Ferdy on Films, etc.

Wanda (1970)
Director/Writer/Star: Barbara Loden

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This week, the world lost two of its greatest film makers—Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Both were men of enormous vision, skill, and influence, and their films will pass down through the generations to enlighten new viewers and inspire the giants of cinema’s future. How lucky for us. And how lucky for them!

My words now are not for the much-lauded who saw their ambitions fulfilled over the span of long lives, however, but rather for those directors who died too soon, who hit walls in making and distributing their films, whose output—visionary as anything by Bergman or Antonioni, but not as formed—was, is, and will be ignored and possibly lost. There are a lot of talented film makers in this group. Barbara Loden—who died at the age of 48, having been unable to get another film made after Wanda appeared and disappeared—was one of them.

Some people may know the name Barbara Loden. She was a pin-up model and actress whose best-known performance today is as bad girl Ginny Stamper in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. Loden also was Kazan’s long-time mistress, and eventually married him. Kazan helped open some doors to get Wanda made, but apparently didn’t lend a hand again to help her realize her other projects. Among the many honest things Wanda communicates about women’s place in society in the 1960s and the crushing effects of economic constraints on the human spirit, is an ambivalent, but no less cutting, indictment of traditional men like Kazan. Maybe that’s why he never helped her make another film.

According to Wanda’s cinematographer Nicholas Proferes, the idea for the film came when Loden read a newspaper article about a woman named Wanda Goranski, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in a bank robbery. Apparently, when the judge sentenced her, she thanked him. Loden, who had grown up dirt-poor in Marion, North Carolina, connected with both the boldness and self-effacement Goranski exhibited in this newspaper account. Although the film is set in Pennsylvania, Loden wrote the screenplay with her own experiences in mind.

The film opens on a coal-mining operation. A long shot of the coal fields gives way to closer shots of large machines grasping and moving mountains of coal. Then the scene shifts of the interior of a house in which a baby is crying, a toddler is moving around, and a worn-looking woman just out of bed is in the kitchen, trying to prepare food and quiet her infant. On the couch is a figure under rumpled blankets. It’s Wanda (Loden), who stretches absently as she watches her sister (Dorothy Shupenes) and registers the dirty look her brother-in-law (Peter Shupenes) gives her as he leaves for work. “He hates me because I’m here," Wanda says. It sounds like she’s felt this way before.

Back in the coal fields, a ghostly white figure moves across in an extreme long shot. It is not until the figure nearly reaches its destination that we realize it’s Wanda, dressed in a cotton blouse and slacks, with her hair in curlers. She asks a mentally challenged man who is collecting coal in a bucket for his own use to lend her a little money. His relationship to her is not made clear, but he gives her a dollar. She uses it to get on a bus. She’s late to her own divorce hearing in town.

Her husband (Jerome Thier) is anxious for the hearing to begin because he wants to marry the woman sitting behind him with his two kids as soon as possible so she’ll take care of them. Wanda finally shows up. He claims she abandoned the family. She does not dispute this claim and says that if he wants the divorce, the judge (M. L. Kennedy) should give it to him. She doesn’t even look at her children. “They’ll be better off with him," she says when the judge asks her if she wants custody.

So what’s going on here? Mr. Goranski seems more inconvenienced by Wanda’s disappearance than anything else. He has already lined up a new caregiver and wants to make sure his life gets back on track. On the other hand, Wanda seems indifferent to her children, which he, at least, is not. She seems very emotionally disengaged and resigned to losing what she had. Did she really want it? It’s hard to know. Wanda doesn’t say her wants out loud very often.

The next scene is in a garment factory. Busy hands move irons and push cloth through sewing machines. We see Wanda enter the manager’s office. She tries to collect two days’ pay from the past week. The manager (Milton Gittleman) says she was paid. She reckons she was owed $24 dollars, but only got $9. The manager claims the deductions were government withholding. “They take out that much?" she asks. He assures her they do. She asks if she can come back to work. He says that they need people but not her—she’s too slow. She thanks him as she leaves his office. She knew what she wanted, but she didn’t get it.

She goes to a diner and orders a beer. A man (Arnold Kanig) in the diner says he’ll pay for it. We next see him trying to make good his escape from his hotel room the next morning without waking Wanda up. But she catches him and briefly pursues him out the door before he peels away in his car. So maybe she wanted him. Off again she goes.

Late at night, she walks into a tavern. The man in the bar says they’re closed and tries to push her out the door. She pushes back, insisting she needs to use the toilet. He waits nervously for her to come out as she takes her time washing her face and pushing at her hair. When she comes out, she sits down at the bar. The man comes around the other side. We then understand that he is not the bar owner but a man who came in to rob the owner, who is lying, bound and gagged, on the floor, out of Wanda’s view. Wanda asked the robber (Michael Higgins) for a beer. He opens the cash register and pulls out all the money. Then he draws her a beer. They leave together. After they have sex in his hotel room, Wanda asks Mr. Dennis if he’s married. “You have a ring," she observes. He evades the question.

But they form an alliance. Wanda acts a bit like Mr. Dennis’ dog—obeying his commands about how to dress herself, begging to come back to him after he has thrown her out of the car for questioning what illegal doings he’s up to, scraping pickles off his hamburger. She never calls him by his first name. Dennis is gruff, but he’s a penny ante loser who robs a Goodwill drop box to clothe Wanda and grabs a suit for himself from an open car. He’d take tips off tables if he had the chance. He doesn’t really have a clue how to get by in the world. When he visits his father in Scranton, we learn that he’s just out of prison. His father refuses to take money, considering that it must have been stolen. He’s right, of course, but Dennis is hurt, nonetheless. The next scene shows Wanda and Dennis drinking near their stolen car. A remote-control model airplane is buzzing overhead. Dennis climbs on top of the car roof and dares the plane to come back and get him. This is all the fight he’s got in him? It’s starting to look like he and Wanda were made for each other.

The movie veers bizarrely into a Bonnie and Clyde plot in which Mr. Dennis plans a bank heist and enlists Wanda to help him grab the bank president’s family as hostages. When the bank president (Jack Ford) tries to take Mr. Dennis’ gun, Wanda hits him, grabs the gun, and jams it into his back. She ties up his family, Mr. Dennis places a suitcase full of explosive in front of them, and sets the timer. He, the bank president, and Wanda, leave the house to go to the bank. “You did good," Mr. Dennis says to Wanda. The smile on her face shows exactly what a gift she's gotten.

Of course, the heist goes horribly wrong, and Mr. Dennis becomes a suicide-by-cop. Wanda, shattered, wanders and ends up in front of a restaurant/bar that night. A friendly looking woman passes by her and says hello. Wanda does not respond. The woman climbs some stairs. After a bit, the woman comes back down and asks Wanda if she has anywhere to go. When the apparent answer is no, she steers Wanda upstairs to join a rousing party of her friends in the bar. Wanda sits, holding a beer, looking crushed, lost, and completely alone.

This film was shot in 16mm using a handheld camera, giving it a grainy verite look that has been compared with the films of John Cassavetes. Like Cassavetes, Loden shot some of the film near her home in Connecticut and treated the cast and crew like a family for whom she cooked. Why Loden didn’t follow in Cassavetes’ shoes and act to gain money for her projects is a bit of a mystery—though work for actresses has always been more dicey than for actors—but it seems that Wanda must have been a character close to herself.

Looking for some kind of validation, living at a time of few options for women, despised for walking out on family life, Wanda is a character seemingly moved by an irresistible force within to be something or go somewhere she feels she counts. The women who were at the vanguard of the modern women's movement—often without realizing it—paid a heavy price. Wanda is horribly vulnerable, terribly beaten down, and directionless without society's accepted paths to walk. She made Mr. Dennis take care of her in the brief time they were together, even if it was on his terms. Unfortunately for Wanda, the solution of making a man stand by you has proven over and over to be a sham. Sitting in the bar, surrounded by people who are connected and happy to be together, she looks like an alien, utterly miserable and completely unnoticed. What will happen to Wanda? l

Daisy Miller (1974)
Director: Peter Bogdanovich

By Roderick Heath

Peter Bogdanovich’s directorial career has been in the wastebasket so long it’s hard to remember he was once one of America’s most promising directors. I stumbled upon the DVD of Bogdanovich’s forgotten adaptation of the Henry James novella for sale really cheap. I purchased it with an eye to comparing his approach to a Jamesian tale with Scorsese’s take on James’ acolyte Edith Wharton. Bogdanovich is, in many ways, a polar opposite to Scorsese; where Scorsese is vigorous and eruptive, Bogdanovich presents a cool, studious, deceptively simple approach, emulating his idols Howard Hawks, John Ford, and the naturalistic side of Orson Welles. Bogdanovich’s fondness was less for visual pyrotechnics than for verbal repartee, and he had tried, after scoring his breakthrough with elegiac nostalgia study The Last Picture Show (1971), to recreate the flavour of character-based, motor-mouthed screwball comedy with the hits What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973) and the egregious flop At Long Last Love (1975).

Daisy Miller originated as a kind of vanity project. In a relationship with his discovery Cybill Shepherd, Bogdanovich had tried to talk Orson Welles into directing the project with Shepherd as the eponymous heroine and Bogdanovich playing her romantic foil Winterbourne. Welles replied that whilst he thought Shepherd perfect for her role, Bogdanovich ought to direct the thing himself. The screenplay was written by Frederic Raphael, who has been one of the most incisive and talented of adapters of classic texts, including Far From the Madding Crowd (1968) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Daisy Miller has the feel of an intricately personal work. Indeed it confronts several aspects of Bogdanovich’s life—his adoration of Shepherd, his own feelings of being trapped between cultures (an American, he had lived much of his youth in Europe), and his reputation for emotional chilly films. Stanley Kubrick brought out his adaptation of Barry Lyndon the same year as Daisy Miller and suffered much the same accusations of coldness. In truth, both films present a case for the necessity of emotion, of clear human communication and interpersonal values, by demonstrating worlds that lack them.

Daisy Miller and Barry Lyndon share many qualities. As adaptations of classic literary works, both are acutely conscious of it stylistic presentation, rejecting the plush, cardboard dramatics of old-Hollywood “Classics Illustrated," and forcibly reinventing their cinematic grammar to communicate a world with a far more sedate, socially intricate sensibility. This basically means that their directors refused to jump around a lot. Instead they keep their cameras still, trapping their characters in the camera’s unblinking lens as thoroughly as they are trapped by social circumstances within the narrative. These films are, then, aggressively modern by being consciously anti-modern. So many of James’ stories are essentially about the same thing: social pressure and how it warps human potential. His stories retain an urgency about this pressure long past the end of the social milieu they describe because James’ personal anxiety over his tightly repressed homosexuality charges their drama with a still-relevant sense of the necessity of keeping certain passions in check.

