The Ghost Writer

Publish or Perish

2010 // France - Germany - UK // Roman Polanski // March 14, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

B+ - Roman Polanski's thrillers pulse with their own curious rhythms, conveying a sense that everything—conversations, knowledge, even physical space—is ever so slightly out of sync. Few directors possess his uncanny facility for pulling together all the elements of cinema, especially the selection of shots and music, to evoke a veiled, relentlessly sinister reality. Whether he succeeds (Chinatown) or fails (The Ninth Gate), the result is unfailingly sumptuous and moody. So it is with The Ghost Writer, a potboiler set in the rotten twin worlds of politics and publishing, executed with the auteur's customary dramatic dexterity and passion for generic trappings. Polanski makes no effort to conceal his personal fingerprints on the film: its politics are acidly suspicious of American power and yet also vaguely sympathetic to (ahem) public figures hounded by public outrage and the courts. Yet the film remains relentlessly engaged with the noir-tinged plight of its nameless protagonist (Ewan McGregor), a man who, like Jake Gittes, considers himself a savvy mercenary, and whose pursuit of the truth is rooted not in airy ideals but in his resentment at being played for a fool.

McGregor's character, a rootless thirty-something hack writer that the credits only identify as the Ghost, has been retained to finish the memoirs of the beleaguered former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan, exceptionally cast a half-step against type). An unambiguous analogue to Tony Blair, Lang is a Labor man with a gleaming smile, but he nonetheless oversaw an authoritarian government that became mired in a Middle Eastern war alongside the U.S. As the International Criminal Court prepares to indict the former PM for war crimes related to the rendition of terrorism suspects, Lang and his staff are holed up at his publisher's modernist beach retreat on a gray, blustery New England island. The Ghost arrives to find everyone acting strangely, from the understandably agitated Lang, to his shuttered, disdainful wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), to his cheerily looming assistant, Amelia (Kim Cattral). Incidentally, the Ghost is not the first writer to tackle Lang's memoirs. One day the previous ghost inexplicably took a ferry to the mainland and back, vanishing mid-passage and then washing up drowned on the beach. Was it an accident or a suicide, as one character muses? Or a third possibility, as the Ghost no doubt wonders?

The story, which Polanski and Robert Harris adapted from the latter's novel, encompasses a perilous labyrinth of politics, war, money, sex, and, above all, lies, which the Ghost only gradually perceives and pieces together. The particular appeal of a Polanski thiller is the slow, effortless manner in which the film lowers us into an abyss of vast, complex intrigues, and The Ghost Writer is no exception. Save its mystifying openings shots of the drowned man's abandoned SUV on the ferry, the film unfolds almost entirely from the Ghost's perspective, allowing us to experience his mounting anxiety in real time. Frequently this unease stems from his awareness of his own failures of discernment, whether the object is an Argento-esque cryptic clue or simply a distant figure whose identity and intentions he cannot determine. (Is any director more skilled at using field size to create uncertainty and tension than Polanski?) Just as often, the Ghost expresses a blend of dread and irritation at the notion that someone (or several someones) is lying to his face. This doesn't so much offend his sense of truth—he makes his living pretending his words are someone else's, after all—as it chafes at his self-conception as a world-weary realist. The Ghost is a bit of tabula rasa, but McGregor's creased and rumpled boyishness allows us to easily engage with a protagonist who is faceless by design. Much is made of the fact that the Ghost has no family, no commitments, and no political beliefs. He could vanish and no one would take notice, a fact that seems more and more ominous as he plunges deeper into the film's mysteries.

Harris' screenplay crackles with just the right allotment of gallows drollness, without ever making a show of its own wittiness. Polanski places significant emotional emphasis on the revelations at the heart of the film's puzzle, balancing them adeptly against the progressively escalating sense of apprehension. Much of the atmosphere springs from fearful anticipation that danger awaits around every corner, and the third act does a masterful job of evoking a sense of palpable uncertainty about where exactly the plot is going and who exactly the Ghost can trust. (When was the last time you could honestly say about a thriller?) When the answers finally come, the simplicity of it all is matched only by our relief at having something concrete to latch onto. And then Polanski wallops us with a final shot that is nearly flawless in its execution.

For all the film's plot-centered twists, which meander past a Haliburton stand-in and the Ivy League intelligentsia, one gets the sense that Polanski's primary thematic interest here is the destruction of the self at the hands of others, a decades-long occupation for the director. Like Polanski's under-valued 1976 thriller The Tenant, The Ghost Writer concerns a man who is slowly, inexorably being transformed into the person who preceded him, an unwilling evolution of identity perpetrated with off-handed malevolence by the people that surround him. Other manifestations of this principle abound in the film, such as in the suggestion that Lang is merely a plastic puppet controlled by more purposeful parties. Polanski has long been fascinated with the fear that the self is perpetually under siege by the often ravenous demands of others, and here he manages another absorbing expression of this theme, evincing an unflagging cynicism for the notion that one can ever truly be one's own man. That he achieves this within the parameters of a riveting, evocative, flat-out entertaining thriller makes it all the more gratifying.

