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The Martian (d. Ridley Scott) - I had thought, at one point, and bizarrely, that there was a period in his career during which Ridley Scott wasn't especially productive. That there were like four or five year gaps between films. This is not the case, as my five seconds of "research" reveals to me. I guess I thought this because there's a kind of dead zone in his filmography that even some folks like myself, an enthusiastic born-again fan, haven't bothered exploring. I'm thinking about 1492: Conquest of Paradise and White Squall and G.I. Jane. That kind of stuff. And later Body of Lies and A Good Year. He's made several films I've never seen, and I feel like they almost don't even exist. Or count, somehow (maybe they're very good, I obviously don't know). But he's always worked steadily, and the fact that Ridley Scott has made four films in the last four years isn't actually all that unusual. What might count as noteworthy, at least, is the fact that the first three of those four -- Prometheus, The Counselor, and Exodus: Gods and Kings -- have more or less been critically reviled. Prometheus is a film that seemingly the whole world was excited to see, and the whole world was disappointed by. The Counselor, which boasted an original screenplay by Cormac McCarthy, a great writer who, I suspect, is beloved by more people than have actually read him, was said by one major critic to be the worst film ever made. Both of those films have their pockets of defenders, but even those people seemed to back away from Exodus: Gods and Kings. No one liked that one.

Well, I liked it. I also loved Prometheus (review here) and The Counselor (review, plus anger, here), both of which I consider among the best films Scott has ever made, up there with Alien and Blade Runner and Black Hawk Down, and among the best films of the decade. Given my feelings for his recent work, you must understand how satisfying it is for me that Scott's newest film, The Martian, is shaping up to be one of the most beloved films of the year. Which, I'll grant you, The Counselor, with its "your choices have created a literal Hell on Earth, now look at it" ethos was never going to be. So The Martian, a big old crowd-pleaser, might be somewhat calculated on Scott's part. Or maybe he's just eclectic. He always has been before, why stop now?

The Martian is based on a blockbuster science-fiction novel by Andy Weir -- it's a novel I started and stopped pretty quickly, because Weir's prose gave me the shakes, though the premise, when thought of in the context of what I know Scott is capable of, was very exciting to me. It's basically this: sometime in the future, there's a manned NASA mission to Mars. The crew is all out on the surface of the planet doing their work when a storm they thought was several hours away, and weak, suddenly proves to be much closer and quite strong. In the rush to get back, in the midst of the storm, one astronaut, Mark Watney (Matt Damon), a botanist, is hit by debris and lost to the maelstrom. His spacesuit is punctured, too, which means he's basically dead. So with great reluctance, the rest of the crew, led by Michelle Lewis (Jessica Chastain), leaves him, boards their ship, and launches towards home. But through a type of luck as freakishly good as the bad kind that almost killed him, Watney survives. The storm passes, and he finds himself alive, though injured, and with the base he and the rest of his now-departed crew had previously occupied intact. He's alone, but there's some food, and some water, and equipment. In addition, he's a botanist, and he has some potatoes, some Martian soil, and some human shit. He starts growing potatoes. Then, through one thing or another, he and NASA begin communicating with each other.

I can't detail how all of this comes about, but this isn't a One Man Alone film. I mean, he is alone, but about half of the film takes place on Earth, and there's a big cast. There's Jeff Daniels as the director of NASA, there's Kristen Wiig as the head of NASA's public relations (which is getting a workout under the circumstances), Sean Bean as the earthbound flight commander for Ares III (the mission in question), Benedict Wong as the head of Jet Propulsion Labs, Donald Glover as the awkwardly ingenious astrodynamicist who figures out some important shit, and plus, the rest of the Ares III crew, who eventually become rather important, such as Michael Pena, Kate Mara, and no offense to the rest of them, but etc. You get the idea, I think, of the kind of cast at work here (it's a very racially diverse one, too, which I think is an unmistakable theme here: "Wouldn't it be great if we could get here one day"). I knew the gist of the film, so this was all expected. What I didn't expect was that The Martian would be close to a remake of Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13. Now how do I summarize all of this, because I have two more of these to write.

Well, to begin with, if this is even where I should begin, Scott, or screenwriter Drew Goddard, or possibly original novelist Andy Weir, saw the similarities to Apollo 13 (film and historical incident) and decided to lean into it, because at least one line (possibly two) from the earlier film is quoted in The Martian: such-and-such is a "steely-eyed missile man." This is pretty much necessary, I think, because the similarities are unavoidable. But once past that, how does The Martian hold up? Fairly well, I'd say. It has its problems, and its goofy stuff. There's a bit where Ejiofor's character realizes something important and says, while in the depths of NASA headquarters, "I need a map." Of Mars, he means, so he and another NASA person played by Mackenzie Davis rush to the cafeteria to grab a map of the surface of Mars off the wall. I feel like two NASA employees in NASA headquarters whose work is entirely focused on Mars missions would probably have images of Mars' surface close to hand and wouldn't have to think "Hey is there one in the cafeteria, maybe?" But I understand the idea behind the scene. Rather than showing two people sitting at a table doing math, let's show them being resourceful off the cuff, and let's add the color of a cafeteria, and so forth. I get it, but it's an impulse whose employment can shred the naturalism it's meant to build up. There are a few moments like this in The Martian.

But, in the end, so what? As powerless as I am in the face of Apollo 13, for all its many faults (and they are, indeed, many), so too am I powerless before The Martian. And The Martian doesn't insult its audience by manufacturing a villain, as Howard did with his ridiculous depiction of that film's flight doctor as some sort of stick-up-the-ass dickhead who everyone hated, because hey, this is a movie, there's gotta be a villain, even if the villain is only trying to do his job well. The Martian doesn't have that. There's no villain. Characters disagree -- Bean and Daniels have some good stuff in this regard -- but it's not a case of one of them is wrong and the other is right and the audience has a rooting interest. It's easy to understand both of them, but the point is that everybody is trying to work together for the best result, and the best result is, how many people can we save? This is irresistible. Hence the large and recognizable cast. It's wonderful, and fun, and even exhilarating, if you're in the mood for it, to watch all of this play out.

I regret to say that Wiig, who I like, is the weak link (surprisingly, she sometimes feels like she's in a very low-key comedy sketch, which, of course, doesn't fit; I'm not sure this is her fault), and that the scene where Glover explains his plan to Daniels aims for comedy and completely bricks it. But Glover, otherwise, isn't bad, and the character-actor wing of this film, which is vast, is generally hugely appealing, with Benedict Wong, as the frustrated but unbending chief of JPL, standing out as the most specific human being in the whole production. If there's one thing a film like The Martian needs, it's naturalistic performances from those actors playing the ground-floor, meat-and-potatoes scientists who're trying to get things done. Wong does that better and more consistently than any other single actor in the film. I loved him. He's perhaps my favorite actor in the film.

Next to Damon, anyway, who is terrific (Wong might still be my favorite, but let's keep moving). Very early on, Damon as Watney has to deal with a serious injury. His training has to kick in, and he has to, essentially, perform surgery on himself. Watching this scene I thought "Well, pretty clearly, Matt Damon isn't in this much pain. But if I didn't know how movies and acting worked, I would believe that he was in agony." I was always thoroughly convinced by Damon, and by Watney's plight. The food issue, the potatoes, the ketchup, the rationing, the Vicodin...I was in there. I loved it, I thought the humor of Damon's performance, which is essential, and the desperation, which is also essential (watch him count potatoes during a storm on Mars), the cracked helmet...it's great, the detail of it, the sound of it, the humility plus the scientific wherewithal which backs that up...Damon plays it all. It's not quite a one-man show, somehow. Leaving aside all the other characters with whom he can't directly interact -- Scott and Goddard (and Weir probably) set Damon up with an out: he can talk to a camera, which can function as a person, in terms of performance. But that's still acting by yourself, and Damon is great. He's a movie star, but terminally underrated as an actor. It's his movie, and he brings it home.