The story is uncomplicated. In 1879, Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown) meets Annie P. Miller, whom everyone calls “Daisy," when both are staying at a hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Frederick is visiting his snobbish old biddy of an aunt, Mrs. Costello (Mildred Natwick). Daisy is touring the continent with her frail, neurotic, socially awkward mother (Cloris Leachman) and her brattish younger brother Randolph (James McMurtry, son of Larry, who of course penned The Last Picture Show). The opening shot, in which Randolph emerges from his hotel room and sets about mixing up the precisely arranged ranks of to-be-polished shoes outside, establishes this character as the type who creates havoc wherever he goes and doesn’t give two hoots for adult European propriety. Winterbourne is also an American, but has been educated in Europe, belongs to an expatriate colony in Rome, and has scarcely ever been home; he dresses and looks like a young Marcel Proust. Winterbourne, as the name suggests, is cool and reserved, even as he obviously delights in talking with the garrulous, blithely non-intellectual Yankee girl.

Winterbourne’s aunt talks about the Millers as if they were subhuman. As she reports the hotel gossip to him, and, in a small marvel of true observation of how we are drawn into conspiracies of social prejudice—the things we say to get along with the in-crowd—Frederick finds himself singing her tune of “oh yes, Daisy’s completely uneducated" even whilst he cannot shake his attraction to her.

Winterbourne takes Daisy to an historic landmark about which Byron wrote a poem, delighting in Daisy’s blithe indifference to being unchaperoned. They quarrel when he has to refuse her request that he, rather than the family’s attentive manservant Eugenio, become the Millers’ guide in their upcoming tour of Italy. Later, in Rome, Daisy becomes the talk of the town, and not in a good way, when she proves receptive to any number of gentleman callers, including the superficially charming, but absurd ladykiller Mr. Gionavelli (Duilio Del Prete). She spends day after day promenading with Gionavelli, much to the mockery of Roman staff and the contempt of expatriate high society, most forcibly embodied by Mrs. Walker (Eileen Brennan).

Bogdanovich’s distinctive touch is to give the film a tone not unlike a period edition of one of his screwball comedy homages, and suggests the tensions that sustain that genre have some roots in this style of socially observant material. The verbal exchanges move at a dizzying pace, whether from Daisy or from Mrs. Costello. The central duet of Daisy and Winterbourne resembles the catch-me-if-you-can note of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, which Bogdanovich had already given a makeover with What’s Up Doc? insomuch as the it’s the male who is constantly on the back foot trying to relate to the female. Randolph, with his dismissive, bratty attitude towards Europe—everything about the place, including the fact he can’t get his hands on decent candy, drives him crazy—is a pure old-Hollywood comic tyke. Daisy Miller is not, however, a comedy; it is an observation of behaviour, driven by Winterbourne’s inability to come out of his reserved, gentlemanly shell and take a real stab at courting Daisy. The film’s subtlety, yet with a complete lack of arty posturing, is admirable, as Daisy is baldly and consistently honest about herself and her sensibility. Yet Winterbourne only belatedly understands this, largely because with the tide of innuendo and obscene theorising around her dalliances keep him uncertain of her character. Winterbourne cannot identify whether Daisy is just what she seems—a flirtatious, but essentially innocent girl with nature-child reflexes—or the cheap, uneducated nouveau-riche tart everyone is eager to think her.

The film was largely dismissed because of Shepherd’s performance. Shepherd’s never going to be a candidate for my favourite actress, either, but she fulfills her role well. She presents exactly that right type of persona—a talkative, intelligent, but slightly uncouth and unsophisticated girl whose general impact is to delight some men and to be like nails on a blackboard to many others. In fact, the bulk of the film’s emotional tone must come from Brown, who, as Winterbourne, is sounding board for all that occurs. Brown, who had previously given a fine performance in Bad Company (1972), is a delight as an emotionally caged man, wary of and even occasionally offended by Daisy (as when he attempts to approach her and Gionavelli, but retreats in glum shock when Gionavelli kisses her), but consistently drawn to her. The film is loaded with Bogdanovich’s stock actors of the time, drawing particular venomous excellence from Eileen Brennan, whose society matron tries briefly to extricate Daisy from potential social disaster; when this is met with laughing indifference, curdles to venomous spite. She will later, quite literally, give Daisy the cold shoulder for bringing an ounce of messy, raucous life to one of her soirees.

Daisy finds even this malignancy rather absurdly entertaining. She is completely unafraid of consequences; indeed, she can barely imagine them. When Winterbourne, deciding to walk by himself in the evening, walks into the Colosseum and embarrassedly avoids the shadows that team with rutting couples. Inevitably, he encounters Daisy and Gionavelli, laughing at him. Winterbourne, with quiet intensity, demands they leave, and snakily suggests to Daisy that she has confirmed for him other peoples’ opinion of her. Within a few days, he learns she has been taken ill, and she soon dies. Over her grave stands her now unhinged mother, her silent brother, a distraught Gionavelli, and a meditative Winterbourne, who is left with the knowledge, imparted by Gionavelli, that Daisy really was as innocent as she seemed. Winterbourne is left alone by the grave knowing she was waiting for him to make a move, and concludes to himself, “I have lived too long in foreign climes," as the camera retreats from him, disappearing in a glaze of transcendent white.

It’s a sublime, tragic conclusion that acts to the rest of the film’s gossamer texture like an unexpected punch. Almost before he knows it, Winterbourne finds he has lost something terribly dear and vital in his life, and what had seemed like endlessly beckoning future is suddenly cold history. It also causes one to re-evaluate what one has seen and heard leading up to it in an infinitely more subtle and meaningful way that the self-conscious temporal gymnastics of, say, Memento. Indeed, James was one of the first modern writers to analyse the disconnect between perspective and reality.

At 91 minutes, Daisy Miller is a triumph for Bogdanovich’s concise, but packed technique. He often fills frames with detail, like the telling moment at the graveside when it’s clear Mrs. Miller has cracked up, a throwaway touch in a group framing, that refuses to force the drama but communicates itself thoroughly. As Bogdanovich himself testifies in his commentary on the film, much of the film’s melancholic underpinnings came true, later—the disintegration of his relationship with Shepherd; finding himself later at the graveside of murdered lover Dorothy Stratten; Barry Brown’s suicide three years after the film’s release; and the complete snub the film received at the time. Yet Daisy Miller is a fine wine that’s aged mighty well. l

Habit (1997)
Director/Writer/Editor/Star: Larry Fessenden

By Marilyn Ferdinand

If all indie films of the 1990s were like Habit, instead of self-indulgent misfires like Sweethearts, I’d be hailing the decade as the best one for American films since the 70s. Habit, a bravura production by Larry Fessenden that is an expansion of his 1982 film of the same name, blends urban paranoia and ennui with the vampire horror genre seemingly effortlessly to create a moody, particular piece that reflects a major talent at work.

Fessenden stars as Sam, a restaurant/night club manager living in New York City who is dealing with the double-whammy of grieving his recently dead father and the demise of his relationship with his live-in girlfriend Liza (Heather Woodbury). He spends most of his time dulling his nights with generous amounts of alcohol and parties and using the “hair of the dog" in the morning to get him through the days. He attends a Halloween party hosted by one of his friends and meets Anna (Meredith Snaider), a magnetic beauty with a strong sexual presence. Although Liza is at the party, Sam is so attracted to Anna that he has no compunction about leaving with her in full view of his friends. As they walk down the street, Sam wants to show her pictures of his father, which he has stashed in his coat pocket. When he can’t find them, he realizes he has someone else’s coat. He insists they return to the party. Anna won’t come up with him, but gives him her number. Sam has her promise to wait for him, but when he returns, she has vanished.

Sam goes home, flings his coat to the floor, and collapses on his bed. Anna’s number falls out of his pocket, and Sam’s cat bats at it and loses it under a floor board. Sam’s subsequent attempts to find Anna—seems she crashed the party—fail. In the meantime, Lenny (Jesse Hartman) the crass sound-board operator at his restaurant, regales Sam with stories of a woman he met the night of the party who took him to a boat and fucked him blue. Lenny’s affair continues, though he seems to be growing nervous and sickly. One day, without a word to anyone, Lenny vanishes.

Sam is worried about Lenny, but all of their mutual friends say that vanishing is typical Lenny behavior. Sam is at a carnival and suddenly Anna reappears. She takes him on a Ferris wheel, though he is afraid of heights. She seems to enjoy his discomfort. Afterwards, they go for a walk and stop in Central Park. Anna backs Sam against a monument and jerks him off; as he climaxes, she bites his lip hard and laps up his blood.

On a subsequent date, they walk through Central Park, and observe some feral dogs in an eerie, foggy light. Anna says, “Wolves used to run wild in Central Park." The dogs run after them. Out of view of Sam, Anna stops and puts up her hand. The dogs cower and retreat. The pair return to Sam’s apartment, and the cat takes an instant dislike to Anna. She and Sam make love in an animalistic way. Afterward, they take a bath together. Anna shows him that she had “protection" by putting her hand between her legs and showing him menstrual blood. “That’s not the only thing you need protection from these days," Sam cautions. He doesn't know how right he is, but forgets his concerns in the coming weeks as he becomes physically intoxicated with Anna. “It’s like warm milk is flowing through my veins," he tells his friend Nick (Aaron Beall) about having sex with Anna.

Unfortunately, Sam starts to feel very sick. He becomes convinced Anna is a vampire, telling Nick that he never sees her in the daylight, she never eats or drinks, and, well, she likes sucking his blood. He decides to break up with her and try to make up with Liza. The break-up seems pretty normal, but Sam wakes up one morning to see that his cat is dead. He runs for help to Liza, but has to break into her apartment. She is dead from an apparent vampire attack. He buys a gross of garlic, moves into his father’s apartment, uncovers the mirrors, and digs up a large cross. There, he has his final confrontation with Anna—a violent and sexual scene of hallucinatory splendor.

In Fessenden’s hands, what could have been a straight-up vampire story becomes instead an exercise in ambiguity. All of the clues about what Anna might be are in full view for those steeped in vampire lore. For example, when Anna first comes to Sam’s apartment, she asks him to invite her in—vampires cannot enter the homes of the living without an invitation from their owners. She wears black. She shows up at a memorial Sam gives for his father, a professor of archaeology, with an ancient artifact that has the other archaeologists in the room agog with excitement. She meets Sam on Halloween. She tries to seduce Sam’s former girlfriend Rae (Patricia Coleman), now Nick’s girlfriend—a classic vampire move. She stopped the Central Park dogs, and animals dislike her. We wonder what happened to Lenny, who certainly wouldn’t have skipped out on such a wild sexual relationship.

But it is just as plausible that Sam’s grief, apparent alcoholism, and mental instability could be affecting our view of Anna and his experiences. This film is shown from Sam’s point of view, and he is an unreliable “narrator" because of who he is and what he is going through. Was Liza really dead, or was she just a figment of his imagination? Anna shows up at Rae and Nick’s party in what looks like daylight—or at least twilight—and she wakes up in Sam’s apartment one morning with sun coming through the windows. Rae and Nick show up at Sam’s father’s home in response to Sam’s urgent phone call. We see an image of Sam and Anna, but Anna dissolves; Rae and Nick only see Sam. This could, of course, be some kind of supernatural event, but it seems just as likely that the confrontation was of Sam wrestling with his demons, as embodied by Anna. The setting at the apartment of his father—an absentee careerist Sam hardly knew—makes this seem all the more likely.

