Carnage

While the credits roll on Roman Polanski’s Carnage, the camera fixes its eye on a simple city park. At first, it’s not quite obvious what we should be watching. Children play, joggers jog, and life carries on quietly while the audience contemplates the significance of Kate Winslet’s two assistants to Jodie Foster’s one. Then, when the last extra thank-you has been thanked and we have been legally reassured that what we have just seen is not actually documentary truth (what a relief), a dog and its owner stop by a tree. The dog lifts its leg and—cut to the Sony Pictures Classics logo. Fini.

Perhaps Polanski is not deliberately pissing on his distributor, I’ll grant that. But the timing of the shot is immaculate, cutting off at the exact moment the dog is about to mark its territory. If anything, the moment proves two things: a) Polanski is capable of some nice cinematic sleight of hand, using an elegantly simple long take to mask a streak of puerile humour, and b) he’s still a bit of a smartass.

But any humour is a welcome relief from the vicious philosophical blood sport that plays out in Carnage. A random act of violence between two children—one smashes the other in the face with a stick, knocking out several teeth—begets even more brutal emotional violence between their parents. In this corner, we have Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly), the conciliatory parents of the victim. In the opposite corner, we have Alan and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet), the contrite parents of the perpetrator. Beginning with a simple meeting at the Longstreet’s apartment to talk out the repercussions of the fight, the discussion begins defensive, turns offensive, and finally ends explosive, with all four adults indiscriminately lashing out and trying to wound whoever gets in their way.

Based on a play by Yasmine Reza (who helped Polanski adapt it to the screen), the film occasionally bears its theatrical roots in unflattering ways. Lengthy dramatic monologues in which characters confess their personal lives and value systems are better suited to the stage, where the voice often takes primacy over the visual. Such moments always feel foreign to a cinematic setting, where they often force the director to stop visualizing the drama and simply watch the performance. Polanski fares better than most others would when faced with this challenge, and the cast is all quite capable, but there are still awkward moments where the performances seem pitched not to camera but rather the back rows. It should be noted, however, that Kate Winslet projectile vomits with considerable aplomb—how do you suppose that sequence fares on Broadway?

Still, if you’re going to cram four people into a room and start the cameras rolling, you could do worse than to put Roman Polanski in charge. Ever the skilled navigator of confined spaces, the director finds subtle ways to distinguish the film from canned theatre whenever possible. Sometimes his cinematic gestures are almost grand, like the fluid tracking shot that follows Penelope through the hallway and into the bathroom, with the brittle woman neurotically tidying up everywhere she goes (twice!). But it can also be something so simple as Nancy’s nervous fingers tapping in the bottom corner of the screen as her husband chatters incessantly on his cellphone. Such details seem slight on their own, but just a few of these touches are enough to provide a sense of graceful control to what might otherwise have been a chaotic, cluttered clash of wills.

The implications of the domestic squabble at the heart of the film expand until the children’s random violence becomes a stand-in for any number of horrific conflicts on distant shores (notably, Penelope is working on a book on Darfur, while the world-weary Alan has visited the continent in person). This sets up a fairly obvious opposition between Penelope’s well-intentioned liberalism and Alan’s hard-nosed conservatism. She believes the violence between the boys should be dealt with diplomatically; he testifies to the power of the gods of carnage, and begs off responsibility. Even with the occasional rearrangement of the argument along different lines—most notably gender, when the women square off against the men—the film constantly returns to that binary between a demand for civility and a shrugging invocation of natural law.

It’s not quite accurate to say the match ends in a draw—more like the canvas collapses underneath both fighters. Indeed, Polanski puts so much effort into suggesting the phoniness of everyone’s principles that the film verges on cheap nihilism at times. He upends both the snarling cynics and wounded idealists through a series of well-timed shocks that call into question all of their platitudes about the way the world should work. None of these supposedly mature adults are in any position to understand the conflict between the boys, never mind the Darfur genocide. The childrens’ world possesses its own set of codes and values never fully grasped by the parents, who argue about right and wrong from within an impenetrable fog of arrogance (when Penelope learns her son has a “gang” and may be more complicit in the fight than she first believed, her reaction is bewilderment). The film does not take sides, but rather levels the unbearable smugness of backseat moralists everywhere. Polanski damns the parents not for their beliefs about the world, but their distance from it.

The Lodger

Made during the tail end of the silent era in 1927, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger lays out the director’s concerns with all the clarity of a street lamp piercing the London fog. The barebones plot is primal Hitchcock—a serial killer is prowling the London streets for fair-haired victims, while the titular lodger takes the rap, due to an outrageous series of coincidences (and, it must be acknowledged, his own general air of creepiness). Many of the familiar obsessions are already fully evident here: dim-witted cops, blondes in peril, and the prototype for dozens of unjustly accused and needlessly pursued Hitchcock protagonists, the original Wrong Man.

