commendable. David Mamet also made a film about a subject that became normal our in viewing lexicon and was able to make it wholly unique.
In appropriate manner, I’d like to use both a high and low brow reference to sum up my final point. Ten years ago, Stanley Kauffmann said there were fewer good works of entertainment being made in film than there were serious works. I’d like to think that’s because of our desire not to see the same old standard plots that look the same, but represent the permissive nature of our world today. It’s making standard genre films look and feel more dramatic works when these films should have little interest in that. Because as Hank Hill said in King of the Hill, the only thing you do with Christian Rock is not make God more likeable to teens, but rock n roll a lot worst. The Bourne series has a lot of good qualities because of the inventive action sequences, but the films aren’t doing themselves any favors by seeing Jason Bourne as a meaningful character. That just reduces other serious works.
David Mamet’s next film will be Redbelt, the first film to be made about the new phenomenon, Mixed Martial Arts. Mamet, an enthusiast of boxing and the like only in interviews, has never made a film or written a script that has come close to the subject of a brutal contact sport. Some people are already saying that Mamet has exhausted his film genre of choice, the con genre (he did three films in House of Games, Spanish Prisoner and Heist) and is now roaming subjects that will launch him back to the forefront of the film world. Redbelt, because of the popularity of the subject, could be his first hit in years.
If that philosophy is true then his last film, Spartan, came out a few years too early. It was Mamet’s first endeavor into the world of Special Ops. In 2001, the world warmed to the Special Ops because of the personality of Jason Bourne in the sleeper hit, The Bourne Identity. Now in 2007, the world has Jack Bauer as the most popular figure on television and Jason Bourne a bigger star than ever before. People also have reading material galore that tells them the one of most important concentration of forces overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan is Special Forces. Channels like The National Geographic Channel have already produced specials about this new avenue of military warfare. A television show about Special Forces called The Unit (Which Mamet coincidentally created and serves as Executive Producer) is a major hit. Ratings in all avenues suggest that the public is fascinated. The fact David Mamet made a film about Special Ops in 2004 and went under the radar isn’t too surprising, but The Bourne Identity too went under the radar and later found a resurgence. Why not Spartan too?
Spartan stars Val Kilmer as a Special Op assigned in the rescue of the President’s daughter. In a Secret Service protection screw up, she is left alone, kidnapped and sent overseas in a human trading business. The transportation is for a prostitution ring. The kidnappers have no clue that she actually is the President’s daughter and it’s up to Val Kilmer to rescue her before they do. In the tracking of her whereabouts, Kilmer has little mercy for potential aides in the abduction. He bullies and interrogates them without being forced to identify himself as an officer or official. Even agency officials in charge of the investigation look to him with a sense of mystery. Kilmer has no formal gear. He takes different uniforms and clothes to adapt to each new scenario that is presented.
Mamet takes on a subject that deals with harshness and realities of modern day life. Some filmmakers and writers would adjust the film to suit the realities of the story. The critic would ask that permissive content be applied to the story so the film could resonate with the experience of our world. The Bourne series continues to get more realistic with the violence and scenarios as it goes along. Critics have appreciated every regard filmmakers have taken to notch up the reality. The fact the Bourne Ultimatum made some audience members squeamish is actually a good thing for these critics. The difference in Spartan is these tricks to capture realism aren’t taken. Not only does Mamet keep the filmmaking classical to old methods of editing and framing, but also inflicts his dialogue style in the characters. People had a fun time making fun of how often characters in Spartan repeated the line “Where’s the girl?” Gene Siskel once said if he began to repeat himself, he would know he was either getting senile or was in a Mamet play.
The condemnation of Spartan goes further than its dialogue. Many have attacked the film for sporting a contrived plot with twists that send the story too far off the rails of realism to be considered sincere or objective. In a sense, Spartan is being criticized for being too much of a movie. To an extent, there is truth in these criticisms. The first half of the film is about is chase for the perpetrators of the kidnapping. Each time the feds get close to catching them they run into a road block that keeps them from finding the girl. Each new scenario to locate her seems to be an excuse to be more inventive than the last. In one scene, Kilmer dresses up as a security guard and talks to her boyfriend in a coaxing manner that gets the truth out without getting him to think something is wrong. In a later scene, Kilmer pretends to be a criminal holding up a gas station. He kills the attendant and a police officer. The dead officer was transporting criminals. One of them has a connection to the suspected kidnappers. Kilmer puts on a show for him to convince him he is an outlaw who can be trusted and is now granting him his freedom. The charade is to sneak Kilmer into the inside world of the foreign sex trade. Both scenarios are theoretical realities, but they look and feel more like Mamet con plots.
The second half of the film forces even more suspension of belief. In the inability to rescue the President’s daughter heartbreaking news comes that she wasnt kidnapped but was off with her Professor on a yacht and turned up dead in the water. This new scenario turns to be a cover up by the White House. She really was kidnapped but because she was threatening to expose her father’s sexual liaisons with other women (a late development in the plot) the White House decided to let her stay kidnapped instead of rescue her and risk her exposing her father and costing him the re-election in November. The President and his wife are clueless to this situation and Kilmer goes on the mission alone to rescue her. He’s convinced to do so by a senior member of Secret Service. She makes a desperate plea to Kilmer that she raised the girl and is the only one who loves her. Sound a little out there? It kind of is. The critics looked at this subplot as a comment by Mamet about politics and the nature of power. They were right about to criticize that angle of the story. In anything Mamet has ever done that was political, this idea satisfies the least.
David Mamet is still a notable filmmaker. The film world hasn’t truly dropped off from appreciating his talent, but the reasons why Spartan went under the radar are telling. The lack of realism in the story is the first mark against the film. The question is has Mamet ever made a truly realistic film? Every film he’s done had the mark of genre or fabricated structure. Mamet’s philosophy of film is that it is a melodramatic art form. Mamet is guided by the the long history genre has played in film. The first competent movie made was The Great Train Robbery. It had every identity we identify in a movie with clear cutting and an added on musical score to guide the action. It was also was a thriller. Love it or not, film started with genres and evolved from there.
Mamet plays with those genres. He doesnt try to destroy or write outside of them. Every film he’s done has some significance to one genre or another, regardless if it was borrowed from theater. Mamet has found critical success operating in this manner. This has also made him a classicalist. When experimenting with digital video is fashionable, he sticks to film. When acquiring tons of coverage for a scene with multiple cameras is now a standard, he sticks to regimented shooting plans that require the smallest number of cameras possible. He edits his films to ideas in books that are so old the books would collect dust on any young filmmaker’s shelf.
But when Mamet took on Spartan, he took on the largest genre in the film world. He also took on the genre that has been most perceptible to change over the years. During the golden age of Hollywood all movies were beholden to censors and limitations. The 60s brought about change in the commonplace level of violence and nudity in Hollywood. Genres like the Western, Noir and the Musical died out before they could truly see change. War movies survived and got much more violent, but just as many as War movies are made today that revere the past. World War II is still the common subject for war and many filmmakers want to make films that are nods to old war movies. Some comedies got much more graphic, but it’s still a genre dominated by hokey-made-for-older-women affair.
What is unique about the thriller is that it grew into different popular genres and subgenres. The action film owes its basic essence to what the thriller has created. Other subjects like dramas and even war films are beginning to take on thriller structures. Bryan Singer’s upcoming Valkyrie, about the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, is going to be told within the confines of a thriller. Stanley Kubrick’s planned contribution to the subject of World War II was the adaptation of a novel that had great truths but was nothing more than a basic thriller. The fact is that the thriller is becoming the standard story in which to cross over to the darker side of life. It has a structure that allows every particle of our fears and pains to be enveloped into a simple structure and tucked nicely into a Hollywood exploit. The popularity of the Bourne series is the thriller currently speaking for our interest and fears in the international realm. The world is at war and Jason Bourne is our confused psyche going against a big bad United States that has no end to its potential for corruption.
The reasons these emotions clicked in the audience goes back to the realism factors in the second two movies. The realism challenged filmgoers to remind themselves of the worst moments they've seen on the news. The director Paul Greengrass, a foreign born filmmaker, started his career with challenging and stark dramas like Bloody Sunday and The Theory of Flight. When he went to Hollywood he didn't abandon the style that put him on the map. Instead he developed it be tougher and more daring and forced Hollywood and Middle America to love it. Not only did this make general thrillers look more authentic, but it did do some good for the world of the thrillers. The ancient and pedestrian Bond franchise updated its storytelling to be more realistic so it didn't look dated in a Post-Bourne world. This was a true revolution of the genre because for the first time the Bond series changed and adapted to be better instead of worse. Even when The French Connection won an Oscar the Bond series still carried on happily with silly fluff movies.
But for all the reasons that make Spartan less noteworthy in the topical sphere, I still am choosing it over The Bourne Ultimatum. In an age where you want filmmakers to make comments about the headlines of the day in their films, the last place you want to see those comments being made are in the limited plots of movies like The Bourne Ultimatum. Spartan has little quality for deft comment itself, but it has all the right elements that make a thriller stand out. The best way to illustrate the strengths of Spartan is to compare it The Bourne Supremacy.
The most drastic difference between the two films is in the filmmaking, especially the editing and composition of the scenes. The Bourne Ultimatum is based mostly on hand held camera work and a lot of coverage of a scene with numerous cameras. A simple scene of Bourne walking into a train terminal will be cut into four shots from four different cameras and each shot seemingly comes from a different perspective. Greengrass has said that he allowed technicians on his films to make up a lot of the vantage points of the camera because the story was so tied to the action scenes. This has allowed the film to be less readable for style and design because often the stunts dictate the filmmaking. Expansive action films like City of God had a lot of readable style tendencies and references. The director there took more control of the filming of the scenes. The purpose in Bourne Ultimatum is to guide the action effectively and bring the audience closer to the action and make the experience of Bourne’s chase to discover himself feel more authentic.
Mamet sticks close to his training that the individual shot is most meaningful. It means he uses a lot fewer cameras, but he also focuses mise en scene much more. Important information for the plot is tucked into the action of a scene. Only second viewings show all the details that drives the plot in the film. He makes scenes exist for the purpose of moving the plot in the most interesting way and tries to do so with the smallest amount of dialogue necessary. As literary as Mamet is, his filmmaking is classical visual constructions in the strictest sense. In his book, “On Directing Film”, he preaches the strict teachings of Sergei Eisenstein in how to approach filmmaking. He doesn’t waver from asking the philosophical questions of why every scene is purposeful. In an age where every style has become acceptable, Mamet sticks to a classical approach to storytelling. This belief has impacted his filmmaking. After finishing Spartan, Val Kilmer complained that Mamet cut too many good scenes from the final cut and hoped they would appear on the DVD in either deleted scenes or a new cut. Neither happened but this hasn’t been the case for any David Mamet film. It’s not hard to guess why.
Then there is analysis of the dialogue. As for Bourne himself, Ultimatum follows a melodramatic realistic pattern. The pain and anguish Bourne feels toward the past is always on his mind. His departed girlfriend is still a subject in the third film but this sequel also adds a subplot that goes back into his past to further explain his evolution to a super spy. Numerous scenes are of Bourne at the most heartfelt a tough spy can get – sad but removed from the physical showing of pain, like a nerve has been removed in him. This pedigree the filmmakers give to the story really is nothing new. The writers write the most basic dialogue and Matt Damon speaks it in an almost monotone voice to personify Bourne. The other characters are CIA types have an even more limited range than Bourne. Their characters personify the business tone very well and the characters are written appropriately. The characters range from “good” and “bad”, but you wouldn’t tell the difference in their command. New scenarios or personal crises don’t change their tone at all. The only sense of desperation that resides in a character is with Julia Stiles’ who seems to have personal ties with Bourne and allows it to show sometimes.
In Spartan, Mamet follows the similar tonal patterns of Ultimatum, but he plays with it and adds diversity. Like I said before, some pieces of dialogue are repeated through the course of the film. But a lot of the repetition is purposeful to the characters. Take the instances of Kilmer interrogating witnesses on the field. His character will end up repeating what the suspects say to him or what other officials are communicating to him. Kilmer is doing this because he is allowing his brain to work through the tense situation by speaking his thoughts to whomever he is putting the pressure on so nothing is mis-communicated. Not only is this guiding the action, but the element of repetition of dialogue is long standing for Mamet himself. It plays into his repertoire of past characterizations. The other element of the dialogue that also speaks for Mamet is the clever and quotable dialogue. Army personnel do have a distinct style of language, but they likely do not reference Napoleon or speak in offhand philosophies the way characters in Spartan do. This is purely a fictional touch.
The final discerning observation is the identity of genre in each film. Bourne Ultimatum has enough action sequences to qualify as a thriller, but it has as just as many elements to it that are dramatic. The list goes from Greengrass applying the same film techniques he puts in his serious dramas also in the Bourne series. Another is the emotional core that the film tries to apply to Bourne’s past. As I said before, he is a character who carries his pain with him. Then another is that all the performances and characters are written to capture the likeliest portrait of real CIA agents. The Bourne films are thrillers, but are drenched in the qualities that make up a dramatic work. The problem with this coating around the story is that Jason Bourne as a character is as realistic as Jason Voorhees. He is the super spy who cannot be beat. The question isn’t whether he will be killed, but how he will kill everyone else. The greatest questions the film can ask are superficial questions about how he came to be this spy, not who he is as a person.
