The Collection Project: You are Big Time!

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight is not exactly a young man’s film, but in some ways it is very much a young man’s screenplay. In the DVD commentary track, Anderson talks about struggling with the script almost from the start, and saying the way for him to bust through that is to put two characters in a room and get them talking. This method resulted in Hard Eight’s wonderful opening, with John (John C. Reilly) and Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) sitting in a Reno, NV diner, over coffee and cigarettes, the mysterious Sydney offering to help the sad-sack John – who’s just come from Vegas after failing to win enough money at blackjack to pay for his mother’s funeral – avoid becoming a homeless Reno reject.

As I say, this is a great scene, highlighting Reilly’s effortless comic abilities, and Anderson’s considerable gift for dialogue. It also subtly clues you into the fact that the only reason Hard Eight exists at all is because Philip Baker Hall is an actor who is alive now on this planet. Though I had, by the time Hard Eight came out on video and I was able to see it for the first time, seen Hall in Altman’s Secret Honor (as well as – and this is not insignificant – the episode of Seinfeld where Hall plays the library cop), Hall’s work in Anderson’s debut feature was still a revelation for me. Sydney is one of my favorite film characters, certainly of modern times, and Hall gives what I consider one of the great screen performances. From the beginning of the film, you know just enough about Sydney to be fascinated by him, and to admire him (so fascinating that Hard Eight is one of the films from my burgeoning movie geek years that I got my dad to watch. This sort of thing didn't always work out too well, but after watching the film I remember my dad telling me that he didn't like it at first, but the further along he got, the more he thought, to paraphrase the line he most often quoted from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, "Who is this guy??"). Sydney’s a remarkably decent person, decent in a very old-fashioned way, who appears to know more than anybody else how to get buy in towns like Reno and Vegas, and it’s this knowledge he’s offering to John. But there’s a very sharp edge to him as well, shown first when the knuckleheaded John (who is nevertheless expressing some understandable paranoia) reacts to Sydney’s offer of help by saying he’s not gay, so if Sydney’s looking for some boy hooker, he can forget it. Sydney’s response is to say no, that’s not what I’m after, and this is the last time I’m going to offer my help.

At various points throughout the film, Sydney is shown to be quietly angered and frustrated by any person or encounter that proves to him that basic civility and manners are evaporating, though his only recourse seems to be to make sure those values remain intact within himself, as well as, to the extent he’s able to control such things, John. A sticking point for Sydney is John’s friendship with Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), a flashy, loud-mouthed, low-rent dickhead who works security at one of the casinos. When Sydney and Jimmy first meet, Sydney is playing Kino by himself when John and Jimmy come by. As they do, Jimmy uses his outside voice to comment on the physical attributes of their departing waitress. When Sydney quietly objects to this behavior, Jimmy condescendingly explains that these waitresses not only enjoy such compliments, but they’re all whores anyway. To which Sydney says, “I just don’t want it coming from my table.” It’s possibly my favorite line from the movie, delivered by Hall in a way that somehow mixes civility, exasperation, and a kind of suppressed danger.

To counteract, among other reasons, John’s friendship with the loathed Jimmy, Sydney constructs an introduction between John and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), one of those waitresses Jimmy was talking about. Clementine is typical Reno damaged goods, a nice young girl, lost, or close to being lost, to a life of being a waitress as a cover for really being a hooker. Paltrow is very good here, but it’s around the time of her introduction that Anderson’s writing methods, and his youth, start to show their negative influence. Shortly after Clementine and John first make googly eyes at each other, John calls Sydney in the middle of the night, begging for help. When Sydney arrives at the motel room where John told him they’d be, Sydney finds a terrified John, a tearful, weirdly angry and withdrawn Clementine, and another man, unconscious and bleeding on the bed. That man is or was one of Clementine’s clients, but for some reason he refused to pay her for services rendered, so she or John or both of them knocked him out, tied him to the bed, and called the guy’s wife, demanding Clementine’s fee as ransom.

This is, we can all agree, a very stupid thing to have done, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that the long scene that follows, in which Sydney announces how stupid this is, and alternately offers the best practical advice he can and refuses to help at all, feels exactly like a scene that Anderson had no map for when he began, but he kept writing it until he’d found the exit. I’ve mentioned that Anderson is an enormously gifted writer of dialogue, but if screenwriters ever put together audition reels of their best writing, Anderson should leave this bit off. All you really get here is characters saying something, and then a minute later shouting out the same question or statement or insult, slightly reworded, or, if things have gotten really tense, one character will say “Fuck you!”, and then another character will say “Fuck you!”, or words to that effect.

