A Cowboy in Hamburg

No two filmmakers seem able to agree on how to portray Tom Ripley, the killer Patricia Highsmith invented for her 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley and who she continued to write about in four more novels, the last, Ripley Under Water, coming in 1991, four years before her death. I've read two of them: The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley's Game, the third in the series. These happen to be the two novels that have twice each been adapted into films. In the novels, Ripley begins as a young man driven to murder by desperation and jealousy and self-hatred, along the way discovering that taking a human life does not haunt his conscience in the way he knows it's supposed to. By the time of Ripley's Game, Highsmith had turned him into a kind of urbane white-collar criminal, happily married to a woman named Heloise (his latent homosexuality, clear in the 1955 novel, having perhaps been suppressed, or now manifesting itself into an alien sort of sexually active asexuality), who murders if he thinks he has to, though he claims to detest the act.

As I write this, I'm watching, for the second time, Liliana Cavani's 2002 film Ripley's Game, which stars, almost inevitably, John Malkovich as Ripley. I remember when I first saw this movie, which was many years ago and long before I'd read anything at all by Highsmith, I remarked to my wife, the two of us being fans of Anthony Minghella's well-regarded 1999 film of The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring the less-inevitable Matt Damon, that it was impossible to imagine Damon's Ripley growing up to be Malkovich's Ripley. I also believed at the time that Malkovich and Cavani's take on the character, who they saw as a cold-eyed monster who felt no emotions other than avarice, arrogance, and rage, must be closer to Highsmith, though I loved what Minghella and Damon had done. Which, by the way, was to turn him into a frightened boy who felt guilt but "earned our sympathy" by having been mistreated by at least two of his three (only two in the novel, which is interesting, given the portrayal) victims. However, I've grown to dislike both Cavani's and Minghella's films. This is probably unfair to Cavani, given how much attention I'm paying too it, but, for instance, the opening of the Cavani film is ludicrous -- it depicts Ripley as a man who can't wait to kill someone, who is reckless and stupid (whether or not the film shows that recklessness blowing up in his face). It's a film that sees Ripley as someone whose intellect is so dull that he, and the film, thinks it's interesting to use Icarus as a metaphor. But despite the fairly low profile of this Ripley's Game, one does get the sense that this is the version of Ripley that makes sense to most people. He's close enough to Hannibal Lecter as to make no difference.

The first Ripley film was Rene Clement's Purple Noon, an adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley from 1960. That film plays merry hell with Highsmith's plot, but by telling us so little about how Tom Ripley (played here by Alain Delon, who in retrospect seems as inevitable as Malkovich) thinks that the fundamental mystery of the character and of Highsmith's conception of him is retained. He's not "movie" mysterious, like Malkovich -- he's genuinely inexplicable. In fact, Purple Noon might have been the best Ripley film if not for Wim Wenders, who in 1977 first adapted Ripley's Game into the film The American Friend, which has just been released on Blu-ray by Criterion, and which, to me, counts as one of the two or three greatest crime films of the post-noir era.



The plot of Ripley's Game (and The American Friend) should probably be briefly described, because it's a corker, and pretty vital to understanding, or failing to understand, Tom Ripley. Ripley is at a party, where he meets a picture framer named Jonathan. Jonathan treats Ripley with some small amount of rudeness, and so when later on one of Ripley's criminal associates comes to him looking for a recommendation for somebody to carry out a murder of a member of the Mafia, Ripley gives him Jonathan's name. He does this as revenge. As a means of putting Jonathan on the hook, and make the offer of money to kill a man at least somewhat enticing, Ripley, who has learned that Jonathan has leukemia, starts a rumor that Jonathan is close to death. Jonathan, upon learning that this rumor is out there, becomes understandably paranoid that it might be true. Then the offer to kill a man comes his way. "You can leave behind something for your family." Etc. All because Ripley was offended. If it helps any, Ripley will come to feel bad about this.