On the other hand Spartan is fully engulfed in the fictional world of its story. It is highly accurate in small details about the life of a Special Op, but is surrounded by a story and plot that has more to do with the creative hand of David Mamet than anything. The criticisms of its melodramatic nature at the beginning of its essay really are description of its identity. If the film tried to resemble the Bourne series with stabs at realism, none of the witty dialogue or imaginative plot twists would work. Like animation, true genre works take you into another world and enchant you with unrealistic characters within an unrealistic situation. The criticism isn’t how believable the story is, but how imaginative it is. The way Mamet is able to configure his style of writing and filmmaking to perfectly adapt to this world is commendable. David Mamet also made a film about a subject that became normal our in viewing lexicon and was able to make it wholly unique.
In appropriate manner, I’d like to use both a high and low brow reference to sum up my final point. Ten years ago, Stanley Kauffmann said there were fewer good works of entertainment being made in film than there were serious works. I’d like to think that’s because of our desire not to see the same old standard plots that look the same, but represent the permissive nature of our world today. It’s making standard genre films look and feel more dramatic works when these films should have little interest in that. Because as Hank Hill said in King of the Hill, the only thing you do with Christian Rock is not make God more likeable to teens, but rock n roll a lot worst. The Bourne series has a lot of good qualities because of the inventive action sequences, but the films aren’t doing themselves any favors by seeing Jason Bourne as a meaningful character. That just reduces other serious works.
A Dream Accomplished
The final version of Oliver Stone's Alexander
In 1914, Bernard Shaw made a grand statement by saying that the cinema was a more momentous invention than the printing press. The point he made was that the invention of the printing press did not make it a requirement for a manual labor to learn how to read. The cinema was able to appeal to both the illiterate and literate and bring the arts to someone who lived in the countryside. At the time the stage theater still operated mainly in larger cities and was considered a great pass time for the only the elites to enjoy. Now, nearly a hundred years later, the information age has given almost everyone the advantage to make the arts a part of their daily lives.
Now the situation with cinema is that great works are being shown in fewer theaters and in fewer cities. More movie studios exist and they are jam packing theaters every year with more entertainment movies. The great equalizer to this beginning stage of an elite status for art cinema has been the DVD market. Now any film released on DVD is available to everyone. It is allowing for this new format to become an important level on which to release films. One way to do so has been to release newly edited editions of previously released films. One filmmaker, Oliver Stone, has already made a career of doing this. He has edited a good percentage of the films he has done. He returns again to do this with his new edition of Alexander.
The difference this time is that Oliver Stone has done extensive editing to the film in question. Before he would merely add footage to an already in tact and structured film. Because Alexander was a financial and critical failure, the re-done version was a legitimate effort by Stone to improve the film. Stone has restructured and added over forty minutes to this new version. The film now stands at a crisp three hours and forty minutes. Stone now says that this cut is the version he imagined in his original screenplay. The differences are significant, so the feeling is that Oliver Stone has reconstructed an old film into an entirely new one.
When Alexander was released in 2004, it was the completion of a dream project for Oliver Stone. Ever since the early 1990s, Stone has always listed making a filmed version of Alexander the Great as his dream project. He said the great Macedonian ruler had always been a favorite subject of his since childhood. The dream almost became a reality a few times with Tom Cruise headlining as the famous conqueror. When the project became feasible again to be made, Stone had Heath Ledger in mind but when that fell through, had to give the reigns to Colin Farrell. Stone also got veterans of his earlier works like Anthony Hopkins and Val Kilmer to join the new cast. Angelina Jolie and Jared Leto were newcomers who were announced to the epic project.
Stone plotted the film to encompass Alexander’s entire life. It would deal with his childhood and then continue to his beginning days as king and then to his lengthy conquests in foreign lands and finally to his death. Stone didn’t tell the story strictly chronologically. The film had some back and forth between different points of his life, but the structure was simple because Stone wanted to preserve the epic nature of Alexander the Great. In interviews for the film, Stone spoke fondly of the children’s book about Alexander that he read as a child. The book reinvigorated the mythological status that Alexander the Great had acquired over the years. Alexander the Great was not a simple human leader, but a mythical hero as well. Stone tried to preserve elements of that in the film.
Stone also had a greater idea of Alexander. He couldn’t make another filmed version of Alexander the Great to just out due the one Robert Rossen made in 1956. The epic formula needed a facelift. Oliver Stone wanted to give Alexander a context that went beyond the general Hollywood affair. One of the things that Stone focused on was the homosexual relationships Alexander. Another was the role of liberator that Alexander assumed with his conquests. Historians took exception with both ideas being truly important to Alexander’s life, but the film was so dense and tried to cover so much of Alexander’s life that many people were confused about what ideas Stone really had in mind with Alexander. In interviews, Stone tried to clarify a lot, but the film was still confusing.
This was not the first time Oliver Stone made a film that was detailed with a confusing and conflicting portrait. The Doors hailed the myth of Jim Morrison but showed the absolute worst of him as he descended into an early death. Any Given Sunday was a look into the corruption of professional football but looked with reverence at the legacy of the sport. Neither of these films tried to focus on one aspect over the other. Stone detailed the portraits to create more confusion. The point was that only a serious look at either subject had to be confusing with little clarity. The difference in Alexander is not is there confusion, but there is little idea to know what ideas Oliver Stone has in mind. The Doors and Any Given Sunday balanced themselves on clear ideas and better focus.
When Alexander was released it was critically panned. Many critics said that the film was the equivalent of the terrible epic, Troy. It was understood that Stone was trying to make an art film, but they had little reserve with saying that both films were equally bad. Undeterred by the reaction, Stone took Alexander to Europe where it became an international success and he defended the film against his critics. In the United States, a new cut was made for the initial DVD release that trimmed down the story and focused it more on the action. Oliver Stone, still standing by the film, said this new cut, “the director’s cut”, would be his final cut.
When Oliver Stone did decide to come out with an extended cut that not only added over forty minutes of footage, but also would try to successfully re-structure the film, the news was good. Stone began his journey to prove that a thought provoking epic could exist and not be weighted down by a story either too large or with too many ideas. The first thing was to arrange the story to better show his personality. That meant aligning the main story together into a better structure. In the film Alexander is shown as a soft spoken, shy child who is overprotected and controlled by his mother, Olympias, but scorned by his father, King Philip. The film needed to tie the emotional problems he had as a child to the ambition he had has as ruler and conqueror of the world. The idea is not to just document his entire life, but make thought provoking drama out of it.
Stone shows the intricacies of this dilemma by stretching them as examples through out Alexander’s life. The film begins by portraying King Philip as only a brutal dictator. As a child, Alexander watches his mother raped by him in a drunken scene. This moment carries with Alexander when he conquers new lands and acts graciously to those people. He wants to be a beloved ruler instead of a hated one like his father. The film goes back and forth between the present and the past to show disgusting scenes with his father that made him rebel and how his father still followed him as a ghost during his crusade by just his recollections and the fact that many of his own soldiers had first served under King Philip and still remind Alexander of how he would have carried out his rule.
When Alexander becomes conqueror, he begins to shed light on the resentment and hatred he has for his mother. One of his ambitions with taking over the world is to bring the whole world together. As a child he was taught to disrespect Eastern worlds, but since his mother was herself considered a barbarian, he has understanding for other worlds. Thus when Alexander when is pressured to marry to protect his reign with an heir, he marries a princess of a foreign land instead of one closer to home. He feels his mother would understand but she refutes that she was ever a barbarian and actually believes that his new bride really is the barbarian and thus illegitimate for the throne. Being critical of this, Alexander interprets her as critical of his dream to bring the world together. The film does a flashback to his father telling him to be distrustful of women because they are more dangerous. That sentiment now rings true for him.
Towards the end of the film, when Alexander is at the end of the road with his army and realizing that his soldiers will not be able to carry on much longer, it seems that Alexander is beginning to be reduced to a child again. He has little understanding why his soldiers are beginning to turn against him. He shows outbursts of emotion at his soldiers and begins to lean on the shoulders of his closest allies to understand how he could be hated. When he is nearly killed during battle, he realizes the end is finally at hand. Everyone is told that they are finally going home and once again Alexander is beloved by his soldiers. On the way out, Alexander sees his father standing on a hill looking proudly at him. Alexander weeps in happiness at the sight.
The final identity of Alexander is his most telling. He was named King at only the age of twenty and also conquered the known world before the age of thirty-three. His mother Olympias told of his greatness since he was young by being the son of Zeus and destined to rise to the heights of Achilles. Stone’s idea of Alexander is that he essentially was a man-child his entire life. He never was able to grow up or be truly loved by his parents so he clung to searching for their love while rebelling against their hatred. His worst moments forced him to repeat their worst mistakes. Any film about Alexander could have focused on his adulthood as King and conqueror. Stone made the right decision by focusing on his childhood along with his adulthood to dig at the depths of Alexander as a man-child.
Oliver Stone is not trying to demote Alexander with this portrait. He is trying to deepen his identity and humanize him. The search for love is an intrinsic need we all have. The tragedy of Alexander is that he never was able to find it before he was asked to do everything. The only consistent love Alexander had in his life was his friend Hephaistion. Though the film does not show the physical evidence of a homosexual relationship, they were committed to each other as lovers would be. The circumstance of Alexander as ruler and husband for many wives kept them from truly being together. When Princess Roxane fins them both together intimately, she is outraged and questions Alexander to who he truly loves. Alexander replies, “There are many ways in which to love.”
I believe that piece of dialogue also sums up a great deal of the film. Historical figures, especially those larger than life, are not meant to be artistically interpreted. Their mythical stories are meant to be regurgitated. But artists before have taken mythical figures and humanized them in a way to make people re-think their general idea of greatness. When Shaw wrote Caesar and Cleopatra, he made Julius Caesar not to be a man, but “part brute, part woman, and part god.” The play destroyed myth and gave new ideas for Caesar’s greatness. Now during a time when it is controversial to assert masculine bravery with homosexuality, Oliver Stone gives us an Alexander the Great who fell in love with the person that stood by him his entire life. The way it is done does not suggest historical inaccuracy, but allows for artistic touch to interpret a relationship in a new way to give it a modern meaning.
The film encompasses Alexander in the greatest light. It gives a thorough rendering of his personality that ties his most crucial relationships and personality complexes to the political ambitions he had as a ruler. This is not the first time that Stone had tried such an ambitious perspective. With JFK, Stone offered a dissection of the assassination of John F. Kennedy from every idea of conspiracy. The film grasped the unease the country went through when so many questions were left unanswered. In Nixon, Stone made his largest epic. The controversial President was seen through the lens of a tragedy and his entire political and personal life was the focus. The film was over three hours and a critical success, but left many audiences feeling cold. The film was more in debt to political ideas than the usual biography film. The fine touch of detail of the film was so precise it sometimes felt only a scholar could appreciate it.
The story of Alexander to his political interest is a better mesh in making a biographical work. Alexander believed that the world could become whole and that Macedonia was not the center of the world. He believed there were traditions in the Eastern worlds that were far older than theirs and had to be respected. The film platform is that Alexander wanted to bring the world together for the better. It is a good sentiment, but the film is also rooted in old theory because it also insinuates the world should be ruled by one ruler. No one will take this idea serious now, but the main point is that a story about Alexander meshes better with his political ideals because they were not rooted in dense political theory. They were rooted in the beliefs of man and personal greatness. All are attributes to his personal life. It makes for more organic drama. The film Nixon has a hard time accruing all the political decisions he made to the man he was. A film only about his political history couldn’t have been done. It is a very complicated history. But Oliver Stone perfectly meshes the personality of Alexander to meet the political.
This isn’t to say Oliver Stone has finally made his masterwork. Nixon is too well made to be dethroned just yet, but Stone has made an unexpected great film in Alexander. I think he wanted to be kind to the theatrical audience with his first cut and paid dearly because the subject required a much bigger canvas. Alexander Revisited clears up all the mistakes of the previous cuts and should be seen. The problem is that Stone is asking for the public to re-think a film that is being premiered again on DVD. No other film has had such a re-release and succeeded to be acknowledged to its proper dues. Many online sites are already boasting that this version is by far the best version. I don’t know if this film will get across to the public. The subject and the length may just be too much.
In 1914, Bernard Shaw made a grand statement by saying that the cinema was a more momentous invention than the printing press. The point he made was that the invention of the printing press did not make it a requirement for a manual labor to learn how to read. The cinema was able to appeal to both the illiterate and literate and bring the arts to someone who lived in the countryside. At the time the stage theater still operated mainly in larger cities and was considered a great pass time for the only the elites to enjoy. Now, nearly a hundred years later, the information age has given almost everyone the advantage to make the arts a part of their daily lives.
Now the situation with cinema is that great works are being shown in fewer theaters and in fewer cities. More movie studios exist and they are jam packing theaters every year with more entertainment movies. The great equalizer to this beginning stage of an elite status for art cinema has been the DVD market. Now any film released on DVD is available to everyone. It is allowing for this new format to become an important level on which to release films. One way to do so has been to release newly edited editions of previously released films. One filmmaker, Oliver Stone, has already made a career of doing this. He has edited a good percentage of the films he has done. He returns again to do this with his new edition of Alexander.
The difference this time is that Oliver Stone has done extensive editing to the film in question. Before he would merely add footage to an already in tact and structured film. Because Alexander was a financial and critical failure, the re-done version was a legitimate effort by Stone to improve the film. Stone has restructured and added over forty minutes to this new version. The film now stands at a crisp three hours and forty minutes. Stone now says that this cut is the version he imagined in his original screenplay. The differences are significant, so the feeling is that Oliver Stone has reconstructed an old film into an entirely new one.