Fessenden’s acting is a symphony of nuance, paranoia, sexual ecstasy, and guilt that can only be called a tour de force. His writing is real, fully fleshing all of the characters with believable dialogue no matter how incidental the part. His direction is flawless. This film compares favorably to another superlative exercise in paranoid horror, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. And although I think Fessenden captures the zeitgeist of the 90s perfectly and uses New York City superbly as a gritty gothic backdrop (views of the Twin Towers dominate several scenes in an unintentionally prescient image of a victim awaiting the assault of evil), this is a film that should stand the test of time. It has a great look reminiscent of that essence of urban cinematography, Homicide: Life on the Streets. Fessenden won the Someone to Watch Award at the 1997 Independent Spirit Awards and has gone on to a busy and productive career, primarily as an actor and producer. This is one indie star who deserved to make good. See Habit, and you’ll be a believer, too. l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

The Departed (2006)

By Roderick Heath

John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernardo Bertolucci, Carol Reed, Robert Wise, and George Cukor are some great directors who gained Oscar triumph for films that were, by their standards, second-rate or impersonal works. So, Martin Scorsese finally gaining his statuette for a patchy remake of a slick Hong Kong crime drama seems almost appropriate. The Departed, an American remake of Infernal Affairs (Wu jian dao, 2002), directed by Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak, was greeted by many as a return to form, as if the last 15 years of Scorsese’s career hadn’t been a series of virtuoso, chameleonlike experiments.

The appeal of Hong Kong genre cinema—Infernal Affairs included—is due to its dedication to the Old Hollywood formula: simplicity of technique, broadness of appeal, rigour of story craft, and adherence to archetypal. Infernal Affairs plays like a James Cagney-Humphrey Bogart vehicle shot with the style of a Sony commercial, and was made watchable largely by excellent, yet resolutely unshowy, acting by Tony Leung as Chan Wing Yan, a policeman undercover in a mob, Andy Lau as Lau Kin Ming, his opposite, a gangland mole in the police department, and Eric Tsang’s Hon Sam, a perpetually smiling, calmly malevolent godfather.

These three characters become William “Billy" Costigan Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), and Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), all hailing from the blue-collar, ethnic Irish suburbs of South Boston. What Scorsese and his Bostonian screenwriter William Monahan brought to the material was a sense of local, ethnic, macho culture missing from the original and, for the first hour, a steely sense of social folklore and personal drama, with many unsentimental, amusing observations on class and race in Boston. Scorsese introduces us to the fractured sensibility of the city via news footage of 1960s race riots and the commanding voice of Costello proclaiming “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me!" Costello, kingpin of the Irish mobsters, struts with untouchable confidence. In the late 1980s, he enters a grocery store, makes obscene advances on the owner’s teenage daughter, and recognises the young Colin Sullivan (Conor Donovan) as a boy of potential. (“You do well in school?" “Yeah." “Good. So did I. They call that a paradox.") Soon Costello lectures Colin and other talented tykes in the lore of tough-guy necessities: “When I was growing up, they would say you could become cops or criminals. But what I’m saying is this. When you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?"

Skip forward 15 years or so. Sullivan is in training to join the Massachusetts State Police; so is Costigan, a hot-headed young man whose mother is dying of cancer. Costigan’s uncle was a crime boss, but his father, despite being superlatively tough, rejected the mob and worked his whole life as an airport baggage handler. His mother was from the more genteel end of town. Costigan thus loathes his blue-blood relatives and his criminal kin equally. He is soon picked as a perfect candidate by two senior officers—the fatherly Queenan (Martin Sheen) and the provocative, profane Dignam (Mark Wahlberg)—to become a mole. Dignam digs at Costigan’s psyche and generally takes the endemic Yankee-Irish verbal abuse to new heights of hilarious insult. Underneath this is a rock-solid commitment to the job at hand, and Costigan is offered some “real police work." He is to appear to be kicked off the force and jailed for assault, then seek a way to infiltrate the mob. Simultaneously, Sullivan, smooth and confident, is earmarked for rapid promotion. He joins a squad headed by Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) that is looking to take Costello down.

Each man soon is engaged in a paranoid duel with a mystery doppelganger burrowed into their home organisation and threatening the other’s safety. Each has a quasipaternal relationship with the monstrous Costello. In this way, with its highly Irish flavour, The Departed becomes a modern-dress remake of Gangs of New York; as a father figure like Bill the Butcher, resplendent in his masculine prowess, Costello lolls with multiple women in bed (under a shower of cocaine no less) dealing with an inadequate son who is not what he pretends to be—except here the son is split into good and bad twins. All three figures are characterized with a depth Infernal Affairs avoided—which in the case of Costello doesn’t achieve much. Initially presented as a cool, intelligent, but utterly savage enforcer, rising in the opening as the cynical voice of a tough and fractured city, Costello enjoys deft verbal tussles with Queenan and Dignam and provokes the local clergy with amusingly vicious admonitions about pederasty and breaking one’s vows with pretty nuns. Yet he dissolves into a dull-witted, cartoonish monster—much, but not all, of which is the fault of Nicholson and his latter-day propensity for showboating. Unlike other corrupt surrogate father figures in Scorsese’s films—Bill the Butcher or Paulie or Jimmy the Gent or even Eddie Felson—Costello is required chiefly to be a monstrous foil in a melodrama.

Sullivan, like a classic Scorsese antihero, is motivated by desire to get ahead; for him, being both an exceptionally good policeman and Costello’s agent are complementary ideas. He eyes the gold dome of the city hall with hope and ambition, and buys a swanky flat in sight of it. But inner tension manifests itself in a crippled sexuality. With wit and skill, he romances Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), a state-employed psychiatrist who deals with police trauma and violent offenders. He coaxes her into a relationship that is troubled by his lack of emotional clarity and bouts of impotence. Costello doesn’t help by making sexual threats towards Madolyn if Sullivan fails him. Costigan has to visit Madolyn both to maintain his cover—she is his court-appointed shrink—and as a relief valve for his assailed psyche. Costigan, whilst in her office, is a ball of scarcely compressed rage and desperation, demanding drugs to numb him from his sleepless agitation. Soon he’s yanking off her underwear when she succumbs to a moment of relationship jitters. The idea of two men sharing a life so tightly interwoven that they sleep with the same woman and still don’t know each other’s identity, seems fit for a truly mind-warping psychodrama, but this doesn’t eventuate. Madolyn, despite her spunk and intelligence, doesn’t get to be much more than sideshow in this orgy of Men’s Business.

Costigan deals drugs with his dimwitted cousin Sean (Kevin Corrigan) and gets a reputation for impressive violence. When he beats up two foot soldiers from Mafia-controlled Providence who are trying to enforce protection in Boston, Costello informs him that unless he intercedes, Costigan will undoubtedly end up whacked. In return for leaving the two hoods in a park with bullets in their heads, Costigan is inducted into Costello’s entourage of thick thugs, which includes his intimidating, but soft-spoken lieutenant, Mr. French (Ray Winstone). Costello’s big score for the year is a stolen shipment of microprocessors that he proceeds to sell to some heavies paid by the Chinese government. Ellerby, Queenan, Dignam, and their men uneasily join to arrest them in the act, but Sullivan has given Costello a chance to make his deal (which is a scam anyway) and escape. With both sides realising they have rats in the ranks, an increasingly loopy Costello sniffs out his own men, most specifically new boy Costigan, whilst Sullivan finds himself handed the alienating but highly convenient task of seeking out the mole in the force. Sullivan promptly uses his new powers to have Queenan followed, hoping he’ll be seen meeting with his man in Costello’s mob. This nearly works; when Queenan meets Costigan in an empty building, Sullivan has Costello’s boys descend on the locale. Costigan slips away, and the frustrated thugs throw a tight-lipped Queenan to his death from the window, prompting a gunfight with the cops watching for him.

Most of the entertainment value of The Departed comes from its souped-up cast, all kept on their toes by Scorsese and armed with fierce dialogue by Monahan. For DiCaprio, it’s possibly the best performance of his career; his efforts to be tough in Gangs of New York and mercurial in The Aviator look pallid compared to the lean, mean, half-mad characterization he presents here of a guy with adrenalin so constantly drugging his synapses he can barely tell black from white anymore. Damon, though fine, has an easier time, largely because he’s played variations on this part before—a benign-seeming young man who is actually emotionally closed-off and inherently dangerous, with deep, underlying social and paternal resentments. It’s more impressive for him to play Jason Bourne, who has many of the same characteristics and is still our hero. Many of the interchanges, particularly those involving Wahlberg’s salty mouth provide classic Scorsese macho confrontations, as cops and hoods gouge each other with insults and epithets, jockeying for supremacy of both competence and attitude. For example, Dignam upbraids an incompetent surveillance with “I'm the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy."

Much of this pleasure drains away in the plot-heavy second half, leaving behind the interesting social and character elements. After Queenan’s death, for which Sullivan is blamed, Dignam assaults him and resigns rather than hand over to Sullivan the password for Queenan’s encrypted computer files that contain Costigan’s details. Sullivan sets up Costello in a drug deal; most of the gang perish in the ensuing battle. Sullivan kills Costello himself. This is not so much because, as with Lau Kin Ming in Infernal Affairs, he realises he longs to be a cop and a good guy, but for the less weirdly positive reason that Sullivan feels betrayed on discovering, thanks to Costigan’s digging, that Costello is a federal informant and also is resentful of his brutal father figure. When Costello, coughing up blood, says Sullivan’s been like a son to him, the young man provokes him by suggesting Costello needed a surrogate son because, despite his self-trumpeting sexual capacity, he’s been shooting blanks all these years. The shot Costello takes at him gives Sullivan final cause to fill his abusive patriarch with lead.

Costigan can finally come in from the cold. Waiting in Sullivan’s office, he recognises an envelope he himself had written on containing all the Costello’s crew personal details on Sullivan’s desk. Costigan realises Sullivan is the mole and flees. Sullivan panics and deletes Costigan’s records from Queenan’s computer. Costigan tries to shake Sullivan’s life to pieces by mailing to Madolyn a recording he dug up of Costello and Sullivan talking. Madolyn is, of course, less than ecstatic. Sullivan goes to a meeting arranged with Costigan, but he has no intention of making a deal, intending instead to take him by surprise and arrest him. “Just fucking kill me!" Sullivan begs. “I am killing you." Costigan assures him. But Costigan gets his brains splattered all over the wall of an elevator by another cop, Barrigan (James Budge Dale), who reveals himself as a second Costello plant; he also kills Brown. Sullivan shoots Barrigan in the head, eliminating the last known link of him to Costello. Costigan is given a hero’s funeral after Sullivan reports he and Brown died trying to take in the mole Barrigan.