Alice in Wonderland

Uffish, But Not Frumious

2010 // USA // Tim Burton // March 5, 2010 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

C+ - Any film treatment of Lewis Carroll's Alice books must overcome a conspicuous stumbling block: How does one adapt a pair of Victorian nursery stories, consisting mainly of a succession of absurdist dialogues, into engaging cinema? A literalist, scene-by-scene recreation of the Alice tales would make for an unconventional film, but also a wearisome and distinctly un-cinematic experience. Given his gothic fairy-tale sensibilities and enduring fascination with outcasts defined by their hyperbolic physical and emotional qualities, Tim Burton would seem a comfortable fit for Carroll's brand of amusing dementia. However, the director's track record with big-budget adaptations has been woefully mixed, with Exhibit A in the negative column being his misguided, excruciating Planet of the Apes remake. Happily, Alice in Wonderland, while hardly the rich, cerebral adaptation that Carroll's works deserve, proves to be a solid little adventure tale that traipses through a deliciously gratifying Burton-esque landscape. In Wonderland, the director discovers an expansive sandbox for the funhouse impulses he favors in his most inventive works. Unfortunately, Alice never remotely achieves the madcap vigor of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, or Batman Returns (all exemplars of Burton's vision at its most fiendish and uninhibited). The story is little more than a boilerplate Hero's Journey, but coiled within are both the sensory splendors we expect from Burton the Fabulist, as well as some welcome jottings of subversion.

Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton--whose résumé is long on toy-themed kiddie television, but, crucially, also features Mulan--sidestep the fundamental dilemma of an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland adaptation with a decidedly prosaic approach. Ostensibly, the film is a sequel to Through the Looking-Glass, wherein a nineteen-year-old Alice returns to a Wonderland she no longer remembers. In practice, the film has little to do with Carroll's stories, either in form or in tone. Woolverton employs the source material in the service of a PG-rated fantasy adventure filled with monsters, prophecies, escapes, relics, and epic battles. The whole concept--Wonderland as a wackier, gentler Lord of the Rings knockoff--is vaguely heretical, but Burton and Woolverton at least commit to this angle with full-throated enthusiasm. Channeling a family-friendly Alan Moore, the film re-imagines the characters, creatures, and settings of both Alice stories (and the imagery of Disney's 1951 animated feature) into a monomythical context, complete with facile messaging for a contemporary tween audience. One can only imagine how appalled Carroll purists will be at the sight of a vorpal sword-wielding Alice astride a Bandersnatch.

This Alice (Mia Wasikowska) has the smoky eyes and distracted manner of the little girl from the books, and also a liberated, anachronistic disdain for Victorian society. Her widowed mother expects her to marry a comically repugnant aristocrat, but, true to form, Alice follows the White Rabbit down a familiar hole during her own engagement party. In the years since Alice's last visit, Underland (which a young Alice misheard as "Wonderland") has fallen almost wholly into the power of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).  In a bit of license that has become unfortunately endemic to Alice adaptations, the Queen is an amalgam of Wonderland's Queen of Hearts and Looking-Glass' Red Queen, boasting the most monstrous traits of both. With the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) serving as the Queen's dread knight and the Jabberwocky at her command, the Underland residents have been variously jailed, enslaved, and cowed into submission. Although Alice remembers nothing of her last visit, the locals--including an oddly melancholy Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp)--are convinced she is the foretold champion of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the hero who will slay the Jabberwocky and liberate their world.

This approach to Carroll's work makes for an accessible story, but unfortunately also a rather bland one, and it brings with it all the usual problems that bedevil fantasy adventure films. The template is dreadfully familiar at this point, and treading the same path as countless other entries in the genre demands that a film-maker offer some refreshing angle. The use of the Wonderland characters and locales in unconventional ways proves a compelling hook, as is the script's unabashed affection for Carroll portmanteau, but these are inadequate to energize the film's otherwise rote fantasy parameters. Alice also suffers from an often confused middle act, which mumbles through vital character moments and features some abrupt, distracting shifts in scene and tone.

While the film's story is thoroughly unremarkable, the look of the thing is something to behold. Burton tinges his vision of Wonderland with characteristic gloom, transforming the proto-psychedelic hues of Disney's animated adaptation into a carnival palette that is alternately plush, bruised, and faded. Playing card and chess motifs manifest themselves throughout the castles of the Red and White Queens, respectively, and the Underland wilds have the fitting look of Victorian garden gone to thistle and briar. John Tenniel's iconic illustrations for the books are unmistakably an influence on Robert Stromberg's production design, but that influence is deftly employed and never registers as an oppressive presence. Burton teases out the mythical and oneiric elements of the setting while keeping the overly precious nineteenth-century qualities in check.  When the familiar black shape of the Jabberwocky appears with its flaming purple breath, it vibrates storybook fears long dormant. The film employs 3-D in a consciously showy manner, with abundant objects lunging and soaring out towards the viewer. While gimmicky and slight compared to the immersive worlds of Coraline or Avatar, the 3-D effects suit Burton's aesthetic, which is part haunted house and part pop-up book.