Love & Mercy (d. Bill Pohlad) - Now a director who has had a pretty significant gap between films is Bill Pohlad. His first film was Old Explorers from 1990. His second is Love & Mercy, which got a wide release this year. In between that, Pohlad did plenty -- he served as a producer on a variety of films, including 12 Years a Slave and Wild, for example -- but I do find this sort of creative career interesting. I have no particular theories about it, mind you, though I suspect it's gratifying for his life as a director to quite suddenly be on the upswing. Who could have expected it, after all? Although the idea of a biopic about The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, starring Paul Dano as the young genius Wilson and John Cusack as the middle-aged, deeply troubled Wilson of legend must inspire some fantasies of being noticed finally, one way or another. You're asking for something, making such a film, and what Pohlad has delivered, the film just described, has been rather widely embraced as if not one of the best films of the year, at least one of the better films of the year.

Among the reasons why Love & Mercy has been so well-received as an off-book biopic is its structure. About half the film takes place in the 1960s, as Paul Dano's Brian Wilson was gearing up for the epochal Beach Boys album Pet Sounds, then extending through that album's release and the mental and creative breakdown that coincided with the writing and orchestrating of Wilson's legendary (almost mythical, if a solid version of it hadn't finally been released) album Smile. The other half of the film is set in the 1980s, after Wilson had become the Howard Hughes-esque oddball who it became somewhat hip to make fun of for a while. He lived in bed, he wrote songs about vegetables, this is what fame does to the arrogant. That was the popular idea for a while, and one of Love & Mercy's not insignificant achievements is to make it clear that Brian Wilson isn't just some dick who went mad with excess, but he is in fact a genuinely troubled man who needed help, and finally got it.

On the other hand, among the things that Love & Mercy can't really swing, is being a truly interesting biopic. Yes, structurally it's somewhat unusual, but really, it's not that interesting, and besides the Paul Dano sections are fairly standard-issue. Which is strange, because from what I've gathered it's those sections, the bits where Brian Wilson is in his heyday, the almost otherworldly genius whose sense of sound was (is) so unlike anything else in pop music, that have most earned the film its regard. And yet, in these scenes you have Mike Love (Jake Abel) returning with the rest of the band from a Brian Wilson-less tour of Japan to find the relative craziness of Wilson's plans for Pet Sounds, and thereafter engaging in typical "Brian these songs aren't fun, the Beach Boys are about fun, you have betrayed the band, we shall never succeed, O! desolation!" shenanigans, not to mention the father of the Wilson brothers, Murry (Bill Camp), himself a record producer and unsupportive, at best, of his most talented son, saying "No one will ever remember you, my son, who is the leader of the soon-to-be forgotten music band known as The Beach Boys!" You'll detect a note of sarcasm, and yes I've altered these lines to strengthen my hilarity, but those lines, only with fewer words, exist in Love & Mercy. Is that the worst of it? I'd say no. Later, as Brian Wilson's walls begin to fall, we see Paul Dano sitting on the edge of his pool, having gained some weight, staring at nothing, the voices and musical arrangements taking over his head by now, while his wife (Erin Darke) calls out to him about his infant daughter "Brian, she's smiling! She smiled! She has your smile! You should see her smile!" With all of this having already been done and said, I see no reason why director Bill Pohlad shouldn't have thrown in the line "Your famously troubled masterpiece is called Smile!" at the end there.

It's the Cusack scenes that I find have been critically ignored, or somewhat maligned, and they shouldn't be. I think this is Love & Mercy at its best. Not necessarily because this is the stuff that turns the biopic on its ear -- Love & Mercy is really just a 160-minute boilerplate biopic with the middle part scooped out -- but because the three central performances are so good. Paul Dano has enjoyed most of the praise so far, but it's Cusack, an actor I've both really liked and been really frustrated by in about equal parts for many years, who really knocked me out. Dano's good, but he's an actor who's still full of tics, whereas Cusack, no stranger to tics, is well into maturity now, and has learned how to do a lot with a little. And remember, he's playing a mentally troubled character, which often brings out the worst in actors. But not in Cusack. The gist of this section of the film is, Brian Wilson has become a shut-in whose career is being managed by his psychiatrist Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), who's controlling and exploiting Wilson with pills. Wilson meets a young car saleswoman named Melinda (Elizabeth Banks). They fall in love, she sees what Landy is doing to him, and she fights to extract Wilson from this terrible, potentially fatal situation.

But Cusack is outstanding. Really outstanding. So are Banks and Giamatti, for my money -- I think Banks is generally pretty terrific and has a way of instantly communicating whatever will make the audience either hate or sympathize with her. She has a very classic way of sketching these things out -- it's almost broad, but not quite. She'd have been at home in the 1950s while still working just as well in 2015, which is a rare thing, for which she's of course been taken for granted. Giamatti, on the other hand, is I believe a great actor who has very often been miscast (there's no way he belonged in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but then again, other than Andrew Garfield, who I don't fuckin' trust, but never mind about that, who did?) but when he winds up in the right part has an intensity that also seems, like Banks' style, current and a throw-back. Giamatti is an old-fashioned performer, in a way. He can really go big, and that seems to be his inclination a lot of the time, occasionally, though by no means always, to his detriment. Love & Mercy is one of those instances when his instincts line up exactly with how the character should be played. Landy's a monster, a manipulative little shit, and actually one of the best scenes is between Giamatti and Banks. Banks isn't buying his shit, and he knows it, and it's a great stand-off where nobody is saying what they think. There's also a really stupid scene that should have been re-written, where the two have a real showdown, and in which Giamatti is great, let off the leash to be hateful and scream "Slut! SLUT!" at a closed door, but which is ruined by Pohlad's insistence on making the setting "colorful." It's like the cafeteria scene in The Martian, in fact; the scene takes place on the showroom floor of the Cadillac dealership where Banks' character works, and nobody cares or does anything. This might be fine, but after Giamatti storms off, Banks' boss shows up to casually ask "Now what're you gonna do?" I don't know but what you should've done is called the damn cops, bud. It's a weirdly dumb scene that is nevertheless played very well by its two principals.

But anyway, Cusack is the show here. He's outstanding. This is his best performance in years, and I say that because he seems to get across a depiction of a mentally unhealthy genius being controlled through pills by an unscrupulous greed-monkey that feels exactly right. And obviously I don't know how accurate any of this is -- everybody who's ever managed my music career has been pretty cool, thank God -- but what Cusack does here is hugely convincing. There are a number of scenes that worked for me. One is during a double date (of a fairly perverse sort) in which Cusack as Wilson can't stop himself from revealing terrible facts about his childhood while not understanding that this might be viewed by others as inappropriate in a restaurant with another couple nearby, but Cusack plays that social disconnect just right, which is to say, he doesn't play it. He lets the actors around him play it, which they do ably. In another scene, at a barbecue hosted, apparently, by Giamatti's Landy, the problem of what Wilson wants versus what Landy will allow, and the triviality of it all, is made stark to Banks' Melinda, but it's Cusack, trying to both grab what he can't have and then being docile, because of the pills, in the face of a horrifying onslaught from Giamatti, that drives home the problem. Because he does so little, and Banks sees that. She sees that he's not reacting enough. An argument might be made by some that Cusack shouldn't get the credit for this, that Banks and Giamatti should (and they should), but you could only make that case if you didn't watch the scene. What Cusack does is a marvel of, not stillness, as you might expect, but rather of not reacting to the moment as a mentally healthy person would. He should be openly ashamed or embarrassed or angry, but he's none of those. Yes, context plays a part, but context can't act. Cusack can.

Later, in the third scene, Cusack plays full paranoia, which is a more expected route under the circumstances, but which he pulls off with such sweaty desperation -- because Wilson is still with it enough to understand that he might be driving Melinda away -- that I became uncomfortable. To boil it down, I was finally able to appreciate Brian Wilson at his best because Cusack so perfectly played him at his lowest.