This almost parodic proliferation of brainless bodies is more or less where Infernal Affairs concludes. Instead of giving us two sequels, however, as followed that film, The Departed delivers a sharp coda in which Sullivan, thinking he has triumphed, continues his everyday life, but returns home from grocery shopping to find Dignam waiting in his apartment, armed with a silenced pistol. Dignam has worked out everything and determined to remedy it in the most direct fashion by shooting a resigned Sullivan in the head. The final shot shows a rat crawling across the rail of Sullivan’s apartment, backgrounded by the gold dome towards which Sullivan had looked with hope.

It’s a symbolic joke that sums up the film’s style—gritty, cynical, and funny, but also facile and broad. The self-parodying trend is extended in Nicholson’s performance as Costello literally sniffs out a rat and in one scene, appears bathed in blood with no explanation, like a Monty Python gag. Scorsese’s stylistic imagination is almost entirely quelled, except for some self-referencing snatches, as when his camera makes a lateral dolly past DiCaprio doing push-ups in his cell, a Cape Fear quote. Apparently all a Scorsese film is, according to some people, is swearing, shootings in the head, and Rolling Stones songs played loud. Scorsese felt empowered to make a good genre film by the legacies of directors like Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, and Don Siegel, and his hand on the helm ensures the film is constructed with some fearsomely good editing and structuring. The experimentation in story-through-montage in Goodfellas, Casino, and Kundun proves useful for commercial purposes in the fleet-footed skill with which The Departed sets up and puts in motion its story. But with its overly long, overly tricky story, and relatively bland style, The Departed is very much a well-done genre film of today, not one of the superbly done genre films of yesterday. In Scorsese’s best works, social context is everything, but in The Departed, it is thoroughly subordinated to constructing a cops-and-robbers drama. Yet, The Departed feels unusually true to the zeitgeist in that it depicts an age where officialdom is infiltrated by the self-serving and disloyal, and the true warriors are isolated, frustrated, and doomed.

The Departed is Scorsese’s most financially successful film to date, and seems set for the foreseeable future to remain his most mainstream-appreciated work. If nothing else, it stands as the most honourably foul-mouthed Best Picture winner ever. And yet it’s a minor film in his career, one of his least fully realised, garbled in theme and story. It surely won’t be the end of Scorsese the creative force; his next two projects on the books The Silence, about Christian missionaries in 17th century Japan, and The Rise of Teddy Roosevelt, to star DiCaprio as energetic patrician populist, promise meaty material and chances to extend Scorsese’s life-long fascination with religion, cultural struggle, and history. l

La Marseillaise (1938)
Director: Jean Renoir

By Marilyn Ferdinand

July 14 was Bastille Day, France’s Fourth of July. The hubby and I keep this holiday because we get to run around wearing berets, drink French wine, and play chop the head off the doll with his homemade guillotine. This year, we took in La Marseillaise, which the University of Chicago’s DOC Films student film society thoughtfully programmed. If you look at films that deal with the French Revolution, you are likely to find biopics such as Marie Antoinette or elitist escapism such as The Scarlet Pimpernel. Nothing wrong with either of these approaches, of course. But only La Marseillaise gives anything close to a comprehensive accounting of this extraordinary period in French history, as well as one that does not swoon over the aristocracy and relegate the real movers of this event—the revolutionaries—to the roles of extras.

Jean Renoir made La Marseillaise to counter Nazi/fascist/royalist sympathies in France in the years just prior to the outbreak of World War II. The film was allied with the Popular Front, a coalition of leftist political parties and trade unions in France, and received some of its funding from donations from the public. Given these alliances, it’s entirely understandable that the more polemical parts of the film would skew in favor of the People. But any film named La Marseillaise must first and foremost be seen as the work of a French patriot who chose to close the film with the line, “Vive la liberté."

The cast is grouped into five categories in the opening credits: The Court, The Civil Authorities and The Military, The Aristocrats, The Marseilles Townspeople, and The People. The film itself is roughly organized into five chapters in this same order, and spans the years 1789, when a constitutional monarchy was established, through 1792, when the king and his followers tried to stage a counterrevolution that eventually resulted in the complete overthrow of the monarchy. The events are placed in context by showing the self-indulgent, food-loving Louix XVI (the director's brother Pierre Renoir) receiving news of the fall of the Bastille while he lounges in bed eating a sumptuous “snack." He asks whether this means the country is in revolt. No, says his emissary, La Rochefoucauld (William Aguet), it means revolution!

The next scene (The Court) takes place in the south of France, near the town of Marseilles. An older man, nicknamed Cabri (Édouard Delmont), observes a flock of pigeons pecking at the ground. He places a stone in his slingshot, swings the rudimentary weapon overhead, and lets fly the stone. The pigeons scatter as Cabri runs to claim his quarry. Unfortunately, he is poaching on the land, and is caught. His trial pits one aristocrat, who is lenient with poachers because he thinks the punishment (the galleys) does not fit the crime, against another, who believes in upholding the law to prevent the lower classes from extending their privileges. While the two argue, one of his fellow prisoners frees Cabri's tied hands, and he escapes out a window and hides in the mountains. There he meets two men, also on the run for their political agitation on the docks of Marseilles—the mischevious Bomier (Edmond Ardisson) and the gentlemanly Arnaud (Andrex). Cabri encourages them to continue their fight for future generations of French commoners. The young men return to Marseilles on the advice of a priest who has been supplying them with provisions to take the cause of the People to the king himself.

Moving to The Civil Authorities and The Military, a gathering of Marseillais gather to discuss their options when they receive word that the king is maintaining his right of veto over the nation's constitution and plans to use military force to quell rebellion. A rousing speech by Arnaud encourages the townspeople to gather and take the forts surrounding Marseilles. When they mount a primitive attack using a Trojan Horse scheme, they meet no resistance. Arnaud meets the commander of the fortress, St. Laurent (Aimé Clariond), and explains to him the meaning of nation.

During The Aristocrats section, we meet St. Laurent again, an exile in Germany, who explains to his fellow aristocrats that this fellow, Arnaud, gave him a glimpse of France's future. His fellow aristocrats dismiss him and hail the Prussian Army, set to march on the French commoners and stabilize Louis' reign.

Fighting against the Prussians is intense. Eventually, sections from all over France choose delegations to go to Paris to petition the king and the National Assembly to uphold the accomplishments of the Revolution, or force their acquiescence, if necessary. The Marseilles Townspeople segment shows enlistment in the section at the Marseilles Jacobin Club, where Bomier hears a man singing a song in the next room with which he is unfamiliar. It supposedly came from fighters in the Rhineland. Bomier thinks it betrays the rules of harmony and that it will never catch on. In fact, before the delegation from Marseilles leaves for Paris, the song is on everyone's lips, including Bomier's. As they move through the country on foot and eventually arrive in Paris, the song goes with them—and becomes "La Marseillaise" in their honor. Soon, events move rapidly to the final showdown of the king's defenders at the Tuileries palace and The People. The film ends with French citizens fighting for their freedom against the Prussians in the Battle of Valmy, one nation of citizens having defeated the tyranny of the monarchy.

There is a fair amount of speechifying in this film, but much of it is really wonderful. Listen to this woman denounce the crimes of the king, queen, and National Assembly in a truly charismatic performance, though I'm not certain who played the role. There are also a good many comic moments, courtesy mainly of the portly Javel (Paul Dullac), whose intense dislike and distrust of the clergy make for some good moments. Bomier, too, has a boyish charm to match his Prince Valiant hairstyle. He leaves his tearful mother's side to go to Paris as an adventurer, not as a mature man with a strong sense of duty. Our hearts go with him.

The film has a neorealist atmosphere. Although it is set in the past, the street scenes look very alive and were, no doubt, shot on location. The toppled Bastille, a pile of rubble on which the children of Paris play, is quite a sight. The Champs-Élysées, a fashionable boulevard even then, is a mere dirt road. The aristocrats jeer at the citizens marching to Paris' Jacobin Club in a realistic approximation of protesters on either side of an issue shouting at each other in the streets. The battles are prepared properly, with citizen soldiers crudely armed and moving by stealth. Extras die rather dramatically, but the combat is believably chaotic and thrilling to watch.

Pierre Renoir (not shown above) is rather sympathetic as Louis, seemingly bewildered by events swirling around him, not truly a harsh man but rather a soft and simple one who would have been content to set the gourmet tastes of the country rather than its policies. Lise Delamare as Marie Antoinette is seen as being the ruthless brains behind the throne, perhaps an understandable characterization given France's troubles ahead with Germany and Austria in the coming war. She seems very Germanic, despite her sumptuous French gowns (designed by Coco Chanel). All she is missing is a thin moustache to twist between her dainty, dastardly fingers.

La Marseillaise lacks the irony that make Renoir's Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game true masterpieces, and its pacing is a bit uneven. Nonetheless, Renoir manages to create a feeling that one is actually witnessing the French Revolution. Because this film was intended for a French audience, details that would illuminate some of the actions for audiences in other countries are not explained. No matter. This movie communicates quite a lot. Vive la Revolution et vive Renoir! l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

The Aviator (2004)

By Roderick Heath

The myth of Howard Hughes in his later years, a gnarled weirdo cocooned in a hotel room, casts such a powerful spell that The Aviator’s presentation of the magnate in his youth as a swashbuckling entrepreneur, airman, and lover, was almost bewildering. Inevitable accusations of soft-pedaling dogged it. Indeed, whilst the film is grazing in contemplating genius dissolved by madness, it avoids Hughes the obnoxious control freak, the rabid anti-Communist, anti-unionist, and anti-Semite. The younger Martin Scorsese would have loved tearing apart such a figure and his place in society. But The Aviator was a pet project of star Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off Gangs of New York. The appeal for him was a different Hughes legend, that of the upstart Texan who marched into Hollywood, spent a fortune to make a fortune, and set about doing all the sorts of things we’d like to do if we were young and rich—fly fast planes, make love to gorgeous movie stars, fearlessly boss around money men and politicians, and look good doing it. Michael Mann was originally going to direct, but with Mann tired of doing biopics, DiCaprio offered the reins to Scorsese. The director and DiCaprio’s visions matched in that The Aviator offered Scorsese an opportunity to evoke an era of glamour, electric with cultural action.

Inspired by his dark side and madness, many had tried to make a proper film about Hughes, including Max Ophuls with his 1947 noir Caught, Jonathan Demme and his Melvin and Howard (1980), and even the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever (1971). DiCaprio, screenwriter John Logan, and Scorsese succeeded by realizing that the best way to sell Hughes’ story was primarily as a giddy adventure, keeping one step ahead of Hughes’ assault from within and without. Hughes and the people who jostle in his world, like Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), Errol Flynn (Jude Law), Hughes’ pet what-the-hell plane designer Glenn Odekirk (Matt Ross), are infinitely much more vivid and interesting than the dullards who populate today’s celebrity and business worlds—including the actors who play them.

