The Beaver

I’ll grant The Beaver this much: it’s not the train wreck I imagined. It’s still something of a wreck, mind you, but it’s also intriguing enough to avoid being a complete disaster. Mel Gibson stars as Walter, the clinically depressed CEO of a toy company, in one of the film’s many neat, obvious ironies. One botched slapstick suicide later, and a beaver puppet that speaks in a Michael Caine accent while spouting carpe-diem platitudes takes control of Walter’s hand. Supposedly, the puppet is a form of therapy, allowing Walter the necessary distance so that he can once again appreciate his life. It easily serves the same purpose for the audience, allowing us the necessary distance from this disgraced A-lister to at least tolerate his presence, if not appreciate his talents. (Say what you will, but just look at that mug shot and tell me you’re not mesmerized. Even in still photos, Gibson has an electric presence.)

Jodie Foster directs and plays Walter’s long-suffering wife, and both director and performer release every stray smile through gritted teeth and a pained expression. Does it hurt that much, Jodie? Ah, but this is no laughing matter, and that is where our troubles begin. How can you avoid humor in a film that features a montage of Gibson, Foster and hand puppet engaging in vigorous makeup sex? (Don’t worry, it’s not that freaky—the puppet mostly just likes to watch.) Yet Foster is clearly uncomfortable with the thought that this film will be treated as a joke, and recoils from the inherent absurdity of her premise. This only makes things worse, as she overcompensates, turning every second scene into another emotional peak. The whole film becomes one dramatic high after another until it is as numbing as Walter’s depression; everything is drowned in a somberness typified by the sort of soundtrack that features Radiohead songs and a piano player who only seems to have one finger.

Foster certainly deserves credit for not ignoring the darkness inherent to the situation—the third act takes a grisly turn that is shockingly audacious, in fact—but the film never resolves this tension between inspirational family drama and edgy psychodrama. It can’t decide if it wants to be as cute and cuddly as a talking stuffed puppet, or as dark and dangerous as, er, a talking stuffed puppet.

In Cold Blood

There’s something strangely romantic in the idea of a couple of criminals on the lam—two against the world, outside of the shackles of social propriety and legal responsibility, free to do what they want, be what they want. Sounds better than waking up at six in the morning to go to work on Monday, at least.

But there’s little romantic in the lives of Perry Smith (Robert Blake) and Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson). The two men murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959, and for what? Less than fifty dollars, a radio and a pair of binoculars. Within a few days of the killings, their wallets were once again filled with as much dust as the Nevada desert, and the pair resorted to cashing bad cheques or picking bottles while plotting their next move. This is less a crime spree than a long series of wrong turns down any number of dead-end dirt roads.

Richard Brooks wrote and directed this 1967 adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, aided greatly by the rich cinematography of Conrad Hall and two excellent full-blooded performances from Blake and Wilson. The film is not without a few dubious wrong turns of its own—Perry’s fantasies and hallucinatory visions are particularly at odds with the hardscrabble realism Brooks otherwise seems to be aiming towards—but it’s also an incredible portrait of American violence. Brooks acknowledges the monstrosity of these acts without subtracting the humanity of the perpetrators. Which, when you think about it, makes everything vastly more upsetting.

Not that everything about the film is so dire and dark. In fact, the score (by Quincy Jones!) is rather bright and bold, picking up the usual movie-music tropes and running them through what appears to be some sort of hot jazz machine. But it’s a Technicolor score for a black and white movie. Early scenes of the cheerful, unbelievably perfect Clutter family are married to sprightly, we’re-happy-smiling-people-about-to-die music that borders on poor taste. Just because dramatic irony is impossible to avoid in your story doesn’t mean you should run up and greet it.

No surprise then that the best scenes are often stripped of music. The murder of the Clutter family is played out largely in shadows, a single flashlight used to highlight the cringing faces of the victims. In place of strings and horns are echoing footsteps on a wooden staircase and the hollow, hungry wind. We’re deep in the murk now, as disoriented morally as we are physically.

The hangings might be the most remarkable scenes, however. Strikingly blunt for a Hollywood film of the day—indeed, it’s hard to imagine a mainstream film of any era portraying violence in such stark and unappealing terms—the deaths of Perry and Dick are as chilling as the murders. And yet they must contend with one of the film’s major missteps: a reporter sort-of representing Capote (sans personality, and maybe 30 years older) who supplies intrusive narration about the men’s death-row days, finally capping off his useless presence by making belaboured points against capital punishment while chatting with another vagabond cipher.

