Ferdy on Films, etc.

Bug (2006)
Director: William Friedkin

By Marilyn Ferdinand

When I was going through the comments on IMDb about Bug, I was amused to read that one “reviewer" considers director Bill Friedkin a one-hit wonder. That hit, of course, would be The Exorcist (1973). Ah, how quickly they forget. Friedkin’s early career contained his biggest bangs (The Thin Blue Line [1966], The Night They Raided Minsky’s [1968], The Boys in the Band [1970], The French Connection [1971]). He uncorked another great one, To Live and Die in L.A., in 1983, and recently directed the respectable Rules of Engagement (2000) and The Hunted (2003). I remember reading someone ask when Chicago was going to build a monument to this talented and active native son. (Perhaps when it decides it doesn’t need someone named Daley in the mayor’s office—in other words, not soon.)

Then I started to ponder Chicago’s contributions to world art and entertainment. The city has sent hundreds of influential comedians into the world via The Second City, the city's famous improv troupe and its offshoots. I’ve found fans of the Blues Brothers (Second City alum John Belushi and Dan Ayckroyd) all over the world.

And then there’s the theatre company that made the term “Chicago actor" instantly and enduringly hot—Steppenwolf Theatre. John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, Joan Allen, Tom Irwin, Laurie Metcalf, and many other Steppenwolf ensemble members have gone on to great success in the movies, on television, and in the theatre. Their physical, in-your-face theatrical style went with them, in the process, helping to popularize their favorite playwright, Sam Shepard.

The original ensemble members rarely show up in Chicago anymore to shine their light on early fans such as myself. That’s all right. Steppenwolf keeps the flame alive by nurturing new generations of actors, directors, and playwrights and sending them out into the world. One of them, an Oklahoman who has made the Steppenwolf Theatre an exciting place today, is playwright/actor/director Tracy Letts. Letts has written one hit play after another for Steppenwolf, including August: Osage Country and Killer Joe, the latter of which transferred to New York and wild success. After I saw a knockout performance of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser at Steppenwolf in which Letts had the title role, I was more excited to approach Letts on the street to thank him for a riveting performance than I was to greet the man he was talking to—Oscar winner Adrien Brody. As you can imagine, when I learned that Bug was adapted from a play by Letts, I was more than eager to see it.

Bug was marketed as a horror movie, but its audiences got something both more complex and more basic than today’s horror movies deliver. Letts understands that psychological terror is the worst kind, and that it’s better not to show the monster if you really want your audience to scare itself to pieces. He uses this trick of the unseen threat to terrorize his female protagonist, Agnes White (Ashley Judd), and furiously spin this story of insanity and obsession.

Agnes lives in a seedy motel room with kitchenette in Oklahoma. She smokes, drinks too much, snorts cocaine, and works a deadly dull job at a lesbian tavern. Her days are spent sleeping off the night before, which generally involves partying with her friend R.C. (Lynn Collins). One night, R.C., trying to convince Agnes to come to a party after work, says she has a man for Agnes to meet. The episodic film skips the introductions. We next see Agnes in her room, getting drunk and high with R.C., while the man spends an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom. R.C. leaves. When Agnes learns that the man has no place to go, she invites him to sleep on the couch. He promises not to get funny with her, saying he has sworn off sex.

In the morning, Agnes wakes to the smell of coffee and an empty room. The shower is going. She thinks this is rather strange, but gets up to pour herself a cup from the coffee pot. When she goes to the bathroom to thank her guest, she is greeted by the tattooed, threatening figure of her ex-husband Jerry Goss (Harry Connick, Jr.), only weeks out of prison. He has been calling her—we witnessed her answer the phone, hearing nothing, over and over to an unnerving degree at the start of the film. Without explicitly learning why he was in prison, we already guess that Jerry was incarcerated for spousal abuse.

Just then, Agnes’ guest returns with breakfast in hand. Jerry confronts him, slaps Agnes, and leaves. Before doing so, he learns that the man’s name is Peter Evans (Michael Shannon). This is the first time we’ve heard it, too. Agnes sits down to a bran muffin and vodka and coke with Peter, feeling protected and cared for.

