Revengers Tragedy

No gods, no masters, and so no budget—Alex Cox does Thomas Middleton’s seventeenth century play on the cheap, moving its bloody tale of intrigues in an Italian court to a decaying futuristic Britain. The plot of this flawed but funny anarchist farce is too labyrinthine to summarize, but once the knives come out and the poison starts pouring everything simplifies rather quickly. The important thing is that Cox nails the core of the story, even though the early scenes do drag and he fumbles with some of the finer points of his adaptation—details of the dystopian setting are underdeveloped, and the skimpiness of the futuristic trimmings begs the question of why they were even necessary in the first place. Were modern times simply not grimy enough for this cutthroat tale? But Cox is attuned to the subversive (if not downright seditious) possibilities of Middleton’s play, turning its parade of deposed dukes into a vituperative satire of a corrupt ruling class seeking power as its own end. Vindici, the titular tragic revenger, best summarizes this political philosophy when he says, “Great men were gods if beggars could not kill them.” By these terms, the film is rapturously godless.

Showgirls

The phrase “bad movie” entices me, much like how a piece of shit entices a fly. But it isn’t the allure of awfulness that draws me closer—it is the near limitless possibilities contained behind that ambiguous word, “bad.” When someone dismisses a movie as bad, the judgment seems categorically objective: the movie is an irredeemable failure, absolutely beyond redemption.

But in reality, bad movies are often quite interesting, even rewarding and sometimes well-made cinema. The badness that has incited the audience is often not a matter of technique or style, but morality—the film is bad in the sense that it is perceived as evil, an affront to the viewer’s values. And that brings us to Showgirls, as confident and complete an assault on good taste as has ever come out of the self-deluding whorehouse that is Hollywood.

The plot plays out like a diseased, degenerate version of All About Eve: a desperate young star sets her sights on fame at any cost, moving from naïve innocent to jaded star, only to discover that the climb to fame is merely prelude to a precipitous fall. Except whereas All About Eve focused on the more respectable world of theatre and was thus rewarded with a bucket of Oscars, Showgirls employs a more sordid Las Vegas world as vehicle for its satire on Hollywood and thus earned a comparable assortment of Razzies for its impudence.

Which is unfortunate, because the film possesses a caustic honesty more potent than any tasteful (i.e., neutered), Oscar-winning satire. The film pulses with contempt—for Hollywood and for its audience. A glancing familiarity with the film’s reputation might make it seem like cheap titillation dressed up in big-studio gloss, but sex has rarely seemed so ugly and joyless as it does in this movie, which only shows the act as a means of transaction for money or power. This is brutal subject matter, but I find it hard not to be a little taken by the audacity of director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.

That’s not to say this is an easy film to appreciate, and Elizabeth Berkley’s lead performance might be the biggest stumbling block in this regard. She plays Nomi, the seemingly innocent young wannabe who comes to Las Vegas dreaming of becoming a star but reduced to stripping at a place called Cheetah’s. As the result of a particularly fiery lap dance with Zach, entertainment director at the Stardust (played with an expertly deadpan sleaziness by Kyle MacLachlan), she gets an audition. Cristal, the star of the show (Gina Gershon, who is so commanding at times she threatens to crack open her tight-lipped smile and swallow Berkley whole), takes an interest in the budding starlet and develops a love-hate relationship tinged with lesbian innuendo, which progresses through a series of incomplete seductions and backstabs until Nomi realizes her only chance to become star of the show is to, um, push Cristal down a flight of stairs.

As a character, Nomi can be difficult to take with her lack of anything that might be considered an inner life. This isn't to say she doesn't have secrets (she hides a past as a prostitute that she spends much of the film denying) or a personality of sorts, but she seems capable of only expressing herself through exaggerated gestures, as opposed to inflections of speech or expression: this is not a quiet performance. For an extreme example of this tendency, just look at an early scene between Nomi and her roommate Molly—the only way Nomi seems capable of expressing anger and frustration is by violently (and somewhat comically) stabbing her straw into her soda and then spilling French fries all over the table.

