Ferdy on Films, etc.

Man on the Moon (1999)
Director: Milos Forman

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Many of Milos Forman’s English-language films (I have not had the pleasure of seeing his Czech films) share in common a regard for the iconoclast, the man ahead of his time, the rebel. Whether chronicling the defeat of live wire McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, presenting the perhaps distasteful victory of pornographer Larry Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt, or depicting the desperation of Spanish artist Francisco Goya in trying to save his muse from the Spanish Inquisition in Goya’s Ghosts, Forman has taken on the mores of society and authority as they are applied to the individual and given us one entertaining challenge after another.

In Man on the Moon, Forman offers for our consideration one of the more incomprehensible iconoclasts of our time—Andy Kaufman. Was he a comic genius or an unfunny lunatic who hit our funny bones from time to time, like a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day? Would he have been as big a star if he had never agreed to turn his foreign man character into Latka Gravas on the hit TV show “Taxi"? Is he really dead or pulling off the biggest fake of his career? Andy Kaufman’s legacy is rather complicated. Perhaps predictably, given the scads of Kaufman friends and collaborators on the creative team of Man on the Moon, Forman’s sympathies lie squarely with Andy.

The film starts in a typically Kaufmanesque way—Kaufman (Jim Carrey) as foreign man appearing next to a phonograph and saying that the film took so many liberties with the truth that he felt compelled to edit them out. Consequently, the film is already over, and the credits start to role to the heroic-sounding music on the record player. When the record comes to the end, the credits stop. Kaufman has to start the record over several times to keep them moving. Finally, he says it has all been a joke and that there is lots and lots of movie ahead.

The movie proper opens with young Andy (Bobby Boriello) jumping on his bed and performing to the adjacent wall. His father (Gerry Becker) lays down the law—no performing to an imaginary audience; he has to perform for people. Andy’s first audience is his cute little sister (Brittany Collona, Andy’s real granddaughter). Fast forward to Andy bombing in a nightclub and being fired. “Fired?" shouts Andy. “You don’t pay me!" But he heeds the nightclub owner’s advice about doing impressions and telling real jokes. He does “take my wife, please" at Budd Friedman’s Improv Comedy Club in New York. The audience doesn’t know what to make of his unfunny awkwardness, but he ends up bringing down the house with his impersonation of Elvis Presley. George Shapiro (Danny DeVito) goes back stage after the show to offer Andy representation. Andy stays in character until Shapiro turns to leave, then gushes that he’s honored to meet Shapiro and takes him up on his offer. He tells Shapiro that he eventually wants to play Carnegie Hall.

In 1975, Andy gets the chance to play what would become the comic’s version of Carnegie Hall—he appears on the very first airing of Saturday Night Live and triumphs by lipsynching “Here I come to save the day!" as the theme song to “Mighty Mouse" spins on his little phonograph. Things move fast in this movie, and before we know it, George is talking Andy into turning his foreign man into Latka for “Taxi," which debuted in 1978. Andy’s major condition for being on the show is that someone named Tony Clifton gets four guest appearances on the show. Clifton, an insulting, tone-deaf lounge lizard is really Kaufman. Shapiro sells the deal to ABC by saying they’ll be getting two Kaufmans for the price of one. Kaufman’s logic seems to be infecting everyone.

In reality, Clifton was played by Kaufman’s writer/friend/coconspirator Bob Zmuda (played here by Paul Giamatti) for almost his entire "life." When Zmuda as Clifton and Kaufman appear on the same stage, the pair’s epic practical joking kicks into high gear. Andy, an admirer of the theatre of professional wrestling, decides he wants to tour as a wrestler. Zmuda suggests that a real wrestler would take him apart in five minutes. Kaufman hits on the idea of only wrestling people smaller than himself, leading him to challenge women all over the country, inciting challengers and the crowd with sexist remarks.

I always thought Kaufman just wanted to cop a feel during these matches, and the woman who challenges him in one city and becomes his girlfriend, Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love), says as much. Unfortunately, Andy’s wrestling exhibitions and slurs not only of women but of the South—con- nected to his real-seeming fights with pro wrestler Jerry Lawler (playing himself)—are just too much for his fans to take. He has crossed a line he never acknowledged existed, and fans of SNL vote him off the show as being “not funny" anymore. “Taxi" is cancelled. He gets a rare form of lung cancer, searches for a miracle cure in the Philippines, and laughs bitterly when he discovers that the scam is on him this time.

To generate good vibes (he’s into transcendental meditation), Andy stages a Christmas extravaganza (an interesting choice for a Jew to make) in Carnegie Hall, complete with a human Christmas tree, a flying sleigh carrying Santa Claus, and the Rockettes. He piles the audience into school buses and takes them out for milk and cookies. He dies anyway, and the mourners at his funeral sing along with a filmed Andy projected above his open casket in what looks like a church (again, interesting choices for Andy's Jewish family to make).

The people who knew him apparently loved the guy. Every original cast member from “Taxi" appeared in the film, as did the real Zmuda, Shapiro, Margulies, Kaufman family members, David Letterman and many more—all of whom are credited on IMDb in the longest list I’ve ever seen on that site. Man on the Moon makes Kaufman seem like the opposite of many comedians—sweet in real life and savage on stage. He doesn’t seem to be working out any anger, just trying to mess with people’s expectations. Unfortunately, the psychology or life experiences that created this proto performance artist never made it into the script. Given what I know of the street theatre of the 1960s, a lot of anger at society and attempts to break the mold of conformity motivated it. Kaufman seems to be a product of his time in this regard. It’s sad to say that Kaufman’s experiments gave birth to shock jocks and trash TV like “The Jerry Springer Show." He may have been gentle in private life, but his persona in his later career gave fangs to a society I’m not too thrilled to be living in. Frustratingly, Man on the Moon skips a thorough examination of Kaufman or his legacy, even as it provides a great entertainment. Forman fails to challenge us this time, but perhaps it was not his fault.

It has been commented on ad nauseum how Jim Carrey appears to be channeling Kaufman. My problem with his performance is that he's got Kaufman's personae down perfectly, but fails to connect with Andy Kaufman the man. Similarly, the other performances in this film are sugar-coated. Courtney Love, in particular, showed she could do complex and troubling characters in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Her Lynne is a girl-next-door cipher who appears in Andy's life, and despite her anger at him for using her as a prop in his fake quarrel with Lawler, becomes just that for the rest of the film.

I watched Andy Kaufman and loved a lot of what he was doing—particularly his ABC special that was kept from airing for two years by timid network executives. He was often funny, original, fearless, and tragically, was taken from the world far too soon. He also opened a Pandora’s Box of performance art that few entertainers seem interested in extending in creative ways. Andy Kaufman was a great subject for Milos Forman to explore. Too bad those who loved him decided to scam us yet again. l

My Year at the Movies—2007

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Now that my good friend and collaborator, Roderick Heath, Esq., has seen fit to write one of those bloody year-end wrap-ups—third in my rogue’s gallery of things I wish reviewers would stop doing FOREVER (Top 10 movie lists and using Word. Word. Word. in titles take the top spots)—and slave as I am to the laws of symmetry, I am forced to do the same. Rod, I’ll get you for this—and YOUR LITTLE DOG, TOO!!!

Actually, I’m kind of relieved that Rod’s in Oz fighting the good fight to see all the blockbuster shlock Hollywood can wad up, grease with spit, and throw in the moviegoing public’s general direction. Saves me the bother of trying to “keep up." I’ve already passed the threshold of “I’ll do exactly as I please" in life, but this blog creates in me a strange and unfamiliar sense of obligation. How I fulfill it is to defy the fanboy/rom-com tastes of the younger generation and insist, if they’re going to read my blog, that they get a little “cul-chah" and stop ruining their hearing with overloud action films.