The Green Inferno (d. Eli Roth) - Speaking of oddly paced careers! It's like this is a whole theme that only got rolling because I was wrong about Ridley Scott. Well, such is life. So one might be tempted to say about the career of Eli Roth, a filmmaker who for a couple years was being pegged as some sort of leader among American horror filmmakers. Beginning with the horror comedy Cabin Fever in 2002, Roth seemed prepped to light things up with Hostel in 2005, a film that at least boasted an intriguing premise (look it up), but which he, in an act which I think we as a people might now reasonably describe as "typical," chose to follow up with a sequel to same. The interesting thing, depending on your mood or general approach to life, is that Hostel: Part II struck me, and others, as rather better (as it struck still others as rather worse, the term "torture porn" became a thing, etc., let's skip all the way past all that useless nonsense) than the first film. Eli Roth has a director's eye, and a sense of the eerie even in his non-supernatural stories. See, for example, the pool scene in Hostel: Part II, for atmosphere, and see, as well, the scene in Hostel: Part II where the hostel clerk tries to warn our protagonist, during a party, of her potential fate. It's very creepy, and more than that, well-judged. But Eli Roth has a tendency to throw all this stuff away, and not even count them among his achievements: it's the ripped out eye in Hostel and the cut-off dick in Hostel: Part II that he tends to cite as the kind of thing he's doing right. Such business has led me to remark on numerous occasions that Roth is a quiet horror director trapped in a shallow gorehound's body.

Though it's interesting to me, and I promise you, not in a shitty way, that Hostel: Part II seems to have sunk his career a little bit. It didn't take, in other words, and he's struggled since then to get another film off the ground. He's worked for other people (see Inglourious Basterds), but he hasn't been able to do much with his own stuff, until in 2013 -- six years after his previous feature as a director -- word got out about an entirely Roth-ish project, one that had actually been written, shot, and edited, called The Green Inferno, a film which would recall for the, well let's not say "discerning," but the, and actually let's not even say "informed," but the horror fan who's watched whatever slid by their face, such appalling horror "classics" as Cannibal Holocaust (I saw that one) and Cannibal Ferox (I haven't bothered, and won't). Among the many things a film like The Green Inferno made in a year like 2013 by a writer/director like Eli Roth might promise, I thought when first I heard of it, was a certain kind of political "hey lookit me!"-ism on the part of the asshat making this shit, which I'd be less aggressive about if I hadn't listened to any part of Roth's solo commentary track on the home video release of Hostel: Part II. You tell me how far you get into that one. Bringing that up would be unfair if The Green Inferno didn't promise to be the angry liberal-activist college student nonsense of that commentary track made flesh. This would all be fine on one level -- Roth certainly wouldn't be the first left-leaning filmmaker to take on horror, and indeed in the current horror climate he's simply toeing the company line. But if he's gonna have that kind of head on him, he'd better know what he's fucking doing. I saw The Green Inferno today, and I am not convinced that he does.

So the story of The Green Inferno is this: a college student named Justine (Lorenza Izzo) attends a class wherein she learns for the first time about female genital mutilation, as practiced in certain African and/or Muslim nations. She's outraged, and wants to help, so through Jonah (Aaron Burns), another student who has a crush on her, she finds her way to an activist group led by Alejandro (Ariel Levy), whose goal, at the time Justine finds them, is to fly down to a segment of the Amazon rain forest, chain themselves to trees, and thereby stop the evil corporations from bulldozing anything. Not quite in the same league as trying to stop female genital mutilation, and I'm undecided on the matter of whether or not this point was lost on Roth. I'll let it go, though. So they fly down, they chain themselves to trees, they're arrested, but that doesn't amount to much. They're ready to fly home. Something happens to the plane. At this point, Roth, who had heretofore approached The Green Inferno as something he didn't need to do anything particular about, decides suddenly to direct, and the plane crash is actually visually unique. Apart from the bits which remind me of the plane crash from Alive, Roth seems to me to have hit on a new way to film a plane crash. It won't knock your eyes out necessarily, but it's dynamic, and watching it I thought something along the lines of "Oh well okay, here we go, this is a movie."

And indeed, from this point forward, The Green Inferno does feel more like the work of someone who had an idea to make a film than it had previously. To what end, though? It's honestly hard to know where to begin; I guess the first point would have to be that Roth's inspiration is being drawn, primarily, from a terrible movie: Cannibal Holocaust. That film is not a filmmaker's film, it's a film made by someone who wants to shock. So the artistic impulse, the creative, formal drive, is dead almost from the beginning. And visually, The Green Inferno is a big nothing, a point-and-shoot exercise that draws whatever visual panache it has from the Amazon jungle setting, the filming and manipulation of which (everybody does that shit, I'm not judging) Roth and his crew were fortunate enough to, I'm guessing, blackmail somebody into paying for.

Beyond that, anything cinematic comes from character design. Those who survive the plane crash -- Justine and Alejandro, to begin with, but there are others -- are captured by a cannibal tribe. If The Green Inferno manages to instill a queasy discomfort in the viewer, my guess is that most viewers would feel it during the scene in which the survivors are herded by red-stained natives out of their boats (there's more to all of this, I'm simplifying it, plus, hey, enjoy the surprises!) into a village filled with people whose culture is quite apart from our own, and what the presence of a cluster of know-nothing college students would mean to such people, and what they'd want to do about it, when they have every ounce of control in their hands, because this is rather terrifying. You can deem someone who has that reaction, or can imagine that reaction, any number of things, but I'd invite you to give it a spin yourself. Anyway, Roth does this part pretty well, but then again he's just aping Ruggero Deodato, who, at least in Cannibal Holocaust, isn't even a good filmmaker.

But I was saying that, visually, character design becomes a highlight in the film, and I think it does. The natives look good, the ones who're meant to be especially scary are especially scary while still seeming to exist in this world, and the terror the remaining characters, who are locked up in a wooden cage, feel seems more or less authentic. This authenticity is probably the result of the film's first major gore scene, which I guess I won't "spoil," but whatever, we know what film we're watching, you can guess what the deal is, and even thought parts of this scene involve digital effects, it's pretty effective. I actually thought, gorehound though I am not, "Well, given what kind of film Roth has announced this will be, with his series of vigorous blurts, I'd have to concede that if The Green Inferno continues down this track, he might actually be on to something." Something that would be nothing like original, of course, but something. I needn't have worried, though, because the only track The Green Inferno continues down is the one that kills off its characters one by one, while at the same time indulging in diarrhea jokes (I'm actually serious -- we're supposed to laugh when a young woman who is terrified that she's about to be horribly murdered gets the shits). Politically it's a mess. I don't think Roth knows what his own politics are in this situation, other than that he doesn't like naive college activists. Well, neither do I, but so what? Plus, when he has the most vile character (this is a guy who jerks off in the cage basically right after another character has died because he says it's important to relieve tension, which means nothing about the character or the politics or the, God save me, "satire," and only reflects back on Roth's desire to be what he considers transgressive, which also just happens to be the same thing that a hyper fifteen-year-old boy would consider transgressive), when he has the most vile character, I say again, say something along the lines of "You don't believe the government knew nothing about 9/11, do you?" it's hard to not think that Roth is actually on board for this. I'm not saying he's on board for all the vile shit this character does, but the weak-ass conspiracy cynicism, yeah...Roth's on board for that. All of which means that by virtue of thinking it's "about" "anything", and by having the ideas ("ideas") it has in its stupid empty head, The Green Inferno adds up to being among the most shallow horror films one might stumble into, which, in 2015, is pretty goddamn shallow.

And that's what I'd say if the movie had ended well. Or not well, but rather, reasonably. But it has a post-credits sequence that made me audibly sigh, because the gist of the plot that's hurled at us in those last seconds is that Eli Roth has turned around, pulled down his pants, and begged us shamelessly to allow him to make an even dumber sequel. Let us join forces and not let him.