Her contentment is shattered when Peter announces that people are after him and that he has to leave to protect her. She smashes her drink against the wall, slams into the bathroom, and weeps uncontrollably. Peter returns to the room and speaking through the door, tells her that he was a guinea pig for the military in its biological experiments. He ran away, but is still being hunted. Agnes, moved by his desperate story, opens the door and runs into his arms. They make love in a psychedelic scene, interspersing naked bodies with microscopic views of blood flowing through veins and arteries. When Agnes gets up to use the bathroom, Peter says he has been bitten by an insect. He shows her red marks on his arm. She thinks it might be a spider bite. He examines her sheets with a table lamp and finds a tiny bug, an aphid. He instructs her about the power of this tiny bug. We will see exactly how powerful as the film moves through Peter’s paranoia and Agnes’ dependency to a chilling, almost apocalyptic end.

Agnes is a borderline personality dealing with a tragedy and hopelessly lonely, perfect prey for a parasite like Peter. Because of the episodic nature of the film, we don’t watch Agnes move slowly into Peter’s delusions, and this creates the shock Friedkin mined so effectively in The Exorcist. But the shock is more like meeting someone you haven’t seen for a while and finding them skeletally thin or filthy and deranged. Letts is adept in the mania of American conspiracy theories, tapping into some ideas many audience members may wholeheartedly believe or at least find somewhat plausible. Thus, he shines a table light on the sheet of our own gullibility and distrust.

Ashley Judd gives this role her all. She looks extremely unglamorous in the beginning, softening upon meeting up with some kindness from Peter, and descending into self-loathing and delusion by the film’s climax. Having said that, Letts clearly wrote an actors’ showcase piece; at times, I felt lost in the zeal with which she strutted her stuff. Michael Shannon originated the part of Peter when it was workshopped at his home theatre, A Red Orchid, in Chicago, and premiered the play in London. He’s clearly an oddball from the word go, but modulates his descent into madness at an even pace. His focus on Agnes is total and mesmerizing, a Svengali for the self-destructive. Lynn Collins and Harry Connick, Jr. are both wonderful, creating fully fleshed supporting characters who seem more in control than Agnes, but are in way over their heads when dealing with Peter.

And what about us? The ride Bug takes us on is as exhilarating as it is absurd. Watching Peter and Agnes examine their blood for bugs using a toy microscope is ridiculous, but we can’t stop them from seeing what they want to see. Reduced to almost a primitive state at the end, Peter and Agnes horrify us as much as they sadden us. I don’t think there’s a lesson to be learned here. There is a certain cynicism, even fatalism, in every ball of energy Steppenwolf ensemble members toss into the world. That’s Chicago, all right. l

An Old Mistress (Une Vieille Mâitresse, 2007)
Director: Catherine Breillat

By Roderick Heath

Catherine Breillat is one of the self-appointed firebrands of modern cinema, a volcanic talent with more ideas than places to put them in her films, which means some of them, like the controversial Romance (1999), fall apart from lack of sinew to hold the meat together. Her first encounter with the film world was as an extra in Last Tango in Paris. You might think some demon infesting Bertolucci’s body took up a new home in Breillat’s, except that where Bertolucci can’t shoot someone reading a phone book without making it an erotic act, Breillat can film an orgy and reduce it to a macrobiological meditation. Her Fat Girl (À ma soeur, 2001) was one of the prickliest triumphs of recent times, an utterly unsentimental look at teenage sexuality and family life. Her aesthetic contains shreds of Godard, Varda, Kubrick, Eustache, Cronenberg, Buñuel—even Wes Craven and Russ Meyer are bouncing around in that brain somewhere. Breillat’s gall is eternal, unforgiving, and far too restless to settle into mediocrity. Et violà—An Old Mistress, an adaptation of a Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly novel set in the 1830s that’s as bold and original a period film as has ever been made. D’Aurevilly was pinioned by the guardians of his era for the immorality of the novel, and Breillat may well have gravitated to that less well-known contemporary of Dumas fils, Stendhal, and Balzac, sharing with him the status of lawless provocateur.