Of course, as a hooker-turned-stripper-turned-showgirl, carnality is Nomi’s key asset, and Berkley obliges by physically throwing herself into the role with all the conviction of someone hurling herself off a cliff. The suicide metaphor is deliberate; Berkley herself might beg to differ, but her career came to this film to die. If the intention of the film is to show how the entertainment industry uses women as if they were interchangeable slabs of meat, then the collapse of Berkley’s career after this film seems to prove its point. This is one of the most troubling things about the entire film: if Berkley had gone on to a successful career, the film might have simply become an inconsequential footnote to a larger story instead of the climax. For Showgirls to succeed, its star had to fail.

More bluntly put, Verhoeven is implicated, and I think he likes it. This may be a satire of the way Hollywood exploits women, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get a discreet, academic dissertation on the subject. Verhoeven rejects any possibility of tastefully telling this story and instead plays up the crassness of the tale; scenes like the over-the-top sex scene in the pool feel like a mockery of the audience’s craving for a little bit of titillation.

Verhoeven meets depravity with depravity, not trusting to any notions of art. For those looking to defend him as an artist, Verhoeven offers the ambivalent subplot of James, a dancer who takes an interest in Nomi. The man is convinced of her talent, even if she lacks knowledge or training, and he tries to convince her to perform in a number he has created specifically for her. She refuses, but he forges ahead and debuts the act at a small club where it is quickly booed off stage. “Bring out the real dancers!” someone shouts. The boorish audience is portrayed with some contempt, but the film also has a disingenuous air of “Well, what did you expect?” After all, given the choice between actual strippers and an arty simulation of same, is it any surprise what most people choose?

But it’s only in the third act that the film really goes after the audience. Those who have been chuckling along derisively at the film will have to contend with the rape of Molly, a spectacularly ugly scene by any standard, which disturbs any attempts to treat the whole film as a glib joke (incidentally, those Showgirls drinking games don’t seem to acknowledge the scene, but I like to imagine it provokes an awkward, guilty silence when it comes up). In a film in which the audience has essentially been egging on the sexual exploitation of the actresses for its own gratification, this rape is Verhoeven’s biggest attack on viewers—he takes the desires of the audience to their greatest extreme and visualizes them, if only to throw those desires back in our faces.

For final proof of this, just consider the scene where Nomi—remade as a fierce avenging angel—seduces Molly’s attacker and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of him. The camera constantly shifts to his perspective, uncomfortably aligning the audience’s viewpoint with that of a rapist and in the process equating the violation of voyeurism with the violation of rape (one could easily milk an entire graduate thesis out of this, assuming it already hasn’t been done). Conceptually, this is almost too obvious, but at this point criticizing the film for a lack of subtlety would be absurd.

(This perspective shot also calls to mind Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, another striking film about a reformed prostitute who enters a strange town, suffers at the hands of its residents, and then leaves after having proven herself superior to the amoral hypocrites running the place. That film begins with an incredible scene of prostitute beating up her pimp, which Fuller films from the pimp’s perspective as the prostitute whacks the side of the camera with her purse. As an assault on the audience, this is comparable to Showgirls, even though Fuller’s overarching vision is ultimately more empathetic than Verhoeven’s scabrous cynicism.)

Nomi’s revenge against the rapist is the sort of victory that seems empowering on the surface, but offers little real change or improvement in this vile system. In fact, she ends right where she began, hitching a ride out of town, heading towards Los Angeles where a larger, crueler whorehouse awaits her. Nomi’s actions start to seem more like futile retaliation against a system stacked against her—cathartic, but of no real consequence.

Is there any hope in the midst of such bleakness? Is Verhoeven nothing more than an embittered misanthrope, taking out his disillusionment with Hollywood upon the docile, unsuspecting audience, which all too readily falls into his trap? "We all gotta be a prostitute sometimes" might be the best summary of the film's worldview, which essentially says that all entertainers, itself included, are whores, and by implication, we the audience are johns. In such a vision, the only character growth possible becomes the self-awareness of acknowledging one’s own debased position in this system. Or perhaps, more optimistically, to simply reject this system entirely—a possibility not entertained by any characters in the film, although I like to think it is at least open to the rest of us.