Upon perusing the movie index of films released in the United States in 2007, thoughtfully provided by The Numbers, I see that I only viewed six relatively mainstream movies, three of which happened to be on cable at the same time I was numbly sitting on my living room couch looking for something light to distract me. I was disappointed in all of them, most especially the idiotic The Bourne Ultimatum (seen at a second-run house—thank god I didn’t pay full price!), of which I expected so much more. Paul Greengrass, I’m begging you, stick to what you so brilliantly know (United 93) and never go near a blockbuster again!

Specifically, I spent most of 2007 going to film festivals. It’s an easy thing to do in Chicago, which has a film festival about every 12 hours. Even having missed the Silent Summer Film Festival, the Chicago Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, and the Polish Film Festival in America—all of which I wanted to attend—I still managed to gorge on about 35 films at Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival (now officially Ebertfest), the European Union Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and the Chicago International Film Festival. A handful of the films I saw this year may show up at a theatre near you in 2008. Some, such as the awesome 2007 Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days, sold out at the CIFF, have already shown in arthouses in select cities, unseen by far too many people. OK, so a movie about an illegal abortion isn’t exactly a date night dream, but, people, some day you’ll have to breathe air outside the shopping mall!

All right, that’s not entirely fair. I like to escape real life, too. There were some great films out there that celebrated the notion of happiness and escapism that didn’t require you to check your brains and humanity at the door. One of the best movies of the year—and one, I might add, that many people who look at movies for a living just didn’t get—was Black Book. What a treat it was to watch a Hollywood movie of the kind Hollywood doesn’t make anymore—full of the finest melodrama, genuine intrigue, high production values, and star-quality leads doing their best to entertain us. While Hollywood was remaking musical films like Hairspray, Ireland’s can-do film industry gave us Once, certainly the most heartwarmingly human, musically accomplished film of the year. One of the funniest films of the year was a little Estonian film called Men at Arms. It is so knowing about the trials and eccentricities of small, powerless countries while giving audiences a Monty Pythonesque entertainment of the highest order. It’s everything Borat wanted to be but failed at miserably. Hopefully, it won’t end up as marginalized as its little nation—but I’m not holding my breath.

My film year wasn’t all about watching and commenting on films. I got a chance to interact with my fellow Internet film fans by participating in something I’m proud to say film bloggers invented—the blogathon. Flickhead hosted the Luis Buñuel Blogathon, and I contributed a review of The Young One (La Joven) to it, my first blogathon ever. I had so much fun reading all the contributions that when Gautam Valluri hosted the extraordinary Double Billathon over at Broken Projector, I was all over it, doing two double bills for him (Matewan/Harlan Country, U.S.A. and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song/Baadasssss!).

When I covered the nonappearance of Bela Tarr at a Facets special event, I even got bitch-slapped for misattributions by the renowned film educator David Bordwell in my comments section. It was one of the few, but, happily, growing number of comments Ferdy on Films has garnered. Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.

And speaking of which, I could go on and on about some of the great and small film-related moments I had this year. If you’ve been reading Ferdy on Films, you know what they were for me and Rod. What I’d like to know is what was YOUR 2007 film year like?

Happy 2008, film geeks! l

My Year at the Movies—2007

By Roderick Heath

Filmgoing ’round my way can be a frustrating experience. Blockbusters will arrive instantaneously, sometimes before they hit the U.S., like Transformers, and the films you actually want to see don’t turn up for six months, if ever. I also confess to being a bit of a cinema blockbuster whore: why should I pay AU$14.50 to see Paul Giamatti’s nostril hair, when I can do that in the comfort of my own home and Megan Fox’s navel awaits on an IMAX screen? I was drawn out like the good little drone I am to see Transformers, Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Live Free or Die Hard (witlessly retitled outside the States as Die Hard 4.0. I, personally, am waiting for “Die Hard 7⅜.")

This was, of course, the year of the threequel. And the fourquel. And the fivequel. Most of these flicks demanded—and rewarded—low expectations. The tongue-in-cheek qualities of Rise of the Silver Surfer and Spider-Man 3 became particularly pleasing in such a mood. Raimi’s odd beast of a conclusion to the Spidey Trilogy pleased me for the same reason it dismayed hordes of fanboys for being as much romantic comedy and musical as a tale of an heroic flying whatsit battling gooey black whojars and big sandy thingimys that oddly resemble the mechanic dude from Wings.

Of course you can go too far in applying comedy to action, as At World’s End did in its first two-thirds, before settling down for an unexpectedly impressive finale. This left only one mystery for me and my female friends: how could Keira could pass up Johnny Depp in eyeliner for that other skinny knob, even if he has managed to grow a bad teenage beard? Thank god for Bruce Willis. Until Harrison Ford gets back into the swing of things in “Indiana Jones and the Cure for Arthritis" next year, he’s the only guy around to show us what a proper ass-kicking looks like. Ford will be joined by Shia LeBeouf, who starred this year in a fair approximation of a John Cusack comedy from the ’80s somehow slipped in between a bunch of giant robots brawling in Transformers. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, in its odd way, seemed to make comment on audience tastes these days by alternating a child’s escape into mythic quest and fantasy whilst, around her, war and torture mangle the landscape.

Nonetheless, when I haven’t blown my extra cash on some magic beans, and with a decent night’s sleep behind me, a serious movie will tempt me into a theatre. Much of last year’s Oscar bait fell seriously flat with me.Volver had me wondering if my beloved Pedro Almodovar had gone senile; Notes on a Scandal drove me from the theatre with its cruel and clumsy satire; Stephen Frears’ The Queen provided the most wimpy tabloid expose of repressed Royals ever; Deepa Mehta’s Water promised a harsh study of sexual discrimination in Gandhi-era India and delivered a wading pond inhabited by fat ladyboy villains, lustrous-haired oppressed maidens, and hunky radical doctors. Borat established that Sacha Baron Cohen is a great comic writer and actor, and that comedy written is 10 million times funnier than comedy blundered upon whilst insulting everyday people not in on the joke.

I was briefly bewildered when Mr. Fantastic suddenly lost his super stretching powers, went back in time, and started trying to abolish slavery in Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace. Apted’s film recreated, remarkably intact, the virtues of a ’30s biopic, injecting sober, intelligent, dramatically solid history with a bit of sex—no matter that William Wilberforce was two feet shorter than strapping Welsh hunk Ioan Gruffud, and his wife probably did not have as delicious a rack as Romola Garai. That’s showbiz, folks. Another Regency biopic—it was a happening time—Becoming Jane, promised a bucolic afternoon in Austenland, and presented a similar quandary: if Jane Austen looked like Anne Hathaway, why did she have so much trouble getting a guy? Despite the filmmakers’ strained efforts to make the scribe’s young womanhood resemble her own fiction, they ultimately had the honesty to show that her life lived more like how Thomas Hardy would have written it—a sad, greying tale of a woman who finds greatness by losing happiness. Hathaway gave it her best, but, finally, the film was worth watching for a pitch-perfect performance by the great Helen McCrory, whose short appearance as Mrs. Radcliffe told a dire truth.

At least Marion Cotillard got down and dirty in playing Edith Piaf, burying her smoky-eyed beauty under enough latex to make a dozen outfits for Rihanna, in Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose, which, as a film, was akin to listening to that kid in the schoolyard who just couldn’t tell a story for anything: “Yeah and then she and the American guy got in a car crash, but did I remember to tell you she like had a baby like way earlier, and gave it up? But what’s really important is the interview she gave on the beach to this chick who had really cute knees!" History was further ransacked for heroes in 300, Zack Snyder’s gloriously brainless homoerotic hootenanny. No other film of the year so sharply showed the division of old Hollywood from new for we fans of Rudolph Mate’s The 300 Spartans (1962), which, cheesy, stodgy, and badly acted, nonetheless had naturalistic intensity and a sense of historical accuracy. 300 was, instead, cheesy, stodgy, badly acted, and filled with digital spears rather than cardboard ones. Steve Reeves lives on in spirit.