But none of this can detract from the final shot itself. Capote notoriously ended the book with a fabricated scene in which chief investigator Alvin Dewey met one of Nancy Clutter’s friends at the town graveyard. This misplaced burst of overwrought sentiment was an astounding miscalculation for such a finely modulated book—he might as well have ended with Nancy waving goodbye from a passing cloud.

Brooks wisely cuts the scene right out. His version may not be the equal of the book, but for all its flaws, the film surpasses the source material here. There’s nothing to buffer us from the sting of seeing such a pathetic end to such pathetic lives. No mercy in a merciless world. There’s just the sharp snap of the trapdoor, the sudden jerk of the rope—and then a body swaying like a pendulum, while a heart beats in our ears, slower and slower and slower.

Eyes Wide Shut

Only a truly serious wiseass like Stanley Kubrick would dare to pose the question at the heart of Eyes Wide Shut: if everyone thinks Tom Cruise is so hot, why can’t anyone fuck him? To judge by the film, the problem lies with Cruise himself. Regardless of which way he swings (and the film certainly covers its bases), the guy just won’t get down and dirty with the little people. In a beguiling nocturnal New York, the film tosses all manner of temptations at poor Tom, from lithe Lolitas to oversexed mourners and hotel clerks. He’s the loneliest guy at the top-secret, pseudo-occult evil orgy. Everyone wants to take the cruise, in other words, but the ship just won’t leave the dock.

On the surface, this is really just the simple story of a doubting husband (Cruise) putting himself in temptation’s way to prove his fidelity to his wife (Nicole Kidman, at her best). But the surface may be the least interesting part of this dreamy, weird movie, which remains a provocative and fascinating depiction of the intersection of sex and celebrity. Kubrick’s inherent solemnity obscures the general goofiness of the plot, and deadpan doesn’t begin to do justice to the weird tone that results. He’s not telling a joke seriously—he’s joking and serious, all at once, as if cognitive dissonance were the most honest way to tell this tale. And perhaps it is, considering we’ve got two major movie stars here who are both sexy yet essentially sexless. Admit it—lusting after this pair would be like falling in love with two mannequins, which are just as unnaturally well-formed and equally unobtainable.

The crucial moment comes during the aforementioned freaky-deaky orgy, where Cruise is commanded to strip before a masked crowd. For a film that so casually objectifies the nude female form, this feels like a fair bit of turnabout, an opportunity to make the voyeur squirm a bit and feel his own helplessness. But Cruise is saved from this threat, which begs the question of who exactly is being protected from nudity here—him or us? No one wants to see the sex object, female or male, made real (brought down to size, in a manner of speaking). In the context of the film, the moment is so terrifying it can only be compared to something like the opening of the box in Kiss Me Deadly, which was enough to separate flesh from bone and raze buildings. Is Tom Cruise’s penis another one of those cinematic truths just too terrible to bear?

Source Code

It’s the perfect setup: strangers on a train fall in love, only to be swallowed up by a giant fiery blast. And then the whole thing reboots, and they do it all over again. One can imagine the marketing types explaining why this is the perfect date movie, so finely balanced between the stereotypical male and female viewer (Big explosions for the boys! Icky feelings for the girls!). Plus, the scenario helpfully spares the filmmakers the challenge of portraying love as anything more complicated than the two prettiest people in the room trading flirty banter. This is a perpetual emotion machine, cranking out a generic sense of infatuation with no noticeable wear and tear. It runs on mediocrity and produces happy endings. Entropy is not a factor here. Has someone patented this thing yet? I’m not saying I like it, but it’s certainly brilliant, and it probably has more practical applications than holding together an off-season Hollywood B-movie.

Directed by Duncan Jones—another promising young talent seduced by the ineffable charms of middlebrow banality—Source Code is a love story between a phantom man (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a ghost girl (Michelle Monaghan) that is somehow devoid of all poignancy. Think La Jetee remade as Groundhog Day, minus Bill Murray. How’s that for high concept? Now to be fair, the actual idea behind the film—that Gyllenhaal’s character is reliving the eight minutes before a terrorist attack in order to discover the culprit—is a decent start, but the film doesn’t have anywhere to go. The filmmakers create this powerful plot device, and what do they do with it? Puffed-up heroics, a few earnest weepy scenes, some blown up shit. How curious can one be about a film that seems to lack interest in itself? Eight minutes out of the theatre, and it’ll already be out of your mind.

