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.

Amour

Michael Haneke, cinematic sadist extraordinaire, may have crafted his ultimate iron maiden in Amour. After years of random brutality, films filled with mutilations of the self and the other, the director has at last discovered the greatest horror show of them all: time and our own crumbling bodies. Not that there aren’t signs of a newfound tenderness occasionally breaking through the misanthropic gloom of Haneke’s world. When Jean-Louis Trintignant dodders around an apartment trying to capture a pigeon, one reflexively cringes at the inevitable violence to come (visions of a dead bird a la The White Ribbon flutter around the imagination). Instead the old man simply holds the creature, caressing it sadly before later setting it free—and unless he released it into a turbine, the bird may be one of the first animals to survive a cameo in a Haneke film. Elsewhere, the director’s clinical touch is evident, bolstered by two superbly considered performances from his octogenarian all-stars, Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. When Riva looks through a photo album and declares life to be beautiful, the moment is so drained of sentimentality it makes the weather report seem overwrought. Too bad all of the fine efforts of the actors are torpedoed by Haneke’s predictable fondness for sudden, shocking bursts of violence. As always, he confuses surprise for genuine emotion and assumes making people squirm is the same as making them think. Even in his supposed humanist crowd-pleaser, Haneke can’t resist sucker-punching the audience.

The End of Time

A free-associative epic, The End of Time allows Peter Mettler to fulfill his apparent ambition to make a film that is simultaneously about nothing and everything. This is harder than it sounds, and much more satisfying an experience than you would imagine. The trick is to reduce all reality to abstractions, at which point abstractions become real, and then the world turns into the acid-freak section of 2001: A Space Odyssey and you lunge towards the doors of perception only to realize they were painted on the wall all along. “What is time?” the film asks, and then answers, by showing five minutes of lava footage. “What is time?” the film asks of a physicist, who would love to answer, except that he has a call he really has to answer, can you hold on a minute? “What is time?” the film asks again, this time of the director’s mother. Oh, it’s mother’s day. Well, now I feel foolish for even asking in the first place.

Mettler’s skill as a cinematographer is well established at this point, but The End of Time offers ample evidence of his talent as a sculptor of sound and image. He mines a series of far-flung locales—Hawaiian volcanoes, Swiss scientific complex, holy sites in India, devastated Detroit slums—for strange and illuminating juxtapositions. Stars fall like snow and the metal circles of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are no less mystical than mandalas found at a Buddhist shrine in India. An Indian funeral procession provides the soundtrack to an army of ants pulling at the towering corpse of a grasshopper. The omnipresence of cellphones becomes a running gag, with the devices multiplying like little rodents devouring the now. Visual motifs disappear and resurface like whales breaching the surface of the ocean, while sounds form a thread stitching together images in unexpected ways. Something as innocuous as the tin-coated song of an ice cream truck can transform the sprawling ruins of Detroit in a single neighbourhood. Beyond its exploration of time, the film is a monument to the incidental.

La Terra Trema

Merging decadent style with revolutionary content, La Terra Trema is very much a product of the contradictions of director Luchino Visconti, aristocrat by birth and communist by choice. Rarely has any film purporting neo-realism—natural settings, unprofessional actors, documentary-style voiceover—contained such rampant aestheticism. (Even when filming dirty, decaying hovels, Visconti can’t stop himself from scattering mirrors on seemingly every wall.) However, the film’s immaculate compositions and sumptuous camera movements lend grandeur to the Valastros, a Sicilian fishing family that tries—and fails, disastrously—to overthrow the wholesalers exploiting them to the very last lire. Reducing poverty to aesthetics risks condescending to the disadvantaged by suggesting they have somehow been ennobled by suffering. Visconti elevates his characters to the state of tragic heroes while never denying their own hubris and folly, which only compounds the injustices inflicted upon them. The whole world seems arrayed against the defiant family: the cackling wholesalers, the villagers who sneer at any attempt to destroy the crushing old order, and even the absurdly cartoonish smuggler (one can easily imagine him opening his trenchcoat to reveal a line of fine imitation Rolexes). Assaulted from without and betrayed from within, the Valastros flail through their erstwhile revolt until falling prey to their own weaknesses, whether pride, lust, greed or simple human frailty. The family ends humbled and devastated, discovering themselves to be naked beneath the chains they have thrown off.