Leave accuracy and naturalism these days for art films with really long titles, like Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which kept the guy-lust to a suggestive bathtub scene. Featuring the best male performances I’ve seen this year and uncommon rigour of style and intelligence, Assassination was shot down at the B.O. Corral, and too many darned fer’ners liked it for the Foreign Press Association to nominate it for a Golden Globe. The only film produced by and starring one of Ocean’s 13 they had time for was Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, a sombre and stately thriller whose artistry and pinko cred helped disguise that it was a paint-by-numbers thriller. Star George Clooney was at his best, whilst he was at his most listless and disinterested in Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, a stilted pastiche featuring Cate Blanchett, swiftly becoming ubiquitous and insufferable both on screen and off.

David Fincher came close to making a real movie with the often compelling, often ferocious Zodiac, which, like Michael Clayton, did its best to live up to the cool, methodical class of ’70s thrillers like All The President’s Men, but couldn’t replicate the airy, faintly desperate urban nihilism of those works. Whilst justifiably disparaging Dirty Harry, Fincher could not, for instance, come close to the sonorous noir poetry of the scene in which Harry watches a girl’s body disinterred from Golden Gate Park in the grey light of dawn. Many praised the film for refusing a pat ending with the mystery solved, but Fincher’s style was too slick, as he dispersed his own cred by suggesting a definite suspect, and by giving us a cheap, discursive horror movie scene where paranoid hero Jake Gyllenhaal freaks out in a basement only footsteps from upstairs.

The Greatest TV Show Ever became a good, if not mighty, cinema experience with The Simpsons Movie, which tipped a hat to most of the show’s pleasures and clichés but, ironically, failed to live up to the best episodes, which always made a virtue of compression. Still, in a year of action blockbusters, it proved the most intelligent, emotional, and believable of the lot. Meanwhile, Hugh Grant’s slow career transformation into Troy McClure continued with his leathery charm displayed to full effect in Music & Lyrics, a harmlessly entertaining rom-com that provided some snappy pop pastiche.

And there’s so many more of this year’s statue chasers to come. I hear There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as another hirsute villain, was originally titled Gangs of New York 2: The Moustache Strikes Back. Will Atonement prove Joe Wright an heir to the mantle of David Lean or earn him a place in the Merchant/Ivory Museum of Offensively Dull Objects d’Art? Will No Country for Old Men finally make William Butler Yeats box office gold? Will Sweeney Todd prove to be that rarest of entities, a musical straight guys can watch?

I can’t wait to find out. l

Thérèse (1986)
Director: Alain Cavalier

By Marilyn Ferdinand

All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent? (Salieri from Amadeus)

Thérèse had consciously aspired to the heights, often saying to herself that God would not fill her with a desire that was unattainable. Only 26 years after her death she was beatified by Pope Pius XI, and in the year of Jubilee, 1925, he pronounced her a saint. (from Lives of Saints)

Two real people—Antonio Salieri and Thérèse Martin, aka St. Thérèse of Lisieux—shown in creative imaginings of their lives and significance. The former, in Amadeus, was certainly created virtually out of whole cloth. In Thérèse, director Alain Cavalier meticulously researched the record, then only about 100 years old, including photographs and Thérèse’s own best-selling journal Histoire d’une âme (Story of a Soul), and kept to the facts as they are known whenever possible.

What strikes me most about these two films is that they emphasize the passionate nature of religious longing. While Amadeus, told from Salieri’s bitter point of view, chooses to ridicule the man whose imagined passion was fulfilled by portraying Mozart as an undeserving vulgarian, Thérèse focuses on the object of divine grace, portraying the envy of others as an attraction touching on romantic love for the chosen one herself. In the same way, Thérèse’s life from the age of 14 is a profound love affair with Jesus Christ. During her battle to be admitted to the severe Carmel order, which ended successfully at age 15, she tells skeptics “He is courting me. What can I do?"

In the literature of organizations devoted to her, Thérèse of Lisieux is called “The Little Flower of Jesus." Her self-described way of spreading god’s love was her “little way." Indeed, the first scenes of the film show Thérèse (Catherine Mouchet) struggle to save the soul of a condemned murderer. We see the man on the way to execution reject the Church’s absolution. Later, Thérèse rejoices in reading to her older sister Céline (Aurore Prieto) a newspaper account that says the man rejected the priest at the guillotine, but kissed the crucifix the priest carried. “I’ve done it!" Thérèse exclaims. She has saved him through her prayers.

Thérèse has a happy home life with her sister and her father (Jean Pélégri). Louis Martin has already seen two of his daughters, Marie (Mona Heftre) and Pauline (Sylvie Habault), enter the Carmel. When Thérèse tells him she wants to join them, she thoughtfully asks how he felt about sending them away to a cloistered existence. Honestly, he tells her he was sad to lose their company, but proud of them nonetheless. In fact, Thérèse’s real parents aspired to religious life before they married. You might say the Martin sisters entered the family business, and Pere Martin helps Thérèse achieve her desire.

In the manner of a love-besotted teen, Thérèse pursues entry into the Carmel with single-minded persistence. When the Prioress (Clémence Massart) says she is too young to endure the rigors of life at the Carmel, she appeals to the bishop (Jean Pieuchot). When he turns her down, she goes to see the Pope (Armand Meppiel). Cautioned not to speak to the Pope directly, she defies the order and asks him to let her enter the convent. His reply, “Do what your superiors will tell you," is not the answer she hoped for, but the barriers come down anyway.

On her admittance as a novice, Thérèse is shown to be ecstatic to have her hair cut to fit under her wimple. She takes up her duties, including a vow of silence, with vigor and joy. There is a celebratory and sensuous air in the convent whenever she is around. Cavalier creates this atmosphere on a blank soundstage populated only with necessary props by emphasizing faces, human interactions, tactile activities. For example, the maneuvers the sisters must make to secure their veils and move in and out of their habits are sensuously recorded. The camera lingers on their clothing, their simple cloth shoes, and tasks that involve cloth. One scene shows Thérèse wringing the sheets she has washed, then smoothing them with purposeful caresses along a clothesline. These intimate acts seem to illustrate St. Thérèse’s little way, with perhaps a hint of a new bride attending lovingly to the domestic tasks she would do for a husband. Indeed, she looks like a proper bride when she is prepared to take final vows. And at Christmas, the nuns get drunk and take turns cradling a wood carving of their infant husband as though they were mothers in love with their new baby.

Thérèse coughs blood and is diagnosed, under the strenuous denials of the Prioress, as having tuberculosis. It seems that this level of suffering and probable early death are evidence to the Prioress that Thérèse really is a chosen vessel of god. The well-worn convention of envy again rears its ugly head as the Prioress lashes out, “I’m sick of the Martin sisters." At the other end of religious movie convention is the fictional Sister Lucie (Hélène Alexandridis). Infatuated with Thérèse, she ingests some of Thérèse’s tubercular sputum and leaves the convent wearing the only street clothes she has—her wedding dress from her final vows and her plain canvas shoes, stuffed with coins. These moments mar an otherwise authentic telling of Thérèse’s story. The film also ignores the level of suffering the real Thérèse endured, her desire to become a priest, and her struggle with waning faith in her last couple of years.