He'll Never Get to Heaven if He Doesn't Die

Last night, I spent a decent amount of time reading about the life, court-martial trial, and execution of Harry "The Breaker" Morant. Not so much that I could confidently claim that the amount of time spent thusly had been decent enough, but I was enlightened anyway, to the extent that I'm able now to look at one of my favorite films, Breaker Morant from 1980, directed by the underappreciated Bruce Beresford, a key film in the Australian New Wave, and now out on Blu-ray, most deservedly and, to me, unexpectedly, from The Criterion Collection, in a new way. Before Saturday, it had been many years since I'd last watched it, and when you watch it as a young person, or when I watched it as a young person anyway it can appear rather less complex than it is. Though in fairness to the young, there are good reasons why it might be partially misunderstood, which I'll get to. But when you learn about the real Morant, the sense that the film is "merely" a very strong example of the courtroom drama, with grit and a British-hating twist to it, begins to not just fall away, but to feel absurd.

In 1901, during the Second Boer War, which was waged between the British (with the assistance of forces pulled from their colonies, such as Ireland and Australia) and South Africa (allied with a Dutch sovereign republic located there, populated by Dutch farmers known as Boers) for reasons the explaining of which I thank God it doesn't currently fall under my purview to take a shot at, Morant, in command of a British Army unit called the Bushveldt Carbineers, ordered the execution of several Afrikaner soldiers, who had just surrendered and been disarmed. Later, a German minister named Heese, who had witnessed the crime, was murdered, apparently at Morant's behest, and to keep him quiet. Three men were subsequently arrested for these killings: Lt. Peter Handcock, Lt. George Witton, and Harry Morant, also a Lieutenant, and their commander. The motivation for murdering the POWs was, allegedly, the earlier death in combat of the unit's previous commander, and Morant's friend, Captain Hunt. Complicating matters, prosecutorialy-speaking, was the question of whether or not orders had come down from British high command that no prisoners were to be taken. Complicating matters as far as the legend of Breaker Morant goes is the fact that Witton, Handcock, and Morant were Australian, but they were being tried (and in the cases of Morant and Handcock, executed) by their colonial masters, the British. Witton, who ended up only serving a short prison sentence, would eventually write a book about the case called Scapegoats of the Empire, which, as you might imagine, excoriated the British and called the trial a farce. Many believe this book, among a few other things, went a long way towards positioning Morant as a man who was railroaded, a brave and fiery innocent who had to pay the price for the Empire's callous overreaching. Which is roughly where things get interesting.

There is very little reason, you see, to believe that Morant, Handcock, and Witton were anything but quite guilty, and against the belief that Morant was a hero, there has risen in Australia a counter-movement which hopes to show that the preponderance of evidence, then and now, proves that Morant, Handcock, and Witton were murderers. I can't pretend that I'm an expert on this case by any stretch, but what fascinates me, and what brings us here tonight, is that one of the things that these historians have had to battle against is Beresford's film, which has inspired many of its viewers to regard the story as one of straightforward injustice, with Morant the primary victim of it, crushed under the boot of etc. But what I'd somehow never noticed about Breaker Morant, or let's be generous and say I'd forgotten it, is that that's not really what it is at all. Or almost not at all. A film which once struck me as so classical now seems deeply strange.

The movie stars Edward Woodward as Morant, Bryan Brown as Handcock, Lewis Fitz-Gerald as Witton, and Jack Thompson as Major Thomas, their attorney. Fitz-Gerald's Witton is the young, scared, naive soldier who depends for his education about this world of military legal madness and potential education on the bitter, witty cynicism so expertly projected by Woodward and Brown, and the nose-to-the grindstone efforts, as well as a kind of realistic hopefulness, of Thomas, which is a state of mind that Jack Thompson seems to be actually living through as we watch. Woodward and Brown, as I've said, play their roles as men who refuse to give up and don't want to die and don't think they deserve to, but their experience of the British Army has been such that they can't quite imagine any other outcome. Early on -- and this is a pure courtroom film, by the way, with flashbacks to the killings and the events surrounding them, interspersed -- as Thomas, who has had less than one day to prepare a defense before the trial begins, is offering objections and motions that are dismissed almost out of hand by the lead judge Lt. Colonel Denny (Charles Tingwell), we see Morant and Handcock glance at each, shaking their heads out of frustration, but not surprise.

The whole tone of the film matches Handcock and Morant's fatalism. Beresford uses no score, the only music being that which is occasionally played by a military brass band who appear on screen. That can of irony can't help but bode poorly for those on trial. Though Woodward, and Morant, is the star, this sort of choice by Beresford seems to favor Brown, and Handcock. Brown is really wonderful, his face almost motionless even when he's angry, which is often, but his eyes are magnificent, staring not just through you, but through the wall behind you as well. When he speaks out in court, it's fast, in a bark, and it's always a sarcastic joke. He's fucking pissed and he doesn't believe anything he or Thomas might do will help him, so he might as well tell these people what he thinks of them. The editing matches him, seems almost to follow his lead. Again, it's a courtroom film, which would seem to invite long takes, a certain slowness, but Beresford and editor William M. Anderson cut Breaker Morant, which is only about 90 minutes long, pretty fast. There are shots that last barely a second. Which isn't to say the film is frenetic, but rather, simply, that it moves. There's a frenzy in the air, as at stake is justice for almost two dozen murdered men, and the possible execution of three more. And that frenzy makes the film fast. But with no music. The film is quiet and fast. This is a style that make the courtroom formula, which on some level must be avoidable unless your aim is to turn it on its ear, feel vibrant, or rather desperate.

But they're guilty. Morant, Handcock, and Witton, and Morant and Handcock especially, killed those men, or gave the orders to have them killed. I'm not speaking here about the actual history (although from what I can tell it seems hard to deny their guilt in the real world, too); I'm talking about the film. This film, which has somehow fueled the popular belief that they were innocent, portrays them as guilty. It does argue that a "no prisoners" order was given, and it does very briefly show that Morant may have initially been conflicted about that order, but when the power was his he followed it with gusto. I'll say more about Woodward in a minute, but speaking of "no prisoners," there's a real Peter O'Toole light in Morant's eyes here.

The person most bewildered by the popular reading of Breaker Morant is Bruce Beresford, who, in this rather interesting 1999 interview, which provides an overview of his career up to then, says:

I read an article about it recently in the LA times and the writer said it's the story of these guys who were railroaded by the British. But that's not what it's about at all. The film never pretended for a moment that they weren't guilty. It said they are guilty. But what was interesting about it was that it analysed why men in this situation would behave as they had never behaved before in their lives. It's the pressures that are put to bear on people in war time. Look at the atrocities in Yugoslavia. Look at all the things that happen in these countries committed by people who appear to be quite normal. That was what I was interested in examining. I always get amazed when people say to me that this is a film about poor Australians who were framed by the Brits. That was not what the film was about for me. And I never said that.

And if you're watching Breaker Morant and thinking "Those goddamn British," you might want to take a moment and think about what the prosecution and the judges are arguing for: fair treatment of POWs. Now, of course, if a "no prisoners" order was given then from some quarters, in the course of all this, hypocrisy is playing a part. But is that all there is? Can the prosecution of these killers of a couple dozen men, one of whom was nothing more than a witness to their other crimes, really be boiled down to mere hypocrisy? Are they wrong? Does their hypocrisy absolve Morant? Are we now prepared to accept "I was just following orders" as a valid excuse?

On the other hand, the film does depict the trial as unfair; Tingwell's Denny is almost a bit too much in his portrait of a man whose mind is made up. I do have to wonder why, if Beresford never intended for audiences to see the story as that of three men who have been railroaded, why the prosecution and the judges are shown as so dismissive, unbending, and unsympathetic, torturing with their obtuseness even the undeniably noble Major Thomas. You can certainly simultaneously believe that the defendants were killers and that the trial was iffy, but there's an unbalance in portrayal which, when the true thrust of the film finally hits home, can be almost disorienting.