Zero Dark Thirty

The first moments of Zero Dark Thirty are a black screen, as dark as a shroud laid over your eyes. All the audience hears are spectral voices howling in a void—the lost calls and dead signals of the victims of 9/11, a Greek chorus of horror and fear. It’s a smart decision on the part of director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal to avoid the all-too-familiar stock images of the planes crashing or the towers crumbling. Do those pictures even shock anymore? Have audiences finally numbed to the pain they evoke? Perhaps they are now nothing more than visual markers of a bygone era, like footage of the moon landing or Jackie O. clutching her husband’s limp body. But the black screen and the disembodied voices, these are panic and terror alive and well, restless spirits not easily calmed. Isn’t there a superstition that those who die violently become ghosts?

If these opening moments evoke a kind of purgatory, what follows can’t be anything other than hell. A man is chained in a sun-blasted shack—location undisclosed, but it sure as shit ain’t Florida—undergoing a brutal interrogation. A CIA agent makes it clear that every lie will produce pain, but equally clear, if unspoken, is the fact that a lie is defined as whatever the CIA agent does not want to hear. Maya (Jessica Chastain), another CIA agent, stands back and watches her colleague prepares to water board the detainee (dog collars and hot boxes soon to follow). Shaken and unnerved, her discomfort is meant to stand in for the audience’s own queasiness at what we’ve just witnessed. Consider it as a kind of relief valve on the scene, which would otherwise prove to be as torturous for the viewer as the victim. There is sanity in the world, we are told by the horror on Maya’s face. There is still moral righteousness. And then her colleague orders her to fill a bucket of water to pour on the man’s face, and she obeys after only a slight, startled pause. This is the last time we will see Maya waver.

In Bigelow’s last film, The Hurt Locker, a shell-shocked soldier froze up in the grocery store, momentarily paralyzed by the limitless possibilities of the cereal aisle. By contrast, Maya, with her fiery hair and flinty confidence, projects a moral certitude at odds with ambiguity and self-questioning. Her confidence is beyond question and her determination beyond doubt. She is the self-described motherfucker who finds Osama bin Laden’s hideout. Make no mistake, Zero Dark Thirty is a revenge story, and its star is a Hamlet without hesitation. Unlike a more traditional revenge tragedy, however, there is no sense of the cost of Maya’s all-consuming quest for retribution. She acknowledges, with no sign of regret, her lack of friends and personal life. The only suggestion that she ever had any existence beyond her life as a relentless Osama-seeking drone is a computer desktop image of her holding a young girl. Is it her sister? Daughter? Niece? No answer is offered, and it seems likely the film has none to give.

As a procedural focused solely on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty clings to the shield of journalistic objectivity. Of course, the filmmakers are adamant that they are not making pro-torture propaganda (Bigelow professes to be a pacifist). However, the film’s failings have nothing to do with its views on water boarding, but rather how its supposedly detached perspective is too feeble to survive the moral challenge posed by torture—a flaw it shares with much of the western world in the years immediately following 9/11. Its much-vaunted journalistic integrity consists largely of funneling government reports and testimonials into a concise, gripping narrative (it’s easy to be objective when you acknowledge only one possible viewpoint). A brief quotation from an Obama speech reminds viewers that the current administration has disavowed torture—although one might ask how the closure of Guantanamo Bay is coming along—and with that the issue is allowed to recede into the background. The collared detainee we saw paraded around half-naked through his own filth reappears later in the film, healthy and clean, sharing a meal with the CIA agents and meekly offering up information. The effect is not unlike that of a magician bringing out the woman sawed in half earlier. See? Everything is fine. No harm done.

