Young Mr. Lincoln

The great emancipator can’t dance.

The titular character of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln is shown to be many things: persuasive speaker, fearsome autodidact, prankster, pie-eater. “Dancer” doesn’t even scrape the bottom of the list. As portrayed by Henry Fonda, Lincoln moves like a bug pinned to a board, his legs kicking out as the life steadily seeps from his body. (“You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and you kept your word,” Mary Todd, his bemused partner, quips.) This being a Ford film, dance—and music, for that matter—are extensions of community, articulating the social bonds otherwise left unspoken. But this Lincoln, mythic figure and gangly dweeb, struggles to understand these ceremonies. Capped off by that stovepipe hat, he towers over everyone so conspicuously he comes across as an alien creature desperately trying to imitate human beings. Even his taste of music runs towards the oddball choice of the Jew’s harp, much to the amusement and/or irritation of all around him.

Ford and crew take great pleasure in complicating a figure who long ago left the world of facts for the more nebulous realms of rumour, apocrypha and Steven Spielberg movies. Against such foes, clumsiness and self-doubt prove to be one of this Lincoln’s most devastating weapons. Rather than the wise old leader, we get the young upstart, learning law from a couple of books off the back of a wagon, defending two men accused of killing a deputy in a legal trial-by-fire (moreso for the lawyer than his clients). But his stumbling dance steps, his goofy affectations and his dry wit—these wipe the dust from the statue. If it were not for such touches, this character could easily become too overpowering a persona. Look at his masterful handling of the lynch mob that has come for the two accused killers in prison. He calms the mob, amuses them, shames them and finally wins them over. “I’m not up here to make any speeches,” he says, and then makes a speech.

Fonda’s face is often as stony as the monument that flashes at the end of the film, but it masks a figure far stranger than the secular saint found in most popular histories. This Lincoln is something of a trickster. Like a shapeshifter, he moves from solemn moralizing on capital punishment at one moment to cheating at tug-of-war in the next. He’s the smartest man in the room, and it would be too easy to dislike him if the same qualities that make him great didn’t also make him so comical. His judgment finds no greater challenge than the choice between peach and apple pie. His diplomacy involves tricking illiterate farmers into settling their disputes out of court (admittedly, some less-than-subtle threats are also needed to close the matter). He deploys his laconic style and self-deprecating humour with all the shrewdness of a master chess player. He’s the ultimate self-made man—and once you’ve made one self, what’s the difficulty in creating a few more?

Actually, “self-made” may be a misleading term. People often cling to the myth of the self-made man as if there were no society buttressing the triumphs of these apparent loners. Ford captures this most succinctly in the curious relationship between Lincoln and the Clay family. Not only do Matt and Adam Clay serve as Lincoln’s first clients, but the family years earlier also gave him the law books that provided the foundation of his legal education. Yet if they recognize each other, neither party shows it. When Lincoln wins freedom for Matt and Adam, there is a sense that they owe him; one could just as easily say he owes them for the revelation of his talents and for the tools that nurtured his legal acumen. The nation does not owe the great leader so much as the great leader owes the nation. The man enters into legend not entirely because of his own merits—although the film certainly holds him in awe—but rather because the country needs its own self-defining legends.

Such contradictions are key to the man. Ford’s Lincoln embodies the American ideal: a simple man from a lowly background, who achieves greatness through a combination of innate ability and hard work, with a bit of luck for good measure. Through the Emancipation Proclamation, he fulfills the egalitarian promise of the United States (well, there’s still a ways to go on that front, but it was a good start, I suppose). Perversely, he is also a walking rebuke to that promise. In myth and history, he has been raised to levels as lofty as any king, a coronation crowned with his own early death. He looms so large he threatens to dwarf all around him. Any child can grow up to be the president, the saying goes, but not any child can be Lincoln.