A film this odious can only be reckoned with in one of two ways. The first approach is to embrace the film as pure camp pleasure, celebrating its every exaggeration and absurdity as signs of intentions gone awry—“a seriousness that fails,” as Susan Sontag writes in “Notes on ‘Camp’”. This approach essentially dismisses everything caustic and upsetting in the film as accidents caused by filmmakers too inept to actually mean any harm. Given the rather deliberate offensiveness of much of the film, it is a generously forgiving audience that can approach Showgirls on these terms—camp is also a “love for human nature,” according to Sontag—but it also takes a bit of willful blindness to not be bothered when someone spits in your face.

Treating the film as a so-bad-it’s-good spectacle might be worth a few laughs, but it’s also a shield from the more unsettling spectacle of Hollywood as a rumbling volcano requiring a steady stream of nubile, scantily clad (but not necessarily virgin) sacrifices. By now we’ve long since reached the point at which everything subversive about the film has been co-opted by the marketplace—which in this case means the release of a special edition DVD including drinking game, shot glasses, and two stripper tassels to pin on a nude poster of Berkley.

No, I prefer a second approach to Showgirls, which is to assume Verhoeven and Eszterhas are making a very deliberate film, no matter how vile and ridiculous it might seem. And I mean it—those drinking games might leave you buzzed, but treating this film as a sincere response to modern culture will have you reeling for days. Even when the dialogue seems offensive and stupid, take it as intentionally offensive and stupid, including that infamously inane dialogue between Nomi and Cristal about how nice it is to have nice tits.

Tempting though it may be to assume that this is merely erotic dialogue gone astray, recall that the bulk of the audience has come to the film expecting to ogle those very same tits. The crass yet banal dialogue makes a mockery of the audience’s own lechery by voicing the very thoughts running through our heads and rendering these thoughts loathsome and insipid. Understandably, audiences don’t much appreciate this treatment, but to suggest this is a failing of the film itself misses the point. Oh, poor monster—why hate the mirror?

JCVD

It’s tough out there for an action star, isn’t it? Things used to be you could just pop off a quick ass-kicking adventure every year and make a decent living at it, but Hollywood seems to have cut back on these modest little genre pictures in recent years—too narrow a demographic appeal, I imagine, and just not enough return on investment. But suffer the Van Dammes and Seagals, the Lundgrens and Stallones? Where are the muscle-bound lunkheads of yesteryear?

Well, if this film is any indication, they’re out there somewhere being subjected to the humiliations of a steadily diminishing fame. JCVD features Jean-Claude Van Damme playing a fictionalized version of himself who must sit through a child custody case in which his films are used as evidence against him. Even worse, after going to the post office to pick up a money transfer (his bank account is frozen), he stumbles onto a hostage drama. To the outside world, it appears that Van Damme is responsible for the hostage taking, a confusion that the real robbers readily exploit. The incident becomes a media circus, with Van Damme’s fans on the street cheering on their hero and his parents begging their son to release the hostages.

This all sounds better in concept than it actually is, but the film still manages to offer some amusing—if not particularly profound—insights into fame. For instance, there is a running gag about how everyone prefers Van Damme in his films than in real life (people comment on how short he is, and a garrulous cab driver declares him to be nicer in his movies). The joke even extends to other people—outside the hostage taking, someone observes that a local reporter is much better looking on television. The simple fact of appearing on a television or movie screen instantly elevates our perception of a person.

