Thomas Anderson, sometimes known as Neo and an anagram of One (as in “the One”), is a nocturnal hacker in our sad world. He is arrested by the multiple Smith (Hugo Weaving) and told to help arrest Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), resistance leader of the struggle against the Matrix, “an artificial intelligence that rules the world”—you know the kind of guy. It’s a battle in which Morpheus has one-liners from old fortune-cookie factories, the good guys wear long dark coats, and the girl, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), favors soft-shiny black leather and catatonia.
Andy and Larry Wachowski wrote and directed it, and you know they have a lot of theories about what it means. Vaguely we know what it means: Matrix is destroying the world, sucking away its vitality (doesn’t everyone have that feeling?), and Neo is going to have to find a new kind of martial combat to handle Agent Smith, who just turns into two or two hundred Smiths if you kill one of him. Bill Pope photographed the whole thing and the visual effects credits go on forever. These films are very expensive. But, lo and behold, they work: It is supposed to have cost $63 million, and it had a U.S. gross of $171 million. And that was only the beginning. There were two sequels and then there was the DVD.
Of course, you’re going to say that the Matrix-like threat to human vitality actually operates on such different battlegrounds as the home front, the school, how people think politically, and so on. But we all know very well that no one has the least faith in those forums, not even the “and so on,” and the Wachowski brothers know that a good, earnest teacher in a needy school might earn $50,000 a year. So our culture goes straight to the apocalypse and the big killing. And in its profusion of computerized effects, its monotone acting, and its assertion that people like Neo and Morpheus and Trinity are alive, the film is the enactment of its own warning.
The Mattei Affair (1972)
It’s easy for Italians, as well as Americans, to believe that Hollywood owns the “Mafia” film, as well as that tradition of picture-making (it goes back as far as Capra, at least, the Sicilian) in which we begin to see the forces of outlawry as a dark mirror image of the people called “law and order.” And it fits into the complex, and sometimes ironic, view of Francesco Rosi that these things sooner or later become synonyms for “Italian” and thus a constant fog or miasma as any Italian—artist or not—makes his way in the world. And so, Rosi has often explored other kinds of material, but the selection in this book, and others, inevitably homes in on those things that seem clichéd Italian. Let us just say that Italy is not only a founder of democratic ideals and rational government; it has also been a model for natural corruption and confused thinking.
Enrico Mattei was a left-wing oil tycoon killed in 1962 when his plane crashed on the way from Sicily to Milan. The pilot and a reporter from Time-Life were also killed in the same accident. (October 1962, of course, was the haunted moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis—and thus a prelude to the eternally uncertain mystery of who killed John Kennedy, and how and why.)
I make that reference because the Mattei affair remains an unsolved case. Rosi’s film (scripted by himself and Tonino Guerra, with the assistance of Nerio Minuzzo and Tito Di Stefano) is a reconstruction of the main strands of Mattei’s life, with evident allusions to Citizen Kane, in the realization that so many people had reasons for wanting him dead—the Mafia, the CIA, perhaps even aspects of the Left who may have felt betrayed by him. Indeed, one of the investigating journalists on the story vanishes when on the point of making a breakthrough discovery.
We know this modern paranoia from our own films, and Rosi leaves in a reference to the Corleone family just as he seems to have seen most of the relevant American political thrillers. But Rosi has his roots in Italian neo-realism (he worked with Visconti on La Terra Trema), and he has a taste for the real places, for people playing themselves and for extras who are the voting public in the relevant areas. So this is not nearly as clear-cut or aesthetically decisive a film as Citizen Kane or The Godfather, films thirty years apart but done with the same bravura control so that the dream seems perfect and the heroes poised. As shot by Pasqualino De Santis, The Mattei Affair is far less tidy, but very suggestive. Indeed, ever since his groundbreaking mixture of legend and documentary in Salvatore Giuliano (1961), Rosi has pioneered a fusion of melodrama and naturalistic “coverage.”