Yet the film’s greatest strength lies in its skewed love triangle, with the lodger and a policeman vying for affections of the landlord’s daughter Daisy. Sexual repression becomes interchangeable with police oppression, and the paranoid mistrust of the lodger is impossible to separate from everyone’s attempts to micromanage Daisy’s love life. Tellingly, the smarmy cop comes on to the girl by equating a wedding ring to a hangman’s noose, and then slaps a pair of handcuffs on her (smooth operator, he). Little wonder she prefers the lodger, who lustily kisses her golden locks and doesn’t make his love conditional upon a hanging. But in an icky twist that oddly recalls Vertigo, Daisy is revealed to be the spitting image of the lodger’s murdered sister, meaning she is essentially a recreation of his lost love (his, um, sister). Unlike Vertigo, there’s a happy ending, but only of the most sour and peculiar sort. Somehow, the murderer seems less perverse than our putative hero.

The Grey

A group of hardened men—tough and brawling types, the sort who pick their teeth with rusty nails and shave with shards of broken glass—are abandoned to the wilds of Alaska. All they have is what they can carry, their only weapons a box of shotgun shells and a couple of pocketknives. Around a campfire they all sit, shyly revealing their greatest fears and sorrows as they learn to trust one another. And should this prove too much for the men, they can always take their chances with the pack of wolves just beyond the firelight, circling in the dark.

Quite possibly the cruelest male sensitivity retreat ever devised, The Grey is a hard-nosed tale of Arctic survival and existential despair. Writer/director Joe Carnahan’s mixture of visceral action scenes with introspective reveries could easily collapse into an embarrassing mish-mash of macho posturing and maudlin self-pity. Yet the film actually fits well with another recent melancholy action film, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. Both invest deeply (and sincerely) in traditional tough-guy poses—Ryan Gosling’s steely, quiet driver, Liam Neeson’s no-nonsense, take-charge oil worker—and then reveal a clanging hollowness inside that strength. These are still both action films, filled with moments of vicious, blood-spattering violence. But unlike mainstream action films, they can conjure up a stillness more shattering than any of the savagery on display. There is nothing quite so lonely as a man of action in repose. 

Not that there is much time for repose in The Grey. Following the struggles of seven plane-crash survivors hounded by a pack of wolves in the Arctic, the film spends much of its time on the run with the men. But it still finds time for quiet moments around the campfire, where the terrified men try to come to terms with the looming promise of death. Granted, there’s something perfunctory in these moments—what wilderness survival tale doesn’t have the campfire bonding scene?—but Carnahan elevates them with a sense of detail. Rather than have his characters unspool long, overdramatic monologues revealing their life stories, the filmmaker instead settles on a few snatches of the past. One man is encapsulated in the image of his daughter’s hair tickling his face; another dwells upon a lousy encounter with an aged prostitute. Neeson’s character, John Ottway, is defined by the deathbed letter written by his deceased wife, which flashes before the camera on several occasions, but never long enough to read. The tantalizing detail is all we’re given.

Although the film is ostensibly a survival film, it isn’t so much about surviving as it is about coming to terms with death. If you were feeling uncharitable, you could even characterize it as a big-screen takeoff on the cheese-ball television show 1000 Ways to Die (aired on ultra-macho channel Spike, incidentally). The film ticks off a number of gruesome death fantasies, from plane crash to animal attack to drowning and asphyxiation. More importantly, the ubiquitous wolf pack serves as a somewhat obvious stand-in for the grim implacability of our own mortality. They’re the brute truth of our animal natures, which demands we succumb to the decay of the world like any other beast, regardless of whatever high-flown palliatives offered by our philosophy or religion. Still, this is an action film at root, and Carnahan’s blissfully materialist filmmaking does not neglect the physical reality of his symbols. When the metaphor is mauling you, its meaning is largely moot.