It's enough, at times, almost, to make you think that Breaker Morant wants you to understand that these men were guilty, but that collectively we should let them all off the hook. But no, that's not what's going on here, because quite clearly, what interests Beresford the most is Morant. And casting Woodward, who was English, not Australian, was a masterstroke. In his 2004 commentary track ported over for the new Criterion release, Beresford says that he cast Woodward mainly because he looked so much like the real Harry Morant, but Woodward is so extraordinary that he could have looked like me and he would have still been the perfect choice.

If the film seems to match the rhythms of Brown's Handcock more than those of its titular character, I'd say this makes sense. The real Morant was a somewhat well-known poet (some of which is read in the movie by Woodward), and Woodward plays him as a man who somehow projects aristocracy and everyday approachability at the same time. He seems well-liked by his men, and they're loyal to him, but he has more education, and interests and ambitions which are quite unlike those of the men in his command. He seems like he should be at the table with the other judges during the trial, but he isn't. As such, liked or not, he's apart. He's apart from the film too, in a way. Woodward was a unique presence -- he didn't seem like a guy who could, or even should, make an entire movie bend to the will of his personality, but he was capable of it, and he does it here. His Morant is such an engaging yet disturbing enigma (but, as Beresford notes, would he ever have done anything like this if his friend hadn't been killed?) that Breaker Morant the film ends up feeling as though it's being held up for examination by Morant -- by Woodward's Morant. As though it's one of his poems. Which, as the ending suggests, it sort of is.

Men in Other Towns

The actress Susan Tyrrell died in 2012. She was 67 years old, and she was taken by a disease called essential thrombocythaemia, a condition that had already taken her legs below the knees in 2000. Within the name of her disease, that word "essential" seems almost like a mockery, because what could be less essential in the life of any individual than an illness that whittles you in half, just to begin with? But she died, Susan Tyrrell did, who'd appeared in a wide variety of films, including Paul Verhoeven's lunatic medieval bloodbath Flesh + Blood, the rather less violent Big Top Pee-wee, and a variety of other things besides, including the Amicus-esque horror anthology From a Whisper to a Scream and the oddball cult 80s comedy Tapeheads, which as a much younger man I must have watched God alone knows how many times. Tyrrell was living with her niece when she died, and as she wasn't a movie star, hers was a passing that went largely unremarked upon.

In 1972, when she was about twenty-seven, Susan Tyrrell appeared in the film Fat City, directed by the by-then legendary John Huston. Fat City would wind up being one of a series of films that Huston made in the 1970s which proved that while he was in his 60s, John Huston was entirely capable of keeping up with, and occasionally even outdoing those arrogant little shits like Scorsese, Coppola, and you know the rest. Fat City would be his first declarative and confident statement on the matter, following as it did forgotten failures and bewilderments like The Kremlin Letter, A Walk with Love and Death, and Sinful Davey. How the 1969 novel Fat City by Leonard Gardner made it to him I don't know, but Gardner would go on to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of the one novel he's ever written. Or ever published. That's me being optimistic.

It's a curious thing, when you regard the idea of a "cult status" as it pertains, respectively, to films and novels. A cult film tends to be genre -- horror, crime, and so on. No worse for that, God knows, but interestingly distinct from the cult novel, which can be pretty much anything. It can be a strange crime novel like The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers, or it can be a work of capital L "literature" such as the kind of novel that is academically beloved, embraced for its poetry by other writers and some readers, but culturally weirdly set aside to be read by only certain people, but by no means forgotten because we like you, we'll get to you, just sit tight, A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. In his very brief introduction (though partly due to its economy it is one of the best such introductions I've read in a long time) to the recent, and desperately needed, reissue of Fat City from NYRB Classics, Denis Johnson relates an anecdote about a writer friend of his encountering Leonard Gardner reading a boxing magazine in a drugstore, some time after his novel had been published and been reverently passed around and worshiped by other writers, both aspiring and accomplished, if not by other segments of the population:

"Are you Leonard Gardner?" my friend asked. "You must be a writer," Gardner said, and went back to his magazine. I made him tell the story a thousand times.

Set sometime during the 1950s, the novel begins like this:

He lived in the Hotel Coma - named perhaps for some founder of the town, some California explorer or pioneer, or for some long-deceased Italian immigrant who founded only the hotel itself. Whoever it commemorated, the hotel was a poor monument, and Billy Tully had no intention of staying on. 

Tully is almost thirty, an ex-boxer and drunk who when we meet him has not recovered from the divorce that devastated him. He lives in one hotel after another, in Stockton, CA. One day he aimlessly wanders into a boxing gym where he meets a young man, Ernie Munger. They spar, and Ernie beats him. Billy recommends that Ernie head over to the Lido Gym and talk to Ruben Luna, Billy's old trainer and manager. "Don't waste your good years," Billy tells him. Ernie goes, and Ruben accepts him into the world of amateur boxing, and driving in cars crowded with other boxers and corner men up and down California, into Utah and other places, for a night of fights. Tully, meanwhile, decides he's not too old, and he starts trying to get back into shape, though he still drinks, and makes his living, such as it is, as a day worker, picking walnuts or chopping onions clear and filling sacks with them. But he, too, is soon back in Ruben's orbit, though in the course of this short novel, Tully and Ernie will rarely meet again.

Fat City is I suppose what you'd have to call plotless, in that the events of the novel occur with the same sense of understandable randomness as do the events of everyday life. There are no detectable mechanics at work, shaping the author's sense of what the lives of these men should become. Though of course on some level such mechanics are there, they pretty much have to be, but I could neither hear nor see the gears turning. A novel that worked like that would not find room for a chapter about another of Ruben's fighters, a teenager named Wes Haynes, whose impact on the lives of Ruben, Tully, and Ernie is at best negligible, but whose life Gardner starkly lays out as a return trip from a fight, with Ruben and other boxers, wheezes to a sleepy end, and Haynes is almost startled to find himself back in his own neighborhood, wondering what is happening to him.

...Wes saw a low building in the fog with Regale Pale glowing in blue neon in a window and was overcome with dejection. He had made no secret of his training. Acquaintances at school spoke to him as though they believed he was a professional, and he had not cared to correct them. He had believed he would be one soon enough -- because it had seemed the natural and inevitable thing for so many years, because against all contrary evidence, and simply because he was himself, he felt he could never be dominated. Now he felt he should have known all along that he was nothing. Boxers were men in other towns, in big cities far from this car parked in the darkness alongside the highway between fields of vegetables. Resting his cheek against the cold window, he thought of killing himself, but years ago, standing beside his father's legs in a crowd on a night sidewalk, he had seen a dead man profiled in a puddle of blood, his eye dumfounded, and Wes knew that if he was going to be killed he was not going to do it himself. They would have to come and get him and he would club them and choke them and shoot them and then he would run.

Tully and Ernie both meet women. Ernie meets another young woman name Faye, and they both lose their virginity on a night that ends with Ernie falling into icy water while trying to find wooden boards to use as traction so that he can get the car in which they had sex unmired from the mud. Tully, meanwhile, meets Oma, another drunk, a juicehead, a woman who, when Tully meets her in a bar, is going out with Earl, a black man (Oma is white) who Gardner writes as a man who has to put up with a person like Oma. Nothing he says will result in anything but shit from her, though she claims to love him. Even as she claims to love Earl, a thing she claims to Tully, she's drifting towards Tully. When Earl ends up in jail, Gardner charts the fragmented hypocrisy of someone who only drinks:

"And he didn't mean it. He just gets so nervous. You don't know what you have to take when you're interracial. Every son-of-a-bitch on the street has to get a look at at you. And Earl's really a peaceable man. He's even-tempered. He didn't hurt that guy and he didn't want to...He's just not made that way. He's the sweetest-natured man in the world...He's so jealous. I wouldn't put it past him to be out already, spying on every move I make."