Beneath the cornball jokes and glimmers of pastoral beauty, the legal duels and high-minded speechifying, there is a clear-eyed depiction of the complex relationship between Lincoln and his public. This may seem surprising coming from John Ford—who has been known to lapse into easy sentiment and misty nostalgia from time to time—but a master myth-maker obviously knows the tricks of the trade. This Lincoln betrays hints of self-satisfaction and egotism; there are moments when he is caught savouring his own storytelling prowess, like a child dipping his finger in the icing when your back is turned. But most of the time, he seems chagrinned by his own authority. When he walks out of the court in his moment of triumph, the wild cheers of the crowd greet him; a crowd, it should be noted, that earlier wielded torches and rope on the jailhouse steps while howling for vengeance. Facing these people, Lincoln’s expression is blank, as if he were uncertain of whether or not to accept this gift. It is perhaps a little difficult to feel at ease with the applause of a lynch mob.

Leviathan

Does Leviathan feature the finest performance in the overlooked cinematic career of hippoglossus hippoglossus? Has anyone even been keeping track? (The Halibut Stu episode of The Beachcombers doesn’t count, so don’t even ask.) At the very least, the film is a rare example of the species earning an acting credit, as befits the egalitarian philosophy of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s dazzling, sensuous documentary, where puffinus gravis is granted equal billing next to Paul Brenner. Leviathan levels the hierarchy of man and nature during a fishing trawl off the Atlantic coast, watching with equal fascination a fish head bouncing around the deck and the sea gulls wheeling above this floating chum buffet. A fisherman lulled to sleep in the lunchroom by a colon cleansing commercial is treated with the same impeccable curiosity as the frantic shouting and jostling of the crew hauling up the nets. The camera, unburdened and as insistent as a small child, seems awestruck by it all. One minute we see the world as a fish sees it, with unknown hands snatching away our peers; the next we’re gazing intently at the head of a man shucking scallops, his brow so close to the camera he scarcely appears human. Ethnography of the most peculiar sort, the film suggests man cannot be understood without context: the vessel bobbing in the dark, the gulls piercing the water, the coughing diesel engine and chattering chains of the winch. Consider it a nature film told from nature’s perspective.

Stoker

Someone must have been pissing in the DNA samples, because something has gone horribly wrong with this Shadow of a Doubt clone. If Stoker is supposed to evoke the Hitchcock classic, then it does so only as a Frankenstein-style re-creation, built out of spart parts left over from South Korean horror films and The Paperboy. Regardless, there are now two sociopathic Uncle Charlies stalking the corridors of cinematic history, and we must contend with Park Chan-Wook’s contribution to this proud tradition of avuncular terror. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Hitchcock and Park—making his North American feature debut here—but the contrast is illuminating. Shadow of a Doubt pours acids on the idylls of middle America; Stoker looks at the scarred remains and suggests everything is precisely as fucked up as it seems. Park et al. have arrived to point out that damaged loners and isolated eccentrics are kind of nutty, which is as dramatically satisfying as declaring a spade is a spade. The gulf between the two films is written in the faces of the men who play Uncle Charlie. When Joseph Cotten’s gentleman-killer smiles, he looks like he’s going to offer you a drink. When Matthew Goode smiles, he looks like he’s going to brain you with a rock.

Despite a few elegant visual touches here or there, Stoker only occasionally rises to the heights of coherence, while its stately pace and artful splatter veers ever closer to camp with each twist of the plot. For such grisly sex-and-murder mayhem, the film is surprisingly bloodless. The fault lies partly with Park’s smothering style and partly with the performances. Goode, as mentioned, is little more than a smirk in a sweater, while Mia Wasikowska (as India, Charlie’s equally deranged niece) is reduced to petulant sulking for much of the film. As for Nicole Kidman: future scholars will write of this film when discussing her camp-vamp phase, so I will defer to their expertise. However, what could any performer do with this ripe nonsense? Self-realization in the film is intimately twined with sex and violence, which amounts to masturbating in the shower after your uncle has killed your would-be rapist—with your father’s belt, I should note (wouldn’t want to lose any of the psychosexual nuances, after all). The film pushes so many buttons at once it smashes the remote. Even when the film gets it right, it gets it wrong. Yes, children do often reflect the madness of their families, but that doesn’t typically apply to distant relations you don’t even know exist. Or is strangling people with a leather belt some sort of hereditary condition now?

