About 130,000 feet of film came down to 95 minutes. The film went to Cannes. It won a prize for New Director: and it earned $17 million on its first run, and maybe $40 million in total. As such, it launched the careers of those attached to the film. It allowed BBS a couple of creative years. And it undoubtedly encouraged the system to think of offering opportunities to young directors, actors, and writers. It established Nicholson as the new master in a rare American tradition, heroic yet comic.
And it is unwatchable—unless you are benefiting from the illegal substances it advocates.
L’Eclisse (1962)
Consider the extraordinary coincidences of 1962, like Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse. Do they just exist together in the same year, or do they have anything more in common than being shot in black and white? I know that the Antonioni film is set in the busy city of Rome, where the stock exchange goes wild and there is always the insect life of traffic on the streets, whereas The Exterminating Angel’s action—or should we say the opposite of action, the ingrowing nature of the film?—occurs at a large house in a quiet Mexican suburb on Calle de la Providencia. That is where the social event is set, the one from which—mysteriously—the guests are unable to depart.
So I wonder, is it just possible that L’Eclisse’s two young Italians, Vittoria and Piero (Monica Vitti and Alain Delon), who had been scheduled to meet on a certain street corner, or at a Roman intersection—is it possible, when they do not meet, that they are among the company irrationally but quite definitely detained, or withheld, at the Calle de la Providencia?
This may sound more like a game than criticism, but there are profound ways in which great films are more like one another than like lesser films. In other words, there is a point in film’s hierarchy where schemes like Western or Romance or even Noir fall away, tired and useless, and the only genre left intact is the name of the author. And then, even though Buñuel is famously a surrealist while Antonioni maintains a kind of baffled respect for reality (the shots of the city at the end of L’Eclisse are documentary-like; indeed, the longer they go on without our characters arriving, the more grossly banal they become). Still, the ellipses in great artists quite easily reach out to hold hands, and I mean it in all seriousness when I say that the rendezvous in L’Eclisse has been prevented by The Exterminating Angel.
Now, ostensibly L’Eclisse concerns the meeting of a beautiful but hesitant young woman—shall we just say Monica Vitti—with a young wolf of success, a man of money, disguised as Alain Delon. It is about the chance of some kind of relationship developing be-tween a creature who lives in her imagination and a man who counts nearly everything that is precious to him—thus, she has two eyes, two breasts. And since this is Antonioni arranging figures in a cityscape (photography by Gianni Di Venanzo), then this is less a movie narrative than a visualized novel in which space, light, movement, and gesture are as factual and as evocative as words. We are talking about probably the most heightened or searching kind of movie ever made. We are talking about a masterpiece.
But don’t rely on narrative suspense. What will happen to these two people is rewarded by their sustained absence and by the prospect of the city’s carrying on without noticing. The year 1962 was also the year of the Cuban missile crisis, and when the streetlamp comes on at last, as dusk comes in, you can easily think of it as some kind of explosion. For the failure to meet is now achingly metaphysical, a warning. As the critic Seymour Chatman has proposed, it is a whole society or a whole civilization that cannot meet.
Ed Wood (1994)
Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1922–78), was famous in his shadowy lifetime as perhaps the most eager and probably the least talented director around. He made films like Glen or Glenda (much interested in sex change) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (a stranded vehicle for the dying Bela Lugosi). There was a good-natured college cult over his films, which played in the sixties and the seventies. Ed Wood, quite simply, is a tender, trusting film about this guy, lit up equally by director Tim Burton’s sense that passion is more than talent and by Johnny Depp’s fabulous, wide-eyed absence of self-awareness in the central role.
The picture is derived from a book, Nightmare of Ecstasy, by Rudolph Grey, and from a screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, and I think it’s fair to say that there is a great deal of well-digested research, without the least attempt at the kind of cutting judgments that are so available. In other words, treating Wood on his own terms—and making this in some ways like a Wood picture—is the challenge. That said, apart from the overall control of Burton, a huge debt is owed to the rare black-and-white photography by Stefan Czapsky, which lets one think of Wood’s own murk-and-milk lighting while offering a thing of beauty in its own right. There is also very good work done in production design (Tom Duffield), art direction (Okowita), set decoration (Cricket Rowland), and costumes (Colleen Atwood).