Jealousy is quite the theme in Fat City. It's the unacknowledged engine. Even if nothing especially comes of it, Ernie can't shake the belief that Faye, the woman he never wanted to be bound to, but once done can't help judging and suspecting at the same time he loves her with a childish desperation, may find a more satisfying man, and is looking for one almost every day. And there's Oma, who spends her drunken hours kicking out at what she believes are the jealousy-based behaviors of Earl and, later, Tully, yet she's also constantly paranoid that she herself is being betrayed. Not just sexually -- at one point Tully simply walks out the door and she, who has to dress first before she can follow him, can't bear the idea that he might drink in a bar without her.

In John Huston's 1972 movie, made from a script by Gardner himself, Tully is played by Stacy Keach, an actor who was about thirty-years-old during filming but who in my experience has never looked younger than forty-five (making him physically perfect for Billy Tully). Keach plays Tully just right, with hope cut by hopelessness, optimism hand-in-hand with total despair. The opening of Huston's Fat City is a masterpiece of tone-setting (among other things) as the plot (once more, such as it is) kicking off because Keach's Tully can't light his cigarette, which compels him to not only put on pants, but actually leave his hotel room. Yet as he exits the place, Keach lets an energy creep in. In the film, Tully is less gutted by divorce than the Tully in the novel -- this doesn't ruin the character, but instead simply lets him breathe differently. So when he leaves the hotel, wanting only fire for his tobacco, he manages a happy to him, but pathetic to us (but who are we?) little dance. Maybe if I get a large-enough skinful of booze in me, I can make something happen.

And I have to say, the sweat of booze is on the film just a bit more than it is on Gardner's novel. Gardner's Fat City is not quite a booze novel (in the same way that it's not quite a boxing novel), though, certainly not in the way that Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend is a booze novel. Both in the novel and the film, Ernie isn't much of a drinker. Neither is Ruben, who in the book is what in film terms you'd call the "third lead." The drinkers are Tully and Oma, but in the film not only is Ruben (a terrific Nicholas Colosanto) pushed to a supporting role, but Tully's drinking overwhelms Keach, and Susan Tyrrell's Oma nearly overwhelms the whole thing.

I don't mean to dispense with Ernie, the film's Ernie. He' splayed by a very young Jeff Bridges, and it's a fine performance. However, here Ernie's relationship with is wife Faye (Candy Clark) doesn't carry the strain of his juvenile hypocrisy, so plainly and brilliantly, and even sympathetically, stated by Gardner in his novel. For whatever reason, Gardner the screenwriter found too much, enough, all you need, of life in Tully and Oma (it's just possible that the hard-drinking Irishman Huston guided things this way) so that the frustrations of being a drunk (Tully) who lives with someone (Oma) even drunker than he becomes the film. Boxing isn't quite ancillary at this point, but it almost is. Look at the scene where Tully makes steak and peas for himself and Oma, and begs Oma to eat. Watch Oma's introduction, when her companion is Earl, played by Curtis Cokes (a boxer in a boxing movie, not playing a boxer). When they sit down and Oma begins rambling out to Tully her irrational, rude, two-faced nonsense about Earl, look at Cokes -- this is the best kind of pay-off when casting a non-actor. Cokes doesn't pour a bunch of ticks or mugging expressions into his performance. He just keeps his face blank, because this is a guy who's lived a lot of time with Oma, and if she wants to talk to another guy, fine, maybe I can just relax and have a beer in peace for once.

But more than anything, look at Susan Tyrrell as Oma. Look at the shot of her sitting at the sad little table in the awful little hotel room where Keach's Tully will try to cook her steak and peas. She's playing solitaire and drinking something bright red, which means you know it's sweet, and so the ensuing headache will be a real son of a bitch.

The novel Fat City doesn't have a villain, but if you had to pick somebody to qualify, you might pick Oma. She's such an infuriating, hair-pulling presence, her unbearable behavior off-set for the reader only by the fact that Tully ain't much better. Yet in Huston's film, not only is Oma almost more appalling, she's also that much sadder, that much more of an unbearable drain on our sympathies. There's a scene in the film where Tully and Oma have really hit it off, the two of them drunk, in a bar. Tully head-butts a jukebox. This proves something to somebody, he supposes. Oma has been drinking all day, longer, probably, than Tully has been. Anyway, they leave. It's bright daylight outside. They're both drunk in bright daylight. Oma hesitates, and Tully asks her what's wrong. She says "I don't know...I guess I'm drunk." The sadness with which Susan Tyrrell delivers this line is not merely interesting. It's Oma's whole biography. Because listen, I can imagine a person whose definition of the the phrase "over the top," which has become a synonym for "worthless," would encompass Susan Tyrrell's performance as Oma. Watching Fat City again for the first time in many, many years, I realized that Tyrrell's work here may well be called, now, "cartoonish." When considering such critics, I'll refrain from speculation (I realize I'm kind of making them up anyway), but I will acknowledge that for all Tyrrell does to make Oma not just frustrating but also heartbreaking, and my God she is that, she's also comic. How can she not be all of these things? As an acting exercise, imagine playing someone who is not only always drunk, but who has been always drunk for many years. That was Susan Tyrrell's job on Fat City, and what she does is extraordinary. So is what Keach does, but look at Tyrrell's face. She clowns it up, but that's the result of someone who is perpetually hammered trying to live among people who aren't. Tyrrell ruthlessly plays Oma's effort to be part of a day-to-day society she'd realize has rolled right on by her if she was ever sober. Which she never is.

Susan Tyrrell, as I've said, passed away in 2012. She'd stopped acting after her disease had redefined for her the meaning of the word "essential," which means over a decade away from performing. I don't know anything about those years of her life, but I watch her in Fat City and I see one of the great performances. One that was nominated for an Oscar, which must have been nice. And then what? We forget. "History is the judge" is bullshit, because history forgets about 80% of the great stuff. I don't trust it and never have. If it's going to render Leonard Gardner's novel Fat City a cult favorite that may disappear again in ten years, then no thank you. If it's going to forget Susan Tyrrell's performance in John Huston's Fat City, then no thank you. But no one's forgotten anything yet. We all will eventually though, so I guess for this great artist all we can do is hope that the prayer of one of Susan Tyrrell's final diary entries, written just months before she died, came true:

I demand that my death be joyful and I never return again.

Do You Like Capsule Reviews? Well Then Brother Guess What!

Here are a few "capsuled" reviews of films I have recently watched. I hope you enjoy reading them more than I enjoyed writing them.

The Sender (d. Roger Christian) - First up is this 1982 horror film, just out from Olive Films and part of the, I don't know what you'd call it, telepathy-horror subgenre? Anyway, pretty clearly the idea was to follow the path carved out by David Cronenberg's Scanners and Brian DePalma's Carrie and The Fury. It's about a young man who winds up in a mental hospital following a suicide attempt, and the caring doctor who comes to believe that he really can make others feel, and experience, his hallucinations and dreams, which is to say, his nightmares.

The Sender is packed with familiar faces, whose wide variety of credits you simply don't really see coming together in one film anymore. Starring as the doctor you have Kathryn Harrold, who I consider sort of an icon due to her role as Albert Brooks' other half in his masterpiece Modern Romance. Plus besides which, there's just something about her, you know? (Interestingly, given her role in The Sender, Harrold hasn't acted since 2011, and is now a licensed psychotherapist in Los Angeles.) There's also Paul Freeman, best known as Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark as Harrold's boss, and Shirley Knight, who not long ago I saw in the very good, and very early, Francis Ford Coppola film The Rain People. Here, Knight plays a mysterious woman who visits the disturbed young man in the hospital. That disturbed young man, by the way, is played by Zeljko Ivanek, who is one of those character actors who has spent nearly the last forty years being always good in everything. More often than not playing a villain, in 1982 Ivanek hadn't yet been typecast, and it's nice to see him in The Sender playing someone we don't want to punch.