The result is a web of narrative, or is it intrigue? Remember, plot is a word with such different meanings, in which we are forever trying to find a solid ground from which we can judge the charismatic performance of Gian Maria Volontè as Mattei. So caught up in political theater, this Mattei has learned Kane’s lesson—that you never know yourself whether your greatest allegiance is to truth or to performance.
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven in the U.S.) could be a Stanley Kramer film, as if made by a young child. On the one hand, it involves the most direct, head-on confrontation with a large issue that could be imagined—in this case, the future of Anglo-American relations. On the other, it turns upon the resolution of a tiny, dreamlike situation—to wit, whether a downed bomber pilot can survive brain surgery or not. Granted the flex being exerted from either end, there are openings all over the place so that the film can absorb enchanted beach sequences that seem more surreal than natural; the blush on Kim Hunter’s cheek; the working of a camera oscura; passing jokes about Technicolor—they’re so starved for it in a monochrome Heaven that looks like a Moscow subway station. And so on: This is a film about a shattered mind and anything and everything can stroll in and out as the synapses flap in the breeze of concussion.
An English pilot, Peter Carter (David Niven), is shot down over the southern English shore. His last exchanges are with June (Kim Hunter), an American who is working for the war effort as a radio operator. He goes to a hospital headed by neurologist Dr. Reeves (Roger Livesey), and the crisis he faces in surgery is dramatized by a trial in Heaven where his right to live and Britain’s virtue in American eyes are to be argued in a trial where America is represented by a slain patriot, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey). In the end, Peter lives because June is willing to die in his place—love conquers all.
No, it’s not exactly the way Clement Attlee and Harry Truman discussed matters, but it is a film of sweeping boldness and confidence. Emeric Pressburger did the script. Jack Cardiff handled the Technicolor photography. Alfred Junge was the production designer. Hein Heckroth did the costumes. Reginald Mills was the editor. This was the core of the Archers team in those years, and this was a big production with large sets. However, Cardiff did replace Erwin Hillier, and that shift marked a new commitment to Technicolor. It was also important to Michael Powell’s confidence that England looked far more heavenly than the appointed place.
The childlike story sustains a real knowledge of neurology and the American revolutionary era. The shift from real to fantasy was deft and comic most of the time, and in the best possible sense Powell always made his audience feel they were watching a movie, or a process that only film could manage. In turn, as Powell would have said, the movie was America’s contribution to culture just as history, the countryside, and eager young people were Britain’s. It’s fanciful, yet it moves quickly enough for the question marks to be swept away by exhilaration. The cast included Robert Coote, Richard Attenborough, and Bonar Colleano as pilots, Kathleen Byron as one angel, and Marius Goring as one who lost his head in the French Revolution. Abraham Sofaer is the judge.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
With two films in the early 1970s, Robert Altman established a poignant theme—that of the smart little boy who looked in most respects like a grown man, who, by dint of fantasizing energy, has willed himself up onto the screen and into the story. We are talking about a couple of the screen’s perfect moments of self-reflection in which a director recognizes the thrust and the function of the movies—so men may kid themselves about their limits. I am talking about McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, two of the most beg
uiling films ever made in America.
McCabe was a novel, by Edmund Naughton, published way back in 1959. The rights had bounced around a lot and several scripts had been tried. The producer David Foster wound up with it in the late sixties. He fancied Altman to direct, with Elliott Gould in the lead, and he gave the script assignment to Brian McKay. Altman took that script over, which meant doing his best to edge McKay into obscurity. And it was Altman who said, Gould is not bankable, let’s go for Warren Beatty—just off a thing called Bonnie and Clyde, which he had produced, too (so he was full of strutting McCabery).
Altman had had a falling-out with McKay, and he tended then to try to get rid of writers—so that everyone else could have a go. Altman rewrote. So did Beatty, and Beatty’s line-slinger, Robert Towne. And then when Julie Christie was hired and the ampersand came into view, she was given rein to make Mrs. Miller a Cockney stand-up (in a lie-down mode). Then came rehearsal, with “script supervisor” Joan Tewkesbury writing it all down as fast as she could—if she could hear it, for amid all the one-upmanship people started improvising out of the corners of their mouths. It’s likely that some of the best lines were simply forgotten.