But no matter. The performance Catherine Mouchet gives is one for the ages. She is utterly convincing as an earthly girl with an unearthly love (not to mention she bears an uncanny resemblance to the real saint). Not much happens in this film, certainly nothing terribly dramatic, but it is impossible to turn away. We are wrapped in a heavenly cloud of love through Mouchet’s utter conviction, which stands in stark contrast to the ordinary Carmelite sisters who cling to their pre-cloister loves and lives with a wistful regret, “In Carmel, it’s the first 30 years which are the most difficult," says one dying nun whom Thérèse attends. This fictional film helps us achieve an approximate experience of intense faith that the fine documentary Into Great Silence, which also focuses on the simple repetitions of the faithful and their quiet faces, cannot penetrate. Cavalier allows us a sympathetic understanding of a life that defies reason. l

The Walker (2007)
Director/Writer: Paul Schrader

By Marilyn Ferdinand

One of my favorite movies of all time is Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth (2000). This film, based on the wonderful Edith Wharton novel of the same name, shows the depths to which one can fall in American high society by being even slightly out of sync with the prevailing mood and manners of the day. The best way to remain in everyone’s good graces, therefore, is to be as superficial as possible so as not to betray an incorrect emotion or thought. The protagonist of The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, is ruined by seeming to criticize a powerful society doyen and then refusing to expose an indiscretion of someone she loves to save her own skin. It seems strange in this day and age of social muckraking that anything as “quaint" as the notion of scandal could truly ruin a person’s life, but as The Walker illustrates, power at many levels is all about who is willing or unwilling to be seen with you.

The Walker focuses on an ethical dilemma faced by insider/outsider Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson), an impeccably turned-out, discreet homosexual from a good Virginia family whose fortune was made in tobacco. Carr, as he is known, works one day a week at a realtor to the rich and mighty and spends the rest of his time socializing with several society matrons, escorting (“walking") them to functions their husbands would rather not or cannot attend, helping them redecorate their homes, and gossiping with them at a weekly game of canasta at their exclusive club. The film opens with Carr entertaining Natalie Van Miter (Lauren Bacall), Abby Delorean (Lily Tomlin), and Lynn Lochner (Kristin Scott Thomas) at the canasta table with the gossip of the day and joining in their conspiratorial delight in knowing that others fear what they say and panic when one of the group is seen whispering to another.

Lynn and Carr are especially close, sharing progressive political viewpoints and an odd sort of love—Carr once asked Lynn out before she was married (“the 70s were a confusing time" says Carr). His loyalty is tested when he drives her to the home of her lover, a lobbyist who has given him bad investment advice, and she returns to the car almost immediately and tells him that her lover is dead—murdered. She doesn’t want their affair to become public—it will mean her husband’s political ruin, and, she says, kill her. Carr sees her home and then returns to the scene of the crime, carefully observing the scene and wiping the door knob clean of Lynn’s prints. A neighbor sees him leaving. He is forced to sit down on the steps and phone the police.

Carr’s situation starts to strangle him bit by bit, as an overzealous FBI investigator (William Hope) decides to become a star ripe for promotion by burying one of his social betters. Lynn disappears, supposedly to tend to her sick mother, and Abby declines a luncheon invitation from Carr. “That is the sound of all the doors in Washington closing," Carr muses to himself. Carr’s on-again/off-again lover, Emek (Moritz Bleibtreu), a photographer who creates lurid photos of naked men in Abu Ghraib torture poses, starts investigating the affairs of the murdered man. He and Carr are threatened and attacked, but in the end, the only thing destroyed is Carr’s comfortable berth in Washington society.

One would expect nothing less than a well-written script from Paul Schrader, and he delivers a very literate one indeed, one that forms, as Schrader says himself, a companion piece to his American Gigolo. He is grappling with some provocative ideas as well. For example, as the film unspools, it’s clear that the women relish their social power because, in fact, they are basically inconsequential in the lives of their rich and powerful husbands. Lynn says that she wanted a bit of happiness with her lover because the men don’t need them: “They fuck each other." That is a swipe at the hypocrisy of Washington, DC, and its many closeted gay men. Lynn’s husband (Willem Dafoe) confirms her view (or at least confirms their relationship) to Carr, who continues to shield her: “Lynn inflates her importance in the larger scheme of things." From the look on his face, he really seems to mean it.

So why is this film so unsatisfying? I think the problem lies mainly in choosing to introduce a scandal that crosses from the private to the political. Comparisons are made constantly of Carr, an apolitical social creature, with his father, a senator who helped bring down Nixon during the Watergate scandal. By bringing in an informal investigation conducted mainly by Carr’s dark-haired lover, but also by the blonde-wigged Carr, the parallels The Walker perhaps unintentionally evoke are to All the President’s Men. The dirty politics of this dirty era get a clothesline airing, but the real story is Carr’s fall from society’s grace. Schrader’s polemical script doesn’t drill into the heart of that story; it doesn't even sound like real people, not even cultured and educated people. Schrader’s focus is all over the place.

Worse, perhaps, by creating a social milieu composed entirely of people who live their lives so superficially that they can’t even explain their own actions to themselves, Schrader creates an emotionally vacuous story. All of the actors in the film are capable of depth, but Schrader directs them only as deep as the first circle of Hell. We can’t believe that any of them, perhaps with the exception of Emek, yearns for more, not even Lynn, who says she wants what every woman wants—love, family, home—and then rifles through her dead lover's pockets to find an incriminating picture he might have had on him, a creaky plot device at best and a cynical repudiation of her declarations of love for him.

In this film, the one person who most understands this crowd is the art director, David Hindle. Why are these people the way they are? What do they want? What motivates them? Look around. The lavish, exquisitely tasteful interiors, the priceless art and artifacts, the gilt-dripped crystal goblets and Louis Quatorze office furniture—these are what make this world turn. These riches are the heartbeat underneath nearly every scene in this film and the only things that give the film life. Don’t listen to Bacall’s character when she says that marrying money is hard work because you can only look at it, you can’t touch it. She sits comfortably in her fourth row center seat at the opera and holds her lead-crystal old-fashioned glass steadily enough. She’s long, long past needing the touch of anyone. Ned Beatty, who plays Lily Tomlin’s industrialist husband, is being disingenuous when he says people only want a story, a good American story, they can believe in. What he really believes people want is what he wants—money, and lots of it.

Schrader, unfortunately, doesn’t really know this world. He wasn’t able to bring it to life in his screenplay or his direction. I admire his attempt to reach past his rough-and-tumble masterworks under Martin Scorsese, and The Walker does hold some interest. But in the end, it's a lot less than the sum of its parts. l

Michael Clayton (2007)
Director: Tony Gilroy

By Roderick Heath

Michael Clayton is a lawyer who doesn’t practise law anymore – instead, he’s more of a “janitor" for the powerful New York law firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, as his friend and coworker Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) describes him. His niche position has become one of tending to the messy situations of clients and colleagues. Without using bribery, standover tactics, or nefarious means, Michael simply has the ability to read a situation and construct the best strategy for easing the pain. Early in the film we see Michael called to counsel Greer (Denis O’Hare), a creep of a client who’s just knocked a man down in a hit-and-run accident. Michael is dispassionate about reciting the man’s options, and afterwards, takes off in a panic into the countryside, pausing his journey to get out and approach a trio of horses on a hillside. As he reaches to pat one of the horses, his car explodes.

Who put a bomb in Michael’s car, and why? The film travels back a few days to explain. He was called to bail out Arthur who had been working on a six-year-old class action lawsuit brought by hundreds of rural families who had been falling ill, so they say, because of a pesticide produced by the massive U/North Corporation. Wilkinson, a manic-depressive who is also an exceptional lawyer, seems to have gone into another unstable episode; during a deposition by Anna (Merritt Weve), a pretty teenage plaintiff, he stripped naked and got himself arrested after chasing the girl and her lawyers off through the snow. Michael believes Arthur has gone off his meds, and so ignores Arthur’s pleas that he is responding to a real and urgent crisis in what he is doing. Arthur takes a runner from Michael’s care

Meanwhile, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) has been promoted to the job of her boss, Don Jeffries (Ken Howard), as head of U/North’s legal department, taking over responsibility for the case. The film cuts between her fastidious, fluent appearance when giving interviews with her arduous, obsessive rehearsals. With her pale flesh, her secret sweating, and her bloodless face, she suggests something octopoidal, as though having conquered most of her humanity in the process of rising to the top, but still fighting a guerrilla war with her own rebellious cells. Realising what it might mean if Arthur is truly a threat to the security of their case, she soon assigns two goons to finding and keeping an eye on him. She’s the kind of woman who orders someone assassinated and then goes to have a panic attack in the bathroom—not that it makes her think twice. She’s got reason to worry—Arthur has found a document proving that the heads of the company knew of and buried scientific data that proved the pesticide caused cancer, and that it seeped into the water table used by residents as drinking water. He’s also in contact with Anna, promising to help her in the case.