This is existential angst with teeth, in other words. When the story begins, Ottway is preparing to kill himself, coming so close as to taste the barrel of his rifle. But he stopped, either because of the memory of a poem written by his father or the taunting howl of the wolves. Later, when the men are lost in the wilderness, they each must confront death in turn. All of them seem to live for something or someone—a wife or a daughter, perhaps—except for Ottway, who lives for nothing and yet clings more tenaciously to life than all the rest. For all the film’s anguish about death and fear, it is finally a guttural piece of tough-guy philosophizing, where men grit their teeth and shout fuckface at the unblinking heavens—and then face down death with a broken bottle in hand, as if in a barroom brawl.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The time is the early 1970s, and deep inside the paranoid cocoon of Britain’s Cold War-era Secret Intelligence Service, the news of a mole inside the upper echelons of the agency is slowly corroding all sense of what is real and what is not. It’s a strong hook, and good thing, too—the first half-hour of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will likely appear incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the John Le Carre novel from which the film is adapted. This would be a dense narrative under any circumstances, but the early establishing scenes have a clipped feeling, as if the filmmakers had resolved to adapt every second chapter of the book and then hoped the details would somehow sort themselves out. Thankfully, they do, and Le Carre novices (like myself) will find themselves eventually forging the connections neglected by the filmmakers. Indeed, everything flows together gracefully enough that one begins to wonder if the early awkwardness was really due to clumsiness or was actually meant to evoke a sense of disorientation befitting this duplicitous world (a little of both, I suspect).

It helps to have such a deep lineup of talent on the cast—led by the esteemed Gary Oldman and his glasses—with fine character actors penetrating into even the smallest roles. This might seem like a strange compliment, but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy possesses one of the most homely casts I’ve seen in a mainstream film in recent memory, even with Colin Firth screwing up the bell curve. So many wizened, weary men, their worry lines slicing through their age lines, and then seemingly rubbed in an extra layer of dust and sadness—every face is a desiccated monument to a life of hard choices. The whole film echoes that sense of drabness, right down to the perpetually overcast skies and each dowdy detail of the production design (were the 1970s really this brown?). Director Tomas Alfredson could easily be accused of overindulging in the retro-chic, except that the style seems at least as important to the film’s purposes as its spy-counterspy machinations. As the mole notes, his betrayal “was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one.” A glib characterization of the Cold War, perhaps, but the film makes a case for it. The decaying western world is safeguarded by the moral compromises of its decaying protectors, and whatever you may call this sad sight, "pretty" is not likely a term that comes to mind. How else to rationalize the image of a balding, pasty middle-aged man dancing in paisley and ruffles? The loyal soldier commits many crimes in the name of war—against fashion, as much as anything else.

The Artist

Armed with the score from Vertigo and the dog from The Thin Man, The Artist prods its audience with a thousand different pilfered pleasures. It’s a charm offensive wielding a crowbar—not necessarily to pry a smile out of you, but rather to open coffins while out on its grave-robbing expedition. Example: Is the gag about the extra that plays Napoleon and thinks he’s actually Napoleon a muddled reference to Josef Von Sternberg’s The Last Command? And does it even matter when the bit is so weak anyway? Writer-director Michael Hazanavicius is on his strongest footing when he relies on the real chemistry between his stars, Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo (an impromptu dancing duel, a series of botched takes). But there isn’t enough vaseline in the world to make me buy into the film’s half-remembered nostalgia, which reduces film history into some sort of mawkish twaddle about how the medium moves forward by paying fealty to its forebears—an idea repudiated by The Artist’s very own unimaginative appropriations and distorted notions of silent film. Just compare this to the work of Guy Maddin, a movie obsessive who has internalized the grammar of the silents and learned to speak it fluently. Hazanavicius, on the other hand, memorizes a few phrases and tries to bluff his way through a conversation.

Armadillo

At its best, Janus Metz’s documentary Armadillo captures war in all its terror and tedium. Following a group of Danish soldiers on a tour of duty at a frontline base in Afghanistan (the titular Armadillo), the film contrasts the mind-numbing boredom of soldiers killing time with the brain-scrambling adrenalin buzz of killing the Taliban. Metz has been given remarkable access to the soldiers and he takes full advantage, following them on patrols and diving for cover alongside the young men when bullets start flying from parts unknown. It’s a stiff cure for boredom, but when you see the dreariness of life on the front without action, you begin to sympathize with the men’s professed desire for a bit of gunfire once in a while. This isn’t macho posturing—they just want something to do.

But as the film progresses it becomes difficult to trust Metz’s relentless stylizing of the material. At times, the film feels almost like fiction, scrupulously avoiding anything that might suggest its documentary roots—the soldiers never speak to or even acknowledge the camera, and only reveal themselves through conversations with other soldiers or family. Indeed, Metz appears to be treating the men less as subjects and more as characters, if such a fine distinction can be made. This misplaced desire is the source of one of the film’s most dubious tactics: an oft-repeated setup where a lone soldier stares blankly into space (or in one case, shuts his eyes while at home in the shower—oh, such dedication to documentary truth). Obviously, the intention is to suggest a level of melancholy reflection not otherwise borne out in any of the men’s actions and words. No one would be naïve enough to suggest a documentary is unvarnished truth, but the material should ideally dictate its terms to the director, not the reverse.