Despite the distressingly routine story and the director's often clumsy handling of it, Burton discovers all sorts of personal affinities in his Alice, which is all the more remarkable given the work-for-hire odor that clings to the film. Consistent with the source material, Wonderland's absurdism is portrayed as a proxy for the real world's madness, with Burton paying particular heed to notions of social determinism and the connection between identity and action. Alice chafes under the strictures of late 1800's England, but while her objections are obliviously modern, they are also the keenly felt doubts of a willful individual who loathes being lectured on what is possible, permissible, and reasonable. The adult Alice's plunge into Underland coincides with her mounting dread at the proper (sexual) life that is rushing towards her, and her adventures represent a honing of her directionless anxiety into a tangible, real-world ambition. Woolverton ups the ante on the film's welcome gender reversal by recasting the Mad Hatter as the Princess to Alice's Hero, narratively speaking. Depp spends much of the film as the passive object of an Alice rescue mission, and his Hatter's own sorrowful, absent-minded searching--for a purpose, an answer, and an occasion worthy of a truly frabjous dance--mirrors the heroine's own quest to define herself on her own terms. With The Princess and the Frog's overdue corrective to the company's commercial mythmaking, and now Alice in Wonderland's sly tweaking of conventional gender-based fantasy tropes, Disney appears to be on a modest roll.

The White Ribbon

Innocence and Other Noble Lies

2009 // Austria - Germany - France - Italy // Michael Haneke // March 3, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

A- - There is a mystery at the core of Michael Haneke's Palm d'Or-clinching new film, The White Ribbon, but it is not a mystery that requires a solution. Unlike the director's brilliant splatter of post-modern mindfuckery, Caché, his latest feature does not wander outside the frame in the pursuit of answers. The culprit who has committed The White Ribbon's bizarre misdeeds is hiding in plain sight. Set in the rigidly Protestant German hamlet of Eichwald just before World War I, the film presents the events of a single year, a year in which a series of peculiar and disturbing misfortunes befall the community. Someone in the village is clearly responsible for these misfortunes, but sorting out whodunit is, at best, tangential to the film's striking emotional and intellectual vigor. Maintaining a mannered, somber tone that swathes the viewer in Old Testament dread, Haneke uses his setting and plot as portals through which he accesses a breathtaking array of themes. Impeccably constructed and exquisitely shot in black-and-white, The White Ribbon will frustrate viewers seeking dramatic jolts. This film is all trembling and lip-licking, a work brimming with the sour-gut sensation that something is wrong, just out of sight.

The story, which spans the summer of 1913 to the summer of 1914, is narrated by a nameless school teacher (Christian Friedel, with voiceover by Ernst Jacobi). His viewpoint is that of a rational, somewhat perplexed young man, an outsider from a neighboring town and an emissary for the twentieth century modernity that Eichwald has steadfastly resisted. However, Haneke shows us events that this schoolmaster does not witness, and thereby grants us glimpses of the rot that his narrator senses only vaguely. The film begins with a sinister mishap: the village doctor is seriously injured when his horse trips over a wire strung just outside his home. The question of who would set such a trap (and why) haunts the film, but this puzzle is quickly compounded by others. The story proceeds with chilly evenness and yet mounting anxiety through the year, as a succession of strange mishaps and crimes accrue: a sawmill worker is killed in a fall; the local baron's son is trussed up and whipped; an infant suffers an illness; a barn is burned; a boy with Down syndrome is brutally beaten. For the village residents, these myriad troubles blur together and begin to smother them with aimless fears and suspicions.

The physical borders of the village rigorously bound the film's action, and yet the cast of characters is vast. The oppressively patriarchal character of Eichwald's social organization is reinforced by Haneke's approach, which identifies and examines each family through its male head of household. Accordingly, we meet the baron and his wife and children; the pastor and his wife and children; the steward and his wife and children; and a farmer and his wife and children. This isn't to say that the female characters are neglected, although they are often less emotionally rounded than their male counterparts. Rather, Haneke has tightly bound his film's structure to its milieu. He alights on one family and then the next, absorbing how the village's small calamities affect each clan. Overwhelmingly, the repercussions of the film's events are discerned through the lens of each patriarch's way of life, whether aristocrat or peasant. We witness the way each man dominates his family through a strictly enforced regimen of emotional and physical abuse, and then watch, numbed and apprehensive, as the ripples from these patterns of violence spread and collide with one another.

Two men stand outside this framework. The first is the narrator, a kindly bachelor who never seems wholly at ease with the village's puritanical culture. He is smitten with the baron's nanny, Eva (Leonie Benesch), a timid yet guileless girl who seems positively saintly compared to her fellow villagers. She accepts his courting with the faintest acknowledgement, but beneath their mutual shyness we can sense a longing for human warmth. Haneke approaches this sweet, chaste romance without a trace of condescension, employing it to unabashedly express the virtue of the narrator and his beloved. However, the film-maker is less enamored with facile contrasts than with the ways the romance subplot highlights the story's more sinister aspects. When Eva objects to the schoolmaster's suggestion of an un-chaperoned picnic off the beaten path, we sympathize with his disappointment, because we are privy to his honorable intentions. However, the village's troubles have revealed the ugliness of the human heart, and what might seem like prudishness on her part reads instead as the sensible judgment of a woman who feels surrounded by malevolence.

