My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  Hitchcock’s Psycho provided a master class in misdirection. The predatory antiheroine who steals a small fortune becomes the prey, while the meek victim of an innkeeper is revealed to be a deranged murderer. A white-knuckle, hard-boiled noir about a scheming woman on the run morphs unexpectedly into a psychological horror film. The protagonist never even makes it to the halfway point, and a seemingly key supporting character—the innkeeper’s demented, hectoring mother—is revealed to have died a decade earlier.

  Van Sant, in sharp contrast, was making the film as an art school lark, a self-indulgent postmodern experiment made possible by the unexpected success of Good Will Hunting. Indie film darling Van Sant suddenly had Hollywood cooing into his ear, “You’re the man now, dog!”

  Van Sant’s artsy debacle asks intriguing, easily answerable questions about the nature of art and genius. Can genius be replicated? Can it be cloned using the creative DNA of an earlier masterpiece? Or is true genius ineffable, tricky and elusive, as difficult to pin down as a whirlwind? The answers, respectively, are no, no, and yes.

  Van Sant’s miscalculations begin with casting Anne Heche as a woman with a dark secret at a time when Heche was notorious for not being able to keep anything about herself secret. I could be misremembering, but I vaguely recall Heche and Ellen DeGeneres unexpectedly showing up at my apartment in Madison sometime in the late ’90s to deliver an hour-long presentation on their sex life. It was all part of Heche’s campaign to educate America about what was going on with her vagina.

  Heche plays Marion, a bored career gal who impulsively decides to make off with $400,000 from her employer. While hotfooting it out of town, Marion stops for the night at creepy old Bates Motel, where she and fidgety proprietor Norman Bates share a drink they call loneliness because it’s better than drinking alone. Vast universes divide these two lost characters, yet they’re united by isolation. Marion’s loneliness is temporary, however; it’s the alienation of having done something criminal that she can’t possibly share with the world. For Bates, that loneliness is permanent. It defines him.

  This scene marks the pinnacle of Vaughn’s otherwise misfiring performance. Part of the problem is physical. Much of what made Perkins such an effective and surprising killer is that he’s unassuming physically. He looks like someone who wouldn’t harm a fly. Though tall, he’s slight and creepily androgynous, whereas Vaughn looks like a college wrestler. There’s an underlying vulnerability and sadness to Perkins’ performance that Vaughn recaptures only during his scenes with Heche, and then only fitfully. Vaughn can’t get inside the character’s tormented psyche; his laugh, a sort of trilling, high-pitched, nervous giggle that gets stuck in the throat, feels theatrical and forced. It’s a jock’s feeble attempt to channel what it must be like to be the weird kid at the lunch table, the one whose mom writes Bible verses on his lunch bag. Once Heche exits the film, Vaughn’s Bates seems less tragic and tormented than pissy and unpleasant.

  Also, there is masturbation. And bare asses. Lots and lots of bare asses—male and female. In the film’s biggest detour from the original—other than being in color and sucking—Bates gazes at Marion through a peephole and engages in feral, simian masturbation. In what universe does artlessly spelling everything out qualify as an improvement over subtext and intimation? It’d be like remaking Citizen Kane but changing the protagonist’s last words to “Rosebud … which incidentally was the name of my childhood sled, which represents a lost childhood Eden of innocence and purity that throws the materialist emptiness of my adulthood into even sharper relief. Alas, I’ve said too much and now I must die, mysteriously. Or not.”

  Then comes a riotously anticlimactic shower sequence. Arguably the most famous bloody scene of all time is rendered paradoxically bloodless and lifeless. In Van Sant’s retelling, it feels like a bad cover song; the notes are the same, but the soul is sorely lacking. The shower scene highlights another of the film’s fatal flaws: The novelty and surprise of the original are gone. Audiences were understandably shocked to see a heroine get brutally murdered halfway through a film back in 1960. Audiences in 1998 were waiting patiently to see how Van Sant would handle one of film’s most iconic sequences.