Such qualms are minor next to the queasy discomfort of the verite moneyshot of this borderline war porn. A patrol is ambushed by a group of Taliban fighters, leading to a frenetic, disorienting battle that concludes in the deaths of five enemy combatants (the Danish squad suffers a couple of injuries, but no fatalities). As the soldiers pull the Taliban men out into the open, Metz blurs the faces of the dead—a curious decision that begs the question of who exactly is being protected here. The dead men’s families? Or the audience itself, who are now free to appreciate the vicarious thrill of combat without having to recognize the dead opponents as anything other than faceless corpses? Armadillo seems ill prepared for the moral questions of filming war, which explains its retreat into the security of aesthetic distance. Shamed and horrified by these images, the film’s only refuge is to finally compromise their reality.

Cold Weather

Aaron Katz established his talent with a pair of low-key efforts about youths adrift in a sea of suburban anonymity: the charmingly simple love story Quiet City and the more troubled Dance Party USA, which is perhaps what a Michael Haneke movie would look like if it were performed by a high school drama class. Cold Weather, Katz’s third feature film, ingeniously extends his world without compromising it. The same drifting, dislocated youths are in evidence here, only this time they seem to have drifted their way into a Raymond Chandler novel.

However, in the place of a hardboiled hero we must make do with a doughy slacker. Doug lives on his sister Gail’s couch after dropping out of college, giving up the study of forensic science to spend his days shuffling bags of ice around in an ice factory. Unable or unwilling to commit to the drudgery of a career, he discovers the drudgery of a livelihood instead. He’s the perfect example of an aimless twenty-something unable to decide what to do with himself—the film makes a running gag out of him goading on his friends and sister to ditch work, much as he often does.

Early scenes focus on Doug and his slim social circle goofing off and hanging around. Indeed, the film may be unique in dedicating a montage sequence to a board game party (rather appropriately, it ends with the characters trying to decipher the instructions). But the story soon takes a sharp left turn into thriller territory, as Doug’s ex-girlfriend blows off a date with a mutual friend and seemingly disappears. Egged on by his friend Carlos to tackle the mystery—“You know about these kind of things,” Carlos explains—Doug indulges his love of Sherlock Holmes and puts his unfinished detective courses to use. From there, the usual hardboiled details begin to crop up, including pornographers, secret codes, and the requisite briefcase full of money.

Katz is clearly having fun riffing on detective stories here, but the film can’t be so easily pigeonholed as some genre parody or mishmash of mumblecore mannerisms with thriller tropes. Self-conscious films like this typically display their artificiality, not their naturalism. Yet Katz ignores stylized gestures, rather hewing to his well-established mode of quiet urban contemplation and small, personal moments. Even the relationships between the characters have an easygoing realism that doesn’t appear normally in hardboiled dramas. A stylish drama devoid of style and drama, the film becomes something far stranger and more rewarding: a collection of offhand character observations, delivered with warmth and intelligence.

One sees this especially in the relationship between Gail and Doug, a beautiful slice of sibling interaction. There are no long-buried hatreds and jealousies, no recriminations and shouting and hugging and sobbing and all that sticky nonsense. Instead, there are simply fond jokes, flashes of shared memory, and the staple of any sibling bond, embarrassment. The best—and perhaps most representative—moment in the film comes when Doug buys a porn magazine, explaining to Gail that it might contain clues. Her response? A simple, withering, “Oh.” There’s an entire conversation in that one word, with all the bantering and teasing of their years together boiled down to a single, deadpan syllable.

The fact that the primary male-female relationship in the film is not sexual, but rather familial, colours the proceedings in striking ways. We’re never really drawn into a sordid underbelly of crime and depravity, even when shady pornographers start popping up. Instead, Katz discovers a childhood game buried inside the sometimes-dreary lives of these young adults. The film feels like a group of kids playing dress-up in their backyard. Like a child imitating the grownups, Doug buys a pipe, just so he can sit around smoking and thinking as Sherlock Holmes would. Even Gail dresses up in a disguise at one point, although, apropos for this ramshackle adventure, it’s one cribbed from a lost and found.

All of this probably sounds terribly slight, even if one can’t underrate the film’s affectless charm. But Katz understands something crucial about genre that is often missed by other referential filmmakers mining familiar territory for fool’s gold. As a director who has cultivated his own filmmaking family over just a few projects, Katz is attuned to the pleasure in simply watching a group of friends create their own story together. The interactions of the characters always take precedent over the rehashed genre plot. So it should come as no surprise that the mystery of Cold Weather falls away in the last moments, leaving us once again with nothing other than the sibling bond we began with. Rather than resolution, Katz settles for a little flicker of insight into Doug and Gail’s relationship. As with a mix tape shared between friends, the quality of the song is secondary to the moments and memories conjured up by the familiar tune.