The film never really pursues these ideas very far, nor any of its other ideas for that matter. The media circus around the hostage taking suggests the possibility of an antic farce on celebrity and hero worship—there’s a nice, mild surrealism to lines of dialogue like, “Jean-Claude Van Damme’s robbing the post office! I need back-up!”—but this potential goes untapped due to the underdeveloped supporting characters and tepid resolution of the hostage crisis. The sad-sack life of Van Damme suggests a more ruminative drama about the disillusionment of fame and celebrity as a trap (either as hostage or in prison, Van Damme spends much of the film confined and cut off from the world); unfortunately, the film’s combination of deprecating humour and flattery caters to Van Damme’s self-pity instead of providing genuine insight into his persona.

Van Damme still deserves to be recognized for a rather engaging performance, which feels looser and more relaxed than one might expect. At the same time, I have trouble accepting the centerpiece of Van Damme’s performance—a teary, one-take monologue in which he defends himself against undefined detractors while trying to appear sympathetically vulnerable. It’s perhaps the closest the film comes to some sort of emotional honesty with its protagonist, which makes the calculating performance that much more unfortunate. You can see the contrivance behind each motion and expression—he underlines every emotion in a way that is almost academic, as if he were pulling all of this from a textbook somewhere. Yes, it’s impressive that Van Damme can actually act, but how much more impressive would it be if he didn’t have to call so much attention to it? The scene occurs outside the world of the narrative in a film studio with cameras and equipment behind Van Damme—the setting broadcasts the moment’s supposed reality, but the man’s every studied twitch suggests otherwise.

Is the film mocking Van Damme here? Or merely indulging him? The cheeky score often plays like a parody of action film music, making it difficult to take serious when mournful strings play behind Van Damme’s supposedly soul-bearing monologue. If the whole thing is a joke, then why not this as well? Director Mabrouk El Mechri seems to vacillate between mocking and worshipping his subject, and this confusion means the film never really amounts to more than a few funny scenes and an intriguing premise. And none of this is helped by El Mechri’s relentless hyper-stylization of everything, which distracts without actually adding anything to our perception of events. The most you could say for the director’s use of sepia tones, for example, is that it suggests nostalgia for a bygone era of action heroes. But given the film’s immense self-regard, it is more likely just nostalgia for itself—a fond reminiscence of its own cleverness, long since faded.

The Second Track

Who knew East Germans made films? And who knew they made films as stylish, paranoid, and fascinating as this one? While heavily referencing The Third Man—the last shots of both films are obviously similar, and both share comparable trajectories of moral disillusionment—Joachim Kunert’s 1962 The Second Track is ultimately a strange beast all its own. True, Kunert plays up the noir atmospherics nearly to the point of genre parody, but has there ever been any other noir to score itself with a harp? Imagine a sinister figure walking through shadows while a pastoral lullaby plays on angelic strings—reality just breaks down.

This incongruity of sound and image might seem like a flaw, but for a film defined by the dissonance of belief and reality it’s actually a rather smart tactic. Walter Brock, an employee in a train yard, witnesses a robbery, but when asked to identity the culprit, he mysteriously holds back from fingering the guilty party. Hidden Nazi pasts and buried crimes are exhumed, and even as the film remains a terse thriller, it also becomes a kind of social allegory—the younger generation discovering and repudiating the sins of the old. However, the film is too unnerving to offer any genuine cathartic release from the burden of Germany’s Nazi past, especially when Kunert twists audience sympathies so effectively by making us identify with Brock before unveiling the worst of his sins. The issue isn’t how a Nazi could be disguised as a decent person, but rather how a decent person could have the capacity to be a Nazi. Noir was always the best genre for finding the evil in everyone.

The Profound Desire of the Gods

Japanese director Shohei Imamura made a career out of casting a sardonic eye towards society and sympathizing with the plight of outcasts. But he also possessed a benign fascination with the peculiarities of human communities and the way baser urges cannot be repressed by civil society, all of which come to bear in his 1968 film, The Profound Desire of the Gods, an immense three-hour epic of a remote island community.