Michael Clayton is a welcome update of the guy-with-a-conscience movies of the 1970s and ’80s, except with a more middle-aged, world-weary air than, say, …And Justice For All (1979) or Brubaker (1980). Where these earlier films and their like usually dealt with young men trying to grapple with corrupt institutions, Michael Clayton is about a man who long ago happily sold out, but is forced to fully confront his own corruption and that of the people around him. The film centers on a detailed, devoted, achingly assured performance by Clooney. Michael, an aging, disillusioned golden boy, has an ex-wife, a son Henry (Austin Williams) of whom he has partial custody, a partly conquered gambling problem, and a serious, sudden debt when the bar he set up to be managed by his feckless brother Tommy (David Lansbury) goes under. Angry at his brother for his weakness, Michael considers him a dead weight on his own worldly success. But his success doesn’t seem to make him very happy. Michael wants his son to grow up strong and independent, but is what he does what he hopes his son will do?

Amorality isn’t just a job requirement in his sphere, it’s a virtual philosophy. When he approaches Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), who is one of the senior partners and his boss, and simultaneously tries to borrow money and work out how to deal with Arthur’s mouthing off, Marty prods him until Michael asks, “What do you want me to say? Give me 80 grand and I’ll forget Arthur?" Marty ripostes, “Maybe you should have!" Fiscal motivations are clear signals of intent; everything else is untrustworthy and self-indulgent. Marty is also entirely fine with defending a case he knew “reeked from day one;" it’s their job.

Debuting director Tony Gilroy brings his own screenplay to life with an intense, icy airbrush of artistry that helps, not hinders, the machinery of his story arc. The photography by Robert Elswit conjures a world of steely beauty and hazy grace, as if all seen through eye still bloodshot from last night’s drinking. Gilroy’s tight control on his style and his story take the film a long way, but not quite far enough to avoid revealing that his film is essentially a sexed-up version of A Civil Action (1999) with some Alan Pakula paranoia. Gilroy, an experienced Hollywood wordsmith, writes the Bourne movies, and like those films, he gives his genre offering solidity and momentum by grounding it in a tough, unsentimental take on institutions. Be it the CIA or the corporate world, Gilroy knows how to zero in on what is obnoxious about their behavior and phony about their poses. But whilst deftly characterising the self-delusions and contradictions of Karen and Marty as characters, the film’s take on corporate malfeasance and cover-ups is shallow, despite Clooney and Gilroy’s solid liberal perspectives; we’ve seen this story already with The Constant Gardener (2005) and a half-dozen other films. The company and its monstrous acts remain bogeymen. Their two hired goons are amusingly introduced as bland, grinning golfers forced to abandon their day’s game to go do evil henchmen stuff. Whilst I, for one, don’t doubt that Big Business can pull off these sorts of shenanigans, one doubts it all comes off with the kind of Machiavelli-via-Rolex-ad slickness it does here.

So Michael Clayton certainly never becomes a message picture as well as a thriller. Instead, it follows a pretty worn arc, as Michael picks up the threads of Arthur’s investigation and soon puts himself in danger, through to the finale and his method of driving Karen to the wall—all very familiar scenes redeemed by sharp style and impeccable acting. Clayton’s family background and midlife quagmire are well detailed but actually add up to little. The film isn’t interested, for instance, in describing why Michael and Timmy have ended up so different. It’s not really a character study, despite the title. Moreover, some of Gilroy’s flourishes are riddled with a metaphysical element that never escapes the yoga class, like the opening monologue by Arthur that tries to channel the kind of crazy-genius babble of Peter Finch in Network (1976), or a Shakespearean Fool. Arthur, and later Michael, invoke “Shiva the God of Death" as a joke about delusions of grandeur, but also to signify an earnest, righteous intention to tear down the Towers of Babel around them in seeking karmic rebirth. Then there’s the irritating motif where Michael’s son turns Arthur on to a series of fantasy books (made up for the film) that reflects Arthur’s paranoia but also provides a prescient warning through those horses on the hill—symbols of freedom, they recreate an illustration from the book—the sort of tinny, significant pseudo-metaphysical touch that is the definition of sophistry. Wilkinson handles his role, laced with screenwriter’s indulgences that might have been excruciating in the wrong hands, with a skill that is truly blinding.

Gilroy’s enough of a professional to know how to put his story across, but this also presents Michael Clayton from reaching the grounded, procedural brilliance of All The President’s Men (1976), a definite influence, nor quite the lean, electric intensity of a no-frills noir film. Nor, really, does the film challenge anyone’s moral precepts. Though their motivations may be distinct (what we’re willing to do to get ahead), Marty and Karen never do anything that is definitely right, and Michael never does anything that is definitely wrong. He brushes his brother off a bit brusquely, and we presume he’s done unpretty things in protecting assholes in the past, but we don’t see that. Everything we see him do is essentially decent until he’s stuck holding both his alternatives literally in his hand—Arthur’s report that will blow the case up, or the $80,000 from Marty. It’s a bit too obvious a conundrum. Michael fails the test, but only briefly. The audience is never really forced to question its loyalty or identifications, and so the map of characters is definitely in the realm of melodrama. We know who the baddies are and that our hero will do the right thing eventually or go down trying.

So the film’s politico-social edge is blunted, and as a narrative it can’t break the mould. It’s a pity Gilroy plays safe, because his handling of the film and the elements within promise mastery, and with a fewer clichés, he might have produced an affecting, terrifying parable. Yet where the film is strongest, it is very strong. Michael is a believable character, and the reflections his situation offers on what success in life means are valid. When, in the end, we grin with pleasure when he gets the baddies, the film and he have earned our cheers. It’s a natural part for Clooney who, with his increasingly steel-shaded hair and perpetual five o’clock shadow, effortlessly embodies class gone a little to seed, lending charm to his sombre expression and dour estimation of mankind’s state, rich with underlying anxieties and unhealed psychic sores. It’s essentially a personal story as Michael tries to avoid having his brain broken like Arthur’s or his identity sucked away like Karen’s. I most admired Swinton’s turn. Armed only with a variation on the Cold Corporate Bitch part, she conjures a blackly comic creature, a startling spectacle of contradictory impulses that it proves impossible for a human body to contain. l

A Christmas Carol (1938)
Director: Edwin L. Marin

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Of the many screen adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, to my mind, the best and most definitive version is the 1951 production starring Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. Filled with wonderful performances, evocative settings, and a fully fleshed story, this is the movie that has imprinted my mind’s eye with how the story goes.

So when the hubby said that his favorite Carol was the 1938 version starring Reginald Owen, I suggested we watch it. I was sure I had seen it before, but after a full viewing of this short, 73-minute film, I can say I had only seen clips, not the entire thing. So different was it in so many respects from my cherished version, I found the entire experience a revelation.

First a word of thanks to the good people of Turner Classic Movies who dig up all those interesting facts for their various movie hosts to drop at the beginning and end of each screening. Robert Osborne, the indispensable main host on TCM, introduced the film by saying that to radio audiences of the 1930s, the audio version of “A Christmas Carol" with Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge was as ubiquitous and popular as A Christmas Story and It’s a Wonderful Life are today. To capitalize on the popular radio special, MGM decided to produce a filmed version with Barrymore leading the cast. Shortly before filming was to begin, Barrymore had a crippling fall that, added to an earlier injury, would cost him the use of his legs. Because so much was already invested in the film, MGM decided to forge on. Barrymore suggested Owen as his replacement and did a promotional trailer for the film. This background helped me enormously in understanding the very different choices director Marin and screenwriter Hugo Butler made in telling this familiar story.