When Alexander was released in 2004, it was the completion of a dream project for Oliver Stone. Ever since the early 1990s, Stone has always listed making a filmed version of Alexander the Great as his dream project. He said the great Macedonian ruler had always been a favorite subject of his since childhood. The dream almost became a reality a few times with Tom Cruise headlining as the famous conqueror. When the project became feasible again to be made, Stone had Heath Ledger in mind but when that fell through, had to give the reigns to Colin Farrell. Stone also got veterans of his earlier works like Anthony Hopkins and Val Kilmer to join the new cast. Angelina Jolie and Jared Leto were newcomers who were announced to the epic project.
Stone plotted the film to encompass Alexander’s entire life. It would deal with his childhood and then continue to his beginning days as king and then to his lengthy conquests in foreign lands and finally to his death. Stone didn’t tell the story strictly chronologically. The film had some back and forth between different points of his life, but the structure was simple because Stone wanted to preserve the epic nature of Alexander the Great. In interviews for the film, Stone spoke fondly of the children’s book about Alexander that he read as a child. The book reinvigorated the mythological status that Alexander the Great had acquired over the years. Alexander the Great was not a simple human leader, but a mythical hero as well. Stone tried to preserve elements of that in the film.
Stone also had a greater idea of Alexander. He couldn’t make another filmed version of Alexander the Great to just out due the one Robert Rossen made in 1956. The epic formula needed a facelift. Oliver Stone wanted to give Alexander a context that went beyond the general Hollywood affair. One of the things that Stone focused on was the homosexual relationships Alexander. Another was the role of liberator that Alexander assumed with his conquests. Historians took exception with both ideas being truly important to Alexander’s life, but the film was so dense and tried to cover so much of Alexander’s life that many people were confused about what ideas Stone really had in mind with Alexander. In interviews, Stone tried to clarify a lot, but the film was still confusing.
This was not the first time Oliver Stone made a film that was detailed with a confusing and conflicting portrait. The Doors hailed the myth of Jim Morrison but showed the absolute worst of him as he descended into an early death. Any Given Sunday was a look into the corruption of professional football but looked with reverence at the legacy of the sport. Neither of these films tried to focus on one aspect over the other. Stone detailed the portraits to create more confusion. The point was that only a serious look at either subject had to be confusing with little clarity. The difference in Alexander is not is there confusion, but there is little idea to know what ideas Oliver Stone has in mind. The Doors and Any Given Sunday balanced themselves on clear ideas and better focus.
When Alexander was released it was critically panned. Many critics said that the film was the equivalent of the terrible epic, Troy. It was understood that Stone was trying to make an art film, but they had little reserve with saying that both films were equally bad. Undeterred by the reaction, Stone took Alexander to Europe where it became an international success and he defended the film against his critics. In the United States, a new cut was made for the initial DVD release that trimmed down the story and focused it more on the action. Oliver Stone, still standing by the film, said this new cut, “the director’s cut”, would be his final cut.
When Oliver Stone did decide to come out with an extended cut that not only added over forty minutes of footage, but also would try to successfully re-structure the film, the news was good. Stone began his journey to prove that a thought provoking epic could exist and not be weighted down by a story either too large or with too many ideas. The first thing was to arrange the story to better show his personality. That meant aligning the main story together into a better structure. In the film Alexander is shown as a soft spoken, shy child who is overprotected and controlled by his mother, Olympias, but scorned by his father, King Philip. The film needed to tie the emotional problems he had as a child to the ambition he had has as ruler and conqueror of the world. The idea is not to just document his entire life, but make thought provoking drama out of it.
Stone shows the intricacies of this dilemma by stretching them as examples through out Alexander’s life. The film begins by portraying King Philip as only a brutal dictator. As a child, Alexander watches his mother raped by him in a drunken scene. This moment carries with Alexander when he conquers new lands and acts graciously to those people. He wants to be a beloved ruler instead of a hated one like his father. The film goes back and forth between the present and the past to show disgusting scenes with his father that made him rebel and how his father still followed him as a ghost during his crusade by just his recollections and the fact that many of his own soldiers had first served under King Philip and still remind Alexander of how he would have carried out his rule.
When Alexander becomes conqueror, he begins to shed light on the resentment and hatred he has for his mother. One of his ambitions with taking over the world is to bring the whole world together. As a child he was taught to disrespect Eastern worlds, but since his mother was herself considered a barbarian, he has understanding for other worlds. Thus when Alexander when is pressured to marry to protect his reign with an heir, he marries a princess of a foreign land instead of one closer to home. He feels his mother would understand but she refutes that she was ever a barbarian and actually believes that his new bride really is the barbarian and thus illegitimate for the throne. Being critical of this, Alexander interprets her as critical of his dream to bring the world together. The film does a flashback to his father telling him to be distrustful of women because they are more dangerous. That sentiment now rings true for him.
Towards the end of the film, when Alexander is at the end of the road with his army and realizing that his soldiers will not be able to carry on much longer, it seems that Alexander is beginning to be reduced to a child again. He has little understanding why his soldiers are beginning to turn against him. He shows outbursts of emotion at his soldiers and begins to lean on the shoulders of his closest allies to understand how he could be hated. When he is nearly killed during battle, he realizes the end is finally at hand. Everyone is told that they are finally going home and once again Alexander is beloved by his soldiers. On the way out, Alexander sees his father standing on a hill looking proudly at him. Alexander weeps in happiness at the sight.
The final identity of Alexander is his most telling. He was named King at only the age of twenty and also conquered the known world before the age of thirty-three. His mother Olympias told of his greatness since he was young by being the son of Zeus and destined to rise to the heights of Achilles. Stone’s idea of Alexander is that he essentially was a man-child his entire life. He never was able to grow up or be truly loved by his parents so he clung to searching for their love while rebelling against their hatred. His worst moments forced him to repeat their worst mistakes. Any film about Alexander could have focused on his adulthood as King and conqueror. Stone made the right decision by focusing on his childhood along with his adulthood to dig at the depths of Alexander as a man-child.
Oliver Stone is not trying to demote Alexander with this portrait. He is trying to deepen his identity and humanize him. The search for love is an intrinsic need we all have. The tragedy of Alexander is that he never was able to find it before he was asked to do everything. The only consistent love Alexander had in his life was his friend Hephaistion. Though the film does not show the physical evidence of a homosexual relationship, they were committed to each other as lovers would be. The circumstance of Alexander as ruler and husband for many wives kept them from truly being together. When Princess Roxane fins them both together intimately, she is outraged and questions Alexander to who he truly loves. Alexander replies, “There are many ways in which to love.”
I believe that piece of dialogue also sums up a great deal of the film. Historical figures, especially those larger than life, are not meant to be artistically interpreted. Their mythical stories are meant to be regurgitated. But artists before have taken mythical figures and humanized them in a way to make people re-think their general idea of greatness. When Shaw wrote Caesar and Cleopatra, he made Julius Caesar not to be a man, but “part brute, part woman, and part god.” The play destroyed myth and gave new ideas for Caesar’s greatness. Now during a time when it is controversial to assert masculine bravery with homosexuality, Oliver Stone gives us an Alexander the Great who fell in love with the person that stood by him his entire life. The way it is done does not suggest historical inaccuracy, but allows for artistic touch to interpret a relationship in a new way to give it a modern meaning.
The film encompasses Alexander in the greatest light. It gives a thorough rendering of his personality that ties his most crucial relationships and personality complexes to the political ambitions he had as a ruler. This is not the first time that Stone had tried such an ambitious perspective. With JFK, Stone offered a dissection of the assassination of John F. Kennedy from every idea of conspiracy. The film grasped the unease the country went through when so many questions were left unanswered. In Nixon, Stone made his largest epic. The controversial President was seen through the lens of a tragedy and his entire political and personal life was the focus. The film was over three hours and a critical success, but left many audiences feeling cold. The film was more in debt to political ideas than the usual biography film. The fine touch of detail of the film was so precise it sometimes felt only a scholar could appreciate it.
The story of Alexander to his political interest is a better mesh in making a biographical work. Alexander believed that the world could become whole and that Macedonia was not the center of the world. He believed there were traditions in the Eastern worlds that were far older than theirs and had to be respected. The film platform is that Alexander wanted to bring the world together for the better. It is a good sentiment, but the film is also rooted in old theory because it also insinuates the world should be ruled by one ruler. No one will take this idea serious now, but the main point is that a story about Alexander meshes better with his political ideals because they were not rooted in dense political theory. They were rooted in the beliefs of man and personal greatness. All are attributes to his personal life. It makes for more organic drama. The film Nixon has a hard time accruing all the political decisions he made to the man he was. A film only about his political history couldn’t have been done. It is a very complicated history. But Oliver Stone perfectly meshes the personality of Alexander to meet the political.
This isn’t to say Oliver Stone has finally made his masterwork. Nixon is too well made to be dethroned just yet, but Stone has made an unexpected great film in Alexander. I think he wanted to be kind to the theatrical audience with his first cut and paid dearly because the subject required a much bigger canvas. Alexander Revisited clears up all the mistakes of the previous cuts and should be seen. The problem is that Stone is asking for the public to re-think a film that is being premiered again on DVD. No other film has had such a re-release and succeeded to be acknowledged to its proper dues. Many online sites are already boasting that this version is by far the best version. I don’t know if this film will get across to the public. The subject and the length may just be too much.
Pure Emotions
Another Look at Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique
The best thing about a one hundred year plus history in cinema is that there have become many kinds of great films. Years ago, the discourse on great filmmaking was limited to Hollywood and the few areas around the world that challenged Hollywood with their own ideas and brands of filmmaking. As film developed into an art, the term “cinematic” came to include many ideas and theories. All sorts of different philosophies and structures were being seen around the world, from new film languages in L’Avventura to the advent of films of essay subjects, like in Hitler, A Film From Germany. When Krzysztof Kieslowski made The Double Life of Veronique, he made an ambitious work in the nature of metaphysics. The result was a personal film that challenged conventions and introduced new ideas into film art.
Even today, The Double Life of Veronique stands out as the most unique and ambiguous film for Krzysztof Kieslowski. It is the mysterious story of seemingly two women, one in Poland and the other in France, and how both share connections and similarities so intimate that they seem to be connected with each other. When one dies, the other feels grief so foreign and strong that she no idea what to make of it. The grief though gives her an innate understanding to take measures to prevent the death that was caused in the other. Towards the end the woman in France, Veronique, discovers a picture of a woman resembling herself and is captivated by the possibilities of what it means. It leads her focus on the metaphysical possibilities around her.
Before the film was made, the project was considered an alien one for Kieslowski. Having made his stamp in Polish cinema first with short documentaries that extended back to the 1960s with his days at the Lodz Film School, he became the face of Polish cinema during the mid 70s and the 80s with films like The Scar and Camera Buff that explored personal despair in the Poland. Even films like No End had political implications that went back to his documentary period. But in his fiction he was beginning to explore the subject and themes that would predate The Double Life of Veronique. Kieslowski was making personal films that focused on the place of blind chance and fate. Blind Chance epitomized its title while The Decalogue looked at the place of fate in real life as guided by the moral messages of the Ten Commandments.
The similarities that these films had to other Polish works that they were made on modest subjects and dealt with bleak themes. The difference is that Kieslowski was beginning to edge out an interest in his subjects that made him unique. Having come from a constricted the world that was under the reign of the Soviet Union, he didn’t simply turn to the social and political like many other filmmakers. He saw other avenues to focus on to bridge the gaps in life. As he stated in an interview, “There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all…. Feelings are what link people together, because the word `love' has the same meaning for everybody. Or `fear', or `suffering'. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way.” This belief sounds simple, but it was also the only way he was able to make the drastic jump to the very different film, The Double Life of Veronique.
When Krzysztof Kieslowski made The Double Life of Veronique, he made his first film that included an international cast as well as an international production. But the film was not a clear leave of Poland. Half of the production was situated in Poland and the other half was in France. The film had hallmarks of Kieslowski’s past and showed the future he was going to begin stepping into. The first part (set in Poland) of the story deals with Weronika. She is the exact duplicate of Veronique in France, but dies tragically in a concert. Before she does, Kieslowski implemented aspects of Polish life and his old filmmaking realism to get Poland to stand out. In one scene, Veronika is caught in the midst of a street protest and then another scene shows the transportation of a statue of Vladimir Lenin. These are cues to tie in Kieslowski’s past filmography with all the elements that it makes his new material for him.
But for Kieslowski, the major thrust of his work in The Double Life of Veronique is what he was able to do with an international production that allowed him to use the best equipment around the world. He made a film that was able excel in cinematography and have a lavish look and feel that idealizes the world instead of showing it at its gritty core. This evolution to large production had little to do with greater financial opportunity, but feelings based on an aesthetic choice. I get a similar feeling in his decision with the one that filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni made in transitioning from black and white to color. They didn’t do it at their first opportunity, but only when they wanted to tackle the aesthetic responsibility of filming in color. As Roger Ebert said about Federico Fellini with Juliet of the Spirits, “It is the work of a director who has cut loose from the realism of his early work and is toying with the images, situations and obsessions that delight him.” When Fellini entered his Fellini-esque stage, he needed the backdrop of colors and a bigger budget to fulfill his fantasies on screen.
Kieslowski’s switch to sophisticated production allowed him to use production to give a more rounded approach to conveying the themes in his film. As he once said, “It’s a film about emotions and nothing else.” Kieslowski, because of that, layers his film with colors and textures and a plot to emphasize the emotions in the story. The scenes play like meditations. Colors and music inhabit scenes. There is little standard drama, but moments of their lives that play to greater meaning because of the force that the colors and music play into the characterization. The end result of the texture of the scenes is a film that is not balanced on a typical approach but instead has closer relationship to avant-garde. The small moments make up the film. Every shade of color and texture is not just a setting of the scene, but a forwarding of ideas.