The film focuses on the inbred Futori clan, pariahs of this resplendent tropical paradise. One of the sons, Nekichi, is even kept chained in a pit, slowly digging out a hole so that an enormous boulder (placed there by a tidal wave supposedly as the gods’ punishment for the wicked ways of the family) will fall into the earth and allow the family to reclaim the use of its rice paddy. Compounding his sins is his love for his sister, Uma, a priestess who is also the mistress of Ryu, the island’s leading businessman. Making up the rest of the clan is Nekichi’s father, Jaja, a befuddled old man who also married his own sister, and Nekichi’s two children, half-witted, lusty daughter Toriko and son Kametaro, the only member of the clan who aspires to leave the island.

The basic plot sounds almost cliché—an engineer from Tokyo arrives to help find a freshwater well on the drought-plagued island so that his company can build a factory to process the sugar cane grown there. This big-city outsider in a remote rural location premise is by no means fresh, but it is typically played for light farce, not the frenzied anthropological melodrama that Imamura sustains here. He envisions an entire culture for the island, complete with pagan rituals and local creation mythology, and then sets it into conflict with the industrial capitalism brought by the engineer.

There is a density of incident and richness of implication here that you might find in an epic novel, and Imamura’s style rises to the challenge. The nature photography in the film is stunning, and the animal world is omnipresent, always watching over the action like taciturn, troubled gods (as one character explains of the island’s religion, their gods are the whole of nature, right down to the grass). But Imamura is just as skilled with filming the human animals. I’ve never paid much attention to the style of Imamura’s films before—he seems like a director more concerned with effectively serving the story rather than creating prettified images—but the entire film is constructed with meticulous intelligence and care. Conversations—the stumbling block that separates the good director from the mediocre—become riveting with their complex layers of competing action. With the camera typically set at a distance, Imamura creates webs of relationships within a single shot while letting us witness the characters in their environment, at the mercy of their gods.

Even though the film evinces nostalgia for a natural world lost to industrialization—most eloquently in a shot of a lizard’s tail severed by a bulldozer and left writhing on the jungle floor—Imamura is after a mood more complicated than mere yearning for rustic simplicity. As is common with his films, he uses often-depraved characters to tease out the primal urges denied by polite society—characters who as a result of revealing such truths are cast out and despised by the community. Social order maintains itself by the people uniting against the outcasts, such as in the truly terrifying scene when a group of villagers gather around Nekichi’s pit one night and start to throw dirt and rocks into it while he cowers and begs absolution for his every sin. Black silhouettes rim the top of the pit while Nekichi is brightly lit below—exposed and vulnerable, while the villagers can hide in the anonymous violence of the mob claiming to act for the good of the community.

As Imamura’s outcasts re-enact the myths of the island they become stand-ins for the gods themselves. The Futoris evolve from social rejects to social myths that enter the fabric of the island’s culture (it seems even outsiders have their place in society). As the island opens up to the world, the primal passions of the Futoris remain, albeit coded in the language of legend and superstition. But what they represent can never be fully repressed or removed, and the film leaves us with the ever-present possibility of the irrational world derailing the rational—the inescapable spectre of our own animal nature that haunts us no matter how many gods we kill.

Note: Shohei Imamura’s films have become increasingly available in recent years, but The Profound Desire of the Gods, arguably his masterpiece, has yet to be commercially released in North America in any form. Desperate to find a copy for myself, I took to the shady cybernetic underworld and chanced upon an excellent quality DVD rip with good subtitles. If you have the patience to download 15 Rapidshare files (which I hope you will), the film can be found here.

NFB Film of the Week: Flutter

Films like Howie Shia’s Flutter remind me of what makes animation so attractive a medium—a distinctive artistic style put into motion in order to tell a tale primarily in images, albeit aided by music, sound effects, and the occasional sub-linguistic noise. This is prime visual storytelling, and is that not the essence of all good filmmaking?