The film sketches in its own backstory but concentrates on the making of Plan 9, and thus it hinges on Bela Lugosi, acted with deep, slow relish by Martin Landau (he got an Oscar for it) and much helped by the lurid makeup work from Rick Baker. Yet in a way, Lugosi is an easier role than Wood himself and some of those bright idiots he had for company. Depp was still young doing Ed Wood, and a dozen years later he is a huge cult but still a question mark as an actor. This film ought to have stopped that chatter. He gives an inspired and inspiring performance—you can see how Wood believed in himself and had won others to that cause. Great credit goes also to Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, G. D. Spradlin, Bill Murray (as Bunny Breckinridge), Mike Starr, Max Casella, Brent Hinkley, Lisa Marie (as Vampira), and George Steele.
But I have to give a special nod to Vincent D’Onofrio, who has a single scene as Orson Welles. There have been plenty of Welles impersonations onscreen (including those by Orson himself), and I think it’s clear that he is a great temptation and a severe challenge as well as a diatribe against it. D’Onofrio’s version is a moment that accepts Wood as a fellow pilgrim in an absurd quest. And it is so close to Orson Welles that it is a tragedy to let the actor and the chance of a biopic go. You feel that if only D’Onofrio could have been Welles—and Welles Ed Wood—then who knows? Things might have worked out more kindly.
8½ (1963)
Forgive this observation, but if you’re undecided about what film to make, 135 minutes is rather self-indulgent on the worry. But then you’d have to consider the argument as to whether Federico Fellini—full of art-house celebrity and restless facility—didn’t turn to self and selfhood as opposed to story or subject. I know that seems ungrateful when you consider the unique and endearing insouciance/lethargy/fraud/boredom that Marcello Mastroianni turned on for this role—to say nothing of the photography (by Gianni Di Venanzo) that produced sophisticated blacks and whites like the layouts in a great fashion magazine. (It’s not that you admire the clothes in this film—you want to purchase them. A boutique in every lobby would have cleaned up!) And surely, after the brooding disquiet of, say, Antonioni, there were more Italians than just Fellini who saw the charm in having the greatest problem in the world be what will you do or wear next?
But Antonioni—give him his due—hovers over spaces filled with mystery, whereas the gravure look that Fellini perfected here has an instantaneous accessibility that shuts out subtexts, doubts, or inner meanings. What you see is what you get—and what you see is Fellini reveling in the ironic self-centeredness of a whole film in the way Guido (Mastroianni) dreams up the harem set piece to give equality to all the competing (and betrayed) women in his life. So the considerable bitterness and justice of his wife (Anouk Aimée) can be shrugged off as high-strung nerves.
On the other hand, I agree with anyone who observes that as Fellini gives up on the charade of being interested in anything except himself, his style becomes richer and more mellifluous. It’s not that 8½ could or should go on forever, just that it feels as if it does. Whereas there was an authentic
conundrum awaiting him after the specious La Dolce Vita: What should he do next? The matter of pressing subject was waning, and it was one among many signs that film was losing its grip on him. So Fellini turned to celebrity, with some wry grace but still as wholeheartedly as far more painfully vain directors.
Now, there is talk about his life as an ongoing circus or party—but we know those parties we cannot remember, and after a few years we gaze in dismay on the hundreds of nights they consumed. This was an act Fellini could turn on anything—his Rome was to come. He could as easily have made a film about his shirts or shoes. For myself, I don’t think another real movie for him comes after 8½, and I include Amarcord, which is something like My Youth, yet in a way that has forgotten how to notice pain. So the word Fellini-esque crept into being at almost exactly the moment when it had come to mean much less than ever before.
But Di Venanzo’s photography changed the world. And Nino Rota had the oil to add to every dish. Also with Claudia Cardinale, Sandra Milo, Barbara Steele, Rossella Falk, and Madeleine LeBeau. The script was by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi.