The push into the avant-garde is detailed in the story. Both Veronique and Veronika are singers. Music is at the heart of their passion and singing becomes the demise for the latter. Instead of Kieslowski filming to capture music as background, he uses it through out the film to dig at the emotions. As Annette Insdorf commented, “The choral music during the credits turn out to be sung by Veronika in the rainy street. But Preisner’s melodies continue like magical aural strings between the two women, invoking invisible forces at work.” Kieslowski did a similar thing in Blue by focusing on Juliette Binoche’s character through her deceased husband’s music that continued to haunt her after a tragic accident.
While the audience is aware of the connections between Veronique and Veronika, the problem is that Veronique doesn’t know. She unknowingly grieves for Veronika’s death, but doesn’t know what it means. So the film introduces a character to make Veronique more aware of her surroundings. It is in a puppeteer named Alexandre. Veronique becomes aware of him at one of his performances. She becomes entranced by the performance and by him. The texture of his face in a mirror off to the side and the music surrounding the performance enthrall her. It becomes her initial scene to become interested in him. The scene has little correlation to offer an explanation why there is romantic interest, but Veronique’s intense focus on him and his performance links her character very emotionally to him in a way that the audience can understand.
Kieslowski explained the reason of using a puppeteer is because he felt he needed something delicate as well as mysterious. The character fits because his presence is never over stated and his art allows for an emotional connection. When it becomes evident that there is interest between both characters for one another, Alexandre challenges Veronique’s attention by sending her mysterious items, like a string in the mail or playing her music over the phone but never identifying himself. The audience knows the string is personal to Veronika because in an earlier scene she was playing with it while auditioning. Veronique then looks to a similar string in her apartment that is also attached to music sheets. The music is obviously personal to both of them because it relates back to their singing.
The floodgates open between the world of the metaphysical when Alexandre and discovers a picture of Veronika in her collection of photographs. First, he assumes it is really her, but Veronique attests to the fact it isn’t her, but her emotions can’t help but become overwhelmed to all the possibilities of what it could mean. The purpose of Alexandre finally becomes clear. As Kieslowski explains, “Alexandre’s made [Veronique] aware that something else exists, that the other Veronika did exist…He’s the one who noticed, and perhaps he understood what she couldn’t understand herself.” The rest of the story shows how Alexandre weaves Veronique’s life into his art, but his initial purpose in the plot is that he is the one who begins to make her think with all her senses. The example is clear with how they finally meet in a café. It is done by him sending her a cassette of the surrounding noises and hoping she was able to use the clues in the recording to track down his whereabouts. It was a scene that had little to do with anything, but made obvious what level the focus of the film was on.
In one way, The Double Life of Veronique plays into the classical sense of metaphysics as defined by Aristotle. It gives a rendering of the fundamental nature of reality that says in every person there is a second life being lived elsewhere that keeps them from being alone. Because Aristotle did not define metaphysics by a specific religious doctrine, the film is able to be true to Aristotle’s word and yet be a purely emotional work that exists on a more spiritual level instead of a religious one. The film isn’t entirely devoid of themes and issues that were in Kieslowski’s earlier works, but it delves into metaphysics with a visual and feeling that is unlike anything Kieslowski had done before.
Outside of the unique place the film stands in Kieslowski’s filmography, it is also a rare film that expands the bounds of film art. One of the major literary movements of the last hundred years has been the metafiction movement. Now it has a million different interpretations and ideas, but a general idea has been about the place of the author to the text. Patricia Waugh identified the main staple as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.” This has been apparent in all major works ranging from James Joyce to Kurt Vonnegaut.
What is unique about Double Life of Veronique isn’t that the film just relates back to its superficiality. All filmmakers who have taken on a style in any form have also done this. Style is the ambition to ditch just telling a story and instead making the audience aware that a creator is at the helm of the film they are watching. The difference in this film is that Double Life makes it reference deeply within the story. At the end, when Alexandre tells Veronique he has written a book seemingly about her life called, “The Double Life…” he has implied that he really could be the author and acting as the role of Kieslowski within the story. Kieslowski never implied this idea in interviews himself, but he clearly did say, “I don’t film metaphors. People only read them as metaphors, which is very good. That’s what I want. I always want to stir people to something.”
People have all different ways to weigh the value of techniques in a story. But there is no doubt that the focus on style before content has oppressed film history for too long. Filmmakers are still authors rated higher on their style than the depths of their storytelling. The Double Life of Veronique began as a film that was crowded between two major works for Kieslowski, but the depths the film reaches on an internal level has made it an important work. The challenge is that maybe films of this style and philosophical level can start to become influential in major studies. The film world is still dominated by the novice ideas of a world that created the “auteur” and celebrated it as the heights of cinema.
The best thing about a one hundred year plus history in cinema is that there have become many kinds of great films. Years ago, the discourse on great filmmaking was limited to Hollywood and the few areas around the world that challenged Hollywood with their own ideas and brands of filmmaking. As film developed into an art, the term “cinematic” came to include many ideas and theories. All sorts of different philosophies and structures were being seen around the world, from new film languages in L’Avventura to the advent of films of essay subjects, like in Hitler, A Film From Germany. When Krzysztof Kieslowski made The Double Life of Veronique, he made an ambitious work in the nature of metaphysics. The result was a personal film that challenged conventions and introduced new ideas into film art.
Even today, The Double Life of Veronique stands out as the most unique and ambiguous film for Krzysztof Kieslowski. It is the mysterious story of seemingly two women, one in Poland and the other in France, and how both share connections and similarities so intimate that they seem to be connected with each other. When one dies, the other feels grief so foreign and strong that she no idea what to make of it. The grief though gives her an innate understanding to take measures to prevent the death that was caused in the other. Towards the end the woman in France, Veronique, discovers a picture of a woman resembling herself and is captivated by the possibilities of what it means. It leads her focus on the metaphysical possibilities around her.
Before the film was made, the project was considered an alien one for Kieslowski. Having made his stamp in Polish cinema first with short documentaries that extended back to the 1960s with his days at the Lodz Film School, he became the face of Polish cinema during the mid 70s and the 80s with films like The Scar and Camera Buff that explored personal despair in the Poland. Even films like No End had political implications that went back to his documentary period. But in his fiction he was beginning to explore the subject and themes that would predate The Double Life of Veronique. Kieslowski was making personal films that focused on the place of blind chance and fate. Blind Chance epitomized its title while The Decalogue looked at the place of fate in real life as guided by the moral messages of the Ten Commandments.
The similarities that these films had to other Polish works that they were made on modest subjects and dealt with bleak themes. The difference is that Kieslowski was beginning to edge out an interest in his subjects that made him unique. Having come from a constricted the world that was under the reign of the Soviet Union, he didn’t simply turn to the social and political like many other filmmakers. He saw other avenues to focus on to bridge the gaps in life. As he stated in an interview, “There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all…. Feelings are what link people together, because the word `love' has the same meaning for everybody. Or `fear', or `suffering'. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way.” This belief sounds simple, but it was also the only way he was able to make the drastic jump to the very different film, The Double Life of Veronique.
When Krzysztof Kieslowski made The Double Life of Veronique, he made his first film that included an international cast as well as an international production. But the film was not a clear leave of Poland. Half of the production was situated in Poland and the other half was in France. The film had hallmarks of Kieslowski’s past and showed the future he was going to begin stepping into. The first part (set in Poland) of the story deals with Weronika. She is the exact duplicate of Veronique in France, but dies tragically in a concert. Before she does, Kieslowski implemented aspects of Polish life and his old filmmaking realism to get Poland to stand out. In one scene, Veronika is caught in the midst of a street protest and then another scene shows the transportation of a statue of Vladimir Lenin. These are cues to tie in Kieslowski’s past filmography with all the elements that it makes his new material for him.
But for Kieslowski, the major thrust of his work in The Double Life of Veronique is what he was able to do with an international production that allowed him to use the best equipment around the world. He made a film that was able excel in cinematography and have a lavish look and feel that idealizes the world instead of showing it at its gritty core. This evolution to large production had little to do with greater financial opportunity, but feelings based on an aesthetic choice. I get a similar feeling in his decision with the one that filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni made in transitioning from black and white to color. They didn’t do it at their first opportunity, but only when they wanted to tackle the aesthetic responsibility of filming in color. As Roger Ebert said about Federico Fellini with Juliet of the Spirits, “It is the work of a director who has cut loose from the realism of his early work and is toying with the images, situations and obsessions that delight him.” When Fellini entered his Fellini-esque stage, he needed the backdrop of colors and a bigger budget to fulfill his fantasies on screen.
Kieslowski’s switch to sophisticated production allowed him to use production to give a more rounded approach to conveying the themes in his film. As he once said, “It’s a film about emotions and nothing else.” Kieslowski, because of that, layers his film with colors and textures and a plot to emphasize the emotions in the story. The scenes play like meditations. Colors and music inhabit scenes. There is little standard drama, but moments of their lives that play to greater meaning because of the force that the colors and music play into the characterization. The end result of the texture of the scenes is a film that is not balanced on a typical approach but instead has closer relationship to avant-garde. The small moments make up the film. Every shade of color and texture is not just a setting of the scene, but a forwarding of ideas.
The push into the avant-garde is detailed in the story. Both Veronique and Veronika are singers. Music is at the heart of their passion and singing becomes the demise for the latter. Instead of Kieslowski filming to capture music as background, he uses it through out the film to dig at the emotions. As Annette Insdorf commented, “The choral music during the credits turn out to be sung by Veronika in the rainy street. But Preisner’s melodies continue like magical aural strings between the two women, invoking invisible forces at work.” Kieslowski did a similar thing in Blue by focusing on Juliette Binoche’s character through her deceased husband’s music that continued to haunt her after a tragic accident.
While the audience is aware of the connections between Veronique and Veronika, the problem is that Veronique doesn’t know. She unknowingly grieves for Veronika’s death, but doesn’t know what it means. So the film introduces a character to make Veronique more aware of her surroundings. It is in a puppeteer named Alexandre. Veronique becomes aware of him at one of his performances. She becomes entranced by the performance and by him. The texture of his face in a mirror off to the side and the music surrounding the performance enthrall her. It becomes her initial scene to become interested in him. The scene has little correlation to offer an explanation why there is romantic interest, but Veronique’s intense focus on him and his performance links her character very emotionally to him in a way that the audience can understand.
Kieslowski explained the reason of using a puppeteer is because he felt he needed something delicate as well as mysterious. The character fits because his presence is never over stated and his art allows for an emotional connection. When it becomes evident that there is interest between both characters for one another, Alexandre challenges Veronique’s attention by sending her mysterious items, like a string in the mail or playing her music over the phone but never identifying himself. The audience knows the string is personal to Veronika because in an earlier scene she was playing with it while auditioning. Veronique then looks to a similar string in her apartment that is also attached to music sheets. The music is obviously personal to both of them because it relates back to their singing.
The floodgates open between the world of the metaphysical when Alexandre and discovers a picture of Veronika in her collection of photographs. First, he assumes it is really her, but Veronique attests to the fact it isn’t her, but her emotions can’t help but become overwhelmed to all the possibilities of what it could mean. The purpose of Alexandre finally becomes clear. As Kieslowski explains, “Alexandre’s made [Veronique] aware that something else exists, that the other Veronika did exist…He’s the one who noticed, and perhaps he understood what she couldn’t understand herself.” The rest of the story shows how Alexandre weaves Veronique’s life into his art, but his initial purpose in the plot is that he is the one who begins to make her think with all her senses. The example is clear with how they finally meet in a café. It is done by him sending her a cassette of the surrounding noises and hoping she was able to use the clues in the recording to track down his whereabouts. It was a scene that had little to do with anything, but made obvious what level the focus of the film was on.
In one way, The Double Life of Veronique plays into the classical sense of metaphysics as defined by Aristotle. It gives a rendering of the fundamental nature of reality that says in every person there is a second life being lived elsewhere that keeps them from being alone. Because Aristotle did not define metaphysics by a specific religious doctrine, the film is able to be true to Aristotle’s word and yet be a purely emotional work that exists on a more spiritual level instead of a religious one. The film isn’t entirely devoid of themes and issues that were in Kieslowski’s earlier works, but it delves into metaphysics with a visual and feeling that is unlike anything Kieslowski had done before.
Outside of the unique place the film stands in Kieslowski’s filmography, it is also a rare film that expands the bounds of film art. One of the major literary movements of the last hundred years has been the metafiction movement. Now it has a million different interpretations and ideas, but a general idea has been about the place of the author to the text. Patricia Waugh identified the main staple as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.” This has been apparent in all major works ranging from James Joyce to Kurt Vonnegaut.
What is unique about Double Life of Veronique isn’t that the film just relates back to its superficiality. All filmmakers who have taken on a style in any form have also done this. Style is the ambition to ditch just telling a story and instead making the audience aware that a creator is at the helm of the film they are watching. The difference in this film is that Double Life makes it reference deeply within the story. At the end, when Alexandre tells Veronique he has written a book seemingly about her life called, “The Double Life…” he has implied that he really could be the author and acting as the role of Kieslowski within the story. Kieslowski never implied this idea in interviews himself, but he clearly did say, “I don’t film metaphors. People only read them as metaphors, which is very good. That’s what I want. I always want to stir people to something.”