Monsieur Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) is a 30-year-old, penniless aristocratic who’s just given up Vellini (Asia Argento), his mistress of the past 10 years, to marry Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida), a rich young girl with the consent of Hermangarde’s aged grandmother, the Marquise de Flers (Claude Serrault). The marquise is a grande dame of Parisian society who pines for the good old licentious days of the eighteenth century, so she’s all too willing to facilitate the marriage,as long as Marigny is utterly honest with her about his past and his connection with Vellini. Utterly respectful of sexual experience herself, but suspicious of lingering emotional attachments, the marquise works on the theory that a well-tempered rake is better for her daughter’s future happiness than a rich dullard. De Flers is prodded to investigate by two friends, the Vicomte de Prony (Michael Lonsdale) and the Comtesse d’Artelles (Yolande Moreau), who themselves are having an affair purely through consuming rich food together; de Prony, one of Vellini’s gentleman callers, has seen Marigny visiting Vellini. De Flers makes Marigny tell her the whole sordid story.

Marigny and Vellini’s tale, recounted in the central third of the film, is one of enraged romance, bloodlust, and tragedy. Vellini, the illegitimate daughter of an Italian countess and a Spanish bullfighter, married and was enriched by an elderly Englishman, Sir Reginald (Nicholas Hawtrey). Ryno first saw her in the company of a male friend who was already set on becoming her lover, and casually insulted her appearance. She heard, and professes powerful antipathy for him, even as he rapidly swings from dismissal to obsessed ardour. Encountering her one day whilst riding in the Bois du Boulogne, he forces a kiss on her, is interrupted by her husband, and gives him a swat with his riding whip. A duel ensues. Ryno fires in to the air, but gets a ball in his chest in return. Vellini, tending to his wound, sucks the blood leaking from it. And away we go!

Their passion drives far into the realm of amour fou and then drifts inevitably back to the shore of compromised existence. Breillat’s style maintains a consistent tension between the messy, illogical force of passion—usually sexual passion—of the characters and her own clinical, stringently naturalist shooting style. An Old Mistress is an utterly unadorned piece of filmmaking, taking no solace either in period plush or erotic revelry. The lighting is flat, the compositions stark, the editing unhurried, and there is no music. Nature sounds are integral, from the insects swarming the air in the Bois du Boulogne to the waves of the ocean. Breillat starts pointedly with de Prony and d’Artelles eating, de Prony wryly calling gluttony the last sin of which he is capable. For Breillat, it’s all an overwhelming question of nature and appetites.

Vellini and Marigny burn each other’s flesh to the bone and replace it with something else; everything that comes after is both too painful to enjoy and too great to forget. The real climax comes halfway through, when Vellini abandons her drunkard, elderly husband, left a weeping mess on the floor, and departs with Ryno to live with him in an Algerian hut. She has a daughter by him, but loses her to a scorpion bite, of all things. For days she weeps with the corpse in her arms, until they decide to burn it, leading to a hallucinatory moment where Vellini howls to the heavens in agony, whilst copulating with Ryno by the blazing pyre, amidst the desert sands.

Breillat’s constant theme is of the inescapable nature of human desire, but also of the difficulty in stripping away the layers of lies, distortion, falsity, and power that often enfold it. Romance confronted its heroine with an ultimate truth of sex—procreation; red, red blood of birth is the capstone on that journey. Red blood of miscarriage caps that of An Old Mistress—the failure of renewal and the blind alley of amour fou. Breillat, with an alchemist’s fascination with sexuality has always been tinged with a bold feminist distrust of its manipulation, taking shots constantly at male-centred sexual mores. Her sex-riddled films have been, ironically, extremely unsexy. An Old Mistress, for all the vividness of it couplings, isn’t exactly likely to cause arousal either, but it pulses with a heady sense of its gravitational force.