Eichwald's widower doctor (Rainer Bock) likewise fails to fit the preferred template of a patriarch with a submissive wife, but his situation is unusual in other ways. His control over his children is of a seemingly kindlier stripe, but also subtler and altogether more monstrous at its heart. Most of the villagers perceive him as an educated angel of mercy. The local midwife (Susanne Lothar), who faithfully serves him as an assistant, nanny, and lover, sees his dictatorial side, yet cannot wrest herself from his stranglehold. Occasionally, Haneke permits this cancerous relationship to wander into the hyperbolic, as when the doctor concludes a harrowing torrent of emotional abuse with a resigned sigh, "Why can't you just die, already?"  In the main, however, the film deftly succeeds in establishing the common strains of arrogance, resentment, and sadism that run through the village's men. Fortunately, Haneke's superb attentiveness to emotional detail prevents The White Ribbon from devolving into a glib indictment of everything white, male, and Christian. He conveys the hazards of Manichean condemnation not by shoehorning in sentiment, but by providing the narrative space to discover notes of sympathy for his characters' often repugnant worldviews. By any yardstick, the pastor (Burghart Klaußner) is a vile authoritarian, but Haneke asks us to savor the wisdom in his advice to his son, who wishes to care for an injured bird. When the boy later offers the animal as a replacement for his father's own dead parakeet, it is both a moment of learned submission to a feared patriarch and a gesture of love, and the delicate expression that plays across the pastor's face registers both.

The question of who is responsible for the village's misfortunes is never answered satisfactorily, although the narrator offers one possible explanation in the film's final scenes. Tellingly, this does not draw the story to a conclusion, but deepens its mysteries and elaborates on its themes. Haneke emulates Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock and Fincher's Zodiac by abandoning the necessity of resolution and embracing the mood of dissolution and despair that emerges from Not Knowing. However, whereas those films took up the corrosive effect of mysteries on communities and individuals as primary themes, The White Ribbon employs its strange events as incitements for broader explorations of the nature of evil, both in the context of its specific setting and more generally.

The solemn tone that predominates throughout the film belies the provocative character of Haneke's purpose, but perhaps it should be obvious that the man who made Funny Games wouldn't be satisfied with a mere starched period drama. The children of The White Ribbon are, of course, the Nazi generation, and Haneke has described the film as an investigation into the roots of authoritarianism, and specifically how Germany's austere pre-Reich society could give rise to the defining evil of the twentieth century. The cusp-of-the-Great-War setting and disturbing depiction of pre-Industrial cultural norms position The White Ribbon for a cunning attack on conventional historical wisdom. The West has grown accustomed to the myth that World War I served as a kind of social dividing line between the pastoral simplicity of the Past and the crushing, dehumanizing Now, helped along by eloquent veterans such Tolkein, Lewis, and Germany's own Remarque, who authored the ur-anti-war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. The accepted narrative regards the Great War as a violent deflowering of the West's supposed moral purity.

In The White Ribbon, Haneke assiduously and forcefully confronts this myth by starkly portraying the malevolence of the patriarchal Christian social structure that dominated agrarian Europe on the very eve of the war. His attack on the prevailing innocence/fall narrative also manifests in the film's increasingly uneasy stance towards its own innocents, the children of Eichwald. By casting doubt on an accepted wisdom—the purity of childhood—the film undermines the metaphorical foundation of the Great War myth. What emerges from the film's grim confines is a pessimistic rejection of the very notion of innocence, both as a moral state and as a framework for mythmaking. The White Ribbon acknowledges the power of such fictional ideals, whether social, spiritual, or sexual, but regards them as tools of obfuscation and tyranny. Haneke, who has developed a reputation as a provocateur rivaled only by that of von Trier, demonstrates the power of classic dramatic storytelling for focusing his righteous artistic scorn while also attending to his humane side. The result is gorgeous, morally forceful work, guaranteed to get under viewers' skin and gnaw at them for years to come.

Shutter Island

Experimental Treatment

2010 // USA // Martin Scorsese // February 21, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B - Eternally the Catholic kid from the Garment District, Martin Scorsese has long used his narrative features to explore the relationship between violence and guilt. Granted, the stultifying, deforming influence of societies on the individual frequently figures prominently into his films, with the societies in question ranging from blinkered, hierarchical subcultures to the vast, alienating melting pot of over-stimulated contemporary America. Even Scorsese's most unambitious feature in the past two decades, his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, took pains to develop the original film's anemic foundations into a more substantive commentary on the absurdities of the criminal justice system and the allure of masculine mythology. However, settings only seem to hold the director's attention inasmuch as they relate to searingly personal concerns; at the center of most Scorsese films is a battered man squeezed between others' rules and his own sins. Given these tendencies, I suppose I should have expected that Shutter Island would prove to be something more elaborate and bruised than the "mere" creepshow thriller that is being presented in the film's marketing. Not that there's anything wrong with a creepshow thriller done exceptionally well (q.v., Drag Me to Hell), but Scorsese, despite his profile, isn't the film-maker that leaps to mind when one hears the phrase "Master of Horror." Shutter Island feels for all the world like a florid imitation of a Wes Craven delve, and it's only in the final twenty minutes that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Scorsese tell, the strand of private Christian torment that stretches all the way back to Mean Streets.