Happiness

After seeing Alexander Medvedkin’s 1935 Soviet silent film Happiness, Sergei Eisenstein supposedly remarked, “Today, I saw how a Bolshevik laughs.” Strangely, he meant it as a compliment. But viewers of this beautifully barbed fable could be excused for thinking otherwise, given that every laugh in the story comes at the expense of revolutionaries turned greedy and foolish. This is laughter skittering along the sharp edge of despair—how many comedies contain two suicide attempts? One, brilliantly, involves an old woman attempting to hang herself on a windmill (the blades pick her up and drop her down again and again, and the laughter gets mighty queasy but quick). The other occurs when our hapless hero—Khmyr, a peasant so poor even robbers have to give him money—says farewell to the cruel world and starts building his own casket, much to the anger of the authorities, who are the only ones allowed to authorize death here. His punishment: whipped for 33 years, shot 12 times, killed 7. After which, the film dryly notes, his faith in happiness is somewhat shaken. Still, he discovers some kind of joy by film’s end when, flush with new wealth, he drops a bag in the road just to watch two beggars scramble for it. Little wonder this surreal, savage film was banned in the Soviet Union for decades. The laughter of one Bolshevik feeds on the tears of another, and in a world of supposed equality, happiness for one little man is just feeling bigger than someone else.

Film Socialisme

There’s something crucially key about Luxury Cruises in evidence here: being entertained by someone who clearly dislikes you, and feeling you deserve the dislike at the same time that you resent it.

— David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”

I’m not sure why Jean-Luc Godard hates me, but I’m pretty sure he does.

Is it my comfortable North American lifestyle, which insulates me from all the suffering in the world? Is it the essential banality of my white-collar job? Is it my face? Do I read the wrong books? Do I watch the wrong movies? Is it because I’m gauche enough to visit the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris and take a picture of Henri Langlois’ honourary Oscar even though the sign clearly says no photography allowed? Is it because I’m self-absorbed enough to think any of this matters?

Maybe he hates me because I insist on watching his latest experiment, Film Socialisme, despite the fact that every inch of the screen seems to radiate a singular sense of purpose, a simple message delivered with a kick in the ass and a punch in the teeth: piss off. This means you, jerk, there in the audience with your chai latte and bourgeois hipster smugness. So you think you’re going to watch a bit of artful Gallic business and come away feeling oh-so-cultured and oh-so-so-sophisticated? Well, the joke’s on you, because here comes Godard to show us we’re not smart, not sophisticated, not cultured, and not much of anything else really. Look inside that cup. It’s not chai—it’s water! Presto! ART.

Like any magic act, your enjoyment of Film Socialisme depends entirely upon your own credulity. Believers will trust in what they see as sorcery, and give in to the spell. Skeptics, bored and distracted, will fidget and start poking around for the trapdoors. Or, put another way: everyone agrees that Godard is at least several steps ahead. The question is what planet he’s walking on.

Divided into three parts, the film defies easy summary. The first section is set on a luxury cruise, populated with the disparate likes of a Russian detective, numerous puckered silver-haired vacationers, and Patti Smith. There are glimpses of several stories, but these rumours of narrative remain unconfirmed. We move to a small gas station for the second part, where an obnoxious television news crew harasses the family that runs the place. The final section consists of a montage of art, film, and history, finally ending with white text on a black screen, the legal disclaimer against piracy you find on DVDs, and a defiant final message: “No comment.” No kidding.

Why then, despite all my skepticism, is it so hard to get that final silence out of my head? The entire film is a thwarted attempt at communication. The subtitles—written in a halting, gnomic style that has been dubbed “Navajo English”—are inscrutable little puzzles. When someone says, “War is war,” does it mean anything? How could it? You might as well say, “Chair is chair.” (Actually, maybe someone does at some point—it’s hard to tell.) But the audio offers little help to those not bound to the subtitles. Voices fade in and out in mid-sentence, the smothering noise of the waves against the ship swallows most everything else, and the rest is borderline gibberish.

There’s something despairing in all of these obstructing tactics. True, refusing to speak is perhaps the most damning gesture of defiance. It suggests an unwillingness to play along, to accept the rules of the conversation. But it’s also a futile act, one borne out of a lack of power. Godard gestures towards larger meanings, greater problems—Palestine, AIDS, colonialism—but he sets them adrift in this crippled vessel just to watch them drown. This is the work of a fatally wounded romantic.