The glaze of alienation caused by their tragedy finally split Vellini and Ryno. Vellini, reduced soon to being a kept woman at the leisure of twerps like de Prony, Ryno recounts indulging in an affair with a sex-hating woman, where the pleasure is entirely in getting her to surrender to him, until he’s rescued from this ennui by the prospect of marrying Hermangarde. De Flery hopes that Hermangarde will cure Ryno of sexual guilt, and that he will ease her into the world of adult sensual experience. Their marriage proves blissfully happy, indeed, for a short time, until Vellini follows them to their seaside castle abode. Vellini’s a classical femme fatale, cousin to Carmen, Nana, Hedda Gabler, and any lesbian vampire Ingrid Pitt ever played, studded with wild, ambisexual capacities—she’s also sleeping with her chambermaid, cuts her lover with a knife, drinks blood, becomes a banshee of grief, dresses as a man to watch Ryno die or triumph in his duel, and finishes as a cigar-smoking fisherman. She’s a force of nature that Ryno cannot, finally, break from, even with his comely, wealthy wife properly bedded and impregnated.

Breillat is aided in all this by Argento’s ferocious efforts in a performance her Madame du Barry presence in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette promised, but never delivered, giving Breillat the shaman of female identity she’s been looking for. No other actress to hit the big screen since Barbara Steele has possessed such a map of the darker side of female sexuality as Argento. Roxanne Melquiades, as Hermangarde, serves as she did in À ma soeur as the blonde, conventionally beautiful foil to a more complex brunette protagonist. Aattou, in his film debut, could be the prettiest male movie actor since Alain Delon, certainly enough to make it clear why all these women in the film go dotty over him. More importantly, he can make his character work—it’s harder than it seems at first glance, to embody a character often callow and self-seeking, but without endowing him with sleaze or self-satisfaction. But he can’t provide a strong enough template of masculine identity to counterbalance Argento.

Tragedy does finally ensue in An Old Mistress, but it’s what you expect—a quiet, almost offhand event that nonetheless spells the end of a kind of hope and the repetition of behaviour and history. Ryno finally abandons his wife upon realising she will maintain a stoic bourgeois affect over a loss, rather than the incantatory rage of Vellini, underlining finally why he can’t forget his “Malaguena;" she may be a monster, but she’s a very, very human monster. The film leaves these characters without, essentially, anything resolved, but with a future firmly established, as de Prony summarizes at the end. It’s the tragedy of inevitability. l

Persepolis (2007)
Directors: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I admit I have a lot of trouble writing about animated feature films. For me, art is an interior experience, a far more subjective exercise in viewing and absorbing than looking at a movie with real settings and live actors. Animation gives me complete access into the writer/illustrator’s vision—no famous faces and places mitigating that experience—and that fact puts another layer of contemplation into how I see these movies. I welcome the challenge, however, when the film provides me with a rich and honest canvas of images and emotions.

Persepolis, an animated film of the autobiographical graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, is a truly extraordinary anime in the spirit of adult anime we have come to associate with the Japanese. Satrapi is an Iranian who has been living in self-imposed exile in France for some time. Persepolis was the ancient capital of Persia (now Iran) that was sacked by Alexander the Great in 331 BC and now lies in ruins. The film chronicles Marjane’s life in the current capital, Tehran, under the Western-backed Shah, through the Islamic revolution that deposed the Shah and on to the strict Islamist government that replaced it. The journey on which Satrapi takes us is both back in time through her life as told in voiceover flashback, and to the echoes of ancient Persepolis and its sad fate repeated again in the 20th century AD.

The film begins at an airport, where an adult Marjane (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni) is asked for her passport and ticket. She looks dumbfounded at the ticketing agent, then adjusts her veil on her head and walks away. She sits and the full-color illustration turns black and white as Marjane reminisces about her life.

As a child, Marjane (voiced by Gabrielle Lopes) is exuberant and outspoken. Her hero is Bruce Lee. So is her grandmother (voiced by Danielle Darrieux). Her parents (voiced by Catherine Deneuve and Simon Abkarian) are against the Shah, who imprisoned Marjane’s Uncle Anouche (voiced by François Jerosme) for being a communist. When the Shah is overthrown in 1979, the Satrapis and most of the rest of the country rejoice, including Anouche, who has been freed from prison.