The film opens not on the offices of Scrooge & Marley, but rather in the street near the accountancy, where Scrooge’s nephew Fred (Barry MacKay) is sliding on the icy sidewalk with some youngsters. This scene goes on for quite some time, setting up Fred as a handsome and likable lead; this image is further reinforced when he enters his uncle’s place of business and encourages Bob Cratchit (Gene Lockhart) to put more coal on the fire and have some wine Fred has brought as a gift for Scrooge. This scene of good cheer and camaraderie really is delightful. Bob retrieves a glass from his boss’ office and hands it to Fred. “What’s that smell?" Fred inquires. “Cough syrup," says Bob. They both grimace and chuckle as Fred fills the glass for Bob. It is then that Scrooge makes his entrance. Cratchit hurriedly puts down the glass and runs to the fireplace to remove some unignited coal briquettes.

The scene then progresses as Dickens wrote it, with Fred and Scrooge declaring their opposite philosophies of Christmas and life in general. When Scrooge dismisses some men collecting for charity with the famous line “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population," it comes as the shock it always does, no matter how often it has been repeated.

The story deviates again from the original by having Bob take off after collecting his week’s wages and getting involved in throwing snowballs with some neighborhood boys. He ends up throwing a snowball at Scrooge and knocking his top hat into the street where a coach tramples it. Scrooge fires him. Bob blows his entire wages on food for Christmas dinner and chestnut treats for his children.

From this point on, the story proceeds in pretty much the traditional manner, with light sprinklings of sugar here and there. Leo G. Carroll ably acquits himself as Marley’s ghost. The Spirit of Christmas Past, played by Andy Hardy regular Ann Rutherford, is the strangest casting in the film. She is far too glamorous and sounds like a scold as she preaches to Scrooge of his failings. D’Arcy Corrigan as the Spirit of Christmas Future looks like a fugitive from an Ed Wood film. But the brilliant performance and costuming of Lionel Braham as the Spirit of Christmas Present make him my favorite of all those who have played the part.

The hubby thinks Terry Kilburn is a creepy-looking Tiny Tim, a sort of Peter Lorre in training, but he’s still endearing and manages to toss off “God bless us, every one," without too much syrup coating the screen. Lynn Carver as Fred’s fiancée Bess takes the romantic lead other versions of the story properly reserve for Ebenezer’s lost love Belle, whose story is never told. Old Fezziwig (Forrester Harvey), a great favorite of mine, is barely a walk-on in this movie. So much is left out of this A Christmas Carol, it seems like a Cliff’s Notes version. Additions leave other moments hanging; for example, Bob Cratchit’s splurge on Christmas dinner makes Scrooge’s purchase of the prize goose on Christmas day rather beside the point. And Owen’s bald wig and roaming eyebrows are atrocious.

What then are we to make of this movie? I think the key is the radio drama it was supposed to emulate and the conventions of the time that demanded an attractive ingénue couple, moving Fred and Bess to center stage. This shorter version, which I'm convinced must have tracked closely with the radio play, certainly fits the restrictions of radio and simplifies some plot twists that might have been confusing to listen to. The film is filled with sounds, from the clock in Ebenezer’s bedroom striking the hour to the pop of Scrooge’s hat under some carriage wheels. These sounds certainly would have brought the tale alive for a radio audience. The omniscient voiceover is omitted to keep the narrative moving, but its absence leads to some heavy-handed moralizing by the Spirits. There is, however, one shocking image that the radio could not deliver—Scrooge reading his own tombstone. That scene still has a lot of power and was well handled in this telling.

And how does Reginald Owen stack up as Ebenezer Scrooge? He had less to work with than Sim or other screen Scrooges, and yet, I think he set a standard that others followed. His gestures and carriage are perfect, and his transformation from a miserly humbug, though a bit too swift, is heart- warming nonetheless. This A Christmas Carol delivers the sentiments we all crave at this time of year. I’m glad to have welcomed it into my home. l

Dune (1984)
Director: David Lynch

By Roderick Heath

Frank Herbert’s Dune, published in 1965, is my favourite science fiction novel and a clear contender for the greatest of the genre. A monumental work of mythic imagination, it marked a bridging point of the literary scifi form, linking the mind-bending modern genre with its space opera past. David Lynch had only two feature films to his credit—Eraserhead(1976) and The Elephant Man (1980)—when he was chosen to direct Dino de Laurentiis’s huge-budget adaptation of the novel. Lynch’s film of Herbert’s novel hardly lived up to the stature of either artist. Instead, it signaled Lynch’s retreat from a mainstream career and the beginning of the end of the scifi film boom of the late ’70s early ’80s.

Why was Dune such a big bust? There are a few standard answers that can be offered: the book was too long and complex to adapt; the FX demands too great even for post-Star Wars Hollywood; the cinema is inimical to much of what the novel was about—metaphysics, moral complexity, speculative physics, political intrigues, oh my! As far as Lynch’s career goes, Dune is sort of a black hole these days—too weird for fanboys and not weird enough for fans of Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks. Dune surely needed the love, running time, and technical wizardry Peter Jackson gave to The Lord of the Rings. It needed to encapsulate a huge amount of geek expectation while selling itself to a mass audience.

In essence, the plot of Dune isn’t that complicated. In the distant future, computers are banned. We who are fed up with Windows XP might sympathise. The Goodies—the Atreides family—take over the planet Arrakis, where spice is mined. Spice is really cool shit that lets some people who make up the Spacing Guild fold time and travel through space, lets others live really long, and inspires many to develop incredibly bad fashion sense. The spice is produced by giant worms that infest the sands of Arrakis. The Baddies—the Harkonnen clan—used to run Arrakis, and they plot, with the help of the Emperor (Jose Ferrer), who fears the Atreides’ growing popularity, to take over again. Plots unfold. The Duke of the Atreides, Leto (Jurgen Prochnow), is betrayed and killed; his wife Jessica (Francesca Annis) and son Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) escape and meet up with a Merry Men-like mob of wild freedom fighters, the Fremen. Paul meets a hot desert chick, Chani (Sean Young), and soon confirms that he is the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy and the product of generations of selective breeding by the weirdo, quasi-religious, scientific sect called the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. Paul is a potential superhuman who can read minds, kill with a shout, and see the future. He leads the Fremen in a guerrilla war to halt spice production, avenge his father, and bring the universe to its knees.

Boiled down to essentials, it reads like a fast-paced adventure yarn, not so far from Star Wars. Indeed, Lucas borrowed elements from Herbert—a universe ruled by feudalism and pseudo-scientific religion. The Force, like the Spice, is a metaphysical trope that contradicts the technofascist drift of scifi. De Laurentiis undoubtedly thought he’d be making an upscale Star Wars. But it’s the endless digressions, folklore, and ideas that fuel the narrative that distinguishes the novel. Working out what to stress and what to render inconsequential separates a good adaptation from a bad one. Peter Jackson, for instance, never let Tolkien’s goobledygook get in the way of sword fights and battles, trusting that an intelligent audience will absorb a new glossary in the experience. Lynch, writing his own script, fails badly. His efforts to explain are usually garbled, clumsy, and infuriating. Storytelling, never a Lynch forte, almost completely eludes him here, and though much of the novel’s material is present, it never gels into a narrative. Dune, a novel filled with complex manoeuvres not just of plot but also of thought and philosophy, is not so much an action story as a tale of characters thinking of how, why, and when to take action. Its nature inevitably changes on the big screen.