People have all different ways to weigh the value of techniques in a story. But there is no doubt that the focus on style before content has oppressed film history for too long. Filmmakers are still authors rated higher on their style than the depths of their storytelling. The Double Life of Veronique began as a film that was crowded between two major works for Kieslowski, but the depths the film reaches on an internal level has made it an important work. The challenge is that maybe films of this style and philosophical level can start to become influential in major studies. The film world is still dominated by the novice ideas of a world that created the “auteur” and celebrated it as the heights of cinema.
An Unexpected Christian Film
Notes on Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center
The general (plus biographical)
Oliver Stone has created a memorial for 9/11. After months of speculation that the director would politicize the event of our time, the sobering truth is that his new film is instead endeared to the everyman of those attacks. World Trade Center is a return to grace for Stone who - back in 1987 - won the academy award for his personal experiences in Vietnam with Platoon (1986). World Trade Center documents the story of two Port Authority Officers who were trapped in the rubble of Trade Towers once they collapsed. The film cares very little about the questions that 9/11 has asked; rather, it attempts to dig at the unexpected self that so many found that day.
World Trade Center is a history lesson for Oliver Stone. When Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and even JFK (1991) were made, they were made out of his experience of the Vietnam War. The first two films were direct biographical accounts from Vietnam. JFK was philosophical of the fact that the war never would have been if Kennedy wasn't assassinated by the powers for war in Washington. The majority of the films Stone has made have been made out of conviction. World Trade Center digs at one of his oldest convictions.
Before he was a filmmaker, he was a Catholic school teacher. Stone later renounced the faith but dug at signs of Christ in the autobiographical Platoon. The shot of William Defoe reaching his hands up toward the sky before his death is dramatized as martyrdom for all that was given up by the men who went through that war. Signs of Christendom also run throughout World Trade Center. Stone's former belief, Catholicism, is the only major Christian religion that can make saints out of regular individuals. Not only does Catholicism enshrine individual human beings but, as George Bernard Shaw wrote in his essays and plays, it makes saints kneel before those who have performed generous acts of goodwill. In WTC, it is Oliver Stone, the non-believer, who is kneeling for all the men and women who showed goodwill on September 11th. Many people that day found a courage that was unexpected; it could be asked whether Oliver Stone too hasn't rediscovered a portion of his old faith.
The major concern with World Trade Center is how personal the film allows itself to be. When Stone made Platoon in 1986, the controversy of Vietnam was still existent but the war was over a decade old. Stone was also telling his own story and operating under the knowledge that he could never explain the war. Many films about Vietnam had already tried. The attacks of the September 11th are only five years old and a very fresh topic in the movie world. Stone knew the film would be scrutinized from every possible side for what position it took on the attacks, and he does play to appease those who might see any political ideology. In the movie, characters assess the importance of bravery and courage and offer large talk that tries to wrap itself protectively around the attacks. This distances the film from the personal experience it tries to be.
Though this is still a rewarding experience for an artist who continues to grow, the expectations, in the end, were too large. The on-going controversy of 9/11 asks that all those who insist on giving comment be wary of the consequences. Oliver Stone, perhaps still bruised by the failure of Alexander (2004), does seem ultimately to have caved in a little bit.
The details
Unlike any Oliver Stone film before, World Trade Center has an inkling of melodrama. The two officers trapped in the rubble deal with the situation of life or death while their families deal with the possibility of losing a family member. Because the portraits extend only to the hours after the attack, the depth of the emotions are limited, since the characters are only dealing with the shock and numb of the event. The emotions overlap because all the stories involve similar situations; they then become sentimentalized because they deal with our most intrinsic fears and worries. The panic of potentially losing your wife or husband has a place of depth. It's just that real-time coverage of it has the potential to cross over into dramatics that is redundant.
The film aches to find depth in the story of the two couples. Nicholas Cage plays a weathered police sergeant who knows he always has to be strong to keep his department going. Maria Bello has a similar façade to her life in order to keep their household going. Their story develops to tear away outer shells and reveal the depths of how much they mean to each other. Scenes of better times play through Nicolas Cage's brain. The sense of grief hits Cage when he realizes all that will now be lost with this unlivable situation. He comes to breaking point when he realizes the greater thing he has to fight for to survive.
While Cage's story has some semblance of a self-contained story, Michael Pena's is another matter. He is the other officer trapped in the rubble and has a brand new family to worry about. The only story arc this young couple has (the wife being played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) is who should name their soon-to-be-born daughter. No scene of their interacting before the attack rises above a cliché of happiness and an ideal relationship. The scenes mainly show simply the couple together in bed. A few years ago, In America (2003) gained critical success even though it contained scarcely a scene that rose above the equivalent of such home-movie dramatics. The same superficiality of emotion plays out here.
The emotional center of World Trade Center runs counter to the other film released this year about the events of 9/11, United 93 (2006). Without a doubt, United 93 is an intense experience. The feeling of deep mortality plagues our perception of all its characters, and the hyperbolic filmmaking only charges the ride to be more intense. The problem though is that the hyperbolic filmmaking is the only thing that stands out in that film; the rest is an experiment in realism that gives little comment about that day, and rests the story upon no higher meaning. The rationalization for the hyperbolic filmmaking is that it raises the mundane story above its limitations to become a greater experience. It does become a more memorable experience, but as the critic Parker Tyler once said, "It's not how you film a shot that matters, but what shot you film."
Stone here takes a hands-on approach to the filmmaking. The distance of the camera is never pronounced with an aesthetic distance. New scenes and locations get very little introduction. The camera quickly goes straight into the foreground action and maintains a tight focus on the faces of the characters. Even during a scene involving many characters, the camera barely resides in the background for coverage. The main consistent stylistic note is this focus on the faces. The camera also improvises with the action. Stone has been known to make subdued films, like Nixon (1995) and Heaven and Earth (1993). The difference is that those films have a greater focus on composition. World Trade Center, with its method of constant shifting from hand-held to steadicam, could be interpreted as Stone simply using a combination of all his filmmaking skills. The themes of the film, however, suggest a larger reasoning.
The career of Ingmar Bergman should be noted here. When he was doing work in the late 50s, he was working with subjects and styles that he would lose by the 60s, when his chamber dramas and the subject of the 'absence of God' took over. In Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Seventh Seal (1957), Bergman was a filmmaker developing his skills for the camera focusing on the face. He also was using religious symbolism. Many hold to the belief that Bergman was merely transitioning in his style during this period, and perhaps this is true, but Wild Strawberries is also filmed with a momentum and a successful focus on action. It brings a punch to the major symbolic scenes in the film. Because the film is not as formal as other Bergman works, the symbolic moments are able to ring true and have a deeper connection to the characters. The film is highly connected to the psyche of the protagonist.
World Trade Center adopts a similar loose style. The film plays out as an adaptation of real events but then will utilize symbolism that comes out of nowhere. Certain moments are overt (the vision of Christ) and others aren't (Cage being lifted out of the rubble which transcends to a tomb). Both moments are rooted in theme and story. This new style is a small feather in the cap in the ever expanding filmic capabilities of Oliver Stone, but an achievement nonetheless.
The largest accomplishment in the filmmaking here comes in a unique area. In World Trade Center, there are two parts that act as indirect prologues and epilogues. After Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena are introduced, then so is New York City. Stone dedicates a series of stills that range from shots of unrecognizable streets at dusk to larger shots of recognizable skyscrapers and then finally shots of New York City as a whole. The epilogue features similar shots but this time it is of New York City filled with the debris from 9/11. All the stills are varied but all are excellent.
The beginning stills, of unrecognizable streets, play with color objectives. In 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni professed in an interview that color would help reveal the beauty in things such as factories and barren urban landscapes. Filmmaking in color gives Stone that element necessary to separate his work from virtually all past pictorials of New York City. Certain stills focus on buildings that have unique colors for the city, then on streets that off set-the colors of street lights. It goes beyond the postcard image of New York and then adds a new depth that separates itself from the familiar great black-and-white photography of New York in the early twentieth century. The stills then go to shots of the greater New York City that displays an excellent composition and attains the beauty and size of New York all in one. The depth these stills go to are interesting in themselves. They're structured so eloquently that it is hard to tie them directly to the story of the film itself. They also go on for long enough that one can appreciate that they do exist in the real world. The feeling is that Stone wanted to create a pictorial composite of New York City throughout the day.
A major drought in the film has to do with acting. Ordinarily, Stone is stellar in casting and digging great performances out of capable actors. Michael Douglas routinely cites his performance in Wall Street (1987) as his best work and remarks that Stone has a way of getting actors to perform at their peak level. Actors in general usually walk away from an Oliver Stone set with utmost regard for their experience. Every actor involved in Alexander (2004) claimed their experience was near life-changing. Actors came out of World Trade Center with a similar feeling. The intensity of a Stone set, matched with the emotional heights that World Trade Center was aiming for, certainly must have meant for a cathartic experience. The acting in this film, however, doesn't meet that ambition. First off, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello are only moderate talents. Both fill their roles with the right accents, but don't lift their performances above adequate work; neither performance ever feels personal. They are predictably sentimental. Michael Pena, on the other hand, does manage to find a perfect pitch to his character. He is the stand-out actor of the group. The big disappointment comes in Nicholas Cage. He has only truly proven himself in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), and here works with little conviction in his role. His face tries to be interesting but he has been doing Hollywood vehicles for too long to be able to give his performance the subtlety it needs.
There are many regrets to World Trade Center. Oliver Stone, a first-class director, does not direct above the performances and the melodramatic material. He does, however, prove that a failure in his hands still has a lot to be thankful for. Great directors are able to do this. Ingmar Bergman, between his shifts of style and focus, averaged a major hit once every nine years: films that were only European successes, local successes or failures dominated the years in between. In retrospect, Bergman has nothing to prove: the extent of his filmography in achievement and depth speak above the bumps in his career. There is a feeling that Stone may not be in the same class as Bergman, yet he also has nothing left to prove. He is the greatest American filmmaker working now.
Post Script
Having first watched the film months ago, I recently re-visited it when it was released on DVD. The period of time between allowed for much to happen. First, Oliver Stone – a very thoughtful filmmaker – clarified his feelings on the subject of 9/11 and said that World Trade Center would not be the only film he was going to do. This is great news. While Stone didn’t want to say this before the release of World Trade Center so the film could be released unaffected by criticism of the director’s beliefs, that same secret also allowed for many of his fans to assume the depths of his concern in recent US history was only a human story from our greatest disaster. This didn’t ultimately affect my judgment of the film, but it gave me hope for Stone’s concerns and future.
The general (plus biographical)
Oliver Stone has created a memorial for 9/11. After months of speculation that the director would politicize the event of our time, the sobering truth is that his new film is instead endeared to the everyman of those attacks. World Trade Center is a return to grace for Stone who - back in 1987 - won the academy award for his personal experiences in Vietnam with Platoon (1986). World Trade Center documents the story of two Port Authority Officers who were trapped in the rubble of Trade Towers once they collapsed. The film cares very little about the questions that 9/11 has asked; rather, it attempts to dig at the unexpected self that so many found that day.
World Trade Center is a history lesson for Oliver Stone. When Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and even JFK (1991) were made, they were made out of his experience of the Vietnam War. The first two films were direct biographical accounts from Vietnam. JFK was philosophical of the fact that the war never would have been if Kennedy wasn't assassinated by the powers for war in Washington. The majority of the films Stone has made have been made out of conviction. World Trade Center digs at one of his oldest convictions.
Before he was a filmmaker, he was a Catholic school teacher. Stone later renounced the faith but dug at signs of Christ in the autobiographical Platoon. The shot of William Defoe reaching his hands up toward the sky before his death is dramatized as martyrdom for all that was given up by the men who went through that war. Signs of Christendom also run throughout World Trade Center. Stone's former belief, Catholicism, is the only major Christian religion that can make saints out of regular individuals. Not only does Catholicism enshrine individual human beings but, as George Bernard Shaw wrote in his essays and plays, it makes saints kneel before those who have performed generous acts of goodwill. In WTC, it is Oliver Stone, the non-believer, who is kneeling for all the men and women who showed goodwill on September 11th. Many people that day found a courage that was unexpected; it could be asked whether Oliver Stone too hasn't rediscovered a portion of his old faith.
The major concern with World Trade Center is how personal the film allows itself to be. When Stone made Platoon in 1986, the controversy of Vietnam was still existent but the war was over a decade old. Stone was also telling his own story and operating under the knowledge that he could never explain the war. Many films about Vietnam had already tried. The attacks of the September 11th are only five years old and a very fresh topic in the movie world. Stone knew the film would be scrutinized from every possible side for what position it took on the attacks, and he does play to appease those who might see any political ideology. In the movie, characters assess the importance of bravery and courage and offer large talk that tries to wrap itself protectively around the attacks. This distances the film from the personal experience it tries to be.
Though this is still a rewarding experience for an artist who continues to grow, the expectations, in the end, were too large. The on-going controversy of 9/11 asks that all those who insist on giving comment be wary of the consequences. Oliver Stone, perhaps still bruised by the failure of Alexander (2004), does seem ultimately to have caved in a little bit.
The details
Unlike any Oliver Stone film before, World Trade Center has an inkling of melodrama. The two officers trapped in the rubble deal with the situation of life or death while their families deal with the possibility of losing a family member. Because the portraits extend only to the hours after the attack, the depth of the emotions are limited, since the characters are only dealing with the shock and numb of the event. The emotions overlap because all the stories involve similar situations; they then become sentimentalized because they deal with our most intrinsic fears and worries. The panic of potentially losing your wife or husband has a place of depth. It's just that real-time coverage of it has the potential to cross over into dramatics that is redundant.