The Act of Killing

Six beautiful women shimmy their way out of the mouth of a giant rusting metal fish. Ahead of them, an old man in a black robe leads the way, followed by another woman—okay, an overweight man in drag, but never mind that—dressed in splendid pink. The group stands before a waterfall, the sunlit mist giving each figure a faint, ethereal glow. The familiar cloying melody of “Born Free” blankets everything in a haze of faded MOR schlock. The dance is interrupted when two people approach the black-robed man. Their own necks tangled in strangling wires, the pair hangs a medal on the old man. “Thank you for sending us to heaven,” they tell the man who murdered them.

This scene serves as the centerpiece of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, a remarkable documentary in which mass murderers stage surreal fantasias of their own crimes, mutilating reality until their culpability is deformed beyond all recognition. The old man, Anwar Congo, is but one killer among many. As a self-described gangster, he took part in the mass killings of communists, ethnic Chinese and other marginalized groups in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. The total death count varies, but 500,000 seems a modest estimate; one person in the film suggests Anwar’s share of the bloodshed is likely around 1,000.

What makes this particularly horrifying—and also what fuels Oppenheimer’s penetrating study of guilt—is the fact that Indonesia has barely begun to acknowledge this brutality, never mind make amends to the survivors. The winners wrote history here, and even burnt the history books for good measure (as was the case with a sanitized 2004 textbook version of the events). Anwar and his cohorts don’t just walk free, but are seemingly celebrated for their crimes. When he appears on a talk show, the host introduces him as the man who devised a more effective method for killing communists—wrapping wire around their necks and yanking really hard, apparently—as if he were some celebrity promoting his latest film on The Tonight Show. A viewer walking in unprepared might mistake this for a richly imagined political satire, and not a particularly subtle one at that.

Anwar hardly fits the part of murderous thug. Jovial and easy-going, he gently scolds his grandson for mistreating a duckling and delights in teasing his sidekick Herman (the aforementioned man in drag during the music video). But when he sits around drinking with his gangster buddies, the horrors come bubbling up. One man reminisces about raping women during the burning of a village, sighing like a lovesick romantic as he recalls what he did to a 14-year-old girl. The men gloat while the survivors and their families can only look on with pained smiles, unable to speak out, reduced to bowing and scraping before the thugs. The brutality from over 40 years ago still lingers in the air. When the men decide to immortalize their youthful escapades in film, they struggle to find anyone willing to even play the part of communist.

Anwar and his buddies are still eager to play the part of killer, so why would anyone jump at the chance to play victim? Oppenheimer plays with this sense of performance in the re-creations by often mirroring the Hollywood films that inspired Anwar—gangster and war films, in specific. During the staged destruction of a village, a government minister on hand is acutely aware of the value of image management. As he leads the militia in a fiery kill-the-communists chant, he suddenly turns self-conscious and admonishes the director not to show the group as totally bloodthirsty. But, he continues, they also must not be shown as weak. Herman wryly captures these contradictions with his observation that the entire country is like a soap opera. Everyone is an actor, from the corrupt politicians to the indifferent citizens faking enthusiasm at political rallies for money. (Naturally, Herman wants to get in on the action and runs for office himself. He loses, thus depriving the world of yet another mid-level plutocrat with a sideline in embezzlement, mass murder, and cross-dressing.) 

Amid this maze of self-deceptions, popular delusions, and false histories, the barrier erected between killer and victim is almost the only thing maintaining the brittle peace. Those who died were vilified as foreigners and radicals, an infection of the body politic to be purged through the time-honoured medical treatment of bloodletting. It is only once Anwar plays the role of victim in the re-creation that all of his carefully crafted self-defence mechanisms crumble. Early in the film, he takes the director to a little patio where he did much of his so-called “work.” He fondly recalls his youth; he dances the cha-cha on the tiles where he shed blood. But his earlier bravado is drained away when he returns at the end. “This is one of the easiest ways to take a human life,” he says of the wire, and his voice trails off. His body shakes and shudders with the sounds of retching, while his shoulder blades jut out like fists trying to punch through his skin. Whatever composure the years have bought him vanishes in a moment, and he verges on physically tearing himself apart. One can only wonder at what tremors will shake the rest of the nation when it one day sees itself as clearly.