I criticize with love, though, because I feel like I know what he was going through. In my own humble way, of course, and I’m in no way trying to associate myself with Anderson, but I don’t think anyone who has tried their hand at fiction, either in script form or prose, doesn’t know what it’s like to hit a dead end in your story that you simply try to write your way through. It’s like a car being stuck in the mud, and you keep the wheels spinning in the hopes that something will grip. Sometimes it do, sometimes it don’t, and this scene from Hard Eight don’t. At the very least it should have been tightened up, if not ditched outright and completely rethought. But the good news is that the narrative goal of that scene (the scene has other things on its mind, to do with character, which I suppose are more or less accomplished, however clumsily) is simply to find a reason for John and Clementine to get the hell out of Reno and leave Sydney alone with Jimmy, thereby setting up Hard Eight’s brilliant final stretch. In that stretch, which I won’t describe in detail, you find out why Sydney went out of his way to help John, a stranger at the film’s beginning, and while that explanation might be a bit too neat in terms of cause and effect, Sydney remains a largely mysterious figure by the end. Less mythic, perhaps, but still mysterious, and, in any case, Hard Eight, while by no stretch Anderson’s best work, does contain my favorite last shot (or shots) out of any of his films, and those shots would have no weight, or wit, if Sydney’s myth hadn’t been shattered.

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This post is part of the Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon, hosted by Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter.