He's good, too, as is everyone else. And despite my implication that The Sender was merely riding the coattails of Cronenberg and DePalma, it's quite a solid picture. Setting the film almost entirely within the hospital was a good move on the part of director Roger Christian and writer Thomas Baum, and the sketching out of the employee and patient population is accomplished with a lighter touch than you tend to see from this era. While the nature of this story does mean that certain crazy, special effects-heavy sequences don't actually occur in the reality of the story (although, well, never mind), which I at least find a bit frustrating in a general sort of way, those sequences are handled really well, and at times are pretty spooky. And anyway, the film's not a cop out, and it doesn't cheat. Give it a look.

God's Pocket (d. John Slattery) - Of the handful of films that Philip Seymour Hoffman had finished but which had not yet been released at the time of his death in early 2014, the one I was most looking forward to was God's Pocket, the directing debut of actor John Slattery. In addition to Hoffman's starring role, which itself was more than enough for me, the film also featured John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, and Eddie Marsan, all favorites, and was based on a violent and weirdly funny novel of blue collar crime and neighborhood provincialism by Pete Dexter that I'd read years ago, and liked a fair amount. Then it came out, and people didn't like it very much, and anyway it only sort of came out in the first place. So it more or less drifted off my radar. Maybe it was a swing and a miss, which would be too bad, and which might make me sad to actually watch.

But I finally did watch it, and damn it, it's pretty good! I think some people may have been thrown by the fact that Slattery and his cast, which also includes strong performances by Christina Hendricks, Jack O'Connell, and others, do a very good job of translating Dexter's oddball tone to the screen. There aren't a lot of real jokes in the films, and it's often pretty brutal, emotionally and in terms of actual physical violence, but Dexter, and Slattery, recognize that the kind of behavior exhibited by some of these people, and the choices they sometimes make, none of which are unheard of among human beings, are so absurd that it's sort of grotesquely funny, just on the face of it. It's a hard tone to strike, and Slattery strikes it, but I suppose it's also a hard tone to like. But I liked it.

King Kong (d. Peter Jackson) - I was recently moved by illness to revisit this, Peter Jackson's three-hour remake of a 1933 Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack motion picture which perhaps you've heard of. It occurs to me that Jackson's film came out almost exactly ten years ago (give or take a few months), and it's been about that long since I watched it all the way through. I've gone back to the opening Great Depression and Vaudeville montage, cut to Al Jolson's "I'm Sittin' on Top of the World," because I'm quite fond of that bit, as I once was fond of the the rest of it. After my recent viewing of the whole film, I'm still fond of that opening montage.

I should say here that I'm not bothered by the 187-minute run-time. In fact, I'd say most of my favorite stuff is in the set-up. There's something about a remake of a movie like King Kong that, unless you're fucking it up left, right, and sideways, adds a unique sort of tension, for me anyway. I felt it here, and I liked seeing what led Naomi Watts' Ann Darrow (a highlight) to meet Jack Black's Carl Denham (not necessarily a highlight but I appreciate the effort), and then to the boat, and all the people on the boat, or most of the people on the boat. It's like the build-up of a disaster movie, in a lot of ways, and that's often my favorite part of disaster movies.

The problem is that following his triumph with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson apparently lost all control. The absurd cartoonishness of his pre-Heavenly Creatures films (an era I'm not that fond of to begin with) does not marry well with the kind of huge-budget emotional spectacle that he's aiming for with King Kong. And it is emotional. Kong's death is quite moving, and Andy Serkis's performance as Kong is very good (I mean, I guess it is). But when it's just spectacle, or even when it's just people, this thing is a goddamn mess. I've rarely found the one-damn-thing-after-another nature of modern special effects blockbusters to be as enervating as this film was the second time around. The brontosaurus stampede on Skull Island is a complete wash -- at no point did I believe any of the humans were on the same plane of existence as the dinosaurs, and the sequence was just fucking endless. For how many minutes straight must we watch Adrien Brody frantically look left and then right? At a green screen, incidentally, which I swear I could practically see, covered though it was by brontosauri. Plus, I used to think the fight between Kong and the tyrannosaurus rexes was really cool and fun and such, but somehow I'd forgotten that through it all Kong is tossing Ann all over the place. She almost falls to her death but he catches her and throws her to another hand so he can punch a t-rex, and then he has to catch her with his foot while flipping through a whatever-the-fuck kind of tree...it's just too much. Too much by an absurd amount. Never mind that Ann would be dead as hell by the end of it all.

And unlike in The Lord of the Rings, never mind Heavenly Creatures, with the people here Jackson is basically hopeless. All the actors in the 1933 film had a better sense of when to pull back than pretty much anybody here. Clearly, Jackson wanted to honor that era of filmmaking stylistically, but he shouldn't have. Trying to act like that when you're not that kind of actor is death, and I actually think Jack Black (not exactly the subtlest of actors to begin with) knew that right up to the point he delivers the line "It was beauty that killed the beast." And he knew it while delivering it, too. You can almost see him thinking "Oh no, this is going to be too much, this is going to be too much, I should pull back, Peter's wrong about this I need to do someth - 'IT WAS BEAUTY THAT KILLED THE BEAST' - shit goddamnit damn it god shit." Something like that happened, I bet.

Also, that bit where Adrien Brody types "Skull Island" in slow motion while saying each letter out loud, making everybody look at him in terror, is an idea so bad, and a bad idea executed so terribly, that I almost can't believe it, or even speak about it rationally.

The Kind of Face You Slash: The Struggle Was Brief and Weird

The dedication to a bizarre 1946 horror novel written by Paul Bailey provides, maybe, a clue, or clues, to, well a variety of things. The dedication is:

To MYSELF...

and the life that

is slowly loosening

my skull plates...

There's humor there, certainly, but humor of a particularly grim, even despairing, sort. How much weight should be given to the humor, and how much to the grimness? Or the despair? While recently reading the novel to which that dedication is attached, called Deliver Me from Eva (another joke, obviously), it never really occurred to me that, as crazy as much of the book is, I was not supposed to regard it as serious. Yet when I consulted Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's indispensable reference book Horror: 100 Best Books, from which I first learned of the existence of Deliver Me from Eva way back in 1988, in the introduction to Forrest J. Ackerman's short essay about Bailey's novel written by Newman and/or Jones, I find the it described as "blatantly silly" before reading this:

...Deliver Me from Eva has just enough jokes...to suggest that the author wasn't absolutely serious.

Which, okay. That's certainly not the same thing as claiming the novel was intended as parody. But in Ackerman's essay, the legendary editor/publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland, noted goofball, and lover of puns (he points out, not incorrectly, that if Bailey hadn't used the title Deliver Me from Eva, Robert Bloch certainly would have) comes perilously close to dismissing the novel as deliberately tossed-off hackwork at the same time that he's ostensibly praising it as his favorite, or at least among his favorite, horror novels. Deliver Me from Eva is a pretty healthy distance from being a masterpiece, but I nevertheless find the opinions expressed by Newman/Jones and Ackerman to be pretty curious (as I find many of the opinions expressed in Horror: 100 Best Books, however indispensable it remains). Deliver Me from Eva struck me as, yes, ridiculous in the way that pulp often is, but also genuinely horrified, if not quite horrifying (though you might find it to be that as well). An interesting distinction, if I do say so myself, and one that, if I'm write about this, strongly implies that Bailey wasn't in the business of winking at the audience. At least, not the whole time.