The film aches to find depth in the story of the two couples. Nicholas Cage plays a weathered police sergeant who knows he always has to be strong to keep his department going. Maria Bello has a similar façade to her life in order to keep their household going. Their story develops to tear away outer shells and reveal the depths of how much they mean to each other. Scenes of better times play through Nicolas Cage's brain. The sense of grief hits Cage when he realizes all that will now be lost with this unlivable situation. He comes to breaking point when he realizes the greater thing he has to fight for to survive.
While Cage's story has some semblance of a self-contained story, Michael Pena's is another matter. He is the other officer trapped in the rubble and has a brand new family to worry about. The only story arc this young couple has (the wife being played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) is who should name their soon-to-be-born daughter. No scene of their interacting before the attack rises above a cliché of happiness and an ideal relationship. The scenes mainly show simply the couple together in bed. A few years ago, In America (2003) gained critical success even though it contained scarcely a scene that rose above the equivalent of such home-movie dramatics. The same superficiality of emotion plays out here.
The emotional center of World Trade Center runs counter to the other film released this year about the events of 9/11, United 93 (2006). Without a doubt, United 93 is an intense experience. The feeling of deep mortality plagues our perception of all its characters, and the hyperbolic filmmaking only charges the ride to be more intense. The problem though is that the hyperbolic filmmaking is the only thing that stands out in that film; the rest is an experiment in realism that gives little comment about that day, and rests the story upon no higher meaning. The rationalization for the hyperbolic filmmaking is that it raises the mundane story above its limitations to become a greater experience. It does become a more memorable experience, but as the critic Parker Tyler once said, "It's not how you film a shot that matters, but what shot you film."
Stone here takes a hands-on approach to the filmmaking. The distance of the camera is never pronounced with an aesthetic distance. New scenes and locations get very little introduction. The camera quickly goes straight into the foreground action and maintains a tight focus on the faces of the characters. Even during a scene involving many characters, the camera barely resides in the background for coverage. The main consistent stylistic note is this focus on the faces. The camera also improvises with the action. Stone has been known to make subdued films, like Nixon (1995) and Heaven and Earth (1993). The difference is that those films have a greater focus on composition. World Trade Center, with its method of constant shifting from hand-held to steadicam, could be interpreted as Stone simply using a combination of all his filmmaking skills. The themes of the film, however, suggest a larger reasoning.
The career of Ingmar Bergman should be noted here. When he was doing work in the late 50s, he was working with subjects and styles that he would lose by the 60s, when his chamber dramas and the subject of the 'absence of God' took over. In Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Seventh Seal (1957), Bergman was a filmmaker developing his skills for the camera focusing on the face. He also was using religious symbolism. Many hold to the belief that Bergman was merely transitioning in his style during this period, and perhaps this is true, but Wild Strawberries is also filmed with a momentum and a successful focus on action. It brings a punch to the major symbolic scenes in the film. Because the film is not as formal as other Bergman works, the symbolic moments are able to ring true and have a deeper connection to the characters. The film is highly connected to the psyche of the protagonist.
World Trade Center adopts a similar loose style. The film plays out as an adaptation of real events but then will utilize symbolism that comes out of nowhere. Certain moments are overt (the vision of Christ) and others aren't (Cage being lifted out of the rubble which transcends to a tomb). Both moments are rooted in theme and story. This new style is a small feather in the cap in the ever expanding filmic capabilities of Oliver Stone, but an achievement nonetheless.
The largest accomplishment in the filmmaking here comes in a unique area. In World Trade Center, there are two parts that act as indirect prologues and epilogues. After Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena are introduced, then so is New York City. Stone dedicates a series of stills that range from shots of unrecognizable streets at dusk to larger shots of recognizable skyscrapers and then finally shots of New York City as a whole. The epilogue features similar shots but this time it is of New York City filled with the debris from 9/11. All the stills are varied but all are excellent.
The beginning stills, of unrecognizable streets, play with color objectives. In 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni professed in an interview that color would help reveal the beauty in things such as factories and barren urban landscapes. Filmmaking in color gives Stone that element necessary to separate his work from virtually all past pictorials of New York City. Certain stills focus on buildings that have unique colors for the city, then on streets that off set-the colors of street lights. It goes beyond the postcard image of New York and then adds a new depth that separates itself from the familiar great black-and-white photography of New York in the early twentieth century. The stills then go to shots of the greater New York City that displays an excellent composition and attains the beauty and size of New York all in one. The depth these stills go to are interesting in themselves. They're structured so eloquently that it is hard to tie them directly to the story of the film itself. They also go on for long enough that one can appreciate that they do exist in the real world. The feeling is that Stone wanted to create a pictorial composite of New York City throughout the day.
A major drought in the film has to do with acting. Ordinarily, Stone is stellar in casting and digging great performances out of capable actors. Michael Douglas routinely cites his performance in Wall Street (1987) as his best work and remarks that Stone has a way of getting actors to perform at their peak level. Actors in general usually walk away from an Oliver Stone set with utmost regard for their experience. Every actor involved in Alexander (2004) claimed their experience was near life-changing. Actors came out of World Trade Center with a similar feeling. The intensity of a Stone set, matched with the emotional heights that World Trade Center was aiming for, certainly must have meant for a cathartic experience. The acting in this film, however, doesn't meet that ambition. First off, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello are only moderate talents. Both fill their roles with the right accents, but don't lift their performances above adequate work; neither performance ever feels personal. They are predictably sentimental. Michael Pena, on the other hand, does manage to find a perfect pitch to his character. He is the stand-out actor of the group. The big disappointment comes in Nicholas Cage. He has only truly proven himself in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), and here works with little conviction in his role. His face tries to be interesting but he has been doing Hollywood vehicles for too long to be able to give his performance the subtlety it needs.
There are many regrets to World Trade Center. Oliver Stone, a first-class director, does not direct above the performances and the melodramatic material. He does, however, prove that a failure in his hands still has a lot to be thankful for. Great directors are able to do this. Ingmar Bergman, between his shifts of style and focus, averaged a major hit once every nine years: films that were only European successes, local successes or failures dominated the years in between. In retrospect, Bergman has nothing to prove: the extent of his filmography in achievement and depth speak above the bumps in his career. There is a feeling that Stone may not be in the same class as Bergman, yet he also has nothing left to prove. He is the greatest American filmmaker working now.
Post Script
Having first watched the film months ago, I recently re-visited it when it was released on DVD. The period of time between allowed for much to happen. First, Oliver Stone – a very thoughtful filmmaker – clarified his feelings on the subject of 9/11 and said that World Trade Center would not be the only film he was going to do. This is great news. While Stone didn’t want to say this before the release of World Trade Center so the film could be released unaffected by criticism of the director’s beliefs, that same secret also allowed for many of his fans to assume the depths of his concern in recent US history was only a human story from our greatest disaster. This didn’t ultimately affect my judgment of the film, but it gave me hope for Stone’s concerns and future.
Post-Latter Day Worries
The Concern about Neil LaBute
In 2006, Neil LaBute released The Wicker Man, but many of his most dedicated fans didn’t realize it. The film was a typical horror film of the blandest kind and LaBute defended its legitimacy. This came from the masterful director of In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. I, realizing it was LaBute, hoped for the best but was pained to realize the fate of this once talented director. Now any writing of his career in film might have to be a memoriam.
Neil LaBute’s future in film doesn’t look very good. In interviews for The Wicker Man he has already expressed interest in doing a sequel to the film. The poor performance of The Wicker Man at the box office could destroy that hope, but his desire to move forward with lackluster projects should be alarming. The pedigree Neil LaBute had to get to this point should suggest a different filmmaker and an entirely different attitude toward the material he deals with.
Neil LaBute first started out in theater. He studied theater at Brigham Young University and did graduate work at New York University and the Royal Academy of London. From there he taught both film and theater at the IPFW in Fort Wayne, Indiana. During the 1980s he was already a playwright, but in the 1990s he moved to incorporate film in his repertoire by making his first film, In the Company of Men, for $25,000. That script was originally a play. The film won him the Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival while garnering nominations and awards at numerous other festivals around the world.
LaBute continued on by moving to large budget films. He also maintained his theatrical background by writing and directing plays with titles ranging from The Distance Here, The Mercy Seat and The Shape of Things. Each play (all unread by me) was catalogued works described as a progression of his two early successful films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. Only The Shape of Things was adapted into a film. LaBute’s follow up to Your Friends and Neighbors was the quirky comedy, Nurse Betty. It starred Renee Zellweger and Morgan Freeman and was uncharacteristically charming but also very characteristically bland. The writing was sharp but the film was served no special advantage with LaBute at the helm directing. He wasn’t even trying to protect his writing. The writing wasn’t his. It was done by someone else.
So the nature of Neil LaBute became epitomized by that situation. Possession and The Wicker Man stand as two larger budget films that drew much of his attention because their production values were so much higher than his independent films. Both films were also Hollywood material in every regard. LaBute bragged in interviews while promoting Possession that the ending of the film would surprise audiences for how genuinely heartfelt it was. He shouldn’t have been bragging. The ending was genuinely heartfelt, but sophomoric on every level in artistry. His final theater adaptation, The Shape of Things, fell in between the glaring limelight of these two films. I sadly missed the film. I forget what force kept me from seeing it originally. Critical word on the film also wasn’t that great. The film fell into line with the nature of In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors but wasn’t seen as an evolution in either film.
Was there an evolution from In the Company of Men to Your Friends and Neighbors? Both films differ greatly in their filmmaking attribute because it is evident Your Friends and Neighbors is greatly balanced in a better budget. Editing is used to highlight those better sets instead of hide them like In the Company of Men with distant static shots. But, consider the characterization though. In the Company of Men focuses on the nature of a domineering masochist who is conniving against women and anyone that is competition against him in the workplace. Your Friends and Neighbors lifts the same type of character to play a secondary role. Unlike the first film, he is not the only character who is displaced to emotions. Other characters slowly show their colors of being adrift to emotion and sentimentality.
The immoralities in both films are not purely fictional. The characters rise out of social dilemmas and ideas to the modern male or female. Your Friends and Neighbors was a development over In the Company of Men in digging at societal comment. The nature of immorality was not easily predictable as in the one domineering masochist who dominated the screen time of the first film. The characters existed in realms that were more subtle and asked larger questions of our roles. Do complacent feelings in a relationship transcend to problems with the other or our inadequacy to show love? Your Friends and Neighbors didn’t have all the answers. One imagines even that LaBute wasn’t done asking his largest questions.
This is the dilemma of the playwright. He can only do so much on stage. Shakespeare graced the stage with epic battles, but only film could realize them. Thus the playwright has to focus on larger dramatic questions. He also has to focus on questions that can be contained in minor set changes through out a performance. Thus the reality of theater is that the drama is very inert. The plays that do try to achieve the epic in character focus and time period are still contained. Take for instance the play I, Anatolia by Gungor Dilmen. It’s an epic play on the evolution of women in the Middle East. It is contained to one woman monologues that scratch the surface of every time period and large problem women faced in that region. One comes away from reading the play impressed with the indulgence the play has for its subject but also feeling it was stretching its art a little too far. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, theater began to challenge its physical limitations of time and space. That challenge was one of the reasons that film caught fire so quickly with many talented people. A good percentage of people who were seriously making films in the early days were coming from theater.
Those who stayed with theater regarded its limitations with high esteem. The theater of Neil LaBute could fall in line with Bernard Shaw’s. Shaw worked in the late 1800s with comedies. In the early 1900s he turned those comedies on their head with comedies that were driven by ideas. Between 1903 and 1915 Shaw turned out an average of a play a year. The plays were driven by a perspective and theme. Shaw was challenging the basic ideals of Christianity and turning them on their head. Instead of providing an atheist viewpoint, Shaw dug at ideas that were out of belief. He challenged the bourgeoisie institution that Christianity became. Shaw didn’t try to write a definitive play to preach his beliefs. Every play was a new challenge and a new avenue of criticisms.
Neil LaBute also offers similar challenges. Since his first two films, his career on stage has been a continuation of his potential. Consider the play, Bash: Latter-Day Plays. The play digs at the high morality of the Mormon religion by revealing the seedy actions capable of their everyday believers. LaBute himself left the religion by the time of this play. Then there is The Mercy Seat, a reflection of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. LaBute counteracts the ordinary by focusing on the affair of two people believed to be dead from the attacks. They spend the night of September 12th by debating what to do with their lives. Do they continue on as normal or start anew? LaBute poses greater questions than giving the simple renderings of humanity in struggle and peril. LaBute also interjects his own personality by having the play act as a battle of the sexes.
LaBute proves with his stage work that he can continue to do interesting work. Why has he veered off from similar ambitions in film? One of the reasons could be because he does come from theater to begin with. The tradition of theater has guaranteed many things. One guarantee is a respect for structures. One of the greatest arguments of the last century was the place of the tragedy in a modern context. Some say it ended with Shakespeare and some say it is able to continue on in modern plays. Critics aren’t the only people really arguing this. Playwrights also argue these matters and do so in essays as well as plays. The reason is because many times playwright did begin either as a critic or a teacher (LaBute did the latter). Theater is an art that has more discipline and regards structure with greater care.
This could be how Neil LaBute approaches filmmaking projects. He respects the genres that film has created for itself and tries to utilize them the best that he can. He does try to rework the stories but always still in care of staying in bounds of the structure above the story. Other playwrights who have become filmmakers have shown a similar respect for genre. David Mamet keeps his writing voice in tact with his film gigs but has little problem of writing for a genre. He also has been an ever changing presence in theater. The merit of his depth still stands though in theater. I don’t know of any play he has done that was as weak as his recent thriller, Spartan. Other filmmakers have taken opposite approaches. Ingmar Bergman began in theater and continued in theater after he retired from theatrical filmmaking in 1983. I can’t think of one film that he did that ever bowed to a genre. He has used identities and themes of genres like horror in films like the Silence and Persona, but always done at the merging to his personality.