The film opens on a ferry looming out of the fog of Boston Harbor in 1954. Aboard is Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio in his fourth consecutive collaboration with Scorsese), a U.S. Marshal with an anxious manner and a heedless inclination for provoking anyone that rubs him the wrong way. Teddy is bound for Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital, a federally-funded institution for the criminally insane. He and his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have been tasked to investigate the seemingly impossible escape of a female patient (Emily Mortimer), incarcerated for drowning her own children. The titular island is a misty purgatory straight out of a Val Lewton film, complete with a coastline of jagged black rock, a lonely lighthouse, and a decrepit graveyard. Naturally, a violent thunderstorm rolls in just as the marshals arrive, and then quickly escalates to a hurricane. Teddy intuits from the outset that something is rotten at Ashecliffe, and he's determined to get to the bottom of it. As with any atmospheric tale of horror worth its salt, the sensation of wrongness develops not from one thing but lots of little things: the contradictions in the tale of the murderess' escape; the guards who seem a bit too menacing and the patients who seem to be trying to warn the marshals; and the German Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), who gives Teddy (a WWII vertran who helped liberate Dachau) a case of the heebie-jeebies.

The genial director of the hospital (Ben Kingsley) explains that psychiatry is poised at a turning point, as lobotomies are being supplanted by pharmacology and psychoanalysis for even habitually violent patients, with the latter tactics favored by Ashecliffe and its staff. Then why do parts of the hospital complex look more like a medieval dungeon or industrial hellhole than a place of healing? The efficacy of Teddy's investigation isn't helped by a sudden bout of crippling migraines, or the intrusion of vivid memories: slaughtered children in the death camps, a Nazi commandant dying at his feet, and most especially bittersweet visions of his wife (Michelle Williams), who years ago perished in a fire at their apartment building. The lines between reality and delusion start to blur in short order, and eventually we reach a point where the film's framework snaps decisively and poor Teddy is forced to face what we have long suspected: he is well and truly fucked. Needless to say, there is much more going on in Shutter Island's puzzle-box plot than is initially apparent, although it holds onto its revelations until the bitter end, at which point almost everything settles into place (with a little jostling).

If you're thinking that all of this sounds both a little pedestrian in general, and a little odd coming from Scorsese in particular, well, then you'd be right. Plenty of directors have ventured outside their generic comfort zones with fine, even spectacular, results, but Scorsese is unable to discover the precise tone for a tale of psychological horror. The director's approach here is best described as "shamelessly unrelenting," a gambit that at times pays spine-tingling dividends, but at others just comes off as domineering. On the positive side, the setting is marvelously evocative, particular the repeated imagery of black evergreens and sea spray against slate skies. It isn't just forlorn, it's Movie Forlorn, and making this sort of thing look gorgeous is all in a day's work for cinematographer Robert Richardson, who has lensed some of the most visually arresting features from Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and Errol Morris. Likewise for production designer Dante Ferretti, whose attention to detail and penchant for visual overstatement function spectacularly well here, from the painfully cheerful flower beds to the abyssal prison cells to the ludicrously baroque staff lounge, where Mahler plays on a phonograph and glasses of brandy glint in the golden light.

There's a bit of metatextual canniness at work in the casting, for added creepiness. Who wouldn't be freaked out at an asylum staffed by Kingsley, Von Sydow, John Carroll "Zodiac" Lynch, and Ted "Buffalo Bill" Levine? (Levine, who has just one significant scene, claim the film's best line: "If I bit into your eye right now, do you think you'd be able to stop me before I blinded you?" Remember, he's the warden.) Elsewhere, however, Shutter Island's eagerness to convey its menace just comes off as lumbering, most conspicuously in the orchestral strings that pound and pound and POUND. This doggedness becomes gaudy by the end of the first act, when an unfortunate reality sets in: the film just isn't especially scary. It's unquestionably moody, and it conveys the perversely pleasurable sense of disorientation that the best potboilers strive for. However, the stretches of unease and moments of fright that should be the meat-and-potatoes of a horror film are decidedly limp and unremarkable here. Scorsese can do tension masterfully when he wishes to, especially violent tension. Watch Tommy DeVito's rage slowly boil over in Goodfellas, or Bill Cutting as he makes Amsterdam twist on the tip of a meat cleaver in Gangs of New York. In Shutter Island, however, Scorsese privileges ornate atmospherics and the presentation of the convoluted plot over the emotional potency of any given scene. Too often, the film feels like a parlor trick rather than a story. The concluding twist, which throws everything that has come before it into a fresh light, only heightens this sense that we have been pranked.

Whether one regards the prank as clever, or the reveal as gratifying, may be a matter of taste. Happily, Shutter Island's late-game U-turn also enriches and contextualizes the film a whole, nestling it alongside the other works of Scorsese's oeuvre that starkly address evil and penance. The grittiness that has become synonymous with the director's narrative features has become so hopelessly (and erroneously) conflated with realism, that it can come as a shock when Scorsese demonstrates that he has always been comfortable gazing through a distorted lens. Films like Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, and Bringing Out the Dead flirt with the hyperreal character of modern life, embracing their narrators' unreliability and their habit of perceiving the world through personal anguish. Although Scorsese's command of generic essentials is uncharacteristically ungainly in Shutter Island, the film dovetails strikingly with the thematic concerns that have roiled for four decades in his work. Moreover, it provokes the most coveted reaction among twisty thrillers: the need to see it again.