The Aviator follows Hughes’ career beginning in the late 1920s, when he set up the self-financed production of the WWI aviation epic Hell’s Angels, a production that dragged on for years, shifted from a silent to sound production, introduced Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani), and ended up costing so much it didn’t make its money back on its first release. Hughes is swiftly introduced as a high-powered young man glad to have finally shoved off the mantle of “junior" with his parents’ deaths (perhaps also signaling DiCaprio’s determination to escape his post-Titanic boy heart-throb status). He’s going to spend his fortune from a company that manufactures drill bits as he wants. Hughes’ independent production is anathema to the Hollywood of the time; Hollywood titan Louis B. Mayer (David DiSantis) mocks his production methods and advises him to go home. At one point, Hughes keeps his fleet of aircraft—the largest private air force in the world—on the ground for months, waiting for clouds, the only way he can communicate to the camera lens, via relative motion, the speed of the aircraft. He hires a UCLA meteorology professor, Fitz (Ian Holm) just to keep an eye out for them. When they finally come, Hughes and his fleet cavort through the clouds to the strains of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" in the first of the film’s brilliant aerial scenes.

When Hell’s Angels opens, its lavish premiere and rapturous reception make Hughes a star. But cracks are already beginning to show. In a vintage show of Scorsese’s technique, Hughes’ march along the red carpet with Harlow on his arm is a nightmarish experience, as flashbulbs explode (a Scorsese fetish) and shatter under his shoes, the crowd screams deafeningly, a woman hurls herself in front of him, and Hughes, deaf in one ear, can barely hear an interviewer’s questions. His brow, slick with pomade and jazz-baby style, wrinkles with fierce concentration of will just to make it through. It’s the first sign that though he loves courting adulation, it assaults his fragile senses.

Nevertheless Hughes launches a career as a Hollywood producer and playboy. He gets a date with Hepburn using the direct approach—he flies a seaplane to a beachfront set where she’s working with George Cukor and Cary Grant and asks her for a game of golf. In the course of this contest, however, she quickly outpaces him, with her mannish gait and motor-mouthed confidence: “Now we both know the sordid truth: I sweat, and you’re deaf. Aren’t we a fine pair of misfits?" Although their affair is possibly not much more than a fling, The Aviator pitches the Hughes/Hepburn romance as the centerpiece of his romantic life largely for the chance to explore oppositions—Hughes’ Texan industrialist rough edges against Hepburn’s Brahmin poise. Blanchett’s sharp, if initially broad, performance (the fifth in a Scorsese film to get an Oscar) aids a portrait in of Hepburn patterned after her signature character, Tracy Lord, in The Philadelphia Story—an apt characterization as Lord was built around Hepburn’s persona. Hughes snares Hepburn by treating her to uncommon pleasures, like flying her by her night over Los Angeles, and keeps her dazzled with his energy. She quickly deduces Hughes’ underlying fragility, and warns him: “Howard, we’re not like everyone else. Too many acute angles. Too many eccentricities. We have to be very careful not to let people in, or they’ll make us into freaks."

Hepburn comes from an arty old-money Connecticut family (her ex-husband lives with them). When she takes Howard to meet them, his true pride in his work and talents is swamped by familial blather and pseudo-intellectual talk. When Hepburn’s mother (Frances Conroy) casually says, “We don’t care about money here," Hughes irritably ripostes, “That’s because you’ve always had it!" This places Hughes firmly among Scorsese’s socially resentful heroes. Though rich from birth, Hughes sees himself as combating “high-hat Ivy League assholes" and corporate giants like Pan-Am with earthy grit and old-school American can-do. His mix of neurosis and down-home intransigence spectacularly annoys Hepburn. One fight between the combustible pair results in her heading to a film set in tears, where Spencer Tracy (Kevin O’Rourke) asks her what’s wrong. “There’s too much Howard Hughes in Howard Hughes." she sniffs, focusing on the actor who will soon fill her life instead. When she officially busts up with Hughes, he is snaky: “Don’t you ever talk down to me! You’re a movie star, nothing more!" Yet later he will intervene when a photographer (Willem Dafoe) plans to publish pictures of her and Tracy, who is still married to someone else.

Simultaneously, Hughes is conquering aviation. He achieves tremendous fame when he flies around the world. He and Odekirk work on a racing plane, which eventually becomes the fastest aircraft in the world. The H-1, which, when he flies it, breaks a speed record before running out of petrol, forcing Hughes to crash-land in a beet field; Hepburn at first mistakes the juice caking his legs for blood. Soon he’s taking over TWA and competing with Pan Am’s lethally smooth boss Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) for the future of commercial aviation. Key to his efforts is the new fleet of Lockheed Constellations. He also helps the U.S. Army’s war effort by producing the spy-plane XF-11 (“My Buck Rogers ship") and his behemoth transport plane, the H-4 Hercules, also called the Spruce Goose. Such efforts anticipated today’s tactical and commercial airships, but were pursued with wild abandon; Hughes orders his frazzled manager Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) to hock assets, ignore shareholders, and generally spend fortunes on his latest wild idea. Hughes approaches business like a sport, delighting in defying belief and beating competitors, even as it slowly tears his mental muscle to ribbons.

Scorsese goes to town in evoking the thrill of Old Hollywood, as when Hughes and Hepburn visit the Cocoanut Grove, playground of Hollywood’s A listers, where dancing girls ride on swings and gloriously corny 1930s-style singers perform. Hughes and Hepburn are pestered by Errol Flynn (Law), who picks a pea off Hughes’ plate, preventing Hughes from being able to touch his meal, before Flynn gets in a fight with a man who calls him a “Limey bastard." “I’m a Tasmanian bastard, you ignorant prick!" Flynn responds before ironing him out. It’s the most entertaining scene of Law’s career. The film’s visuals reproduce the effect of two-strip Technicolor, which Hughes used to shoot some of Hell’s Angels. He moves to the ripeness of three-strip Technicolor, making for gloriously weird effects, as the peas on Hughes’ plate appear turquoise. DP Robert Richardson won an Oscar for the film, though these effects were done post-production. Oddly enough, considering cinephilia has powered so much of his oeuvre, The Aviator is also the first Scorsese film to portray film-making and the movie world.

Hughes’ mental state begins to deteriorate after Hepburn leaves him. He incinerates all his clothes and searches for a new starlet to mould, interviewing ingénue Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner) at night in a hangar. Hughes is seated in forbidding shadow, foreshadowing his ultimate retreat into monstrous isolation. When she tells him she’s 15, he mutters “Holy Mary, mother of God." This doesn’t stop him romancing her and Ava Gardner simultaneously. Gardner, fiercely independent, resists Hughes’ romantic style of buying a girl, and mocks his personal cheapness. When Hughes takes Gardner out to dinner, a furiously jealous Domergue crashes her car into theirs—if only she’d ever been that spunky in her acting career! Later Gardner physically assaults Hughes and drives him from her house when she finds he’s been bugging her place: “What do you mean, all the microphones?"

Hughes finally cracks in the wake of a terrible crash—a tremendously powerful cinematic sequence in which the XF-11 falls from the sky and crashes into suburban Los Angeles. Hughes is almost pulped, and spends months recovering. His ambition for TWA to compete with Pan Am in post-War transatlantic trade results in Trippe calling in favors from bought-and-paid-for Maine senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), who proceeds to hound Hughes through several Senate committees and reinforce Pan Am’s monopoly with legislature. The Civil Aviation Board grounds all Constellations after a crash, threatening TWA’s future. Treating Howard to a luncheon in his New York hotel room, Brewster presses him to sell out to Pan Am, before he spills the dirt he’s collected and brands him a war profiteer for money Hughes made on the XF-11 and the Hercules. Brewster coolly assumes the mantle of government authority: “We just beat Germany and Japan. Who the hell are you?" The combined effect of all this drives Hughes to lock himself in his office for months, spiraling into a prolonged obsessive-compulsive fit.

Although efficient, Logan’s script is one of the most standard and Hollywoodish of Scorsese’s films. And yet, under the candy-colored gloss of The Aviator is an acute portrait a man in whom genius and mental illness were intricately linked. Hughes’ business in the 1960s reflected his own paranoia, as he made listening devices for the government. The Aviator opens with a warm yet creepy scene from Hughes’ childhood, where his beautiful mother Allene (Amy Sloan) washes him down at a disturbingly advanced age in a tin bath, making him spell the word “Q-u-a-r-a-n-t-i-n-e" and harping on about outbreaks of illness. From this point of textbook Freud onwards, Hughes’ obsessions are delicately entwined, especially his sensual thrills. The erotic satisfaction Hughes gains in flying—he needs to fly in front of clouds that look like “giant breasts full of milk," and caresses the skin of the H-4 like that of a woman—matches his fixation on large breasts and his desire for cleanliness. He swills milk, both because of its maternal and sexual associations and because it’s reliably disease-free. He alternates design discussions over the Hercules with blueprints, indiscernibly different, of the cantilever bra he’s designed to show off Jane Russell’s boobs when he directed her in her debut film, The Outlaw. Hughes’ eroticisation of technology predicts a strong tendency today in everything from advertising to pornography. He can swap bodily fluids with all the women in the universe, yet still fear touching a steering wheel because of the association he has between sleek curves and cleanliness. “I want her clean, Odie!" he commands in reducing the wind resistance of rivets on the H-1.

Scorsese reveals Hughes’ brain as working like a supercomputer in one scene when he refocuses his attention to the Hercules’ design; Scorsese inserts quick-scrolling blueprint images. Shortly thereafter, Hughes fixates on a sweeper, his simple acts imbued with alien quality, establishing a direct link in film-making between Hughes’ mind working precisely and Hughes’ mind working faultily. His commitment to detail underpins both his success and his ultimate collapse into obsessive-compulsive disorder. Increasingly, Hughes deals with moments of romantic or business trial by retreating to the bathroom and furiously scrubbing his hands with a cake of soap he keeps in a tin. In a grimly funny scene, after such a cleansing session following a run-in with Trippe, he realizes he can’t touch the doorknob to leave the washroom.

Once Howard locks himself in his office, his disease runs riot as he endlessly repeats phrases, strips naked, and fills up precisely placed milk bottles with his own urine. He watches his films in endless loops, Jane Russell’s lips constantly zooming up like an offering of sexual annihilation, or violence from Hell’s Angels projected on his body evokes his mental and physical agony. Hepburn’s entreaties at his door are ineffectual. He receives a provocative visit by Trippe, promising his destruction in public hearings Brewster is holding. Trippe even blows smoke through the keyhole to irritate him. Hughes soon gathers himself together enough to leave his office, and lets Ava clean him up. Hughes proceeds to reduce Brewster’s interrogation to comedy, turning all of his questions back and effectively answering all charges. He proceeds to give the Hercules its first and only flight, managing to coax the mammoth plane whose size and shape predicts the airbus, into the air. It’s a rousing moment, but Scorsese delivers a mean sucker punch of an anticlimax, as Howard, raving to Gardner, Dietrich, and Odekirk about the coming jet age, spies white-gloved handlers who his brain processes once again as alien, and begins repeating the line, “The way of the future," over and over. And over and over. Escorted into a toilet to get a grip, Howard gives up trying to control it, staring at himself in the mirror, still repeating “The way of the future"—a phrase that winds together his vision of progress and an acceptance, even an embrace, of his fate, retreating into solitary, self-obsessed dissolution.