  After Marion’s disappearance, sharp-witted shamus Milton Arbogast (William H. Macy) goes looking for her, as does Heche’s sister, Lila (Julianne Moore), and Heche’s lover, Sam (Viggo Mortensen). In a 2001 interview with The A.V. Club, Macy argued that his primary job as an actor is bending other actors to his will. In his only scene with Vaughn, he bulldozes over the innkeeper’s evasions and stonewalling. Yet even here, Macy’s perspicacity works against him; he’s such a smart cookie, I half expected him to haul Bates off to the police station minutes into grilling him for the first time.

  When Bates murders Arbogast, Van Sant indulges in a pair of shock cuts from Macy’s character plunging backward as Bates stabs him to jarring, brief images of a masked, nearly naked woman in a sordid erotic tableau and a cow in the middle of the road, footage apparently left over from Van Sant’s first student film or a Marilyn Manson music video. It’s an addition that adds nothing. The part where Moore’s Lila says, “Let me get my Walkman,” however, came close to single-handedly redeeming the film; I can’t imagine why there weren’t more references to Walkmans in the original.

  From there, it’s simply a matter of biding time until the big reveal about the true nature of Momma Bates and her loving son, and Dr. Fred Simon (Robert Forster) explaining to the audience that poor old Norman Bates went a little nuts after killing his mom and her lover.

  Gus Van Sant’s Psycho never feels like anything other than a dry academic exercise. Van Sant’s much-maligned folly ultimately belongs not in a movie theater or a drive-in but in a conceptual art museum in a wing devoted to pretentious experiments in pointlessness, where it could join a real 1993 museum project called 24 Hour Psycho, an installation that slowed the film down over 24 hours and provides a major setpiece in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Epic, Extravagant, Excruciating Book-Exclusive Case File: Cleopatra

  There is a sequence in 1963’s notorious Cleopatra that encapsulates the film in miniature. In it, Cleopatra, the Great Seducer, sets her sights on bewitching an entire city. Having won the heart of Caesar, Cleopatra dazzles the people of Rome with a spectacular entrance.

  The procession begins with wave upon wave of trumpeters on horseback, followed by chariots, archers shooting brightly colored scarves into the air, a buxom, nearly naked dancer gyrating seductively while scantily clad women twirl scarves, Africans in tribal garb unleashing great plumes of canary-yellow smoke and then dancing to pounding drums, dancers in animal costumes, sexy women dressed as birds flapping their golden wings in unison, a flurry of doves soaring skyward, and more fanfare before the main event: Cleopatra entering the city on what appears to be a pyramid on wheels pulled by a battalion of slaves.

  At first, it’s exhilarating. Such color! Such spectacle! Such unabashed sexuality! Such a cavalcade of Technicolor delights! Then it gets a little old. Then it grows tedious, and I began to wonder if it would ever end. I thought perhaps my body and mind would decay, I’d grow ancient and develop an interest in Reader’s Digest and the soccer games of my grandchildren, and then die, while Cleopatra’s procession was still only half finished. I wound up asking myself that question an awful lot while watching Cleopatra: “Will it ever end?”

  Since the cut of the film I saw runs 248 minutes, the answer comes painfully close to no. Astonishingly, both the film and the procession were initially much longer; according to Martin Landau’s audio commentary, the procession was originally twice as long, and writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz conceived of the film as a two-part six-hour epic, with the first half devoted to Cleopatra’s dalliance with Caesar and the second to her stormy fling with Marc Antony.

  Fox, which was hemorrhaging money as the budget skyrocketed with no release date in sight, would have none of it.
Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck demanded that three hours be shorn from the film. (The video and DVD release runs a little over four hours, as did the première and road-show version.) Even in truncated form, the film seems to last several eternities. The six-hour cut of Cleopatra remains one of film’s great what-ifs. Would the director’s cut have validated Mankiewicz’s bold vision? We may never know.

  Mankiewicz, the slashing wit behind All About Eve, set out to make an “intimate epic.” The resulting film is epic but the intimacy apparently ended up on the cutting-room floor, along with much of Mankiewicz’s most sophisticated dialogue. What’s the point in marshaling 10,000 extras, a fleet of ships only slightly smaller than the U.S. Navy’s, and a $44 million budget (adjusted for inflation, that’d be about $300 million today) if you’re just going to fill the screen with bons mots?