Police, Adjective

Hurry Up and Wait

2009 // Romania // Corneliu Porumboiu // February 9, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

B+ - Corneliu Porumboiu's willfully staid and yet wholly absorbing new feature, Police, Adjective, operates on two interlocking planes. On the one hand, it is a police procedural of the driest sort imaginable, an agonizingly attentive study of how people, objects, and information travel through a drug investigation in a small Romanian city. In this city, the Eastern Bloc bureaucracy (and furniture) is still firmly in place, as are draconian narcotics laws that the rest of the European Union has discarded. Strictly as a lesson in how dull police work can be, and specifically how dully absurd it can be in a former Communist dictatorship, Police, Adjective is an intriguing work, whose stifling realism serves as a direct refutation to the bombast of the Cop Picture (regardless of nationality). Porumboiu, however, is far too talented and unruly a director to simply engage in a bit of genre revisionism and call it a day. Accordingly, there is another, more impressive level to the film, one absorbed with language and the way it shapes, steers, and constrains us. What truly fascinates about Police, Adjective is how easily Porumboiu grafts what is for all practical purposes an academic treatise on linguistics onto his police procedural, and how the two complement and fortify one another.

The protagonist of Porumboius's tale—the narrative realities and general tone of the film prohibit me from describing him as a hero—is young plainclothes police detective Christi (Dragos Bucur). Diligent and soft-spoken, he peers out into the gray world over turtleneck collars pulled up high. He carries no gun, but takes meticulous notes on everything he sees and hears. When we meet him, Christi is on his eighth day of a petty narcotics investigation. Tipped off by a high school student who claims that his friend is dealing hashish, Christi spends much of his time following the boys on foot. The remainder of his professional day is occupied with filling out handwritten reports, dodging his obdurate captain (who we do not meet until the film's penultimate scene), and shuffling from building to building to joust with a succession of clerks, lawyers, and fellow police officers. What we observe of Christi's home life mainly consists of him pensively eating his dinner, either alone or with his new wife. Bucur's superb performance is so finely modulated that it barely registers as a performance at all. There is nothing exaggerated about his character; Christi is both serious and jejune, assiduous and ambivalent, a host of subtle contradictions bound within an unassuming whole.

Porumboiu presents roughly two days in Christi's dreary, regimented routine with a studious gaze. The director relies on the long takes that have become a hallmark of the Romanian New Wave, favoring static shots for interiors and a softly prowling handheld camera for exteriors, the latter mimicking Christi's anxious pacing as he watches and waits in the biting winter winds. Porumboiu's previous feature was 12:08 East to Bucharest, a work of wry brilliance that ruthlessly skewered Romanian society. Like that film, Police, Adjective features an extended scene in its third act that serves as, if not exactly a climax, at least a culmination of the dramatic groundwork that Porumboiu has been applying ever so gradually and evenly up to that point. The fact that much of this scene involves a character reading aloud from a dictionary underlines just how unhurried the rest of the film is. To be blunt, Police, Adjective is slow. Really slow. It's a film about waiting and observing and going through the little obligatory motions that enable us to make forward progress (or maintain the illusion of said progress).

Most crudely, then, Police, Adjective is a retort to the notion that police work is exciting. Porumboiu counters that it is, in fact, dull as hell, but his point is not merely to throw a bucket of cold water on a law enforcement myth. It's no accident that the film regards Christi's off-hours activities—slurping soup, flipping television channels, playing football tennis—with the same level gaze as it does his professional duties. The film suggests that police work is dull because, fundamentally, all human pursuits are dull, repetitive, and meaningless. It takes nerve to proffer such a disheartening premise, and it also risks boring the audience in the process of making one's point. Porumboiu avoids this pitfall, I think, due to his canny instinct for dribbling just enough drama into his story to stimulate our interest. Police, Adjective is not exactly a thrilling film, but it does harbor tingles of anticipatory energy. This energy swirls not only around the outcome of Christi's case, but around that inevitable meeting with the police captain that he is avoiding. Compared to the visual and emotional lifelessness that characterizes the films of Lisandro Alonso—who is similarly enamored with long takes and the absence of action—Porumboiu's film practically feels like The Bourne Ultimatum. To those uninitiated in the virtues of "Patience Cinema," however, it will no doubt seem glacial.

What makes Police, Adjective much stranger and more fascinating than it might have otherwise been is Porumboiu's decision to add a slathering of academic noodling about the nature and meaning of words. As such, what might have been a bleak portrait of the post-Soviet world becomes a kind of extended conversation, broken up across multiple characters and locales, about linguistics. In some scenes, this logophilia is unobtrusively enmeshed with the narrative. Variations on the phrase, "What do you mean by that?" pepper the script, and Christi's investigation calls on him to parse out what is hidden by innocuous (and misleading) words like "friend". Elsewhere the film's word-fixation is explicit. Christi has just two conversations with his wife that we see: one about a treacly pop song's nonsensical use of metaphor, the other about a recent change in a Romanian language standard. Most dramatically, Christi's eventual confrontation with his captain (a cooly menacing Vlad Invanov) revolves around a disagreement over the definitions of "conscience," "moral," "law," and "police".