If Deliver Me from Eva's entry in Horror: 100 Best Books did nothing else, it did give me a lead on Paul Bailey, clues about whom I was otherwise finding to be non-existent. I was finding him to be rather pleasantly mysterious -- no biographical information that could be linked with that dedication about loosening skull plates was actually turning out to be an eerie detail. Still, the truth isn't necessarily less interesting. Newman/Jones toss out titles for a couple of Bailey's other novels, and subsequent rudimentary investigation turns up that Bailey was primarily a historical novelist whose focus was the American West, and occasionally more specifically Mormons, and Mormonism, as they and it existed within that Western expansion. Trust me, if you found this out directly after finishing Deliver Me from Eva, your reaction, like mine, would be something along the lines of "...Wuh?" It can be a little bit tough to put all this together, and indeed my 2011 Bruin Crimeworks reprint of Deliver Me from Eva offers no contextual addenda, which is odd for this sort of thing these days. Anyway, it turns out that Bailey was better known in his day as Paul Dayton Bailey, a crucial difference -- Paul Dayton Bailey's Wikipedia page mentions Deliver Me from Eva not at all (Paul NMI Bailey's Wikipedia page doesn't exist). At any rate, in addition to writing books like The Gay Saint, For Time and All Eternity, and Jacob Hamblin, Buckskin Apostle, Bailey also wrote essays and articles with titles like "Polygamy Was Better Than Monotony." So, you know. (Bailey's maternal grandfather was Joseph Barlow Forbes, a major figure in Utah history, and I though Bailey might have had connections to others Forbes, those of Steve and Magazine fame, but so far I don't think he does. Just FYI). I have no interest, by the way, in trying to link through smug armchair psychoanalytic means Bailey's Mormonism with what goes on in Deliver Me from Eva. That novel's apparent disconnect from the rest of Bailey's work is part of what's so fascinating here. And it's not like he wrote Eva before find his way to the church. His Mormon writing both precedes and follows after this weird piece of horror fiction.

So then what is this fucking book about, you might well ask. Okay then. That dedication about loosening skull plates isn't incidental, by the way, because listen, here's this guy, Mark Allard, he's around forty years old, and he's seeing a young woman named Edith Brinkley, the daughter of his law partner. Except when we first meet Mark, who is our narrator in Deliver Me from Eva, he's already thrown Edith over for someone else. For whom? For Eva Craner. To be brief, Mark was drawn away from Edith to Eva for reasons we're not entirely clear on (there's nothing wrong with Edith, we're assured), but basically Eva is hopelessly gorgeous and Mark is swept up. And she tells him that her father, Dr. Craner, is a great man, a genius whose ability to manipulate the craniums of human beings -- because the human skull is divided into hinged segments, which must serve a purpose, yes? -- allow them to achieve feats of great genius. See not just Eva's breathtaking knowledge, but also her brother Osman's accomplishments as a concert pianist. Another step along which path he's about to take when Mark is brought into the family estate, or compound maybe, which Dr. Craner, a man born without legs or ears, has dubbed The Cradle of Light.

There's your set up. And a couple of things, or three things, about that: the title, Deliver Me from Eva, is misleading, because Mark is pulled into this world not because Eva, who he loves so much that he's fled his apparently quite lovely girlfriend, as well as his lucrative job as an attorney, is such a femme fatale. She is in fact not that. Mark is drawn in because of the weird and freakish Dr. Craner. It's this detail that begins to slide Deliver Me from Eva from crime fiction into horror. Because it does always seem to be on the cusp of becoming a crime novel, though it's not that easy to say why. I'd suppose it's because religious cults in California are a rich and thriving -- I won't even say cliche' -- pool into which crime writers have and will always dive. Cults, or even just New Age scams, have been covered by Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, and pretty much every other crime writer who has staked their ground in L.A. Bailey shifts that to Pasadena. That's where Dr. Craner's estate The Cradle of Light is located, and within that is found the house where Mark and Eva are expected to live. That house is called Thalamus.

The thalamus, of course, being a gland, which, I just now read, might be called the human body's "hub of information." Plus remember those skull hinges, the manipulation of which, etc. Bailey's dedication suddenly seems less random, possibly less personal (does it?), and more of a nod to his novel. Mark winds up having his skull manipulated by the legless and earless Dr. Craner, and he turns from a skeptic to a true believer. Because of course Dr. Craner is both evil and sort of on to something. But anyway, the point is, Eva isn't the villain. She, like her doomed brother Osman, who when we meet him is in a small way revolting against his father's treatments, is an acolyte, rightly or wrongly. And is she wrong? Her maid Margot, who will turn out to be far more than just a maid, supplies information along the way that both condemns Dr. Craner morally, but perhaps absolves him on scientific grounds.

So that's one of the three things. And it connects to the second thing, which is that Deliver Me from Eva feels, for at least about the first third, like a crime novel. Which it isn't, at all, but you do have a professional guy in Los Angeles throwing away his business and his girl for a mysterious and sexy woman. It's just that Eva isn't asking or driving in any way Mark to murder anybody. For profit, or any other motive. Yet the James M. Cain-ian pulse continues to throb. Deliver Me from Eva is a genre hybrid (comedy/horror, adventure/comedy, horror/crime, etc.), but unlike most such stitched-together creatures it's not trying to be. It's a horror novel of the Mad Scientist variety that perhaps due simply to the year of its publication, and our own contemporary view of pulp fiction from that era, and the fact that it doesn't begin in a dungeon but rather the Honeymoon suite of a San Francisco hotel (a good place for crime to begin) fools us into reading it as hardboiled crime. But out hero Mark isn't just a decent man who fends off the hypnotic cult-ish powers of Dr. Craner so that he is finally aware of the body horror, the rampant decapitation, of The Cradle of Light -- he continues to be a decent man throughout it all, who fights the push into Hell.

The third thing is, what did Bailey mean by any of this? Newman/Jones and Ackerman seem to suggest that he meant nothing, but I'm (obviously) not convinced of that. For one thing, none of them offer any evidence, apart from the pun of the title. I would even add to their meager case the novel's last line, which I won't quote because I guess it's a spoiler, though plot-wise it reveals very little, but in any case it's a joke, one I don't like that much, but anyway, it's a joke, is the point. So they have that. They're not wrong. But what I have is the dedication, which is grim, and its connection to the plot, which becomes a frenzy of mortality, and then, finally, I have the end, which isn't a matter of ten pages or so. No, the climax of Deliver Me from Eva hits, but you're aware, as a reader, that there's a good clutch of pages to go. Without giving away too much, or giving away the bare minimum I can give away while still going forward, Mark, our hero, has to contend with the possibility that Dr. Craner, the madman, the murderer, might, when you boil it all down, have been on to something. That humans, in essence, are fucked, are dumb, blank-eyed zombies, without his skull-plate manipulation (which, also, the reader gets the sense is only the tip of the iceberg). It's insisted to Mark that Dr. Craner's evil aside, humanity stands to benefit enormously by the continuation of his work. Yet Mark is us, he's just a goddamn person, who can't see past evil, or past love. I'll finally quote Bailey, by way of Mark:

The ethical concepts of my nature, as interpreted in normal human behavior, seemed dulled by the impact of forces beyond control. If it were dementia, it seems odd that my mind was still crystal clear as to every detail of past events. The interpretive functions of my intellect were the parts which seemed to have gone awry. As I see it now, the norm of my conscious thought followed a pattern of oblique distortion which seemed in that hour perfectly lucid and logical. I felt the urge not to brush away the evils and oddities of my existence, but to perversely examine them one by one. I knew they were interesting, and I knew that I would write of them, but in this moment it was Eva I wanted; the woman I had married; my wife, and loved one.

Am I supposed to regard this passage as insincere? This, to clarify, is after the violence. This isn't part of a build towards pulp madness. Pulp madness -- of a quite mad sort, I must admit -- has already occurred. What this is, and what the roughly thirty pages in which this is included is, is a dealing with the insanity section that you don't often find in novels like this, and which I can't interpret as frivolous. I don't know what Paul Dayton Bailey's deal was, and I haven't read any of his other novels. They may offer greater insight into him than Deliver Me from Eva could ever begin to. But pretty clearly, this novel is his big outlier. He wasn't in his twenties when this came out. He was forty. He said right up top that life was loosening his skull-plates. I'm sorry, but I can't see the joke.

The Secret History of Movies #10

(This Sporting Life, 1963, d. Lindsay Anderson)

(The Rain People, 1969, d. Francis Ford Coppola)

(thanks to my friend Michael Rizzo for the Rain People screen grab)