Camera Work

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The film critic-o-sphere has been juddered off its axis recently, due to the hurricane of controversy that has whipped up over the fact that in Cyrus, the new Duplass brothers film, the camera zooms in and out a lot (the preceding sentence, I admit, is a pretty flippant way of broaching a topic I’m actually interested in). The problem, according to the film’s detractors, is that none, or at least very few, of the camera twitches and zooms employed by the Duplass brothers are justified by anything resembling a purpose. Glenn Kenny, in his not entirely negative review of Cyrus, puts it like this:
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What I saw in the film were a lot of perfectly serviceable/banal medium shots and medium closeups that were almost constantly interrupted by a sudden, jerky, lunging-forward in perspective. One second, you're looking at John C. Reilly's face as he's saying something; the next, you're looking at his eyebrow, and contemplating just how little hair it has on it, and wondering why that is. The effect, frankly, was rather like taking a sizable slug of high-proof liquor, and having it come directly back up from your stomach, and just being able to catch it all in your mouth before you projectile-vomited it. (I allow that this is a somewhat specialized analogy.) Hence, I cannot say that I found myself even a bit on board with [Karina] Longworth's...defense: "You could say that Cyrus looks ugly, but that ugliness is an artifact of a working method." What "working method" is meant here? The method of drinking a shitload of coffee before you pick up your video camera, so that your thumb hits the zoom toggle on the handle at pretty much any goddamn time? Because if you tally up the number of zooms in this picture, and examine the contexts in which they manifest themselves, it becomes pretty clear that they really have no compelling reason for being.
.Having not seen Cyrus yet, I was only able to, at best, kind of see what he was talking about. Also, not having seen Cyrus yet, I was most unwilling to talk about it here at all, because, well, what do I know about it? Then, over the weekend, I was watching At the Movies, and saw Michael Phillips and A. O. Scott’s review of the film. Scott based his entire negative response to Cyrus on those zooms, and showed a clip of Cyrus to illustrate his point, prefacing the clip by asking Phillips, and the viewer, why the camera was doing what it was doing. What the camera was doing was, in fact, zooming in arbitrarily on John C. Reilly, and then pulling back suddenly, or, when Marisa Tomei enters the scene, zooming in on her. In the case of the Tomei zoom, you might say that, well, she just got there, and the camera wants to isolate her. Which would be fine, if she wasn’t already, not only center-frame, but the only thing in the frame at all that you might want, or feel compelled, to look at.
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So I now had a better context for the negative reactions to the Duplass brothers’ style, but the main thing I thought when I watched that clip was “Oh, so it’s like Homicide.” Not Homicide, the David Mamet film, but Homicide, the TV show from the 90s that was about life on the streets. Put Andre Braugher in Cyrus, and you have everything you need to be an episode of that show, which, by the way, I stopped watching very early in its run precisely because of that fucking goddamn camera that wouldn’t fucking sit still. If memory serves, the creators, and directors, of Homicide went even further with this style, to the point that they’d have an actor in frame (let’s say it was Yaphet Kotto) talking, or drinking coffee, or thinking about life on the streets, and there’d be a cut, but the cut would be to a shot that was very close to the shot they’d just cut from. Not exactly the same shot, because this time Kotto would be a little bit to the left or right of where he had been – not geographically, but within the frame. What this implied was they had two cameras running side by side, and when it came time to edit the show they would sometimes cut between those to cameras, and I knew, as I watched those first few episodes, that they were doing so arbitrarily. I knew this because there was no reason possible for them to do that, no reason inherent to the images they were filming, or the story they were telling, that would explain those cuts. Or those Cyrus-y zooms, which Homicide (and NYPD Blue, while I’m at it) seemed to believe were as essential to visual storytelling as light, or having things to point your camera at.
.Now that I know what Glenn and other critics are talking about when they refer to the camerawork in Cyrus, I must say I am slightly confused by the fact that critics are getting so cheesed off about it now. I was cheesed off about this stuff years ago, but I’ve since become more or less resigned to it. I don’t like it any more than I used to, but this shit is everywhere – isn’t this a form of the whole “shaky-cam” movement that everybody has become so fed up with in action films? – and I have no sense that it’s going away anytime soon. The standard line on this kind of filmmaking is that it adds an “immediacy” and a “documentary feel” to the proceedings, and, in fact, this is the defense that Michael Phillips offered when A. O. Scott asked “Why?” (Although it seemed pretty clear to me that Phillips was playing Devil’s Advocate in the interest of moving the conversation along, and that he was neither ready nor willing to go to the mat for this one.) The first problem is what you mean by “immediacy”, because on its own it doesn’t mean anything. Do you mean that this kind of camerawork puts the viewer “there”, in the middle of the action? If so, then those viewers need to get both their eyes and their brain checked, because I suspect they have a fairly serious neurological disorder – for one thing, the human eye can’t “zoom”. Not only that, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a documentary that employed this kind of visual style; even Gimme Shelter betrays a steadier hand.
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More thoughtful justifications for this style, and particularly as it’s used in Cyrus, have been mounted elsewhere. In the comments section of Glenn Kenny’s review, Richard Brody says:
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The zooms in Cyrus provoke a sense of intimacy and tension, of nervousness and isolation. They're motivated by the directors' sense of mood, their emotional relationships to characters and scenes. The zooms reflect the filmmakers' distinctive feeling for the events they depict, for the texture of life. Which is to say, by their desire to see and to show things a certain way--and that desire is the essence of the cinema. And thankfully the filmmakers didn't have producers who walk around with little rule books in their pockets and ask them what the motivation for their zooms might be. Thinking about movies as closed-off dramas is indeed part of the problem.
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Yes, okay, I can see this point, in the abstract. And it might be easier to see it in a more tangible way if I didn’t know that Homicide and NYPD Blue and so on did this exact same thing, all the time, in every episode (I may not have watched much of the former, but I watched plenty of the latter), whatever the context. It was the house style – violent scenes, love scenes, comic scenes, all get the same treatment. And they all looked exactly like what I’ve seen of Cyrus. Except in Cyrus, the Duplass brothers really mean it, I guess.
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Which is unfair, because I’ve only seen a tiny bit of Cyrus, removed from any context. This is all true, and there’s no way around it. But this style is old – a good twenty years old, or more – and doesn’t signal to me any kind of individual creative stamp on the part of the Duplass brothers. It signals to me that they liked Homicide a lot. A lot of people did, but I didn't.
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Plus, I think it’s probably safe to say that when he made White Dog (which is today’s Collection Project Film of the Day, don’t you know), Sam Fuller didn’t have producers bearing rule books following him around, either, but he still moved his camera (and here I’m expanding the argument out to include not just zooms, but general camera moves, which is what this whole argument is about anyway) in a way that indicated he knew how to work the damn thing. For example, look at the screengrabs below (provided to me by Glenn Kenny, and thanks again for the help). In this shot, Fuller is introducing Keys, played by Paul Winfield. With Carruthers (Burl Ives), Keys runs an animal training business. At this point in the film, we’ve met Carruthers, and learned that the dog of the title, which has been recently taken in by Julie Sawyer (Kristy MacNicol), is, indeed, a “white dog”, which means that it was trained from a pup to attack black people. Carruthers sees little hope that the violence can be trained out of the animal, and things are looking grim. Then we get a shot of a sign, “Carruthers & Keys”. At this point, understand, we have not seen Keys before. Here’s how Fuller introduces him.

Isn’t that great? Mind you, I’m fully aware that this shot loses almost all of its power in this format, but I think you get the idea. The camera pans past the name “Carruthers” on the sign, and focuses on “Keys”, before sliding down to Keys himself. This is Keys, and he is important. This kind of wonderfully blunt elegance can only come from a filmmaker who knows what the hell he’s on about. Maybe at 34 I’m already a crotchety old bastard, but I’d much rather this than a zoom that needs to be explained away later by saying “That’s just the way they see the world.”