Punching up one's languorous, revisionist police procedural with lengthy arguments about linguistics probably doesn't seem like a recipe for riveting cinema. What's remarkable about Police, Adjective is that these logophilic elements do enliven the story of Christi's investigation, and moreover, they blend fairly seamlessly into it, without coming off as tacked-on bits of graduate student pontification. Porumboiu skillfully draws a line between language and human experience, particularly where life's most unpleasant aspects are concerned. The film posits that, ultimately, words are the reason that Christi spends his days freezing his ass off, bored out of his mind, watching sixteen-year-olds walk here and there. Words like "criminal" and "duty," and the agreed-upon meanings of those words, have put him in this situation, whether he likes it or not. Admittedly, the film never discovers the sort of scathing commentary that Porumboiu's dissections of history and memory yielded in 12:08 East to Bucharest. The implications of Police, Adjective's grand thesis—that our everyday actions are dictated by the tyranny of language—are more philosophical than political. This is a letdown in some respects, as Porumboiu's film holds within it the seeds for a withering indictment of the injustices embedded in aspects of criminal law. It also makes the film feel chillier, slighter, and less humane than it might have otherwise been. However, this doesn't diminish the fact that Police, Adjective is still daring, cerebral stuff, and further evidence of Romanian cinema's capacity for novel, compelling storytelling.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans

Bad Bad, Not Good Bad

2009 // USA // Werner Herzog // February 7, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

C - Full disclosure: I have never seen Abel Ferrara's pitch-black 1992 character study, Bad Lieutenant. Neither has German film-maker and madman Werner Herzog. Unlike me, however, Herzog has directed a film titled The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, so he perhaps needs a better excuse than my all-purpose cover for any patch of cinematic illiteracy, "It's in my Netflix queue." If the reports are to be believed, Herzog does not regard his new feature as a remake, reboot, re-imagining, or anything of the sort. He claims that he doesn't even know who Ferrara is, and that the film's producers dictated its title. All this makes me much more comfortable approaching tBL:PoC - NO (yeesh, it hurts to type that) as a standalone work, rather than a tribute to or riff on Ferrara's film. Unfortunately, even if one regards Herzog's film as a wholly original work, there's no way around the fact that it is his sloppiest film in years, especially when compared to his last narrative feature, the lean, propulsive Rescue Dawn. Did I mention that the corrupt, degenerate, possibly psychotic police lieutenant of the title is played by American actor and madman Nicholas Cage? Letting Cage run loose in such a role might have been a nutty stroke of genius, but alas, Bad Lieutenant proves to be just another Bad Nick Cage performance, surrounded by a tonal and thematic muddle.

In a prologue set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans detective Terence McDonagh (Cage) reluctantly saves a man from drowning in a flooded police station holding cell. He is promoted to lieutenant as a result, but he also severely injures his back, setting him up for a lifelong addiction to painkillers. Six months later, McDonagh is the lead officer on the murder of a Senegalese drug dealer and his family. Despite the police procedural window dressing, Bad Lieutenant is not, in any conventional sense, a crime drama. McDonagh deduces fairly quickly that the murderers are a local drug kingpin and his goons, and there are no unexpected twists in this murder mystery thread. Bad Lieutenant is truly about McDonagh himself, and about his downward spiral into an abyss of drugs, sex, gambling, corruption, violence, and madness. The murder case is but one aspect of his festering life that the viewer has the privilege of touring. McDonagh is addicted to prescription drugs and also to cocaine, but he isn't averse to partaking in a little weed, heroin, or crack, as the situation warrants. He has a prostitute girlfriend, Frankie (Eva Mendes), who is also addicted to drugs and occasionally lets him shake down her customers. McDonagh has rung up a sizeable debt with his bookie (Brad Douriff) by betting (badly) on college football. He steals from the property room, and extorts drugs and sex from young club-goers by threatening them with arrest. His widower father (Tom Bower) is a drunk who has married another drunk (Jennifer Coolidge).

Herzog gives all of these elements more-or-less equal weight, signaling that the character of McDonagh is his focus, rather than the story per se. This isn't to say that the narrative isn't compelling in its way; it's just that the film-makers are less concerned with what happens than how McDonagh reacts to those events, and we're bound to follow their gaze. The film presents the lieutenant's existence as an undifferentiated tangle of rotten situations, all of which are colliding. As with many addicts, there are no banal moments in McDonagh's life: everything is always teetering on the edge of giddy victory or utter disaster. There is a kind of mesmerizing, frantic quality to the script, as one calamity leads to another and then another, and then the whole situation reverses with an unexpected stroke of luck, and then reverses again. At times, the story leans a bit too heavily on coincidence, but this arguably meshes with the film's surrealist touches (more on those in a bit).