Ingmar Bergman approached film with the smallest respect. He was able to advance the art of film further than most filmmakers by doing so. Neil LaBute and David Mamet continue to be capable of good work but minor effort when solely working for film. They are structuralists aware of the greater techniques. The greater truth is that film is still an infant art that needs to rest on innovation instead of technique. The influence of theater on film has more to do with practicality than anything else. Both arts were really shifting toward each other at the right time. Will film grow to become dominated by visual aesthetics? The questions are boundless. No one should have the answer. Neil LaBute should be on hand to be asking us some questions. His genre efforts have been painful. Let’s hope the powers to be stop a sequel to The Wicker Man. Let’s also hope LaBute gives the film world a bigger taste of what he is doing on stage. Not all of us are lucky to live in New York City.
In 2006, Neil LaBute released The Wicker Man, but many of his most dedicated fans didn’t realize it. The film was a typical horror film of the blandest kind and LaBute defended its legitimacy. This came from the masterful director of In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. I, realizing it was LaBute, hoped for the best but was pained to realize the fate of this once talented director. Now any writing of his career in film might have to be a memoriam.
Neil LaBute’s future in film doesn’t look very good. In interviews for The Wicker Man he has already expressed interest in doing a sequel to the film. The poor performance of The Wicker Man at the box office could destroy that hope, but his desire to move forward with lackluster projects should be alarming. The pedigree Neil LaBute had to get to this point should suggest a different filmmaker and an entirely different attitude toward the material he deals with.
Neil LaBute first started out in theater. He studied theater at Brigham Young University and did graduate work at New York University and the Royal Academy of London. From there he taught both film and theater at the IPFW in Fort Wayne, Indiana. During the 1980s he was already a playwright, but in the 1990s he moved to incorporate film in his repertoire by making his first film, In the Company of Men, for $25,000. That script was originally a play. The film won him the Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival while garnering nominations and awards at numerous other festivals around the world.
LaBute continued on by moving to large budget films. He also maintained his theatrical background by writing and directing plays with titles ranging from The Distance Here, The Mercy Seat and The Shape of Things. Each play (all unread by me) was catalogued works described as a progression of his two early successful films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. Only The Shape of Things was adapted into a film. LaBute’s follow up to Your Friends and Neighbors was the quirky comedy, Nurse Betty. It starred Renee Zellweger and Morgan Freeman and was uncharacteristically charming but also very characteristically bland. The writing was sharp but the film was served no special advantage with LaBute at the helm directing. He wasn’t even trying to protect his writing. The writing wasn’t his. It was done by someone else.
So the nature of Neil LaBute became epitomized by that situation. Possession and The Wicker Man stand as two larger budget films that drew much of his attention because their production values were so much higher than his independent films. Both films were also Hollywood material in every regard. LaBute bragged in interviews while promoting Possession that the ending of the film would surprise audiences for how genuinely heartfelt it was. He shouldn’t have been bragging. The ending was genuinely heartfelt, but sophomoric on every level in artistry. His final theater adaptation, The Shape of Things, fell in between the glaring limelight of these two films. I sadly missed the film. I forget what force kept me from seeing it originally. Critical word on the film also wasn’t that great. The film fell into line with the nature of In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors but wasn’t seen as an evolution in either film.
Was there an evolution from In the Company of Men to Your Friends and Neighbors? Both films differ greatly in their filmmaking attribute because it is evident Your Friends and Neighbors is greatly balanced in a better budget. Editing is used to highlight those better sets instead of hide them like In the Company of Men with distant static shots. But, consider the characterization though. In the Company of Men focuses on the nature of a domineering masochist who is conniving against women and anyone that is competition against him in the workplace. Your Friends and Neighbors lifts the same type of character to play a secondary role. Unlike the first film, he is not the only character who is displaced to emotions. Other characters slowly show their colors of being adrift to emotion and sentimentality.
The immoralities in both films are not purely fictional. The characters rise out of social dilemmas and ideas to the modern male or female. Your Friends and Neighbors was a development over In the Company of Men in digging at societal comment. The nature of immorality was not easily predictable as in the one domineering masochist who dominated the screen time of the first film. The characters existed in realms that were more subtle and asked larger questions of our roles. Do complacent feelings in a relationship transcend to problems with the other or our inadequacy to show love? Your Friends and Neighbors didn’t have all the answers. One imagines even that LaBute wasn’t done asking his largest questions.
This is the dilemma of the playwright. He can only do so much on stage. Shakespeare graced the stage with epic battles, but only film could realize them. Thus the playwright has to focus on larger dramatic questions. He also has to focus on questions that can be contained in minor set changes through out a performance. Thus the reality of theater is that the drama is very inert. The plays that do try to achieve the epic in character focus and time period are still contained. Take for instance the play I, Anatolia by Gungor Dilmen. It’s an epic play on the evolution of women in the Middle East. It is contained to one woman monologues that scratch the surface of every time period and large problem women faced in that region. One comes away from reading the play impressed with the indulgence the play has for its subject but also feeling it was stretching its art a little too far. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, theater began to challenge its physical limitations of time and space. That challenge was one of the reasons that film caught fire so quickly with many talented people. A good percentage of people who were seriously making films in the early days were coming from theater.
Those who stayed with theater regarded its limitations with high esteem. The theater of Neil LaBute could fall in line with Bernard Shaw’s. Shaw worked in the late 1800s with comedies. In the early 1900s he turned those comedies on their head with comedies that were driven by ideas. Between 1903 and 1915 Shaw turned out an average of a play a year. The plays were driven by a perspective and theme. Shaw was challenging the basic ideals of Christianity and turning them on their head. Instead of providing an atheist viewpoint, Shaw dug at ideas that were out of belief. He challenged the bourgeoisie institution that Christianity became. Shaw didn’t try to write a definitive play to preach his beliefs. Every play was a new challenge and a new avenue of criticisms.
Neil LaBute also offers similar challenges. Since his first two films, his career on stage has been a continuation of his potential. Consider the play, Bash: Latter-Day Plays. The play digs at the high morality of the Mormon religion by revealing the seedy actions capable of their everyday believers. LaBute himself left the religion by the time of this play. Then there is The Mercy Seat, a reflection of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. LaBute counteracts the ordinary by focusing on the affair of two people believed to be dead from the attacks. They spend the night of September 12th by debating what to do with their lives. Do they continue on as normal or start anew? LaBute poses greater questions than giving the simple renderings of humanity in struggle and peril. LaBute also interjects his own personality by having the play act as a battle of the sexes.
LaBute proves with his stage work that he can continue to do interesting work. Why has he veered off from similar ambitions in film? One of the reasons could be because he does come from theater to begin with. The tradition of theater has guaranteed many things. One guarantee is a respect for structures. One of the greatest arguments of the last century was the place of the tragedy in a modern context. Some say it ended with Shakespeare and some say it is able to continue on in modern plays. Critics aren’t the only people really arguing this. Playwrights also argue these matters and do so in essays as well as plays. The reason is because many times playwright did begin either as a critic or a teacher (LaBute did the latter). Theater is an art that has more discipline and regards structure with greater care.
This could be how Neil LaBute approaches filmmaking projects. He respects the genres that film has created for itself and tries to utilize them the best that he can. He does try to rework the stories but always still in care of staying in bounds of the structure above the story. Other playwrights who have become filmmakers have shown a similar respect for genre. David Mamet keeps his writing voice in tact with his film gigs but has little problem of writing for a genre. He also has been an ever changing presence in theater. The merit of his depth still stands though in theater. I don’t know of any play he has done that was as weak as his recent thriller, Spartan. Other filmmakers have taken opposite approaches. Ingmar Bergman began in theater and continued in theater after he retired from theatrical filmmaking in 1983. I can’t think of one film that he did that ever bowed to a genre. He has used identities and themes of genres like horror in films like the Silence and Persona, but always done at the merging to his personality.
Ingmar Bergman approached film with the smallest respect. He was able to advance the art of film further than most filmmakers by doing so. Neil LaBute and David Mamet continue to be capable of good work but minor effort when solely working for film. They are structuralists aware of the greater techniques. The greater truth is that film is still an infant art that needs to rest on innovation instead of technique. The influence of theater on film has more to do with practicality than anything else. Both arts were really shifting toward each other at the right time. Will film grow to become dominated by visual aesthetics? The questions are boundless. No one should have the answer. Neil LaBute should be on hand to be asking us some questions. His genre efforts have been painful. Let’s hope the powers to be stop a sequel to The Wicker Man. Let’s also hope LaBute gives the film world a bigger taste of what he is doing on stage. Not all of us are lucky to live in New York City.
Trying Times
Tarantino and Post Modernism
There is little question that film is art. For years now, academia has backed up this notion in numerous film schools around the world and in countless books that explore the aesthetics of cinema. In the 1920s, film schools were already being created in the Soviet Union. Professors were trying to bring comprehension to an art that had yet to be defined. In the work Beyond the Shot (published in 1929), one professor gleefully admits discussing terms like 'cinema' and cinematography' when the vocabulary did not even exist (the professor was none other than Sergei Eisenstein). As film now passes its hundredth year, one can't help but look back in reflection. The easiest trends to follow have been the film movements in various countries, such as The French New Wave in the 60's and New German Cinema in the 70s. But little has been said to understand the identity of modernism and post-modernism in film, staple terms of both literature and architecture. In the essay "What's left of the Center?" published in the New Republic, the film critic Stanley Kauffmann discerns the place of modernism and post-modernism in film.
There are disagreements about the meaning of modernism and post-modernism in film. In the essay, Kauffmann places the context of morality as the diameter for judgment. While Kauffmann agrees that the French New Wave broke many structural barriers common in film, one can interject that before the French New Wave hit, many films were as daring, if not more daring, than anything to come out of that period. As Kauffmann sees it, morality in film before the 1960s had always been a constant. His example is the gangster films of the 30s. Even though these films portrayed the gangsters as the protagonists, the films always ended in right and wrong. Then the gangster film was transformed with the Godfather series. Though the films have some concept of right and wrong, its main focus is the romanticizing of the mafia. In Part II, the tragedy is not that Michael kills his brother because his life as a Mafioso forces him to, but that he is forced to kill his brother because he betrayed the family.
Serious post-modernism, for Kauffman, does not start with The Godfather. It begins with the 1974 French film Going Places. It is a film about two young men who have no discernible interest except for seeking pleasure and they go to any limits to do so. In one episode, they trap a woman on a train who is breast feeding her child and force her to have sex. Another episode shows them chasing a woman and continually pinching her ass. Compare this with A Clockwork Orange, made three years earlier. Both films are about the adventures of corrupted youth, but A Clockwork Orange is a societal work. The first half is a romp through the youth's crimes but the second half focuses on the human rights he lost once imprisoned and cured. The shift takes the audience away from direct contact with such a volatile character. It comforts the audience because they know the film didn't subscribe to the ideals of its gruesome leading character.
In Going Places, there is no such comfort. The film follows the characters to their very end. Late in the film, a disturbingly beautiful moment happens as the two men meet a bourgeoisie couple on vacation with their teen age daughter. The daughter feels repressed by her parents. The two men get her alone and convince her into having sex. During the intercourse, the camera focuses on the smile on the girl’s face and soundtrack features lighter music for the first time. The mood in the film distinctly changes. The girl’s feelings after are of freedom and joy. The men's accomplishment of sex again borders on rape, but the repression she felt was an abuse as well. The abuse fueled her attraction to them because they presented her with liberation. The audience is challenged because they can identify with her decision. While post-modernism allows for the absence of morals, one of its best features has been the challenge for extremes in a higher context.
During this period, many films were made that broke barriers of moral identity. It was a trend that easily caught fire. America became inundated with films of excessive violence to the point that Going Places was no longer shocking for some. It wasn't until the 90s that the post-modernist movement witnessed a major boom in discussion with the emergence of Quentin Tarantino in the American film world. His debut film, Reservoir Dogs was a stylistic jazz riff on the robbery genre. The new trend in this film wasn't the excessive violence, but how commonplace violence was to the characters. Mundane conversations took place in the middle of horrific situations. Reservoir Dogs drew a small following who championed the film's everyday approach to violence as a new marker in cinema. Then Pulp Fiction hit. For many who were adverse to Tarantino before, his second film was hard to deny. It expanded on all the limitations of Reservoir Dogs: the scope was enhanced, the story was more fleshed out and the film was not as inundated with violence. Tarantino was still playing his tune of a jazz riff, this time with the gangster genre, but Pulp Fiction also proved that Quentin Tarantino was a talented writer.
As Tarantino is the purveyor of everyday violence, he is also a filmmaker of everyday conversation. His first two films had very little of what we understand to be a plot as it had an inhabitance of his characters beginning at the art of their conversations. As distinct as Mamet is in his prose, Tarantino is also for blending realistic subject matter into outrageous conversation. The realism of the conversation is that action doesn’t break up a character’s wordings. Characters go on the way we all do. In his original review, Gene Siskel commented that one of the best parts of Pulp Fiction was that conversations in a scene kept going a few minutes after the scene normally would have ended. The truth of the success of Pulp Fiction isn’t so simple.