And something of beauty emerged: the idea of McCabe in his derby hat seeming like the cock of the walk until Mrs. Miller comes along—someone who really knows the whoring business—and then the syndicate comes along. All of which leaves McCabe as an earnest idiot doing his best to stay in charge when everyone knows more than he does about how this fantasy works. Altman saw it as a love story in which the two people on either side of the ampersand are natural lovers but stay cut off by their situation and their differences in worldly knowledge. Then he got Vilmos Zsigmond to shoot it as from a helpless distance in a kind of druggy haze (I do not mean that Mr. Zsigmond was doing anything except beauty), and then he got Leonard Cohen to lay songs over it all, wall to wall, and if you can’t hear it all or see it all, well, come back and try again. Anachronism? Anachronism is a new genre.
Beatty and Altman fought and each said, But for the other, what a film it would be. Christie curled up in her bleak privacy, and knew it was the film it could have been. Leon Ericksen did superb design on pine trees turned into homes, and then snow came down like heaven on the lovely shoot-out—the most wistful, dreamy climax in a Western. With Rene Auberjonois, Hugh Millais (superb), Shelley Duvall, Michael Murphy, John Schuck, William Devane, Keith Carradine, and so many others.
Mean Streets (1973)
Made very cheaply, with a bunch of friends, Mean Streets is the first of Martin Scorsese’s “boys wanna be gangsters” films. Its impact was extraordinary, and a group of filmmakers rose on its panache and its biting immediacy. But notice one thing: Scorsese had had an invalid childhood. He was a nicely raised kid, who may have watched lurid events from his bedroom window but who never got into the kind of trouble that awaits Johnny Boy in Mean Streets. Thus, Johnny Boy is an idolized figure, based on Robert De Niro’s great vitality and unexpectedness as an actor and on all the noir movies Marty had seen. One reason why he didn’t get into trouble was that he spent so much time in the dark. So Mean Streets isn’t life’s experience, it’s a distant view heated up by the history of the movies.
There is this gang: Charlie (Harvey Keitel), desperately ambitious to be a made man, trying to look after the self-destructive Johnny Boy and carrying on an affair with Teresa (an epileptic)—note, Teresa is Johnny Boy’s cousin and I think we’re meant to heed the possibility that Johnny Boy is literally crazy. Johnny Boy blows up a mailbox. He borrows money without intending to repay it. He gets into fights. He’s on the edge. And Michael (Richard Romanus) is an idiot, a nag, a guy who might die for having not an ounce of Johnny Boy’s impulsiveness.
We know it’s going to end badly because Johnny Boy wears a stupid porkpie hat of the kind that brought doom to so many jazz musicians. Not for the last time, a real sense of jazz—of hectic lyric improvisation—haunts De Niro’s performance, and I think it’s interesting that by the time of Taxi Driver Scorsese had shifted his loyalty from Keitel as his lead actor to De Niro.
The color photography is by Kent Wakeford, and it’s meant to be lurid and theatrical. Not to mention religious. Keitel (not compellingly Italian) is often in church as a Catholic in the film, and it’s the occasion on which Scorsese refers to troubled devoutness more than any other. But the real thing is friendship and whether it can hold in a world where Johnny Boy is technically unknowable. The constant verbal teasing between the two leads is superb, and again it is musical. Not that there isn’t music aplenty—for the first time, Scorsese made a radio sound track for the movie that has the Stones, Eric Clapton, the Shirelles, and opera, too.
Made when Scorsese was thirty, Mean Streets introduced a blazing new figure, but even then you could see the awkward strain of film buff and devil-may-care. So many things would fade away: the religion, the chance of a love story, but not De Niro and the great urge of boys at pretending to be gangsters. Who would have guessed, in 1973, before Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Good-Fellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, and The Departed, that this great director might be incapable of doing any other kind of movie?