The portrait of a man who wins everything but loses to himself is heartland Scorsese territory, but The Aviator lacks the lacerating weirdness of Raging Bull or his other portraits of humans who stake their souls on victory in the rat race. That’s not to condemn the film, which, though Scorsese’s brilliance comes in short bursts rather than rapid fire, moves sleekly and with huge entertainment value for nearly three hours. The film is much like DiCaprio’s performance at the center; dynamic, sustained, delightful, but lacking the manly muscle and loopy, personal force of its precursors. l

Excalibur (1981)
Director: John Boorman

By Marilyn Ferdinand

How can I write a review of Excalibur? What would Sir Lancelot have done? Well, in Excalibur, he waits until the very last moment to champion the honor of his true love and King Arthur’s queen, Guenevere, against a charge of adultery—knowing full well that he and she are guilty of the crime. Er, let’s go instead with a quote from the big man himself, Arthur: “Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be."

I have wanted to think noble thoughts about Excalibur ever since I found myself renting it about once every couple of months and then finally deciding it would cost less to buy it. I still have my VHS copy, but find I can’t seem to justify getting the DVD. This is what led me to believe that maybe this movie isn’t all I thought it was cracked up to be. This is also when I found out that when it comes to indulging in blood, magic, unholy lust, sappy chivalric customs and romance, and lots and lots of shiny, clashing metal, Excalibur is just my cuppa.

In some defense of my tastes, who isn’t a sucker for the legend of Arthur! The brotherhood of the Round Table, the magic of Merlin, the sword with a name, the intrigues of Morgana, the quest for the Holy Grail, and the many battles to defend a nascent kingdom have seen many adaptations on stage, screen, and television. Medieval dramas of every stripe have been de rigueur since, well, medieval times and show no signs of going out of date, if the #10, #15, and #25 rankings of the three Lord of the Rings films on IMDb’s fan-selected top 250 films list are any indication.

Excalibur is a pretty faithful retelling of Thomas Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur. The banquet at which Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne, looking uncharacteristically barbaric) and Gorlois, Duke of Tintagel, are celebrating an alliance forged in battle begins the epic. Uther sees the Duke’s wife Igrayne (Katrine Boorman, daughter of the director) dance and, filled with lust, goes to his personal wizard Merlin (Nicol Williamson) to arrange to have that lust satisfied. Merlin cautions against this, but gives Uther the means to have Igrayne if Uther promises to give up the fruit of their union to him.

In a wonderfully low-tech scene, he transforms Uther’s features into those of the Duke’s and makes a mist separating Uther from the Duke’s castle solid enough for his horse to cross. There, Igrayne greets her "husband," and Uther more or less rapes her in a pretty perverted scene, considering the director is filming his own daughter. Later that night, the real Duke is brought home dead, having been impaled in a scene of glorious gruesomeness on a raft of spears. Little Morgana (Barbara Byrne) senses the moment of her real father’s death and knows at once the impostor is not her father. From that moment on, she pits herself against Uther, who marries Igrayne, and her new half-brother Arthur. Alas, her revenge will not come for many years—Merlin shows up to claim the baby Arthur, with Uther begging and Igrayne screaming; I always imagine Igrayne braining Uther with a cast-iron skillet after this scene (“You promised WHAT?). Unhinged, Uther drives Excalibur into a rock. Who wouldn’t?

Fast-forward to Arthur as a young man. As played by Nigel Terry, he’s a little like a rustic Jimmy Stewart. Uther is dead, and knights have been coming by to try to pull the sword from the stone to prove they are the rightful heir to the throne. (I guess Morgana wasn’t good enough for the title Uther stole, providing yet another reason for her to hate her half-brother—he’s a man!) One day, Arthur’s brother finds himself in a fight. Arthur runs into the woods to fetch their father. On the way, he happens to see Excalibur, though how he doesn’t know what it is is a mystery. He grabs it up and runs to his brother’s side. Wow, just like that! He learns that his father and brother are not his blood kin, and that he is actually the son of Uther and Igrayne. Of course, the knights who are older and tested in battle can’t believe their own eyes and refuse to accept the strapling Arthur as their king. Eventually, in battle, he bests his most vocal opponents, and they kneel to him. Happily, he accepts them and declares that they shall always meet in a circle. He will build a Round Table for this purpose, marry, and provide the kingdom with an heir. Cool!

Of course, there’s the meet-cute of Arthur and Lancelot (hunky Nicholas Clay, whose naked butt in this movie is worth the price of admission) in which Lancelot gives the haughty Arthur a right drubbing. So angry does Arthur become that he breaks Excalibur. Merlin suddenly appears (though not in a soap bubble like the Good Witch of the North) aghast, “You have broken what could not be broken! Now, hope is broken." Fortunately, the Lady of the Lake (Telsche Boorman, more nepotism in casting) knows the rambunctious king needed to learn not to let instant success go to his head, and after he humbles himself, she returns the mended sword to him.

Arthur chooses Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi—what ever happened to her?) the daughter of his friend Leondegrance (pre-Picard Patrick Stewart) to wed. He sends his right-hand knight, Lancelot, to fetch her to the wedding. Their eyes meet. Their hearts pound. That’s it. Adultery in their hearts, and she’s not even married yet. Later, they’re found out, and all the great times in Camelot come to an end. The kingdom is plunged into darkness, and Merlin checks out of the world by becoming a stalagmite. “It is a time for men." What a wuss! He just doesn’t want to risk getting put on one of those round crucifixes and having his eyes pecked out by a mechanical raven. Fortunately, the squire-turned-knight Perceval (Paul Geoffrey) saves the day and learns that the king and the land are one. For his trouble, Richard Wagner writes an opera about him. That’ll show him. (In fact, Wagner's music for the Ring Cycle provides the heroically over-the-top score for this entire film.)

Unfortunately, Morgana (Helen Mirren) has learned all the dark arts and then some from Merlin. She uses them to bewitch Arthur in a scene of scandalously sexy incest. (I’m sure Liam Neeson, who played Sir Gawain, thought fishnet would never look so good again; he and "The Queen" had a scorching affair for years.) Morgana becomes pregnant with Arthur’s son, the dreaded, and sort of gay, Mordred. The grown Mordred (Robert Addie) gets one of the coolest suits of gold armor that magic can conjure. Morgana has nurtured a hate of his father in Mordred, and one day the lad calls him out. A bloody, bloody battle ensues. I especially like when father and son impale each other and die sort of near each other’s arms. It’s a touching moment. It tops Mordred choking his strangely young-looking mother to death after she spews a valley full of mist from her mouth—unwittingly ensuring Mordred’s defeat in battle—and turns into a 100-year-old hag.

Naturally, I’ve touched on the film in only the lightest of ways. There is so much more to it, primarily created by what can only be called the most eccentric performance on film, by Nicol Williamson. He seems like Hermione Gingold on cocaine and could certainly have influenced Jeremy Brett’s bizarrely compelling portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. Merlin is very comical in this film, not something I had ever associated with this mythic creature before, like a trickster character from Native American and other folklore sources. He’s not even a little bit scary. Perhaps this is as it should be—showing the natural world of magic weakening and giving way to the pragmatic concerns of human beings. Maybe it reflects what Merlin himself says, "It is a lonely life, the way of the necromancer... oh, yes. Lacrimae Mundi—the tears of the world." That line always makes me laugh (sorry).

Despite Williamson’s scenery gourmandizing and the gleeful gore of the saga, the power of this myth remains. My mother, not exactly a fan of blood and blades, found the tape and watched it without me. She commented on how distasteful the violence was, but said she couldn’t take her eyes off of it. There’s magic in this story and, by today’s standards, even in the cheesy-looking sets and effects. It’s great fun to see so many of today’s finest and most respected actors in their early days, attacking these juicy parts with energy. Terry is not an especially charismatic Arthur, but he is sincere and believable as a person who wants the best for his country. Maybe Excalibur isn’t such a guilty pleasure after all. l

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

Gangs of New York (2002)

By Roderick Heath

“The blood stays on the blade," Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) tells his young son Amsterdam (Cian McCormack) as he slices his cheek with a razor blade, inducting the boy into a creed of macho lore. Priest shows him a medal of St. Michael: “He cast Satan out of paradise!" Father, holding an iron Celtic cross, leads Son and a gathering army of jostling tribes—Celts, Africans, sheer barbarians—out of an underground labyrinth. These warriors inclue Hellcat Maggie (Cara Seymour), who’s filed her teeth into fangs, McGloin (Gary Lewis), and Happy Jack (John C. Reilly). Their rise to the day passes through eons; from Neolithic depths to the medieval squalor of the Old Bakery building, used as a home by immigrant families. Pounding on the soundtrack is a “shammy," a military march with a syncopated tin whistle, a Civil War style that eventually mutated into jazz. Like a negotiation between Agamemnon and Achilles, Priest briefly discusses payment to take part in battle with Walter “Monk" McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), who wields a club riddled with notches for men he’s laid low, before Monk kicks the doors open on the snow-crusted amphitheatre of Paradise Square, the Five Points, New York, 1846.

This great opening sequence lays out the scheme of Gangs of New York, a devolution of American society and a study of the nature of myth—the way cultural memory is transmitted through legendary narrative. Its plot evokes The Iliad, Gilgamesh, Saul and David, and many other legends, tied to a factual work of social history. The germ for the film was planted when, as a boy, Scorsese heard a piece of Catholic New York folklore, of communal resistance to an attempt by Protestant Nativists to burn down a Catholic Church. Scorsese re-encountered the tale in the book The Gangs of New York by demimonde historian Herbert Asbury, published in the 1920s. For 31 years, Scorsese tried to turn that work into a movie. He finally got the money from Miramax, shooting the film on detailed sets at Cinecitta, home of the Italian film industry and of so many epic film productions. The film was supposed to do for Scorsese what Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan did for Steven Spielberg—garner him an Oscar, which, of course, it did not. Scorsese wanted The Clash to act in the film when he tried to make it in the 1970s, and heavy doses of such punk spirit, period cynicism, and black comedy drive the film, rather than an easily laudable “quality" aesthetic.

It’s loosely based on the true tale of Bill Poole, a Nativist-affiliated enforcer, probably assassinated by the son of an Irish immigrant he had murdered. Scorsese had screenwriter Jay Cocks pen a script, refined later by Kenneth Lonnergan and Steven Zaillian, telling the story of William “Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), who leads the Federation of American Natives to challenge Priest’s Dead Rabbits and allied Irish gangs in a fateful rumble. Bill claims the mantle of his father, killed in the War of 1812, as a defender of his nation from “the foreign hordes." The gang members, outcasts and victims of Empires, drag power out of the earth and wield it fearlessly in this recklessly created New World. Their titanic street battle is a whirl of cracked skulls, torn mouths, gouged eyes, bitten-off ears. Bill kills Priest, whom he declares an honourable enemy. He outlaws the Dead Rabbits and orders Amsterdam committed to Hellgate Asylum.