Election (1999)
By tradition, we are supposed to be more afraid of Rosemary’s baby, Damien in the Omen films, or even Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed. But a more frightening idea could be that the gravest threat comes from our own young, possessed by a fierceness that we never commanded and hardly understand. And this is a type you can find out there nowadays, a pert child of the 1970s born again as a new conservative of the nineties with a special vendetta against the fatal untidiness of the sixties. I give you—please take her, and throttle her—Tracy Flick.
Not many people remarked on it at the time, but the central character in Alexander Payne’s smoky Election was this good girl turned very nasty—and it was clear by the end of the film that Payne saw Tracy moving on to Washington, D.C. She is a character who deserves sequels—the next part could be her becoming a media voice, a sexpot who brings brimstone and treacle to moral ambivalence. But we had not seen this type before, even if Katharine Hepburn had drawn close to it in films like Alice Adams and even The Philadelphia Story—the toxic nerd.
Maybe I am praising Payne too much. His work has been inconsistent, to say the least. But at this moment, I would rather be generous to a new comic talent than able to recognize authentic misanthropy in another David Fincher. And Election is a dazzling comedy in which the pain is as intense as a bee sting in the eye, or an early knee in the groin to the promising career of civics teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), the lightweight who chooses to go up against the dread Flick. It is his job to run the school-president election, and in a reasonable if not just way, he knows that for the good of Carver High, Tracy Flick must not win. We know that in most circumstances she has lost, for her idiot rival, the big penis, has been so softhearted as to vote for her. So Jim fixes the election, and he is going to be an outsider for the rest of his life. While Tracy…? Who knows?
Payne wrote Election with Jim Taylor, working from a novel by Tom Perrotta. The supporting cast is solid, but everyone on the film knows that the satire is flying because of the sails in Reese Witherspoon’s self-satisfied cheeks. And this was only her second great show. The first came two years earlier, when she was only twenty, in Freeway. That remaking of the Little Red Riding Hood tale makes Red so much more dangerous than the Wolf, and thereby inaugurates what might be a new volume of American moral tales in which murder and mayhem are done in the names of the old clichés. Ms. Witherspoon was bound to grow older, and lo and behold, in Walk the Line she was adorable and sexy. It’s quite possible that she will be a curiosity. In which case, there’s all the more point in insisting that in Freeway and Election, Reese Witherspoon was on the point of taking over. The Republic is so vulnerable.
Éloge de l’Amour (2001)
It’s notable that when this film got a release in English-speaking countries (and it was Jean-Luc Godard’s first such opportunity in fourteen years), it was called In Praise of Happiness, which is not quite the same as an elegy to love, even if it may offer more comfort to a middlebrow audience.
In Paris, Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) is preparing some creative project on love that will observe meeting, passion, breakup, and reconciliation. He is auditioning various people for parts. He meets a young woman (Cecile Camp) who seems capable of playing the lead. But before the event, she kills herself—there is suicide in her family. This event is played against an incident from a couple of years earlier, when Edgar travels to Brittany to visit a historian (Jean Lacouture) about the history of the French Resistance. An elderly couple live nearby; they were the “Tristan and Isolde” circuit once, and they are in the process of trading the rights to their story to a “Steven Spielberg.” Their granddaughter Berthe is helping with the contracts.
The Paris sequences are shot on film, but in black and white. The Brittany scenes are done in beautiful color video. That contrary decision, it seems to me, is part of the still Godardian effort to make us reflect on what decisions have been made. And there are very gloomy issues here (often found in his early films) about how television has reduced the cultural gaze of individuals and society simply by letting it seem that our choosing to look or not hardly matters. And the reason I include Éloge de l’Amour is not because I am certain of its masterpiece status so much as because of a response to its belief in my title, Have you seen …? For instance, Berthe is kept a scarcely visible figure—shadowy, with her back to us, obscure—if for no other reason than to make us look in every way we can at her.