The film takes off from a single striking image: a boy with paper wings glued to his sneakers. The boy lines up for a schoolyard race, jumps the gun, and then leaps the fence, heading out of the schoolyard as his baffled teacher helplessly blows the whistle and his classmates watch in confusion. He runs and runs—through the urban landscape, leaping over cars and buildings, into the countryside, racing through wheat fields and alongside buffalo—until he reaches a vast body of water. With the stars reflecting in the water, the night sky and the ocean seem indistinguishable from each other. So the boy simply keeps running, across the water and into the sky.

At the same time, a friend of the boy—a female classmate—takes inspiration from his escape and spray paints a huge mythological mural on the side of a building in the city before being chased away by a resident of the place. The boy’s act of rebellion inspires the girl to her own defiant act of creativity, one great deed inspiring another.

Shia’s animation style is fluid and simple—perfect for capturing the more pronounced movements of his characters as well as their more subtle expressions. The film is primarily in black and white, except for flashes of red when the boy cuts himself as he runs through the wheat field. The backgrounds are dark, imposing shapes that bring into relief the figures, which are drawn with a clean line, turning them into little pools of white space that attract the eye in the threatening urban landscape.

True, this is a modest film. Its goal is simply to celebrate creativity and rebellion with the energy and imagination such themes deserve. But even a modest animated short can attain some powerful effects that are beyond the capabilities of live-action filmmaking simply through the sheer expressiveness of its line or the shifting moods of its different shades of grey. Consider this quote from Rudolf Arnheim, who wrote in his book Film as Art, “I would venture to predict that the film will be able to reach the heights of the other arts only when it frees itself from the bonds of photographic reproduction and becomes a pure work of man, namely, as animated cartoon or painting.” Arnheim, an old-guard theorist writing during the transition into sound in the 1930s, essentially argued that film was an art inasmuch as it diverged from reality. The artistry of the medium lay in its manipulations of reality, not its photographic reproduction thereof. Colour, dialogue—these were the problems, not the solutions.

This stance might sound a bit perverse to audiences today, but considering the limitations of early sound films, which felt comparatively shackled next to the sublime gracefulness of the late, great silents, it’s an understandable if ultimately futile argument. Time marches on, and once people start talking it’s a bit hard to shut them up.

I bring all of this up not because I want to subject this humble animated short to some sort of lofty theoretical analysis—god forbid I should be so cruel to any film, never mind one as charming and beautiful as Flutter—but rather because I want to celebrate its nimble visual storytelling. Animation is really the last bastion of this type of filmmaking where everything can be expressed without words and no one will bat an eye. Film as a medium is at its most distinguished when conveying ideas and emotions through images—that much better to say things that are beyond words. If dialogue driven films most closely resemble novels, then visually driven films most closely resemble music. Sing it, Shia, sing it!

Walker

One of the funniest jokes in Alex Cox’s Walker comes in the very first minute, when the words “This is a true story” flash in bold red letters on the screen.

That’s not to say this film is pure fiction. The plot is based on the exploits of William Walker, an American filibuster who travelled to Nicaragua in the nineteenth century and became self-declared president of that country from 1856 to 1857. But it takes a lot of cheek to label as a “true story” a film set in the 1850s but containing cars and helicopters, as well as Time and Newsweek (both of which didn’t exist until after World War I).

With such perverse anachronism, Cox throws off the musty mantle of historical drama and reaches for something far more colourful and unique—less a comment on history than a burlesque of it, Cox picks up on a neglected episode of American history and turns it into a savage parody of the nation’s history of ill-conceived foreign interventions, evoking both Vietnam and the American government’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s (the primary target of this 1987 film’s sharp-edged political rage). Even though this is ostensibly a “true story,” Cox’s goal is to put those quotation marks around the phrase and undermine the much-abused authority of received narratives and the historical record.

This schism between what we are told and what actually happens is the foundation of the film, and the distortion and corruption of language is rampant throughout. Walker narrates the film in a dry tone that belies its self-aggrandizing intentions—the voiceover rarely matches what appears on screen. When Walker and his crew arrive in Nicaragua, he merely notes that they “landed,” even though we can see his ship in a flaming wreck on the ocean and his men lying soaked and exhausted on the shore with whatever meager supplies they could salvage. Walker’s modestly optimistic description of their arrival elides the calamitous landing implied by the film. Later, after defeating his opponents and essentially conquering the country, Walker and his men ride into Grenada where the voiceover declares, “We were welcomed as liberators.” The town square is conspicuously empty.