When Amsterdam has grown into the glowering adult form of Leonardo DiCaprio, he is released from Hellgate, given a bible by the warden, and told “God has forgiven you. Now you must learn to forgive." Amsterdam throws the bible off a bridge as he walks back to Manhattan, and retrieves from the now-emptied caves below the Old Bakery his St. Michael medal and a knife of his father’s. He is assaulted by, but easily beats, Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas) and Negro pal Jimmy Spoils (Larry Gilliard Jr.); Johnny had, as a boy, aided Amsterdam in his attempt to escape the Butcher’s men, and Amsterdam falls in with their gang of petty thieves. Monk now runs a barber shop. Amsterdam learns that Bill, in an annual act of political theatre, commemorates his killing of Priest by drinking a flaming glass of alcohol before his assembled court. Amsterdam determines to kill him in the act.

New York is kaleidoscopic with nationalities, brisk patricians and vigorous plebeians, a seething society trying to cut out its two cancers—slavery and poverty—before they become terminal. The Civil War is hurting. Irish immigrants streaming off the boats are shoved into uniforms and shipped off to fight the Confederates. The first draft in U.S. history is about to begin, spreading discontent amongst the poor who can’t cough up the $300 to be exempted. Bill likes to throw knives at Lincoln’s posters as his bully boys, who now include McGloin, assault Negro freemen. McGloin typifies the racism of Irish immigrants, displacing the loathing directed at them onto blacks.

Presiding over the city is the Tammany Hall boss William Tweed (Jim Broadbent). He governs through bribes, vote-cramming, dirt-dealing, and back-stabbing. Tweed makes overtures to Bill, wanting him to aid the Tammany machine with muscle work, clobbering political opponents and mustering the voting power of the slums. “The appearance of the law must be upheld," Tweed asserts, “especially when it’s being broken." Bill perceives himself the emperor of the underclass, his strength, the streets that converge on Paradise Square: “Each of the Five Points is a finger. When I close my hand it becomes a fist. And, if I wish, I can turn it against you." Public utilities are a tool of such politics; volunteer fire services in the town war with each other and rob burning houses. A brawl between a team sponsored by Tweed and another gives Amsterdam and Johnny an opportunity to brave the flames and get the loot. From the window, Amsterdam catches sight of Bill riding on a fire engine to Tweed’s aid, bathed in demonic red with Melvillian portent. Amsterdam and his gang must share spoils with Happy Jack, now an extremely corrupt policeman, and with Bill, whom Amsterdam and Johnny pay off at Satan’s Circus, the saloon he holds court in. They’re treated to the sight of Bill stabbing a man he plays cards with in the hand for making small bets, then assuring the boys, “Come closer, I won’t bite."

Bill gives the lads a lucrative score, a Portuguese ship in the harbour. They find the crew’s been massacred by another gang. Amsterdam steals away the captain’s body and sells it to science. Bill congratulates them: “They made the Police Gazette, a periodical of note." He soon finds himself drawn close by Bill, a trusted lieutenant for his well-proven smarts and toughness; Bill clearly fancies Amsterdam as a surrogate son. Bill, who really is a butcher by trade, educates him in the finer points of knife fighting on a pig carcass. The Natives attend a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which an actor playing Lincoln preaches harmony. They pelt the actors with missiles. In the ruckus, an assassin tries to shoot Bill. Amsterdam reflexively tackles and kills him, and Bill’s wound is slight. Amsterdam is stricken over his confused impulses, and Monk, having recognised him, questions him pointedly about his intentions.

The link between the Democratic Party and the Irish that eventually produced JFK begins here, when Bill, having rejected entirely the idea of courting the immigrant vote (“If only I had the guns, Mr. Tweed, I'd shoot each and every one of them before they set foot on American soil!") forces Tweed to reject the Nativists and embrace the Irish. “You’re turning your back on the future," Tweed warns. “Not our future," Bill replies.

The soundtrack jostles with folk music, Irish shanties, African laments, field-hand chorals, and Chinese melodies, all of which one day will be compressed into American pop music. Scorsese’s camera laps up the antique, pimped-up styling the gangs affect, eyeing the roots not just for his own films’ social studies, but for the popularity of gangster and Western films, punk music and gangsta rap, in the power-defying showiness of these criminal-warriors. The film mixes physical realism and grand theatricality. Scorsese references Visconti again—he frames advancing soldiers after the Battle of Palermo sequence of The Leopard. His staging of fights and baroque sense of period style evokes Sergio Leone, John Ford, even Samuel Fuller, as he has singers walking through shots, for example, when Finbar Furey, as a publican, plays to the camera like a congenial host to a patron, sings the period ditty “New York Girls" as we explore Satan’s Circus. Pitch-black comedy gives the film idiosyncratic punch, like in a public execution where the bailiff disgustedly announces crimes that includes “sodomy!" or when Bill pretends to cry over the corpse of a “poor, defenceless little rabbit"

Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), a pickpocket, comes into Amsterdam’s life. Rescued off the street as a child by Bill, she became his lover before having an abortion that left her scarred, something Bill can’t abide. Amsterdam and Jenny’s encounters are fraught with mutual loathing and sexual attraction, which comes to a head when she steals his St. Michael medal, prompting him to trail her across town to get it back. When churchmen who are rebuilding the Old Bakery as a Church hold a dance, everyone flocks there, including transvestite prostitutes who solicit incredulity from the ecumenical Minister (Alec McCowen). Johnny, severely smitten by Jenny, is heartbroken when she chooses to dance with Amsterdam. Their later attempt to rut on the docks ceases abruptly when Amsterdam realises she is “the Butcher’s leavings."

After the assassination attempt, Bill and Amsterdam retreat to a brothel; Jenny tends Bill’s wound as the men lounge with bare-breasted prostitutes and smoke opium. Bill watches Jimmy Spoils dancing to a jig, and comments, “An Irish ditty mixed with the rhythms of a dark continent, stirred to a fine American mess." Despite himself, Bill is aware of what is happening to his country. He beds three women, each a different colour, whilst Jenny and Amsterdam have a noisy quarrel (“Is there anyone in the Five Points you haven’t fucked?" “Yes, you!") that turns into vigorous sex. Amsterdam awakens in the morning to Bill, seated by his bed with Old Glory wrapped around his shoulders, recalling how Priest had given him a severe beating in their first fight. Bill punished himself for flinching from Priest by plucking out his left eye (he now sports a glass one with an bald eagle painted in place of the pupil) before returning strong enough to kill Priest. At 47, Bill says he has kept power by “the spectacle of fearsome acts."

Jealous, Johnny spills Amsterdam’s ancestry to Bill. When, finally, Amsterdam throws a knife at Bill as he’s drinking his fiery liquor, Bill parries the blade with dazzling skill and plants his own in Amsterdam’s belly. He offers a spectacle of murder for the baying crowd, but, respecting the chance Priest gave him, restrains his abuse of Amsterdam to beating him terribly and scarring him. Jenny spirits Amsterdam away to the caverns, where he spends months recuperating. He is visited by Monk, who gives him what he secretly preserved, Priest’s straight-razor, his symbol of blood responsibility. Monk expects to answer to God for his killings, as opposed to Bill, who considers himself a divine wind. “Your father tried to carve out a corner of this land for his tribe," he recalls. “That was him, that was his Dead Rabbits."

Amsterdam re-emerges from underground and hangs slaughtered rabbits in the square to announce his return and the return of his father’s ideals. Soon Amsterdam draws all his friends back, hiding in and defending the Catholic Church’s construction. They embrace their religion as well as a mission to build a safe Irish enclave. When McGloin visits to pray, he’s outraged that Jimmy Spoils is present; when he squeals about it to the church’s long-haired, one-armed, radical priest (Peter-Hugo Daly), the priest wallops him over the head. In retaliation, Bill and the Natives come to incinerate the building, but find it protected by massed ranks including families. Even Bill won’t go that far. Johnny and Happy Jack soon die in tit-for-tat killings. Tweed proposes to Amsterdam that he swing Irish support behind Tammany. Amsterdam proposes Monk for the office of Sheriff. With the aid of Tweed’s electoral shenanigans, Monk gains “a Roman triumph." But Bill, before shocked onlookers, viciously assassinates Monk.

Bills and Amsterdam’s relationship, like several in Scorsese’s oeuvre, is as a surrogate paternal relationship, man and boy drawn to each other through mutual appreciation of the others’ strengths, and ultimately drawn to destroy each other, loaded with jealousies and sexual strife. DiCaprio inhabits Amsterdam with a fair intensity, though he lacks indelible grit as a young hard case or ease with his deliberately weird Irish-American accent. Bill and Amsterdam act out several forms of division, with Amsterdam a man straddling Bill’s dinosaur bellicosity and thoughts of a new, more hopeful world. Jenny, daughter/lover to Bill, mother/sister/lover to Amsterdam, loves each in different ways. Her attraction is Amsterdam is at first that between two rodents—tough, cunning, ruthless, but morally innocent. Violence in this embryonic world flavors all things, including sexuality. Jenny kisses Amsterdam’s scars, marks of survival from Hellgate, after showing him her Caesarian scar, a sacrament of flesh for their physical and mental pains. Written on their bodies is the violent growth of their selves and the world about them.

Bill dominates the film, and not just because of Day-Lewis’s epic, perversely witty performance. He is one of the last Titans, a creature of great physical prowess with a warrior-poet’s soul belonging to a premechanical age. He is obsessed with purity, physical, racial, and cultural. In this regard, he resembles Travis Bickle. Bill’s sense of the physical is intensely spiritual, and enacts totemic punishment on flesh—cutting out his own eye, searing Amsterdam’s face for failing to act like a man. He cannot touch Jenny’s torn body lest it speak to him of the violence, decay, and waste that otherwise surrounds him. He respects the code of honorable warriors and detests the cult of commonality, which is why he feels justified in assassinating Monk dishonorably. It’s also one of his “spectacles of fearsome acts," a declaration that he will not yield to Amsterdam’s efforts at egalitarianism without a fight. The death of the warlords will come by the sword.

Incensed by Monk’s death, Amsterdam challenges Bill to a gang fight. Simultaneously, the beginning of the draft causes New York’s working classes rise up with virulent fury. In all of Scorsese’s films, class and ethnic tensions simmer; here is a nightmare vision of when America’s mostly closeted skeletons of race and caste resentment emerge. Scorsese observes the root of American distrust of high culture; pop culture emerges from the chaotic swirl of the lower classes. The rich propagate high culture in their mansions; as rioters torch their shiny elegance, troves of classical-style paintings burn up. So, too, do political fliers showing the linked faces of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Jimmy Spoils is lynched by the mob along with many other blacks. Jenny only avoids being murdered by shooting a woman. Warships pummel the city, soldiers shoot rioters, and the streets run with blood. McGloin is gunned down, and Amsterdam and Bill fight in a dust cloud before another shell plants a shard of shrapnel in Bill’s side. “Thank god, I die a true American," he says before allowing Amsterdam the coup de grace; he dies clutching the young man’s hand. The city is a burning, shattered mess, corpses laid out in long lines. Amsterdam attests, “All that we knew was mightily swept away."