No. Fuck that. Harm was done. Much harm was done, to the innocent as well as the guilty, to perpetrator and victim alike. It all comes back to the Greek chorus of 9/11 victims that announces this revenger’s...well, not tragedy, that’s not right, what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right. Triumph. Zero Dark Thirty is a revenger’s triumph, and there’s a reason why that phrase should writhe and boil in your stomach like rancid meat. The tragedy of revenge is that violence compounds violence until all who partake are destroyed. The triumph of revenge, on the other hand, is a fantasy in which those who wield violence with righteousness will succeed over their foes (Maya even speaks as if she is on a mission from god at times). The key to the illusion is that the torture is placed in the past, neatly bracketed between the 9/11 attacks and the death of Osama. Everything before and after this brutal decade is deemed irrelevant, as if killing Osama somehow eradicates the moral stain of what led up to that moment. Torture becomes part of the post-9/11 madness, a vicious tool for vicious times. With the killer caught and the crime avenged, the curtain closes on these horrors and those terrified voices from the beginning of the film are at last silenced. More than a story of revenge, this film is an exorcism.

Not Fade Away

Not Fade Away may have a rock ‘n’ roll skin, but its heart apparently lies with Hollywood. Much of the film concerns itself with Doug, a scrawny kid topped with Dylanesque curls who struggles to reconcile his fledgling rock band with his dreams of a filmmaking career. In an apt, if slightly on the nose, bit of geographic symbolism, the film leaves Doug at the intersection of Music City and Sunset Boulevard, suspended between the two artistic poles that have shaped his life. Rock ‘n’ roll, ever the cruel mistress, finally repays Doug’s infidelity by sending a living emissary, Mick Jagger—remember, this is the 1960s—to fuck the lad’s girlfriend. Perhaps that’s why the film prefers not to trust its strongest emotional gut-punch to a Rolling Stones song, but rather a Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune, of all things. The scene comes when Doug’s father (James Gandolfini) watches South Pacific, eyes welling with tears as Juanita Hall implores him to join her in the Technicolor haze. Dying of lymphoma in a New Jersey suburb, the man is stirred to visions of romance thwarted and valour deferred, not faded memories but the impossible past of a life denied him.

Sopranos mastermind David Chase, making his feature film debut here, is particularly astute on the ways everyone from pimply teenagers to pockmarked middle-aged washouts recreate themselves through music. Most filmmakers would render this process entirely in sepia-toned nostalgia-vision; Chase opts for a slightly more ominous approach. After all, the new world can’t exist without the destruction of the old, can it? The first hint comes early on, when the growling opening riff of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” rises out of the mechanical bleating of the emergency broadcast system like a radiation-soaked superhero crawling from a blast site. Later, Chase’s narrator declares the nuclear bomb and rock music the two great American inventions, but the film treats both as variations of the same destructive impulse. (Oppenheimer and Rickenbacker are the Romulus and Remus of this new empire.) In the film’s final moments, Los Angeles is ruined and beautiful, its nighttime streets so devoid of life viewers may wonder if Chase neglected to include the scene where the bomb finally dropped. All the cars are tuned into tomorrow, when the Sex Pistols are charging through their shambolic take of Jonathan Richman’s “Road Runner.” This is what the end of the world sounds like, and no one wants to be part of the apocalypse if they can’t dance.

It's Such a Beautiful Day

For over a decade now, Don Hertzeldt has been doodling his stickmen in the margins of the animation industry. Turns out all along he was creating a modern slapstick equivalent of John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, except instead of a feverish poet-priest we have an amnesiac guy in a hat afraid of crotch-fruit. Combining all three shorts in Hertzeldt’s so-called “Billology” into one feature, It’s Such a Beautiful Day is the culmination of the director’s previous work, as well as a considerable extension of his talents. His humour, an energetic mix of surreal violence and caustic non-sequiturs (eg. “In their later years grandma’s family moved to the big city, where her mother lived out the rest of her days making jam and persecuting Jews”), is back in full force, but now leavened with a newfound tenderness towards his characters. The visual innovations of The Meaning of Life—an equally suitable title for this work—have been consolidated and expanded. Densely layered sound and interpolations of live-action images combine to create a richly realized world populated by nothing more than quivering stick figures. Who needs the listless, cold worlds of computer animation? Art created by machines is best appreciated by robots. Hertzfeldt’s handicraft visions are for the rest of us.