So, to The American Friend. The action is shifted from mostly France, with long detours into Germany, to Germany exclusively. Jonathan Trevanny, Highsmith's Englishman, becomes Jonathan Zimmerman, played here by Bruno Ganz, who has perhaps never been better in his life. And Ripley is play by Dennis Hopper, who somehow manages to be simultaneously horribly miscast and perfect for the role. It's the damnedest thing. Hopper, wearing a cowboy hat and jeans, living in a hotel, unmarried, drinking alone, smart but by no means urbane or erudite, somehow achieves peak Ripley-ness by playing Ripley as a man Highsmith's Ripley would never associate with.

There's an enormous amount going on in Wenders' film, including a long game of post-modern fiddling about with Hollywood genre films, of the kind so many European filmmakers cut their teeth on and revered, at the same time they twisted and commented on it. And it's not just noir -- it's Westerns, too. I mean, look at how Hopper dresses. Wenders' Ripley could be read, and was probably intended to be, a critique of America itself -- what he would regard as its arrogance and violence, for starters, and its brutal Western "advancement" (emphasis Wenders', in my head, though I'm making it up). Needless to say, that side of The American Friend (that's an ingenious title though) doesn't interest me at all, but it's there for anyone looking for it. When considering this swirl of war (quite obliquely, but if you've made the aforementioned connections then war's gonna be in there), crime films, and the Western, casting Sam Fuller as a mobster almost seems to hit the nail too squarely. Casting Nicholas Ray as a painter seems like the most natural thing in the world.



But The American Friend isn't some tedious exercise in the act of referencing things. It is as exquisitely and precise a piece of sincere genre filmmaking as I've ever seen. The two murder scenes, both set around trains and train stations but without remotely repeating any visual or spatial ideas, are so classically designed as to make art out of efficiency. It's that strange Hawksian, Fordian alchemy of telling a story so clearly that it becomes actual poetry.

At the same time, there's Hopper, bringing a wild 70s danger, even horror, to it all. That his Ripley (and this does come from Highsmith) actually feels guilt for what he's put this poor dying man through -- and Jonathan is dying, just not as fast as Ripley's rumor suggests -- is part of that horror. Who is he? And if Ripley is in possession of an otherworldly kind of psychology, Jonathan's is all too understandable. In fact, it's tempting to give the ultimate credit for the triumph of The American Friend not to Hopper, or even to Wenders, but to Bruno Ganz. As in Highsmith's novel, Wenders' film spends a lot of time with Jonathan, going to doctors for tests and second opinions (part of the enticement to commit murder is that these new tests will be paid for by Ripley's associate). In these scenes, Ganz isn't acting in a crime film -- he's acting in a film about a man who wants to hear the best version of terrible news as a dying man can hope for. You can know what's coming, but as long as you feel okay and your test results aren't too bad, you can keep going. But as soon as those tests start to change... Ganz, of course, rejects any kind of ostentatious, or anything even remotely "big," even when it would have been justifiable. It's only in his eyes, and in the pressure in his face that is the result of trying to not show anything.

The American Friend is a film that, for all that also, finally, succumbs to Hopper. Not just to Hopper, but also to Highsmith, because let's face it, this story is kind of insane. And not just to Hopper and Highsmith, but to Ripley. Because it's all perfectly insane. Classically, precisely, reasonably, coldly insane. It's a masterpiece.

It Sure Do Bother Me to See My Loved Ones Turning Into Puppets

In the satirical interview with director Spike Jonze conducted by Perkus Tooth (it's safe to assume this is actually Jonathan Lethem, "Perkus Tooth" being the name of a character from Lethem's novel Chronic City) printed in the booklet for the upcoming Criterion release of Jonze's Being John Malkovich, Tooth, or "Tooth," gets going early on the joke with this:

[A]t 4:15 John Cusack sits on his couch beside Elijah the chimpanzee, desultorily paging through the New York Post, an edition celebrating New York Yankees pitcher David Cone's July 18, 1999, perfect game. The front-page headline reads, "Awesome!" while the rear sports page indulges the woeful pun "Conegrats!" "Awesome" and "Conegrats" together can be anagrammatized to "Get across name woe," "Came onstage worse," while "Conegrats" by itself translates to "Angst core" -- perhaps a tad unsubtle here? David Cone's special rooting section was known as the Coneheads -- derived, of course, from the Dan Aykroyd-Jane Curtin franchise Saturday Night Live sketch -- and they often wore the plastic head costumes, thereby in totality conveying the rebus: alien visitor (alienation) plus head plus cone (or funnel, or tunnel) plus Post (delivery, i.e., birth canal). For the more alert viewer, you barely needed carry on with the film beyond that point, its payload had been so satisfactorily conveyed.

Pretty funny, and also not an altogether bad idea. Being John Malkovich is of course the well-known brain-teaser from 1999, directed by Jonze and written by the then mostly unknown Charlie Kaufman, in which a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich is discovered behind a filing cabinet by Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), in his exceptionally low-ceilinged workplace one night while working late and pining over the sexy but cold-hearted Maxine (Catherine Keener) and basically acting outside of his home as though his wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) doesn't exist, or only barely exists. Cusack is a file clerk by trade for a company called LesterCorp, headed by the obliviously eccentric Dr. Lester (Orson Bean), but a puppeteer at heart, of the not very common deep art/street performer variety, and in the scene directly preceding the one where Craig finds the Malkovich portal, Craig explains to Maxine that puppetry is a way to live inside someone else's body and see through someone else's eyes. Then a minute or so later, boom, Malkovich portal. Rarely have I seen a metaphor or theme stated so baldly, and then so rapidly and shamelessly manifested as plot. This is the sort of thing that, 999 times out of 1,000, will get any other film crucified, but in 1999 Being John Malkovich found that post-modern, mind-game sweet spot that apparently everybody, or enough people, hadn't realized they'd been longing for, and as a result the film very routinely finds itself on lists of the best films of the 1990s. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman got careers out of it, with Kaufman being one of the few screenwriters to be noticed as a human being with a name, and his particular brand of smirking unusualness knocked more than a few people for a loop.

Myself, I've never trusted the guy -- I say this even though one of Kaufman's early credits is as a writer on my beloved Get A Life. But I very quickly became sick -- this happened as I was first watching Being John Malkovich in the theaters, in fact -- of Kaufman, for instance, stripping very old science fiction concepts of their SF accoutrements and riding that disguised genre into the open arms of people who think they don't like genre material and therefore don't read/watch it, and therefore marvel at the very idea that anybody, say Charlie Kaufman or whoever, could ever come up with stuff this original and smart, never mind that Kaufman and Jonze have already treated you as so thunderously stupid that you needed to be explicitly told what the film was about right before being shown what it was about. Show, don't tell, but if at all possible do both very loudly. So Kaufman would do this sort of thing, or he would take a genuinely good idea, an actually new approach to post-modernism, and then panic when things started getting too sincere. I'm talking about Adaptation here, a film about the act of literary-to-cinematic adaptation, and about what's lost and what's compromised, and about writer's block, and about Charlie Kaufman, and about commercialism and art, and reality, all that. But more than anything, Adaptation is a film about becoming a joke, and making everything that had come before the joke a joke, too, and it's about people deciding proudly that the only way to not like the joke is to not get the joke, and come on, you like jokes, don't you? Quentin Tarantino said of Adaptation something to the effect of (paraphrased) "Never before have I been so invested in a movie only to be completely thrown out of it by the end." I know how he feels.