When Tarantino was promoting Pulp Fiction, he was routinely asked why he chose the structure of a shifting story that jumped from end to beginning and every other which way through out the film. Tarantino alluded to the example of the novel in every response. See, the shifting story of back-and-forth is nothing new in movies. The way Tarantino does it though is. Pulp Fiction does little to bring resolution to any of the major characters. While the alleged inspirational film of Pulp Fiction, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, has a similar story objective and a resolution that is tidy to finding an outcome for all the characters. The weight of Pulp Fiction rests solely in the strength of the scenes and the interactions. Novels have the challenge of detailing hundreds of pages with character portraits. Better novels focus on that challenge knowing the value of what they write is hardly ever found in looking for redemption in the final twenty pages. Tarantino makes Pulp Fiction memorable because he understands where the value of the films rests. While the film was well made in many ways, its rare quality was that it was encompassing of the helpful objectives of another art.
The praise for Pulp Fiction has its limits though. In an early scene in the film, a routine drug pick up and execution goes wrong when an assailant, hiding in another room, jumps out on Jackson and Travolta and begins shooting. He misses them entirely and immediately is shot for revealing himself. The situation sets up the final scene where Jackson reflects on the unlikely chance of the shooter missing entirely not as good luck but as an intervention from God and a message to Jackson. Travolta argues his sincerity but when the two are held up at gun point, Jackson spares the robber's lives and says he is through with being a criminal. In the context of true post-modernism, the scene aches to have a personal context for the character. Alas, it does not. In no manner of societal or personal matter is a larger comment issued. The biblical reference begins and ends as stylistic mechanism. The rest of Pulp Fiction, while very good, follows suit to be the introduction to the larger public of what makes Tarantino so appealing at surface level.
As Going Places shows no sympathy for its characters' ruthless aggression, neither does Tarantino for his characters, who are the embodiment of the violence our new culture has grown up with. But the characters of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction stand outside and inside of movies: they kill as the casual heroics of the movies but bleed and die with realism outside of it. For Tarantino, this is how post-modernism existed. The problem with Tarantino is that he never expanded beyond this premise. His films became genre films, wrought with stylistic ambitions yet void of content. He was making films that interpreted genre as high art. While Pulp Fiction had no context, its popularity did. When the wave of imitative filmmakers came after the success and the new wave of filmmakers began to settle as the critical backbone of American cinema, Tarantino became the 90s version of Andy Warhol. The fact is, no filmmaker of this generation (including Tarantino) was able to progress beyond Pulp Fiction.
Filmmakers who were exceptions to that critical praise had to pick up the slack. Ironically, it was out of a Quentin Tarantino story that this began. When Oliver Stone made Natural Born Killers in 1994, he made it the same year as Tarantino revolutionary started with Pulp Fiction but he also had to be aware of the already established gore style of Tarantino. The film is about two serial killers who are in love and kill everyone they see. The filmmaking is anarchistic and flies with no flags of moral identity. It runs with the characters to a state of hyper-realism. This is not the reason why Quentin Tarantino denounced this adaptation of his short story. He denounced the finished film because there was a total transformation of his original story. Tarantino wrote the characters to be believed in. Oliver transformed them into clichés of bad films.
Natural Born Killers ends up as satire. It empties an arsenal of criticism into how America made the killers. It is also a piercing example of Tarantino's limitations. For me, post-modernism is art that not only brings the most challenging scrutiny to our society, but also pushes the limits of its own aesthetic. Tarantino still glides at the top of the film world for his technique of referencing earlier films, but that is as dated as the oldest films made. Citizen Kane tops greatest films lists for a reason. It is the first film to combine all technical innovation and style of the film world into one film. The commonplace violence in Tarantino's films stuns the audience with how brutality is made into easy entertainment beyond anything else. I'm reminded of what Philip Roth once said of literature and the media: "The popular media have usurped literature's scrutinizing function - usurped it and trivialized it. The momentum of the American mass media is toward the trivialization of everything." The media need no assistance now because it has Quentin Tarantino.
Jackie Brown, also in the canon of his work and notably praised, deserves little attention. Tarantino performed an act he should have never committed to: the execution of a plot. It detracts his writing of great detail, the type of detail that made Pulp Fiction worthwhile. At his best, Tarantino writes for the intricacy of everyday life. Jackie Brown asked him to acknowledge the patterns of drama that made him look at depth first and he comes up flat. The film ends up dragging from scene to scene with little motivation. He also directs to a very flat tone. His excuse was that he wanted the film - first and foremost - to be an acknowledged adaptation of the original novel. I’ve never read the novel but the films plays to the little intricacy or scrutiny that most novels possess. Whether Jackie Brown is faithful or not is beyond the answers of this essay but it is not very interesting.
There is little question that film is art. For years now, academia has backed up this notion in numerous film schools around the world and in countless books that explore the aesthetics of cinema. In the 1920s, film schools were already being created in the Soviet Union. Professors were trying to bring comprehension to an art that had yet to be defined. In the work Beyond the Shot (published in 1929), one professor gleefully admits discussing terms like 'cinema' and cinematography' when the vocabulary did not even exist (the professor was none other than Sergei Eisenstein). As film now passes its hundredth year, one can't help but look back in reflection. The easiest trends to follow have been the film movements in various countries, such as The French New Wave in the 60's and New German Cinema in the 70s. But little has been said to understand the identity of modernism and post-modernism in film, staple terms of both literature and architecture. In the essay "What's left of the Center?" published in the New Republic, the film critic Stanley Kauffmann discerns the place of modernism and post-modernism in film.
There are disagreements about the meaning of modernism and post-modernism in film. In the essay, Kauffmann places the context of morality as the diameter for judgment. While Kauffmann agrees that the French New Wave broke many structural barriers common in film, one can interject that before the French New Wave hit, many films were as daring, if not more daring, than anything to come out of that period. As Kauffmann sees it, morality in film before the 1960s had always been a constant. His example is the gangster films of the 30s. Even though these films portrayed the gangsters as the protagonists, the films always ended in right and wrong. Then the gangster film was transformed with the Godfather series. Though the films have some concept of right and wrong, its main focus is the romanticizing of the mafia. In Part II, the tragedy is not that Michael kills his brother because his life as a Mafioso forces him to, but that he is forced to kill his brother because he betrayed the family.
Serious post-modernism, for Kauffman, does not start with The Godfather. It begins with the 1974 French film Going Places. It is a film about two young men who have no discernible interest except for seeking pleasure and they go to any limits to do so. In one episode, they trap a woman on a train who is breast feeding her child and force her to have sex. Another episode shows them chasing a woman and continually pinching her ass. Compare this with A Clockwork Orange, made three years earlier. Both films are about the adventures of corrupted youth, but A Clockwork Orange is a societal work. The first half is a romp through the youth's crimes but the second half focuses on the human rights he lost once imprisoned and cured. The shift takes the audience away from direct contact with such a volatile character. It comforts the audience because they know the film didn't subscribe to the ideals of its gruesome leading character.
In Going Places, there is no such comfort. The film follows the characters to their very end. Late in the film, a disturbingly beautiful moment happens as the two men meet a bourgeoisie couple on vacation with their teen age daughter. The daughter feels repressed by her parents. The two men get her alone and convince her into having sex. During the intercourse, the camera focuses on the smile on the girl’s face and soundtrack features lighter music for the first time. The mood in the film distinctly changes. The girl’s feelings after are of freedom and joy. The men's accomplishment of sex again borders on rape, but the repression she felt was an abuse as well. The abuse fueled her attraction to them because they presented her with liberation. The audience is challenged because they can identify with her decision. While post-modernism allows for the absence of morals, one of its best features has been the challenge for extremes in a higher context.
During this period, many films were made that broke barriers of moral identity. It was a trend that easily caught fire. America became inundated with films of excessive violence to the point that Going Places was no longer shocking for some. It wasn't until the 90s that the post-modernist movement witnessed a major boom in discussion with the emergence of Quentin Tarantino in the American film world. His debut film, Reservoir Dogs was a stylistic jazz riff on the robbery genre. The new trend in this film wasn't the excessive violence, but how commonplace violence was to the characters. Mundane conversations took place in the middle of horrific situations. Reservoir Dogs drew a small following who championed the film's everyday approach to violence as a new marker in cinema. Then Pulp Fiction hit. For many who were adverse to Tarantino before, his second film was hard to deny. It expanded on all the limitations of Reservoir Dogs: the scope was enhanced, the story was more fleshed out and the film was not as inundated with violence. Tarantino was still playing his tune of a jazz riff, this time with the gangster genre, but Pulp Fiction also proved that Quentin Tarantino was a talented writer.
As Tarantino is the purveyor of everyday violence, he is also a filmmaker of everyday conversation. His first two films had very little of what we understand to be a plot as it had an inhabitance of his characters beginning at the art of their conversations. As distinct as Mamet is in his prose, Tarantino is also for blending realistic subject matter into outrageous conversation. The realism of the conversation is that action doesn’t break up a character’s wordings. Characters go on the way we all do. In his original review, Gene Siskel commented that one of the best parts of Pulp Fiction was that conversations in a scene kept going a few minutes after the scene normally would have ended. The truth of the success of Pulp Fiction isn’t so simple.
When Tarantino was promoting Pulp Fiction, he was routinely asked why he chose the structure of a shifting story that jumped from end to beginning and every other which way through out the film. Tarantino alluded to the example of the novel in every response. See, the shifting story of back-and-forth is nothing new in movies. The way Tarantino does it though is. Pulp Fiction does little to bring resolution to any of the major characters. While the alleged inspirational film of Pulp Fiction, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, has a similar story objective and a resolution that is tidy to finding an outcome for all the characters. The weight of Pulp Fiction rests solely in the strength of the scenes and the interactions. Novels have the challenge of detailing hundreds of pages with character portraits. Better novels focus on that challenge knowing the value of what they write is hardly ever found in looking for redemption in the final twenty pages. Tarantino makes Pulp Fiction memorable because he understands where the value of the films rests. While the film was well made in many ways, its rare quality was that it was encompassing of the helpful objectives of another art.
The praise for Pulp Fiction has its limits though. In an early scene in the film, a routine drug pick up and execution goes wrong when an assailant, hiding in another room, jumps out on Jackson and Travolta and begins shooting. He misses them entirely and immediately is shot for revealing himself. The situation sets up the final scene where Jackson reflects on the unlikely chance of the shooter missing entirely not as good luck but as an intervention from God and a message to Jackson. Travolta argues his sincerity but when the two are held up at gun point, Jackson spares the robber's lives and says he is through with being a criminal. In the context of true post-modernism, the scene aches to have a personal context for the character. Alas, it does not. In no manner of societal or personal matter is a larger comment issued. The biblical reference begins and ends as stylistic mechanism. The rest of Pulp Fiction, while very good, follows suit to be the introduction to the larger public of what makes Tarantino so appealing at surface level.
As Going Places shows no sympathy for its characters' ruthless aggression, neither does Tarantino for his characters, who are the embodiment of the violence our new culture has grown up with. But the characters of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction stand outside and inside of movies: they kill as the casual heroics of the movies but bleed and die with realism outside of it. For Tarantino, this is how post-modernism existed. The problem with Tarantino is that he never expanded beyond this premise. His films became genre films, wrought with stylistic ambitions yet void of content. He was making films that interpreted genre as high art. While Pulp Fiction had no context, its popularity did. When the wave of imitative filmmakers came after the success and the new wave of filmmakers began to settle as the critical backbone of American cinema, Tarantino became the 90s version of Andy Warhol. The fact is, no filmmaker of this generation (including Tarantino) was able to progress beyond Pulp Fiction.
Filmmakers who were exceptions to that critical praise had to pick up the slack. Ironically, it was out of a Quentin Tarantino story that this began. When Oliver Stone made Natural Born Killers in 1994, he made it the same year as Tarantino revolutionary started with Pulp Fiction but he also had to be aware of the already established gore style of Tarantino. The film is about two serial killers who are in love and kill everyone they see. The filmmaking is anarchistic and flies with no flags of moral identity. It runs with the characters to a state of hyper-realism. This is not the reason why Quentin Tarantino denounced this adaptation of his short story. He denounced the finished film because there was a total transformation of his original story. Tarantino wrote the characters to be believed in. Oliver transformed them into clichés of bad films.
Natural Born Killers ends up as satire. It empties an arsenal of criticism into how America made the killers. It is also a piercing example of Tarantino's limitations. For me, post-modernism is art that not only brings the most challenging scrutiny to our society, but also pushes the limits of its own aesthetic. Tarantino still glides at the top of the film world for his technique of referencing earlier films, but that is as dated as the oldest films made. Citizen Kane tops greatest films lists for a reason. It is the first film to combine all technical innovation and style of the film world into one film. The commonplace violence in Tarantino's films stuns the audience with how brutality is made into easy entertainment beyond anything else. I'm reminded of what Philip Roth once said of literature and the media: "The popular media have usurped literature's scrutinizing function - usurped it and trivialized it. The momentum of the American mass media is toward the trivialization of everything." The media need no assistance now because it has Quentin Tarantino.
Jackie Brown, also in the canon of his work and notably praised, deserves little attention. Tarantino performed an act he should have never committed to: the execution of a plot. It detracts his writing of great detail, the type of detail that made Pulp Fiction worthwhile. At his best, Tarantino writes for the intricacy of everyday life. Jackie Brown asked him to acknowledge the patterns of drama that made him look at depth first and he comes up flat. The film ends up dragging from scene to scene with little motivation. He also directs to a very flat tone. His excuse was that he wanted the film - first and foremost - to be an acknowledged adaptation of the original novel. I’ve never read the novel but the films plays to the little intricacy or scrutiny that most novels possess. Whether Jackie Brown is faithful or not is beyond the answers of this essay but it is not very interesting.
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