Meantime (1983)
We’re plainly meant to take this title two ways—Meantime is about an interim condition, that of unemployment, but it seems also to reflect a time of mean spirit in British public affairs, one in which only a fool could now regard the lack of work as temporary. More to the point, it was a comeback for a filmmaker named Mike Leigh who had made his debut with the aptly named Bleak Moments—grinding in its realism, yet devoid of hope or even fighting spirit. There was, and there remains, in Leigh an uncommon and often disarming awareness of the oppressed and pathetic in society—those who have given up, but who hardly notice their decision. There was a twelve-year gap between Bleak Moments and Meantime, a period in which Leigh worked in experimental theater and television. Indeed, Meantime was a film for TV, made for Central Television. It looks starry now in that it helped introduce Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Alfred Molina. Though in 1983, they seemed to be playing hopeless cases.
Leigh was a doctor’s son from the Manchester area—in other words, he had seen humble suffering in his own lifetime, albeit from behind the more privileged walls of professional caregivers. I think you also have to say that Leigh was formed artistically by the failure of Labour governments in the 1970s and by the harsh administration of Margaret Thatcher. His subject was the underclass. His method was the steady cultivation of a company of preferred actors, encouraged to improvise their way to story lines. The result? Only Alan Clarke’s films had the same sense of a downcast Britain—but Clarke himself was rowdy, violent, and energetic. Leigh was more intellectual, more watchful, and more anxious.
And so it is that his special ambiguity of tone emerged in which it is not always clear whether he is listening to the whinge and whine of the lower classes—or mocking them for their helplessness. By now, Mike Leigh is regarded as a maker of comedies—though Vera Drake is not really very funny, despite the comic load in a lot of its talk. Similarly, this story of two brothers and their father trapped in unemployment and one wretched East London flat is a portrait of hell, even if a lot of the lines are funny.
This book has films from either end of Leigh’s career—and he deserves at least that, for his method and his dedication are unique and admirable, and the body of work is personal and deserving. But it’s a bold spectator who jumps up to answer the question, Is Leigh a comic artist or a defeated listener?
He is at the service of his actors. But those actors end up sounding like Mike Leigh people. Meantime was photographed by Roger Pratt, and its cast also includes Marion Bailey, Phil Daniels, Pam Ferris, and Jeff Robert.
In its way, Leigh’s ear for endless small talk is like that of Harold Pinter, and sometimes his conclusions are as frightening as Pinter’s. The comparison with John Cassavetes is fascinating: both men seemed pledged to letting actors discover ordinary vitality. But at the end of the da
y, Cassavetes and Leigh are alike in offering us versions of people who are riveting yet caricatures of life.
Meet John Doe (1941)
Frank Capra was both a big hit and an earnest American by the time of Meet John Doe, and you can see the dilemmas opening up for anyone who wished to remain both. I find it hard to be entertained by the film now, because its ostensible ideas and its actual energies are so uneasy together. But that leaves it, unwittingly, one of the most exposed of American dreams, as troubled as the other great political film of the year, Citizen Kane.
Capra was three times winner for Best Director. Late in 1939, he and his writer, Robert Riskin, formed Frank Capra Productions. Riskin remembered a short story, “A Reputation,” by Richard Connell, from the 1920s, about a clerk so dismayed by the world he announces he will kill himself. A movie treatment (by Connell and Robert Presnell) made its way to Riskin, who sent it on to Capra. The director jumped and told Riskin to start on the script—The Life and Death of John Doe, at first. Now the man was a drifter, an ex-ballplayer, Long John Willoughby. The suicide angle is a media hoax dreamed up by journalist Ann Mitchell, who is on the point of losing her job. Willoughby is built into a national hero, used by Ann’s publisher D. B. Norton. Willoughby becomes so disgusted by the exploitation—a string of John Doe clubs for boys—that he really wants to kill himself. But he is exposed first and then the public turns against him.
The film was set up at Warners, who contributed $500,000; Bank of America added $750,000. There was a lot of time spent on the deal and Capra was vexed at having to do it all himself; he was casual about the money—yet he was very eager to come out well. It’s a compromise not unlike the one in the story. Gary Cooper was cast as Willoughby and his dark, loner self is as important as his propensity for self-pity. Willoughby is a bum and an outsider, but ready to crack up. He is Capra’s first helpless neurotic, a vagrant who might kill or be killed.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 86