Being John Malkovich has its moments. My favorite performance in the film is by, no, not Cameron Diaz, silly, but rather Orson Bean, who is never less than funny as the bizarre company head who it is later revealed to have a somewhat wearisome connection to the Malkovich portal, and I'm grateful to at least Jonze for introducing me, as far as I can remember, to Catherine Keener. And by far the most interesting thing about the film is where it's willing to leave John Malkovich himself. Malkovich is also extremely good in what in concept must seem like an entirely bizarre role, but which he quite effortlessly racks it up as another in a long line of calmly, smartly and articulately intense performances. But anyway, the film leaves Malkovich as Malkovich in a place that is fairly ballsy -- people who play themselves in movies are not often made to portray themselves being so thoroughly destroyed, as Malkovich is here. But of course, the film sort of carves itself out a door, there, by naming Malkovich John Horatio Malkovich, not the real Malkovich's real full name. It's unclear to me why Jonze and/or Kaufman (or Malkovich?) would consider it necessary to hedge their bets in this way, but it of course has the effect of slightly undermining whatever effect Malkovich's fate had achieved. But then again, this is one of those movies That Says A Lot About Identity, so maybe this is just part of that. Except, however discerning my taste for post-modernism, I always liked the whole Malkovich angle here, and would have vastly preferred it if Kaufman and Jonze had not fucking winked their way through that, something that is already one massive wink, as well. In any event, just as a by the way on the topic of celebrity, Being John Malkovich extends its approach to the subject beyond Malkovich himself (or, you know, "himself"; rarely has a film been more filled with quotation marks) to include a few other celebrity cameos -- for jokes! -- and while I'm not against this very popular custom in theory, I'm beginning to think I am in practice, because never before has it left me with such a sense of spiritual deflation as when Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn suddenly show up here.

I lay most of the blame for all this, needless, probably, to say, on Kaufman, Jonze seeming to me to be a quite good director who has grown past his knock-off Coen brothers ambitions in Being John Malkovich to the much more interesting and individual (for all its already noted faults) Adaptation, and on to the, to me, legitimately brilliant Where The Wild Things Are. I'm sure Kaufman thrust his scripts upon an unwilling Jonze. So I've been mostly down on Kaufman, is my point, for years, with the maybe glancing exception of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which struck me as quite possibly a good film, and one that I might consider watching again someday. I'm afraid that's as much as I'm prepared to offer on that one. Just to square the ledger, I'll note that I've seen Kaufman and director Michel Gondry's Human Nature, and it functions for me as perhaps the inverse of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in that it struck me as an exceptionally bad film I hope to never have to even think about again; and also the Kaufman-scripted Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a movie I actually kind of like, but which Kaufman has disowned. So make of that what you will.

Oh, but we're not done yet, and who looks stupid now? Having put it off for years, I finally settled down last night to watch Kaufman's directorial debut, the divisive Synecdoche, New York, and I came damn close to loving it from beginning to end. The richest film, by far, of anything Kaufman's had anything to do with up to now, Synecdoche, New York picks up on several of his pet themes, such as death and aging, art and failure, sex and gender confusion (what was little more than a gag in Being John Malkovich becomes here a real, but not overblown, aspect of the personality of Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) as well as the concept of a meta commentary on all the things being commented on, and the mode of comment, and the medium, and whatever the fuck else, it's all here in Synecdoche, New York. The film is unquestionably in keeping with Kaufman's shtick, but with the film, at the same time, Kaufman seems to be saying, among lots else, "Sorry for being such a dick before." Though tough and even a little cruel at times, Synecdoche, New York is more than anything (well, maybe not more than anything) a very kind film, and generous, in a lot of different ways.

To try to summarize Synecdoche, New York, while maybe not a fool's game, it's at least a considerably more reductive one than summarization normally, by definition, already is. But anyway, Caden Cotard is a theater director who, at the beginning of the film, is staging a production of Death of a Salesman with an all-young cast. He is married to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of very small pictures, and has a daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein). At his theater, he has a flirting relationship with Hazel, the girl who runs the box office (Samantha Morton), and is possibly worshiped by his lead actress Claire (Michelle Williams). As Caden finds himself crumbling in the face of Hazel's considerable charms, his marriage is slowly coming undone, helped along in part by Caden's exhausting hypochondria, and also by a revelation from Adele at their couples' therapy that she'd fantasized that Caden was dead and she was free to start over, and also by Adele's dismissal of his production of Death of a Salesman, which in fairness is pretty ridiculous, as just a waste of time he could be spending on creating something new and vital and his own.