Unfortunately, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism brings a different kind of repression to the country. Not only are communists persecuted, but also anyone who challenges the authority of the mullahs and the fundamentalist Muslims who take over the instruments of government. When Marjane’s aunt applies for an emergency visa for her husband, who desperately needs open-heart surgery in Europe, she complains that her former window washer turned her away, saying only that if Allah wishes it, she will have her visa. Marjane’s uncle is buried three weeks later. Anouche, as a former communist, returns to prison and eventually is executed.

Marjane, still outspoken, takes risks to preserve her former way of life as best she can. She borrows money from her mother to buy Western music from black marketers who are standing along a street. As she walks among them, she hears whispers of “Michael Jackson," “The Beatles," and finally the one she wants, “Iron Maiden." Marjane takes a jacket, paints “Punk Is Not Ded" on the back, and dons it over her chader. Two teachers accost her and warn her parents that all will not be well if they don’t bring their daughter into line.

Eventually, worried for Marji's safety, her parents decide to send her to stay with a cousin in Vienna. After their tearful farewell at the airport, Marjane walks away; she turns back in time to see her mother collapse in her father's arms and be carried away. Once in Vienna, Marjane is quickly sent from her cousin's home and to a convent school. Her uneasy stay comes to an end when, after the nuns have used a racial slur against her, she says, "Is it true that all nuns are prostitutes first?" Marjane bounces from home to home and finally ends up in with an older woman and her dog Muki, the latter of which humps Marjane's leg at every opportunity.

Confused and longing to fit in, Marjane takes up with a group of punks. Through them, she meets her first love, but finds him in bed with another woman one day. Depressed, she rejects him in her mind in a series of riotous fantasies of him covered with pimples, picking and eating his snot, and slavishly giving in to his mother. Marjane goes home and throws herself on her bed. When the old lady gives her a hard time, Marjane explodes. She insults the woman and her dog and leaves. She decides to return to Iran, but once there, she feels like an alien in her own land. She remains outspoken as ever at her university. In the end, Marjane leaves Iran for France, probably for good.

I had a leg up in understanding Marjane's story because I had read the remarkable memoir of these very times, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, an educated woman and university professor who described poignantly the lot of women under the mullahs and the variety of choices they had to make depending on their level of devoutness and Westernization. None of the horrors Nafisi described are missing from Persepolis. Satrapi describes the waste of the 8-year war with Iraq, the bombed houses, the executions. A particularly affecting story has Marjane's father try to secure a fake passport for Anouche; later, he and Marjane learn that the forger's residence has been raided, his equipment trashed, and a woman he had been hiding arrested. We see the woman in silouette standing in front of a hangman's noose, awaiting execution. The forger flees the country.

We also get a bit of a history lesson about the first and second shahs, whose deals with the West to modernize Iran included persecuting dissidents against democracy and Western influence. Although the repressions were often brutal, they also were contained; the imprisonments and executions increased 100-fold under the mullahs.

Perhaps surprisingly, the film is also quite lighthearted. We laugh when Marjane and her friend make fun of an ABBA album in class. When Marjane illustrates her growth spurt, with each part of her body suddenly ballooning and toppling her one way and another, it's a true revolution in the depiction of puberty. The absurdist-humanist eye that started when Marjane doodled her first caricature is fully developed in the straightforward lines and painful memories she creates for Persepolis.

For Marjane, honesty is the most important value. She betrays that code to save her own skin at one point, bringing down the wrath of her grandmother. "Always be yourself, know yourself," admonishes her grandmother, who says it's the only way to endure the lousy facts of life. This sounds like good advice, but to a woman trying to make peace with living in another country that is somewhat hostile to Muslims, clinging steadfastly to her Iranian identity is no small feat. The shock of her ordeal stays with her, a rip in her heart over her lovely, lost land, hidden but never healed. She never wanted to be a citizen of the world and still seems to feels adrift, as this honest interview she gave to Bookslut in 2004 demonstrates. As long as Marjane continues to write and draw her simply wrought, honest graphic novels, we're sure to learn how her grandmother's advice plays out in the long run. Personally, I can't wait to find out. l