But the film is rife with missteps, intriguing aesthetic choices though they might be. Lynch’s breadth of imagination and comfort with alien imagery undoubtedly landed him the job of making the film, and Lynch is indeed most at home with the novel’s most difficult aspect—its webs of vision, prophecy, and mysticism. His most arresting work comes in the associative, psychedelic montages that reveal Paul’s prescience, and indulge familiar tropes of his visual imagination, such as alien planets, falling stars, perverted births. However, Lynch’s approach elsewhere is a pasteboard affair, shunning the detailed realism Lucas, Kubrick, and Ridley Scott worked so hard to give to the genre, in favor of a broad, almost cartoonish atmosphere. It’s hard to tell the degree to which Lynch conspired with or was undone by the shoddy work of his special effects, set design, and costume departments; de Laurentiis’ associates seem to have thought they were still working on the parodic Flash Gordon (1980), and for the most part it just comes up tacky.

Possibly Lynch, a true surrealist, was delighted with the pastiche, matching his thinking that film should be flagrantly unreal. If The Matrix was a selection of systematic, market-driven images—techno chic, leather jackets, and drugs of choice—without a narrative to match, Dune is the opposite; it desperately needs Neo’s stylist, rather than the absurd proliferation of Austro-Hungarian and Stormtrooper unforms, big bushy eyebrows, and toy spaceships it’s got. The effects, despite being the work of masters Albert Whitlock and Carlo Rambaldi, are startlingly pathetic in comparison with the contemporaneous work in Alien (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Blade Runner (1982). The action scenes suck, from the lame-o ray gunfire to the cheap battles of the extras from a leftover sword-and-sandal movie.

One aspect of this film that is definitely Lynchian, and yet bugged genre critics and fans most, is the grotesque villains. Lynch’s manifestations of evil are always leering, caricatured, extreme visions (think Frank in Blue Velvet or the old couple at the end of Mulholland Drive), and the Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth MacMillan) and his progeny Feyd-Rautha (Sting) and Raban (Paul Smith) fit right in. Lynch’s evil caricatures are slightly different to Hollywood patent villainy; Lynch tries to evoke the weird, threatening people who inhabit the corners of adolescent nightmares, like escaped pieces of the Id. But that’s not Herbert; the novel’s Harkonnen is monstrous and a sadistic homosexual to boot, but he’s also a master tactician, a figure fit to lead a Roman army. Lynch’s Harkonnen viciously slaughters toyboys and drools over Sting’s oiled pecs, has boils weeping from his face, and rants a lot. There is no impact to his sticky demise; he’s just too lame, a step away from a Popeye opponent.

Dune was hacked down by De Laurentiis, destroying much of its potential texture and clarity. But this would not have saved the film from these miscalculations. I’ve seen both Lynch’s original cut and the extended network television edition he took his name off, which sports a long prologue and new voiceover explanations in addition to extra footage. But rather than making it more fluent, these changes strip the film of one masterful quality—its dreamy tone, set by Virginia Madsen’s Princess Irulan’s appearance at the start (echoing the final image of The Elephant Man). Appropriately for a future run by feudal government and religious orders, the stylisation of the film is often gothic, but never as competently designed as it should be.

Worst of all, Dune just can’t come to grips with Arrakis as a place. Where the novel captures a sense of vastness and infinite possibility, Lynch’s setbound fakery reduces epic scope to tinny cavorting. David Lean’s camera in Lawrence of Arabia made the desert of a living thing; David Lynch’s makes it a sandbox. Lynch, aided by the striking photography of Freddie Francis, stages intermittently memorable scenes and imagery: the thunderous surf of the Atreides’ home planet; the first appearance of a worm during which a huge machine is swallowed from below; Paul and Jessica trying to survive in the desert under a worm’s attack; the gory placenta shots of Paul’s embryonic sister Alia being transformed by the Spice’s influence. Yet Lynch can’t really do justice to Herbert’s most striking and memorable moments, and his gorgeous perversities, like the orgies of the Spice-drunk Fremen and the wild Alia, a fully sentient infant (played here by Alicia Witt) gleefully cavorting on the battle- field slaying soldiers with a knife.

This inadequacy leads to another failure. Herbert’s novel portrays a future whose most genuinely alien quality is a lack of contemporary morality. Herbert provokes us with ideas—Paul’s victory bringing on a reign of bloodshed, Alia as a child housing a sexually knowing and psychotically violent adult—that upend normal ideals and easy identification and are poisonous to the type of melodrama Lynch is constructing. In Dune’s universe, modern liberalism and democracy have been replaced by a nascent medievalism, Byzantine webs of loyalty, intrigue, power mongering and servitude. The universe is infinitely corrupt, and change will be brutal, as Paul, in his visions, realises his ascension as the “Kwisatz Haderach," the great male witch and messiah, will bring on a cosmic-scale slaughter, his “good" distinguishable from “evil" only in being dedicated to collective renewal rather than self-interest. In this way Herbert evokes the undiluted pagan strength of classical myths like those in Die Niebelungen and the Trojan cycle, where the forces of history, identity, and spirituality warp and overwhelm petty human concerns. Lynch, trying to provide the Lucasian blockbuster, can’t come anywhere near this type of climax, with the end merely promising love, order, and peace, Paul brings the rain to Arrakis by magic tricks. Huh? Finally, Lynch completely fails to deliver the adult science fiction epic he was supposed to deliver, ending up instead with a misshapen beast.

For all this, the film is watchable, even enjoyable, and looked at from a slightly different angle, its apparently egregious failures seem like intriguing possibilities—which any Bene Gesserit would appreciate. The film is not as triumphantly weird as the novel, but it is bold, original, and weird in its own, distinct way. Lynch’s anarchic design that evokes the technology of the 1920s (for example, a translation device with the large, round head of a vintage microphone) and bizarre costumes throughout is authentically punk in attitude. Lynch embraces rock-accented music (the score, by progressive-pop legends Toto and Brian Eno, is perhaps the film’s best feature) in trying to make a new kind of epic. The film’s flourishes, I think, sank as deeply, but more stealthily, into the zeitgeist as the more widely appreciated Blade Runner in providing visual counterpoints to cyberpunk writing, graphic novel illustration, and music videos, as well as especially influencing the films of Jeunet and Caro. Despite its failures, the film still has the heft of a mega-production, and the casting is, for the most part, perfect. Kyle MacLachlan, Lynch’s discovery for the movie, makes a pretty, dashing hero. Further down the cast list, Patrick Stewart as the Atreides’ steward Gurney Halleck, probably won his role as Jean-Luc Picard with his nobly hammy diction, and both he and Sian Phillips, who plays the Bene Gesserit leader, came out of the TV production I, Claudius. l

Persons of Interest
A semi-regular feature on the underappreciated, the promising, and the very cool

Peter Zinner

Zinner as Admiral Yuri Ilyich Padorin in The Hunt for Red October

By Julia Gray

When I heard of Peter Zinner’s death this past November 13, I remembered the one and only time I met him. It seemed like it must have been more recent rather than some 16 years ago.

I was working as an assistant film editor on that craptacular cinematic gem Showdown in Little Tokyo with Peter’s friend and former coeditor, John Burnett. John and Peter edited The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988) TV miniseries, for which both earned Emmys.

When I was introduced to Zinner, the thought that ran through my brain was, “Holy crap! This is the same dude who cocut the first two Godfather movies and won an Oscar for The Deer Hunter. Wow." At that moment, I remember telling myself to keep my big yap shut because when nervous, it was not unusual for me to say dumb things. I just stood there with a goofy smile on my face and listened to these two editing giants reminisce about the good old days.

During their chat, I could barely feel my legs and was thankful when Zinner offered me a chair. I think I mumbled something that resembled “thank you," but I don’t remember. He must have understood my uttering because he acknowledged me with a smile and slight nod. Or, perhaps he realized he was dealing with a Class-A nut job and thought it best to assuage me with friendly, nonconfrontational facial expressions.

You know, the kind of expressions those who work with apes use.

Peter Zinner was one of the greats who understood at an almost genetic level the importance of telling a good story. He came of age when film editors had to possess not only mental and emotional resilience, but also physical strength.