The film proceeds from there to show Caden taking this last bit rather too much to heart. Awarded a Macarthur Genius grant, Caden moves to a new theater -- a massive one -- and brings together an enormous cast and crew to stage what will eventually turn out to be Caden's own life, every part of it, parts being rehearsed (which is the other thing, the play is in a perpetual state of rehearsal) the day after the real events happened. But of course Synecdoche, New York is miles stranger than that. It's a film that includes things like one character, Hazel, purchasing a house that is always at least a little bit on fire (not my favorite bit of the film); or, after Adele has taken Olive to live in Germany without Caden, Caden finding his four-year-old daughter's diary, which at first is filled with adorable four-year-old girl things, but continues on, as the film does, through the years to contain all of Olive's experiences as she grows older (this was one of my favorite bits, clever and sad and endlessly rewarding); or Caden turning his stage into basically an exact copy of the city where he lives, with full buildings and streets, and nothing open to the audience (non-existent anyway) because to have buildings with open walls would be fake. And this last is really, finally, what the film is, structurally, or what it will ultimately become, as Caden's rigorous pursuit of the "real" and the "tough" results in various Cadens (one most prominently played by Tom Noonan) and Hazels (another played by Emily Watson) and maybe two Claires, as Caden must not only portray, say, a domestic scene, but now he must portray his attempt to portray that domestic scene. And all of this proceeding at the same pace as life, rehearsing on into old age.

What Kaufman is himself doing with Caden is taking an artistic archetype that is often romanticized -- the shy hypochondriac who is struggling to create his masterpiece -- and depicting him as essentially useless. Not worthless, which is pretty key, but useless in the sense that such a temperament will result in nothing more than an endless loop of a grind of a miserable self-hating chamber of anxiety and dread. So don't do that! Well, Kaufman isn't trying to solve anyone's problems, but he is looking into the soul of such an artist, or just anybody like that, and finding it wanting. Of course, Kaufman does still have a bit of that "Let me tell you what I mean" business going on, but here, late in the film when Dianne Wiest rather too clearly explains Caden's character to him -- meaning Caden in the play, but also, we know, Caden himself, because, well... -- Kaufman cuts this with a joke, a not unusual occurrence in his work, but, crucially, a much better joke than I'd heretofore been used to from him.

I said earlier that Synecdoche, New York is in some ways a cruel film, and I just a second ago said that Kaufman looks into Caden's soul and finds him wanting, but Kaufman does not do that thing that artists for some reason are not supposed to do, by which I mean, he doesn't hate his characters. Even though he invites us to laugh at Caden (he may be a hypochondriac, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a lot wrong with him, and when he has a seizure at one point and manages to punch out a call to 911 and croak out "I'm sick!" to the operator, the operator's response of "Ma'am?" made me laugh really hard) it's only because Kaufman knows full well that none of us is any better or different or more, or less, worthy. That a film can be a great deal more soul-crushing as well as much funnier than the more easily slotted black comedy Being John Malkovich without being any one particular thing -- not even, somehow, particularly soul-crushing, finally, when you think about it, I think -- is a very hopeful clue that maybe Kaufman has shed the smart-ass side of himself. Or tempered it. Synecdoche, New York does still have a lot of smart-ass in it.

