The Real, Real Truth

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In Death and the Maiden (d. Roman Polanski), Sigourney Weaver's Paulina Escobar is already angry, frustrated, and frightened when we first see her. In a dialogue-free opening, save for some radio chatter which provides plot information, we watch her as she finishes preparing dinner for her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson), but these are just the mechanics she needs to perform. As we learn, via the radio, that her husband has been appointed to head up a tribunal that will publicly try cases of torture and murder carried out by the recently overthrown dictatorship of the film's unnamed South American country, we can see Paulina's inner tremors and haunted desperation rise up, just under her skin. She was one of the tortured, and she considers the tribunal, whose goal is to merely name, not prosecute, the guilty, to be a whitewash. This is what her husband will oversee.

It gets worse. The short version is that one way or another, and for one reason or another, a man named Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley) follows Gerardo home, and Paulina recognizes the man -- or his voice, his quirks of speech, his snorting laugh -- as the man who tortured and raped her all those years ago. Soon, she's giving it back, beating Miranda, tying him up, gagging him, and putting him through any number of indignities, over Gerardo's horrified protests.

Is Miranda the man she thinks he is? This question is at the heart of Ariel Dorfman's play, on which Polanski's film is based (with a script by Dorfman and Rafael Yglesias), and it's a rather too neat way to approach questions of justice and guilt, madness and terror. The material is in danger, at every turn, of becoming schematic in its countless ambiguities, though Polanski does try to cut that with his typically perverse sense of humor ("You don't want to push him off the cliff?"), and by playing up the goofy personality of Kingsley's possible demon. It all winds up being an odd mix, but an involving one. This despite the fact that, in the end, Death and the Maiden is a filmed play, worse still a filmed modern play, which means that every five to seven minutes one character will leave the room, or ask another character to join them outside, leaving two of the three leads alone at any given time so that they can talk. Any time this happens in a filmed modern play, you can count on listening to a five to seven minute conversation -- this stuff can get as rote, structurally, as any sitcom. None of this matters if the play is especially good, or if the playwright is a master of language, but when it's only fine, as it is here, when the dialogue is merely a vehicle on which to pin bits of backstory and, I guess you'd call it characterization, well, then I think you can be excused if you choose to let the film play while you go get yourself a bowl of cereal.

Then there's the answer to it all, the real, real truth -- or not the answer, but what the characters and, rather more to the point, Dorfman and Polanski choose to do about it. The solution -- which I have to assume is Dorfman's -- is sort of insidiously gutless, and the ending is almost funny due its endless false starts. A nice shot at the very end leaves the audience something to wonder about, but the penultimate scene on the cliff is quite goony in its refusal to depict action that might have consequences. Yes, there's that shot, and those looks between characters in that shot, but we only get that because Dorfman and Polanski betray they're central character, one who betrayed not an ounce of doubt, until she was required to.

Neytiri Calls Me Skxawng

Yeah, so, I watched Avatar. Or as I like to call it: The John Walker Lindh Story. Ah, see, because at its heart James Cameron's insanely successful science-fiction epic is an allegory about the Iraq War, with US Marine Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) finding his sympathies shifting from US/Earth interests to those of the Na'vi, the humanoid inhabitants of Pandora. And Pandora is the planet the US/Earth Marine/mercenaries are set to plunder for natural resources, and they're willing to bomb the shit out of everything to get it, and the phrase "shock and awe" is used in relation to the military tactics used by the Earth forces. Also, this time around the US blows up the World Trade Center. It's all very confusing.
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This latter detail highlights why I won't be getting into the politics of Avatar -- or indeed any aspect of Avatar -- very deeply. The basic reason is this: while the politics are there in Cameron's film, and while I detest them, they are also completely moronic, barely thought out, and utterly toothless. They're also kind of an afterthought. Cameron has been kicking around the idea for this film for a very long time, or so I understand, and I doubt the Iraq War and Sept. 11 material was always on his mind. When he got around to actually making the film, he just threw everything in, getting so mixed up in the process that he credited his Sept. 11th allegory to those who were, in reality, the victims of it (the crumbling WTC, incidentally, is evoked in a scene where US forces launch a missile strike against the Na'vi's very best tree), but he never really cared about it that much. I mean, he meant it, but he didn't care about it, because James Cameron is essentially a gearhead, or a tech-geek; what matters to him is creating big worlds with big effects, the likes of which haven't been seen before (well, on movie screens, at least -- book, magazine, and album covers are another thing, because those can't move). Ultimately, and broadly, I'm ready and willing to give the political aspect of the film a pass, or ignore it, because it's clear so little effort was put into it. The only thing I really object to is being forced to notice the analogy, and then asked to not follow that analogy through to its logical conclusion, which should be self-explanatory to anyone who watches Avatar and makes note of the rooting interest Cameron wants us to take up.
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But anyway! So with the politics dispensed with (in a more involved fashion than I'd planned, but oh well), what's left? Top of the line special effects, occasionally stunning imagery, all to the service of a nearly three hour film, most of which time is taken up with learning how all our brains are connected to trees' brains. Avatar is a thuddingly dull film for great stretches, with no new ideas, but some pretty great technology at its disposal. The whole film is a rehash, sometimes of classic science fiction, sometimes of Cameron's own films. Giovanni Ribisi's Parker, for instance -- the casually evil corporate goon who's behind all this -- is just a less-well imagined, boiled down version of Paul Reiser's Burke from Aliens (by the way, I've heard some people criticize Ribisi's performance, but I think he does a pretty good job of playing the character as written; it's the character as written that's the problem), and Michelle Rodriquez's tough-girl pilot, and the whole space marine thing, are from Aliens, too (and, erm, from Heinlein's Starship Troopers).
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But let's not get bogged down with where Cameron's ideas came from. If he'd done anything with them, nobody would care, but there's a shocking absence of drama in all this. When things really start to heat up, a major character is killed off in one of the lamest death scenes I've ever witnessed in a film like this. It's as though Cameron took it as a given that we'd be moved, so he needn't bother. The fact that the character dies, and is then taken by our heroes to the Na'vi who are asked to save this person using their native magic, the final prognosis being, in essence, "Nope, sorry, she's too dead", signalled to me that things were edging away from the dull into the unintentionally hilarious.