The satire is scathing. I don’t think any Steven Spielberg was involved with this couple, but the idea of a movie with William Styron doing the script and Juliette Binoche in the lead is all too credible. (Mademoiselle Binoche will be telephoning personally once the contract is signed!) Whereas the valiant couple from the Resistance, grandmother and grandfather, are homely and sunken, and who knows how well they remember the actual betrayal of the past? He turned her in under Gaullist instructions?
So “happiness” is hardly at issue. Instead, we have a dense and truly difficult film document in which we are invited to consider the verity of so many clichés: the Resistance, the value of reporting, books and films, and even the notion that Edgar and Berthe may be in love. Like the best of Godard in the old days, this is a “story” that perpetually questions itself, and if there is an elegy to love buried deep inside, it is not necessarily of comfort. This is the world of a filmmaker—and it is blazing and beautiful—but it agonizes over the question of whether film has turned us in.
The Elusive Pimpernel (1950)
Alexander Korda had done a version of The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1935, directed by Harold Young. It had Leslie Howard as Sir Percy Blakeney, Merle Oberon as his wife, and Raymond Massey as Chauvelin, the French official who is pursuing the Pimpernel to stop his efforts to save aristocrats from the guillotine. Then Korda asked the Archers—the British filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger—to do him a remake, no matter that the status of aristos had altered in fifteen years.
It was their first idea to take the rather flimsy Baroness Orczy story and turn it into an extravaganza, a kind of movie operetta. They even flirted with the idea of doing the whole thing in song. (Can you picture a version of the Pimpernel story as if done by Jacques Demy? Of course you can.) But Korda was nervous: He had seen the thing work as an adventure story, and he flinched at Powell’s vivid accounts of a fantasia. So the novelty was cooked at a lower temperature. No songs. Not too much music. Yet what remained was Powell’s inclination not to take the adventure too seriously and to make everything look as blatantly pretty as possible. What we do have, still, is a version of the Pimpernel story that could be set in the Brighton Pavillion and that might be painted by Dufy.
David Niven was to be Blakeney, and that was fine. He was a demure swashbuckler, after all, with great humor and poise and the nerve to play over the top. Chauvelin would be Cyril Cusack (after fir
st thoughts of Marius Goring), and he does a lovely job: malicious, suspicious, sly but stupid. The great problem occurred with Lady Blakeney. The woman was French, said Powell, so let’s have a French actress. Korda was all for Margaret Leighton, who struck Powell as the stiffest kind of stage actress. He found Madeleine LeBeau (she sings “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca), but Korda was adamant.
So the Archers team went to work, Christopher Challis doing the photography, Hein Heckroth the sets, Brian Easdale the music. Powell called the result a mess and a navet—a turnip. He is too hard on himself. The open-air shooting—the English countryside, the Normandy shore, Mont St. Michel—is lovely. Niven and Cusack are first-class, and there is a great sense of champagne and fun, as well as a supporting cast dressed and behaving like the Harlequins rugby club on a weekend trip to France: Robert Coote, Edmond Audran, Charles Victor, David Hutcheson, David Oxley, Patrick Macnee, and Terence Alexander, along with Danielle Godet, Arlette Marchal, Gérard Nery, and Eugene Deckers.
As with the Archers’ The Small Back Room, this film deserves rediscovery. But in hindsight one can see their tastes diverging from British feelings in the 1950s. Powell and Pressburger rate at the highest level in the 1940s, but they were blessed by being in step with the audience. To be out of step is to be like Josef von Sternberg after The Devil Is a Woman: The art is perfected, but the business is a wreck.
Empire of the Sun (1987)
It really was the case that the young J. G. Ballard became lost in Shanghai as the Japanese attacked at the start of that theater of the Second World War. For the boy, the city was half-playground, half-wasteland before he found himself the Artful Dodger of a prison camp and chief imp to the languid yet thoroughly evil Basie (John Malkovich). So, yes, this is a war story and a prison-camp movie in many ways, but what makes it sublime is its adherence to the boy’s vision. He is “safe” at the end, I suppose, yet he is on the edge of a breakdown, too. And in this great ordeal, the Japanese are bad enough, but still Basie is his Fagin figure, the most understanding fount of evil.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 42