The Collection Project: When it All Makes Sense

I was feeling rather lumpish last night, both physically and mentally, when suddenly, very late at night, I found myself thinking about the Coen brothers. This, in itself, is not noteworthy. If you and I were to play the "What are You Thinking?" game (that's a game, right?), and you guessed I was thinking about the Coen brothers, you'd probably be right, and sometimes I feel like this blog is just one or two posts away from turning into a full-blown Coens fansite. We're not there yet, but look, right now you're reading one of those very posts.
.
The specific Coens film I found myself contemplating was Burn After Reading, from 2008. Not enormously well-loved by critics or audiences at the time, which is something the film has in common with The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading has subsequently failed to develop any kind of strong cult following, which is something the film does not have in common with The Big Lebowski. This strange little black comedy seems to have mildly befuddled or slightly disappointed just about everybody, a reaction heightened, no doubt, by the fact that it followed their top-to-bottom triumph of No Country for Old Men. Personally, I view Burn After Reading as every bit a part of their creative renaissance (for lack of a less stupid phrase, and in comparison to Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, two not-bad films that nevertheless cast die-hards like myself into a state of gloomy concern) as that previous film and their eventual follow-up, A Serious Man. In the same way that Fargo's break-out success slightly confused me -- it's a great movie, but what was it about that one that critics and audiences felt was missing from their earlier work? -- the indifferent backing away that greeted Burn After Reading's release continues to leave me puzzled. Do people still really not know what to expect from the Coen brothers? Or I suppose most people could simply not find the film's collection of selfish, deluded, even stupid, characters, mixed with a few bursts of shocking violence, not all that funny, but, again, if you're a fan going in, what's leaving you cold?
.
I'm not really asking those questions, by the way (though feel free to answer!); I'm merely registering my befuddlement. And besides, it's quite possible I know the answer, which is that Burn After Reading is one of the most sublimely (to me) pointless film I've ever seen. None of the major characters -- the disgraced CIA analyst (John Malkovich); the pair of moronic gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt); their lonely, love-stricken boss (Richard Jenkins); the cocky, unfaithful, practically meat-headed US Marshal (George Clooney) -- have any clue, at any time, what they're doing, or what anyone else is doing, or why any of this is happening -- and it's well worth mentioning that the core reason any of this is happening is that Malkovich decided to angrily quit his job and write his entirely worthless memoirs. Each character gets lost in his or her own motives and wants (as opposed to needs), each has decided, incorrectly, that he or she is smart, and all but one of them loses out in the end, to the point that three of them die violently. For no good goddamn reason at all.
.
In that way, Burn After Reading is of a piece with earlier Coens films like their intentionally less funny (but still sometimes intentionally funny) debut, Blood Simple, whose plot is also dependent on all the main players being utterly clueless about what's going on. In that film, cluelessness also leads to some pretty nasty violence, but not only is Blood Simple less funny, it also, like pretty much all dark crime films, comes pre-burdened (which I don't mean as a knock) with a cosmic message -- something along the lines of "Look what behaving in this way and/or associating with these people gets you." Plus, fate. Similarly, The Big Lebowski is as absurd and meaningless in its plotting as Burn After Reading, but Lebowski has a great deal of heart, which the later film is almost completely lacking. I say "almost", because I don't see how one can be fully immune to the disappointment, sadness, and touching guile of, respectively, the Malkovich (I'm thinking of his early scenes, mainly), Jenkins and Pitt characters, but the fates of those three are not only similar in their completeness, let's say, but in the way the Coens practically gloss over them. The result being that one doesn't walk away from Burn After Reading mourning those lost, so much as thinking "That was pretty messed up."
.
Of all the complaints against a film, or any work of art, that particularly grate on me, the one I hear most often is "It had no point." The idea that a film, or a story, needs to have a specific "point" for it to be deemed good, or in any way worthwhile, is about as short-sighted as you can get, and this perhaps accounts for the mass indifference that greeted Burn After Reading, because, as I say, it is entirely pointless. It's a film whose story initially flows out of the offices of the CIA, but it's not a political film. It contains criminal acts, including murder, but has no message, no insight into criminal behavior or psychology, or clear satirical point of view. It's just a bunch of shit that happens, because a bunch of people weren't paying attention. And I think the ultimate summarization of Burn After Reading's towering absurdism is this quote from Joel Coen, describing the film:
.
It's sort of about the Central Intelligence Agency, and physical fitness, and what happens when those two worlds collide.
.