Walker’s sense of self-importance is one of the film’s primary targets of humour—he even occasionally slips into the third person as he speaks. Well played by Ed Harris, Walker is a rigid, pious authoritarian amid a rabble, cutting an imposing figure as he strides purposefully through his ramshackle army. One of the most striking scenes in the film has Walker brazenly marching down a street as gunmen ambush his squad. As bodies fall around him, Walker ignores the carnage and continues undiscouraged because, as he notes to one of the wounded soldiers, advancing is all he knows how to do.

Combining confidence and folly, Walker quickly moves from being a comical figure to a frightening one. When the brawling, degenerate band of rogues that make up Walker’s army are mockingly described as his “immortals,” it at first feels like a poke at the loftiness of Walker’s Manifest Destiny talk and his paltry means, but the word’s associations with imperial emperors soon become disturbingly real.

As the self-installed president of Nicaragua, Walker turns into the power-drunk, penny-ante tyrant of a tiny nation beset by poverty, disease, and civil unrest (feel free to draw present-day parallels if you so desire). But his talk never swerves from his original rhetoric of democratic liberation, even as he claims absolute power, murders his opponents, and in a final fit of imperious rage, sets fire to Grenada. Unflaggingly confident of the purity of his purpose, Walker rationalizes or simply ignores the constant corruption of his ideals, perhaps reaching the greatest depths of his own personal moral debasement when he forsakes his abolitionist past and re-instates slavery in Nicaragua in an attempt to elicit sympathetic support from the southern states (an event that is true to the historical record, although the fact that one of Walker’s closest aides in the film is African-American is very likely invention). And yet, Walker maintains he is a liberator, bringing freedom and equality to the country. When his mistress argues that they must stave off revolution in Nicaragua because they are both aristocrats, Walker recoils in disgust and haughtily declares, “I am a social democrat.”

Call that hypocrisy or plain old American schizophrenia, but either way Cox goes for the throat and doesn’t relent. This is truly a funny film, but also an angry one, and it ranges wildly from broad farcical swipes at Walker’s pomp and folly to the somber and disturbing footage of victims of war in Nicaragua that plays over the credits—a manic tone that is likely based in the peculiarities of the film’s production. Although financed by American money and distributed by a major studio (Universal), Walker was actually filmed in Nicaragua. Granted, production was removed from the actual fighting occurring at the time—this isn’t front-lines reportage, after all—but there were Sandinistas on the set and bloody conflict at the other end of the country. Surely that would alter the mood of any production set.

Maybe that is why the film’s digressions from historical accuracy and leaps in logic and tone feel so right and so necessary to the telling of this story. When a helicopter comes down at the end of the film and airlifts American citizens from the burning chaos of Grenada, Cox echoes the fall of Saigon and creates a continuity of American imperialist ventures all within this one largely forgotten historical episode. When Walker’s deaf-mute girlfriend tells off a pro-slavery advocate of Manifest Destiny by signing the phrase, “Go fuck a pig,” Walker translates her objection into polite, neutered terms—dissenting arguments are suppressed, and the film’s clearest voice of reason cannot be heard.

Moments like these may feel outside of historical logic, but what is history in this mess of lies? The film ends with footage of Ronald Reagan saying American troops will not be sent to central America, followed directly by images of American troops in Honduras, right on Nicaragua’s border, conducting “manoeuvres.” There’s honesty for you. Who wouldn't be skeptical of historical fidelity in light of such perversions of the record? Far better instead to highlight the story of corrupted, delusional power that recurs again and again, the history behind the history. Maybe that's why despite all the anachronisms and absurdities Walker somehow remains a true story—or at least truer than most.