  Job had it easy compared to Mankiewicz, who must have felt cursed by the gods. Mankiewicz inherited an already-troubled production when original director Rouben Mamoulian quit early in the process after a headache-inducing litany of disasters, including leading lady Elizabeth Taylor contracting meningitis, which shut down filming for months, and a change in location from Italy to England.

  The troubles picked up speed once Mankiewicz took over; the fragile Taylor developed a life-threatening case of pneumonia, and terrible English weather necessitated another change in location, this time back to Italy. When shooting resumed, the script was only half completed; according to the Cleopatra DVD booklet, Mankiewicz shot all day, wrote all night, and staved off exhaustion with Dexedrine in the morning, a shot of uppers after lunch, another after dinner, and then finally a downer at night so he could grab three or four hours of sleep before repeating the whole process the next day.

  Oh, and Mankiewicz’s very married leads (Taylor and her future ex-husband Richard Burton) began a steamy extramarital affair en route to becoming a tabloid couple for the ages. Bad press abounded. But the biggest heartbreak was yet to come: Mankiewicz saw his baby cut almost in half and had to shoot additional footage to paper over the plot holes left by the giant sections of his film that had been mercilessly excised.

  So when Rex Harrison’s Caesar begins the film dispirited and exhausted, his air of resignation seems to belong equally to a leader who has just won a bloody, dispiriting war against Pompey and a veteran actor in the midst of a hellish shoot. Caesar understands that there is no glory in war, only survival. He seems much older than his 52 years; war will do that to a man.

  Caesar rediscovers his lust for life when he travels to Egypt and is irritated and then bewitched by its glamorous queen Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor). Cleopatra’s bona fides as a world-class seductress are clumsily established when Caesar’s right-hand man Rufio (Martin Landau) reports soberly, “In attaining her objectives, Cleopatra has been known to employ torture, poison, even her own sexual talents, which are said to be considerable.”

  At first, Caesar treats Cleopatra like a petulant child, bratty and mischievous but dangerously smart and seductive. Cleopatra oozes sex. Caesar radiates propriety. He’s a very English Roman: droll, literate, and adult. Cleopatra uses her sexuality as a weapon. One might even argue that in attaining her objectives, Cleopatra has been known to employ her sexual talents, which are said to be considerable.

  Caesar soon discovers for himself the full extent of those talents. Hatred, barbed insults, and sultry glares soon give way to passionate kisses, lust, and then love. Cleopatra reawakens Caesar’s world-conquering ambition in addition to his libido and joie de vivre. She’s a Lady Macbeth of the Nile who encourages her lover to pursue a position grander than his current title as Dictator For Life. (You know you’re ambitious when Dictator For Life isn’t good enough.)

  This terrifies the Roman Senate, so on the ides of March, they decide to employ stabbingcentric means of curbing Caesar’s reckless ambition. Just as Great Caesar’s Ghost haunts the film’s lesser second half, Shakespeare’s ghost haunts the proceedings. Mankiewicz earlier directed the 1953 adaptation of Julius Caesar featuring Marlon Brando’s mumbly, marble-mouthed Marc Antony, so he couldn’t have been surprised when audiences half expected Caesar to utter a heartbroken, “Et tu, Brute?” upon receiving the unkindest cut of all, or for Marc Antony to beckon friends, Romans, and countrymen to lend him their ears.

  It’s unfair to compare Mankiewicz to Shakespeare, but in light of the film’s subject matter, such comparisons are unavoidable. Perhaps that’s why Mankiewicz films Caesar’s murder like a Roger Corman B-movie, with Cleopatra “watching” the proceedings through what Mankiewicz describes as “the flames of a temple ritual.” Since we can’t hear Caesar as he gets stabbed, we can imagine he’s saying, “What the fuck? I thought you were my bro, Brutus,” just as easily as “Et tu, Brute?”

  Burton’s Marc Antony slides into Cleopatra’s bed, conquers her heart, and takes over the film’s second half. Where Caesar’s relationship with Cleopatra was paternal in nature, Marc Antony matched her fire with his own. Cleopatra morphs into another film altogether in its second half, as the tart banter of its Caesar sequences devolves into overheated romantic melodrama.