The final shot is as great as the opening, as Amsterdam and Jenny pay tribute at Priest’s and Bill’s graves, side-by-side in a graveyard overlooking lower Manhattan. As they leave the frame, the burning skyline of a haunted city fades through phases in the Manhattan skyline, finally resting at the end of the 20th century, the Twin Towers still in place. l

La Vie en Rose (La Môme, 2007)
Director: Olivier Dahan

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Édith Giovanna Gassion, aka Édith Piaf, is perhaps the best-known and unique singer France has ever produced, and seems to many to be the embodiment of her home town of Paris. Her fabled story of rising from the gutter to the height of wealth and fame, her fast, bohemian lifestyle, and her defiant, iconic song “Non, Je ne regrette rien" (“No, I regret nothing") made her the stuff of fascination and legend during her lifetime and even now, nearly 45 years after her death at the age of 47. Her recordings have been featured in many films, including the 1952 version of Sabrina, Saving Private Ryan, and even Babe: Pig in the City. She had roles in several films, including the Jean Renoir classic French Cancan (1954), and has been the subject of documentaries and at least one other feature film, Édith et Marcel (1983). Now, a fairly young director, Olivier Dahan, has attempted the gargantuan feat of trying to tell her whole life story. With only 140 minutes in which to tell it, alas, he was doomed to failure.

The film is told in the now-familiar scrambling of scenes from various points in the life of the central character. There is no present in which Piaf seems to flash back to the earlier events of her life—presumably the present for any viewer of the film is the real present, and the film happens entirely in the past. I consider this a novel way to deal with the problem of time for audiences of today and tomorrow, but I’m not sure it serves us in establishing a link with Piaf as our guide through her own life. In this case, we really need her.

Despite this structure, we do get a rough chronological account of her life, beginning with an image of a young Édith (Manon Chevallier) crying while her mother (Clotilde Courau) sings in the streets, hoping to be discovered as a great talent. Eventually, Édith’s father Louis (Jean-Paul Rouve) returns from the Great War and, finding his daughter sickly and living in poverty, takes her away with him. He leaves her with his mother (Josette Ménard) while he goes off to reestablish himself on the circus circuit as a contortionist. His mother is a madam, though little Édith doesn’t understand anything—even the johns who tie up their whores or mutilate them with surgical instruments—but the kindness of the women around her. One of their number, Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) becomes especially attached to the little girl and carts her around as though they were mother and daughter. Slowly, Édith regains a bit of her health, though she has been stunted for life by failure-to-thrive (the real Piaf stood only 4’8" tall), and learns how to smile a bit. She goes blind from conjunctivitis, but time and prayers to St. Theresa heal her. Naturally, Louis returns to reclaim his daughter, and a traumatic parting between Titine and Édith ensues.

Now 10-year-old Édith (Pauline Burlet) must adapt to life on the road. Her moments of girlish joy at watching the circus are stopped abruptly by the cruel circus manager, who tells her she must earn her keep or be left behind. Thankfully, this episode is cut short by Louis, who tells the manager to stuff it and goes out on his own as a street performer. Of course, times are hard, but during one performance at which Édith is holding the hat for contributions, the audience asks, and her father pushes her, to perform. She sings the French national anthem in a strong and emotional way, and the approval and contributions from the crowd pour in.

We next encounter Édith (Marion Cotillard) as a wild 20 year old, roaming the streets of Paris with her friend Mômone (Sylvie Testud). This time it is Édith who does all the performing while Mômone passes the hat. An impresario named Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) hears Édith as she sings in a fashionable part of Paris. He gives her his card and tells her to come to Gerny’s, a nightclub he runs, to audition. She gets a spot as a featured performer, only after Leplée redubs her Piaf, “The Little Sparrow," and wows the audience with her distinctive rendering of a wide range of familiar French songs. She starts to make a name for herself in Paris.

Édith probably would have been content to sing at Gerny’s forever, where she got adoration, alcohol, and money, were it not for the people in her past who still had a hold on her. It appears she has a pimp who demands money from her, even after she starts singing at Gerny’s. One day, Leplée is found dead in his office, a possible gangland hit, and Édith is implicated. Although she mourns perhaps more than most the loss of her “Daddy," her name is dragged through the tabloids. She remembers a man who gave her his card long ago. She rings him up.

Enter Raymond Asso (Marc Barbé), the cliché taskmaster who will beat the streets out of Édith and make her Piaf. Her accompanist during her deprogramming/reprogramming is Marguerite Monnot (Marie-Armelle Deguy), a well-known songwriter who previously paid her respects to Édith at Gerny’s and who will come to pen many of Piaf’s best songs. Although Édith resists, as the cliché would have her do, she becomes the artiste Asso demands and—after a bout of stage fright before the show—debuts at Paris’ premier music hall, the Bobino, to a standing ovation.

After this grueling birth of Venus, Édith plunges into the role of Piaf. Piaf demands champagne, the best black frocks for her performances, her ever-present cross around the neck, and an entourage of ever-changing characters. We are threaded forward and backward in time through various momentous occasions of her life—her opening in New York City in which only a favorable review by critic/composer Virgil Thomson ensures her success; her meeting with Marlene Dietrich (Caroline Silhol); her brief, intense affair with married boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins); her intense grief when Bonel’s plane crashes; her later years as a physical wreck and morphine addict following severe injury in a car accident; her triumphal return to the stage in 1960, during which she debuts “Non, Je ne regrette rien." Various constants keep us anchored throughout the film—her devotion to St. Theresa; Mômone, whose lesbian fixation on Édith keeps her true until Édith falls deeply in love with Bonel; and, of course, the artistry of Piaf. At her death, we see her heart’s devotions are still those of the abused little girl we cringed from at first and then came to love. Isn’t that what Piaf is to most of her admirers, after all?

It’s apparent from this review that the fast-forward through a life as rich and complex as Piaf’s must, by necessity, be done in the movie shorthand known as cliché. We are not allowed to have any ambiguous feelings about Piaf for long. Yes, she drinks too much and hangs out with shady characters who may have killed her “Daddy," but what a victim she was! Yes, she takes morphine, but she was injured. Yes, she sleeps with a married man, but it’s true love. The film doesn’t let us know just how much she slept around—she’d screw just about anything that moved and was almost certainly Marlene Dietrich’s lover. It doesn’t tell us that Yves Montand was her discovery and her lover—he’s one line of dialog in this film. Likewise, the fact that she had a daughter who died at the age of 2 is completely ignored until the very end of the movie in an unconvincing deathbed "regrette." The film completely skips World War II, a controversial period for Piaf because she sang for the Nazis. Some postwar revelations that she helped some prisoners of the Nazis escape mitigated her crime of collaboration among the French, but doubts still remain.

In other words—we have a typical, whitewashed biopic, heavy on the pathos.

On the upside, we have incredibly magnetic performances from all of the actresses who play Piaf, as well as the supporting cast. We have a magnificent first third, which spooling out slowly, allows for relationships between characters to form. And, of course, the reason any Piaf fan would go see this film—we have the incredible performances of Piaf herself dubbed into the action of the film. Unfortunately, the lightning speed with which Dahan has to race to get through Piaf’s life leaves no room for any character development or interactions, and indeed, creates a lot of confusion about who the characters are. Piaf is center stage throughout, but that just is not enough. Yes, we love her, but without a real connection to the life around her, she’s just an image, not a person, and all the incidents in the films just performances, not real moments. Might as well watch the documentaries in which she appears or, better yet, listen to her recordings. We also assume that her dissipated life was the cause of her death rather than the real cause—cancer—and that’s kind of a slur on her memory.

Diehard Piaf fans will enjoy the music of this film and the chance to pretend that they really saw her perform them, so good is Cotillard's impersonation. For a true understanding of Piaf’s life, however, this film simply does not deliver. l

Yi Yi (A One and A Two, 2000)
Director: Edward Yang

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Shock doesn’t begin to describe my reaction on Sunday when I learned that Taiwanese director Edward Yang had just died of colon cancer at the age of 59. Call it incredible sadness and a huge sense of loss for a man who, because he had come to films later in life, had left us with so much left to say from his enormous humanity and depth of feeling about the great issues of life and his home country. I know his is a great personal loss to his family and friends—it must have been seeing how much love was a dominant theme in his handful of films.

The loss to the film word of his future output is compounded by the fact that his work has been criminally absent from most of the world’s screens and DVD players. The only one of his works to find a ready place in the arthouses of America and other countries is the one under consideration here, Yi Yi, and then probably only because he won the best director award for it at Cannes, where the film also was nominated for the Palme d’Or. I was exceedingly lucky to catch a screening of his masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991), a four-hour film that ran as a matinee companion to the regular run of Yi Yi at the Music Box in Chicago. I would be reviewing that film here as my tribute to Yang—if only it were available. As it is, however, the three-hour-long Yi Yi visits many of the themes of that film, even telling a slightly different version of the murder story that inspired Yang to pen and make the former film in the first place. How that story haunted him is apparent, yet in films as rich in life as these two are, the incident actually takes up about five minutes of screen time in each.

The film opens as the Jian family prepares for the wedding of A-Di (Chen Hsi-Sheng) to Xiao Yan (Xiao Shushen), a surprise choice for his bride considering his longtime live-in affair with Yun-Yun (Zeng Xinyi). We watch the blushing bride come up the aisle with her portly intended, looking a little portly around the middle herself. The superstitious A-Di has delayed the marriage to occur on the luckiest day of the year, which coincides with the last trimester of Xiao Yan’s pregnancy. After the ceremony, photos are taken of the entire family, during which A-Di’s young nephew Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) is teased by some of his female relatives. As preparations for the reception take place, Yun-Yun runs crying to A-Di’s mother (Tang Ruyun), begging her forgiveness for not becoming her daughter instead. Grandma, feeling unwell, goes home to her room at her daughter Min-Min (Elaine Jen) and son-in-law NJ’s (Wu Nien-jen) apartment. The Jians change for the reception while at their apartment. NJ tells his daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) to take out the garbage. She wraps it up, but leaves it on the balcony in her haste to leave. With the family introduced, the wheels for drama are ready to roll, just not all that quickly.

The remains of the wedding spin out almost in real time. We see the usual drunken singing and dancing among the stragglers at the reception. Min-Min arrives home well after dark, only to learn that her mother has been taken to the hospital after being found unconscious next to the garbage cans in the alley. She runs to chase down the car that has just dropped her off and heads to the hospital, where her mother is in a coma from a stroke. After she is stabilized, Grandma is sent home. The family is instructed to talk to her to stimulate her senses and increase her chances of waking up.