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In the credit where credit is due department, I should say that Zoe Saldana's performance as Neytiri, our window into the Na'vi's world and Scully's love interest, is quite good. I don't know if this is because she threw herself into the job of motion-capture performance with an unusual amount of gusto, or if the computer whizzes who worked on her character were particularly on their game -- I don't know how this stuff works, but it's probably a bit of both. In any case, Saldana provides the story with far more life than any other element in the film. Not a hard distinction to achieve, however, since more than any other Cameron film -- and I'm generally not a fan -- Avatar feels like a jumble of technology that needed some sort of basic and self-consciously earnest story as an excuse be used.

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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Contrast all this with Cameron's Aliens. This is by no means a perfect film -- for one thing, God is that fucker long, and, related to that, it doesn't know when to quit -- but there's a tension to it that never lags. A good hour of the film goes by before we encounter any alien mayhem (said mayhem, by the way, when the Marines get ambushed after they've been made to give up their ammunition, is actually much thinner than I remembered it; the shit hits the fan, there's an explosion, then a bunch of fuzzy monitors and yelling), but Cameron never lets the audience's attention wander. When the film first came out, part of this effect was, no doubt, attributable to the anticipation created by Ridley Scott's original film (and the idea that Cameron's sequel is somehow better than Scott's is an objectively provable untruth that needs to die), but the fact that I still felt that tension yesterday says something. The fact that, after two hours, I was also saying "Shit, Bishop still hasn't been ripped in half?? How much longer does this thing go on!?" says something, too.

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There's also the, or some, performances in Aliens. Avatar has Saldana and, sort of, Ribisi (I'm not sold on the opinion that Stephen Lang's villainous Quaritch was anything special), and that's it. Aliens has a rock solid central performance from Sigourney Weaver, typically easy and strong work from Michael Biehn, and Paul Reiser, who, against all logic, is really good as the odious Carter Burke. The facts of his awfulness are pretty over-the-top, but Reiser really sells it well, especially when he's been found out, and is being interrogated by Weaver, Biehn and Bill Paxton. Reiser plays Burke as a skilled liar who is unsure if this talent can save him, but it's all he's got left.

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And what about those special effects? Obviously, the film was made before the CGI era, and there's a moment in Aliens when, after the shit has hit the fan, our surviving heroes are hustling to meet their command ship, which they hope will whisk them to safety. That ship has been infiltrated by aliens, and the ship crashes right in front of our heroes. I don't believe that a spaceship has ever actually crashed only a few hundred feet away from Sigourney Weaver, but you'd never know it to watch that footage. It's seamless. Meanwhile, in Avatar, even at its absolute, considerable best, you think "Man! That is only barely a cartoon!"

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I'm not anti-CGI, and defend it often. But when a film completely lives on those effects (as well as the 3D Imax presentation, which I didn't experience, so I don't now spend my nights wishing I could live in the movie), as Avatar absolutely does, it's hard not to wonder what the big deal is, and why so many people care so much. What would have been great is if, with Avatar, Cameron had created those same effects, and had attached them to a story that was engaging right off the bat, before a second of film had been shot.