  Marc Antony lives forever in the shadow of Caesar, haunted by the knowledge that he’ll never measure up to a man deified in his death. Underneath his hot-blooded passion, he’s fundamentally pragmatic, so he marries Caesar’s dull sister for political reasons. Mankiewicz designed Cleopatra as a two-part epic, but it feels more like a trilogy with its superior first third devoted to Cleopatra and Caesar, the second to Cleopatra and Marc Antony, and a deadly dull final third concerning Antony’s betrayal of Cleopatra via his marriage of political convenience and his subsequent war with Roddy McDowall’s scheming Octavian.

  Where Mankiewicz seems conflicted about the gaudy spectacle favored by his bosses at Fox, he seems downright apathetic about the film’s battle scenes. By this point, I too suffered from the exhaustion plaguing the film’s characters. By the time Mankiewicz’s epic ended, I was ready to crawl into Cleopatra’s tomb and be put out of my misery alongside the good queen and Marc Antony.

  Yet traces of Mankiewicz’s brilliance remain. Upon hearing of Marc Antony’s death, McDowall has a wonderful monologue in which he upbraids an underling for his dispassionate way of conveying the news about the demise of such a worthy foe. Surely an event of this magnitude deserves pomp and circumstance. It takes death for Octavian to show his respect for a very worthy adversary.

  Cleopatra was the top-grossing film of 1963, and it scored seven Oscar nominations, yet the stakes were so high that it’s still considered one of the all-time flops. Much of the blame deservedly went to Taylor, who doesn’t inhabit the soul of a legendary seductress so much as she pouts, strikes poses, models comically elaborate outfits and headdresses, and spits out her lines. Granted, Mankiewicz doesn’t make it easy for Taylor with purple dialogue like, “My breasts are full of love and life. My hips are round and well apart. Such women, they say, have sons.” But Taylor’s Cleopatra is less a tragic heroine than a precursor to Julie Newmar’s campy vixen Catwoman on the ’60s TV incarnation of Batman.

  Ironically, given the film’s emphasis on eye candy and bleary excess, Cleopatra’s best scene eschews spectacle. Immediately following Cleopatra’s endless procession, Caesar schools his apple-cheeked son in the fine art of leadership. Caesar teaches him all the basics: cultivating an angry glance to shoot in the direction of someone who displeases him, how to make a crowd tremble, how to pardon a prisoner dragged before him, and how to treat a duplicitous former friend. The moppet is a quick study, though he needs to be counseled not to smile adorably while making his subjects tremble in fear of his wrath. Extravagant costumes, giant sets, oceans of extras, a budget equivalent to the gross national product of a small country, and voluminous star power are no match, it seems, for the timeless appeal of a cute kid.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Chapter 8

  A Fairy-Tale Ending, Or, Manic Pixie Dream Girls I Have Known<
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  Constant, Total Amazement Case File #40: Joe Versus The Volcano

  Originally Posted June 12, 2007

  I was at a greasy spoon recently when I overheard a smartly dressed, seemingly sane woman in her 50s gush to her companion, “Have you ever heard of a movie called The Other Sister? It is just delightful. Just a wonderful, wonderful film. Diane Keaton plays a very strict mother whose daughter is disabled. Now this disabled daughter—I don’t know whether she is really disabled in real life—is just about the biggest free spirit you would ever want to meet! It is just a wonderful, wonderful lighthearted comedy, and it’s just about my favorite film.”

  The woman’s passionate endorsement of The Other Sister served as a poignant reminder that just about every film has a cult, even if it’s a cult of one. The world could have Citizen Kane and Casablanca, but The Other Sister belonged to her.

  When I laid down the ground rules for My Year Of Flops, I stipulated that I wouldn’t cover films with substantial cult followings. But I’ve learned from readers and commenters that I am far from alone in my passion for some of the films I’ve written about. I would venture to say Joe Versus The Volcano boasts an even bigger cult than The Other Sister. That’s one of the great gifts of the Internet: It affords us the opportunity to simultaneously assert our individuality, stray from the pack, and find like-minded communities that share our passion for Pogs or Mr. Belvedere or the lesser films of Paul Mazursky. It reminds us that we are not alone, even if our favorite film is The Other Sister.