The Flowers of St. Francis

As ascetic in style as in subject, The Flowers of St. Francis depicts monkish life with radical simplicity. This pastoral hymn, at once comical and reverent, pays tribute to the uncommon devotion of these divine dimwits, who caper about their ramshackle monastery with all the giddiness of children (small surprise the original Italian title translates as Francis, God’s Jester). Indeed, the film is so confoundingly free of guile viewers may suspect director Roberto Rossellini of mocking the men’s innocence. Ginepro, the holiest fool of them all, maims a pig and mistakes the tortured squeals of “Brother Pig” for heavenly praise; a later scene where the village poor fight over scraps of charity from the monks could easily have been taken from Bunuel. Only a religious iconoclast like Rossellini, so ill at ease with institutional authority, could craft a work of such spiritual impiety. (Rather tellingly, the fiercest tyrant in the film rules with an iron fist so heavy he can’t even lift it, while Francis grows in power the more he denies his own strength.) The film carries a whiff of the didactic about it, but these parables of virtue and faith are always firmly planted in the stuff of life: cooking food, gathering flowers, building a home. When Francis lays weeping in a dusky meadow after an encounter with a leper, the camera tilts skyward towards the unblemished heavens, but such transcendent gestures are hardly characteristic of the film. Rossellini, much like the monks, is happier down in the mud.

The Gatekeepers

Six past and present leaders of Israeli defence organization Shin Bet submit themselves to questioning in The Gatekeepers, and the provocative documentary that results serves as a living monument to doublethink. Director Dror Moreh steadily pushes the group on matters of morality; the men gamely push back while often adding their own criticisms of Israel’s treatment of Palestine. A particularly sharp indictment of the Israeli occupation prompts agreement from one of the men, who arches his eyebrows in self-satisfaction, as if to say, “Didn’t expect that, did you?” Political schizophrenia pervades many of the interviews. Referencing the 1984 killing of two captured bus hijackers, Avraham Shalom acknowledges giving the order to kill the men, but denies its immorality—it’s only wrong because the public found out, he explains. (The ensuing controversy precipitated his resignation as head of Shin Bet in 1986.) Everyone in the group has knowingly played a key role in the very same military occupation they now attack, and all seem helpless to change a system uniformly loathed. Even Shalom scornfully dismisses the Israeli government’s handling of the Palestinians as “tactics, not strategy” and compares his country to Germany occupying Poland during the Second World War. All tools of brute authority, the men resent the stupidity of those that wield them.

A New Leaf

A New Leaf, Elaine May’s debut feature as writer-director, drowns the modern romantic comedy in a swamp of bad feeling and savage disdain. May plays Henrietta, a wealthy, clutzy botanist sporting oversized glasses and undersized personality. Her suitor is freshly pauperized playboy Henry, played with a droll sneer by Walter Matthau. Repulsed by women—and most of the human race, actually—the dedicated bachelor aims to marry his way back into money. Add a dash of arsenic, and Henry can live happily ever after as a wealthy widower. Reportedly recut from May’s much darker three-hour original, the film makes for a bracingly black vision of love. So many romantic comedies are built around a desperate woman enduring countless humiliations just to earn the affections of an indifferent man, but few take the premise this far. Subjecting her character to scorn and ridicule in pursuit of a murderer—played not by a dashing leading man, but the eternally rumpled Matthau—May turns movie romance into an extended act of self-flagellation. The film laces the usual bromides of the genre with enough poison to flatten a small elephant.

Artless and stylized all at once, the film suggests a live-action cartoon. The director indulges in grotesque closeups (more for shock than laughs), and buries gags inside carefully cluttered scenes. But she also shoots much of the film on real locations around New York, wedding a rough-hewn realism to a farcical plot. Such contradictions sit comfortably alongside the jarringly dissonant characters, who are pushed to extremes of cruelty and idiocy, yet viewed with bemused affection. This being called A New Leaf, it should come as no surprise that the film turns away from the abyss in the end. Both characters recognize that they complete each other, and the helplessness that Henry scorns in Henrietta is revealed to be a mirror of his own. But even during his big change of heart, Henry still tosses his wife about like a ragdoll, and he submits to domestic bliss the way some people succumb to cancer. Barbed to the very end, the film is both an autocritique of romantic comedy and exemplar of the genre. Can you become the thing you hate? Sure, and you can marry it too.