The editing process in days of yore usually involved standing over a loud, vibrating machine called a Moviola and physically running film through it. Back and forth, back and forth the editor would spool the film while watching the images on a small screen until he or she found the perfect place to cut. That’s where the muscle came in. The piece was spliced together with other pieces and watched over and over, for days, months, and sometimes years until it felt “right."

Zinner got it right. Not many folks would’ve been able to understand the complexities of Michael Corleone (the Godfather movies), Michael Vronsky (The Deer Hunter), and Zack Mayo (An Officer and a Gentleman) the way he did and bring the most out of the performances of the fine actors who played them. Zinner’s sharp eye and understanding of human nature informed by his varied life experience added to his work.

Zinner was an Austrian Jew born in Vienna in 1919. His family fled the Nazis in 1938, first to the Philippines, and eventually to Los Angeles. There, Zinner worked in a movie theater, accompanying silent movies on piano.

Later, he landed a job as an apprentice film editor at 20th Century Fox. He also worked for MGM and eventually opened his own company with two other film editors. He and his daughter Katina, who followed in her father’s footsteps, worked together on the 2006 documentary Running with Arnold about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Zinner even had a bit part in The Hunt for Red October.

My favorite scenes cut by Zinner are from the Godfather films. The first of the trilogy, The Godfather, my favorite drama of all time, reveals the complexities of the characters feeding off an even more complex story line in an almost effortless tour de force. Each viewing provides me with something I missed during the hundred or so previous viewings.

One of my favorite scenes is when the Corleone family is discussing what to do after father Vito is seriously wounded in an assassination attempt. Michael, recovering from a broken jaw courtesy of a corrupt thug of an NYPD captain and not yet involved in the family business, decides to add his two cents on how to get rid of the men responsible for his father’s condition.

The camera slowly pushes in on Michael’s face, and we see him go from an innocent, a war hero, to one of the most powerful and dangerous men of his time. Everyone in the room, all of them harden criminals, is enthralled by Michael’s suggestions for the killings and subsequent ways to spin them in the local, family-influenced press. The overwhelming confidence in his speech and the calm with which he plans the demise of a rival Mafioso and a crooked police captain are unsettling at first. As we learn later, it’s Michael’s cool demeanor that make him so alluring and powerful.

The cuts are few, but potent. It is obvious that this was a scene where less was definitely more. The supporting characters’ reactions seem to convey to the audience that Michael “gets it" and that their lives are going to change from that moment on.

This sequence stops me in my tracks each time I see it. I can only imagine what went on in the editing room between Zinner, coeditor William Reynolds, and Francis Ford Coppola. It would have been the best film lesson ever.

Today, film editing is largely a hands-off affair. It’s done on computers, with an edit taking place by clicking a mouse rather than scraping off splicing tape. Post-production schedules are half what they used to be because of the speed and seemingly endless capabilities of Avid and Final Cut Pro. Film editors have to worry not only about the edit, but also budget and personnel management. The actual editing of actual film is slowly disappearing. It’s hard to imagine a pure, artistic summit between editors and directors happening today. There isn’t time. There isn’t money.

During production on Showdown, I would see Zinner from time to time, and he would give me that same nod and smile he shared the first time we met. At those moments I would think, “The man who helped shape Michael Corleone once offered me a chair." l

The Man in the Moon (1991)
Director: Robert Mulligan

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I enjoy family films. I particularly like anything that smacks of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation. There is something so warm and fuzzy about the simple, even lyrical dramas Hallmark chooses to sponsor, particularly during the holiday season; in an earlier era, I remember such homespun pleasures presented by Kraft, interrupted infrequently by recipe commercials using Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese and “Cheezoid." Just so you know—I’m hardwired to accept sentimental, commercial dramas that promote family values.

This week it was revealed that Reese Witherspoon is now Hollywood’s highest-paid actress. Although her brittle, obsessed performance in Election had some of us fooled that she might spend her time making challenging indie features, her roots and current career trajectory—now well established by her asking price—are mainstream all the way. The best evidence for that fact can be found in her film debut, The Man in the Moon. While it’s a bit risqué for early evening television, this is the kind of film parents should be happy to watch with their tweens and teens, hoping all the while that the kind of romantic/sexual awakenings on the screen represent the kinds of choices their children are up against in this toddling new 21st century. Nonetheless, I believe there is reason to hope that innocence hasn't really gone completely out of fashion.

The story, set in 1957 small-town Louisiana, centers on the Trant family. Mama Abby (eternally rural Tess Harper), pregnant with her fourth child; Papa Matthew (Sam Waterston), a stalwart sort; 17-year-old Maureen (Emily Warfield); and 14-year-old Dani (Witherspoon) live in the kind of large, faux-antebellum house with a wraparound, screened porch we all imagine we’d want to grow up in. It’s summer, and the girls beat the heat by sleeping on the porch. Dani, just starting to awaken to the opposite sex, has a crush on Elvis Presley. She lounges on her cot spinning a single of his “Loving You" as Maureen undresses nearby, revealing her curves and filled-up bra. Maureen is considered a beauty and is much sought after by the boys in town. Dani, plain and still railing against wearing skirts, wonders if she will ever attract a suitor. Maureen cautions her not to hurry. Growing up is confusing, and Maureen is often in despair about ever knowing what she really wants and, worse, ever getting it.

One Sunday, Dani races out of her church clothes and runs to a waterhole on the neighboring Foster farm, now long unoccupied. She goes skinny dipping, unaware that a boy is making his way to the hole. He jumps in, startling her as she quickly covers her breast buds. Both accuse the other of trespassing until the young man, 17-year-old Court Foster (Jason London), says his family owns the property. They’ve just moved back to town.

Court is a handsome boy, and Dani develops a crush on him, signaled, of course, by being as nasty to him as possible until he tells her that he likes her spunk. Then she gets some instruction from Maureen on how to kiss and behave around boys. She tries to get Jason to kiss her in the waterhole, but he rejects her brusquely with the suggestive line, “Well you just almost got yourself more than kissed, little girl." Eventually, she persuades him to be the first boy to kiss her. But her further ambitions toward him are thwarted when he meets Maureen.

This film has the feel of a play to me in the way the dialogue is written and delivered. The actors seem to declaim more than emote, presenting a classic formula for sentimentality. There are some violent and disturbing moments in the film, but aside from a whipping Matt delivers to Dani, they are the stuff of melodrama. For example, a storm suddenly kicks up after Court rejects Dani at the waterhole, setting up a potential tragedy in the Trant family. When the sisters share a mutual loss and then reconcile their rift over Court, it isn’t deeply felt. A possible love triangle between Matt, Abby, and Court’s mother Marie (Gail Strickland), a widow who dated Matt first, is considered by the screenwriter and dropped. Abby got him, and that’s that. The story demands family harmony no matter what.

And perhaps that’s the beauty of The Man in the Moon to me. Yes, it romanticizes family bonds, first love, and bygone values even as it allows fear, estrangement, and death to bite around the edges. Children need to know that they are safe while they explore some of the complexities of life yet to come, from disappointment in love to predatory adults and raging hormones. When Dani forgives her father for beating her, “I know you feel bad about taking the strap to me … You were scared, I know that," we understand that Dani is starting to see her father as a person, not the omnipotent figurehead at the top of the family pyramid. When she runs to him after witnessing a terrible accident near the end of the film, young viewers can rest assured that Matt’s earlier show of weakness and Dani’s recognition of it will not affect his ability to continue to provide her with protection and reassurance.

The Man in the Moon has lessons to teach, but they come out of the experiences of the characters, particularly Dani, and therefore provide young viewers role models with whom they can identify. It is important to introduce children to life in ways that will neither scare them to death nor bore them to tears. Perhaps some teens will be too sophisticated for The Man in the Moon, but many of them won't. And adults like me with a corny streak as wide as Iowa will enjoy the simple nostalgia, likeable characters, and loving families lovingly presented in this film. l