Herzog's only clear objective seems to be to present a slice of this repulsive man's life in sickening detail. There's nothing intrinsically objectionable about this sort of character-based voyeurism, especially when the character in question is a compelling antihero (e.g., Taxi Driver, There Will Be Blood, or even...I don't know... Aguirre: The Wrath of God). However, a film-maker working within this mode should at least take a stab at articulating the antihero's understanding of themselves. Neither Herzog nor screenwriter William M. Finkelstein permit us to glance into McDonagh's inner life. There are whispers of Catholic guilt, childhood nostalgia, unresolved racism and class envy, and other tidbits sprinkled here and there, but these elements have no functional relationship to the events we are watching. The lieutenant's behavior is erratic, which is unrealistic--addicts don't behave erratically, as their whole lives are tightly organized around getting high--and also prevents us from getting a handhold on what's going on behind the sweaty, coke-addled histrionics. This being Herzog, there are some suggestions, in the dialog and through a recurring reptile motif, that McDonagh sees himself as an cold-blooded survivor, as single-minded as a predator on the prowl for its next meal. However, this cynical, amoral take on the character is not developed, and it frequently collides with other anemic themes. Elsewhere, Bad Lieutenant seems to be striving for a kind of ironic redemptive message, complete with a romantic embrace of the American Dream. Still elsewhere it is suggested that a prankster God is playing a direct role in manipulating events for His own sadistic amusement. Contradiction isn't always a flaw, but here it just feels like the result of slipshod storytelling that possesses neither a clear conception of its protagonist nor a coherent thematic thrust.

If Herzog deserves much of the blame for this confusion, Cage's distinctive brand of distracting silliness surely doesn't help. To their credit, both actor and director don't pull any punches; McDonagh is the center of the film, and boy do they want you to know it. Dressed in wrinkled, cream-colored suits a size too large, Cage slouches through the film with his chin slung low, looking like a cross between a sweaty southern lawyer and Frankenstein's monster. He glowers, sneers, screeches, bellows, and laughs maniacally, delivering the sort of So-Bad-It's-Good performances that is delicious fun to watch, but can't really be called "acting" in the sense one normally would mean. I haven't seen Cage in a film since he decided to dedicate himself to obvious rubbish like National Treasure and Ghost Rider, but the right feature can, on occasion, channel his broad, heedless style to great effect (e.g., Wild at Heart). Here the actor's presence just serves to segregate his character from the rest of film, as though someone had spliced Cage's cartoonish thrashings over a modulated, revealing performance by another actor. It's entertaining as hell, sure, but it also torpedoes any chance that Bad Lieutenant might discover its thematic or emotional foundation within its central performance.

I am willing to entertain the notion that Bad Lieutenant is a farce, but if this is the case, then the film is an even more conspicuous failure than I am willing to believe. There are too many overtly grim moments, too many scenes suffused with vividly expressed grief and rage, for the film to read as a work of black humor. Granted, what humor the film possesses is decisively black in character, and Herzog is adept at both alleviating and amplifying the threat of violence with absurdity. However, the laughs that the film elicits are most frequently of the unintentional sort, usually courtesy of an outlandish line or gesture from Cage.

Herzog drizzles the film with surrealistic flourishes that provide a welcome jolt from McDonagh's often suffocating descent into depravity, even if those flourishes often seem digressive. When McDonagh hallucinates that iguanas are crawling around a stakeout location, Herzog lingers indulgently on a lizard's-eye view of the detectives. In what proves to be the film's most inspired moment, McDonagh envisions the spirit of a slain gangster as a breakdancer spinning to zydeco music. "Shoot him again," the lieutenant murmurs, "His soul is still dancing." It's exactly the sort of weirdness that the film needs. Unfortunately such moments are too far and few between for them to provide a convincing fabric of magical realism, and they just end up resembling isolated whimsical gestures.

Longtime Herzog cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger does a marvelous job of capturing a distinctive look for New Orleans and its environs, one that relies on neither a tourist's rosy conception of the city nor a clichéd noir atmosphere. Zeitlinger's approach seizes upon the city's decay, but disregards the colonial or antebellum grandeur. Bad Lieutenant's New Orleans is gray, wet, and rust-flecked. You can practically smell the mildew, the rotting fish, and the ripe body odor of relentless, humid summers. In one of the film's finest shots, the camera crawls low over an asphalt highway, passes sputtering magnesium flares and skid marks, discovers a dead alligator with its entrails smeared, and then pans up to reveal a terrible multi-car auto accident. It's a superb visual that just screams Louisiana, but Herzog and Zeitlinger manage to make it feel anything but gimmicky.

That sort of visual artistry makes it difficult to accept what seems obvious under an honest assessment: Bad Lieutenant is a Bad Movie. It's never dull, and it's often downright thrilling, but there's just no getting around that it's a complete mess in all the ways that matter, and right at the center is a slab of thespian excess that simply cannot be taken seriously. In the past few years, Herzog has made some of the best documentaries in the world, which is why it's tempting to give a pass for something like Bad Lieutenant. However, the director proved just two years ago with Rescue Dawn that he can still create effective narrative features. Bad Lieutenant, by comparison, just feels careless and slightly embarrassing.