Few filmmakers have loved the medium with the same molecular intimacy as Godard, and few can hate it as knowingly as he does. All of these distortions of sound and image make me think he wants to drag cinema through the mud just to see if he can love it afterwards. And in the end, does he not relinquish his mastery of the medium? The film's finale moves from image to word to blackness. Most films end in the dark, but there’s a brutal sense of finality in this particular progression, as if Godard were retreating from cinema itself. What does it matter what he says in a movie anymore? No one is watching.

Well, except for me, in this case—but I suppose that makes me the “no one” in this equation. And for what it’s worth, this no one would like to apologize to the film for watching. I feel like I just walked into a room to find someone standing on a chair with a rope in hand. How awkward. Do you want to, um, talk about it?

No, no, I suppose not. But perhaps we can be friends, some day, you and I, Film Socialisme. I hope you overcome this morbid depression that seems to have gripped you, this overwhelming despair that film is dead and all is lost. I also hope you don’t stink up the apartment next to mine. That’s not very neighbourly, you know.

So get well soon. And maybe we’ll meet one day on the street, perhaps in Paris, out by Parc de Bercy. I’ll smile and start talking about old times. Feeling better, I’ll ask. Sure, sure. Boy, we had us some times, didn’t we? Yeah, yeah, you’ll say, eyes drifting away to some distant memory. Say, there was something that was bugging me, I’ll ask, what was the deal with the llama, anyway? And your eyes will snap back to the present, and you’ll just grin your sly grin and laugh your coy laugh, and say, Oh, that? I just like llamas, that’s all.

Yeah, that would be nice.

Dogtooth

When a young child walks up to his parents, stares up at them with those wide, wondering eyes, and asks where puppies come from, I can only imagine the range of emotions felt by the parent. Tenderness? Amusement? Patience? But mostly, I just wonder why they don’t reply, “Your mom gives birth to them. She’s having a Sheltie and two Lhasa Apsos tomorrow.”

That’s basically the premise of Dogtooth at its most benign. But Giorgis Lanthimos’ ingenious film goes much, much further into darker, stranger, altogether funnier territory. The parents in the film don’t just tell a few minor fibs to their son and two daughters—they lock the children away from society and completely redefine reality, often on a whim. When the son asks his mother what a zombie is, she decides on the spot that it is a small yellow flower in the garden. The children are warned they cannot leave the house until their right (or left, it doesn’t matter) dogtooth falls out. And when you ask someone to hand you the phone, they pass you a saltshaker.

There is some purpose to these surrealist language games—or at least a pattern, given that the parents redefine any word that points to the world beyond the garden wall (sea, motorway, and excursion, for example). But there’s no explanation of why the parents are putting so much effort into hiding away their children. The father is the only one who ever leaves the compound—he works at an amusingly grey factory that seems to produce nothing—although he does bring home a young woman from time to time, who is paid to relieve the son’s sexual urges. Beyond that, there’s little sense of the larger world that produced this warped family, nor any real judgment of these bizarre rituals.

If anything, the film’s allegory is all the more unsettling for this lack of definition. Is this the story of the violence of patriarchy? The madness of totalitarianism? The malleability of reality? Yes, all these things and more! (What a bargain!) Given that everyone is reduced to mad barking by the end, you could just as easily say the film is about the Pavlovian conditioning necessary to sustain the family unit (and by extension, society).

What makes the whole thing work is that Lanthimos never comes right out and stamps a single interpretation on the proceedings. This wicked game he plays could be spun any number of ways, but he wisely steps back and allows the perverse logic of this world to take hold of the story. The results are quite remarkable—loopy moments of childish awe blend with sharp shocks of violence, and who knows if the next scene will produce a dry chuckle or stifled gasp. I doubt you’ll see a funnier scene this year than the son’s horrified discovery of an alien creature in the garden (that is to say, a snuggly little kitten). But then again, you probably also won’t find anything more upsetting than the moment he attacks the intruding monster with a pair of pruning shears. No one said allegory was a clean business.

I’ll avoid getting too deep into my own theories about the film, which will likely change with repeated viewings, personal moods, and the ever-shifting geopolitical tides. But there may be a clue in the film’s use of Rocky and Jaws, both of which find their way into the hands of the eldest daughter. This carefully monitored mental ecosystem only begins to fall apart after an injection of pure Hollywood miracle serum sends it into stupefied shock. Once she watches the contraband movies, the eldest daughter’s brain becomes thoroughly scrambled with visions of a world beyond her parents’ control, a world violent and terrifying and thrilling beyond all her experience. But there’s a fine line between escapism and escape, as the film’s double-edged ending suggests. Hollywood opens up her reality, teaches her a new language, shows her many wonderful things—except, apparently, how to be free.