Val Lewton Blogathon

Isle of the Dead (1945)
Director: Mark Robson

By Roderick Heath

Val Lewton’s series of RKO Horror films concluded with a triptych of features starring Boris Karloff: Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher, and Bedlam. Lewton was initially far from happy about having Karloff, the top star of the goosebump genre, forced upon him by studio executives, who maintained a hands-off policy as long as his films kept making money hand over fist. Karloff’s presence threatened to bend Lewton toward the Universal approach, which had degenerated into monster mash hilarity. However, Karloff, a gifted actor, gave Lewton a strong frame around which to build his films, an improvement over Lewton’s earlier films, which wobbled with unreliable lead actors.

Lewton was not popular in Hollywood because of his reputation for cultural snobbishness. A native Russian, he had come to the United States in the company of his aunt, actress Alla Nazimova, and hovered around the edges of cinema and literature, publishing novels and pornography and working as David Selznick’s assistant, in which capacity, hating Gone with the Wind, he tried to talk him into filming War and Peace instead. Amidst the flag-waving and mind-clogging escapism Hollywood was churning out, Lewton’s approach insisted on a detailed, yet carefully smudged contrast between the everyday world and the Id, painted with dreamy poetic realism. Lewton’s first director, Jacques Tourneur, had been promoted to A pictures, so Lewton broke in two editors as directors: Robert Wise and Mark Robson. Robson gained solid footing here after his uneven debut, The Seventh Victim.

Arnold Böcklin’s famous painting “The Isle of the Dead" (seen on a wall in I Walked with a Zombie) depicts a boat rowed by a figure in uniform, carrying a white-robed female figure and a flower-decked coffin to the gated lee of a Mont St. Michel-type island studded with Grecian ruins. Böcklin produced five versions, which came into the hands of such experts of death as Lenin, Hitler, and Freud. Lewton, keeping in mind his own background, often referenced Slavic and Hellenic folklore in his horror films. Böcklin’s concept was fused in Lewton’s mind with Pontikonissi, off Corfu, a place Lewton had visited and photographed.

The film was called "Camilla" during production, indicating that the story may also have been inspired by Sheridan LeFanu’s sepulchral romance. In the end, the finished film bore little resemblance to the script from which it began, not the first time Lewton threw out a screenplay and recomposed it on the run. The tale Lewton composed (he had a hand in writing all his films), with Ardel Wray and Josef Mischel as the credited screenwriters, is set during the bloody 1913 Balkan War, when Greece engaged in one of its periodic rows with Ottoman Turkey.

The prologue states that this corner of the world, the cradle of Western Civilization, is now violent and backward. The fade-in reveals a Greek officer being disgraced, as he bleats excuses for his soldiers’ late arrival to battle. His general, Nikolas Pherides (Karloff), wordlessly hands the man a pistol to go outside and do the honorable thing. It’s the last dirty job of a dirty day for Pherides. “And I’ve been wondering why they call you The Watchdog," mutters Boston Star correspondent Oliver Davis, disturbed by this event after having befriended this super-patriot. Pherides offers a calming smile; used to suppressing his personal sensations to duty, he shows flickers of repressed warmth when he recalls his deceased wife, who found him anything but “cold and brutal."

Pherides means to take advantage of the brief peace bought by victory to visit an island off the nearby coast, used as a cemetery, where his wife was buried more than 15 years earlier. He invites Davis to come along. They walk across the battlefield, a hellish vision of corpses and moaning wounded under sickly moonlight. Exhausted soldiers are hauling cartloads of bodies for burial. Davis protests: “Why can’t you use horses?" “Horses cannot understand why they have to work beyond endurance for their country,"says Pherides, “but the men understand." Pherides has Davis to talk with Dr. Drossos (Ernst Dorian [Deutsch], who also memorably played Baron Kurtz in The Third Man), who explains the army is in danger of epidemic. “The horseman on the pale horse is pestilence. He follows the wars."

Pherides and Davis row a boat to the Isle. To his horror, Pherides finds all the crypts have been plundered and the dead removed. They follow a lovely female singing voice through the labyrinthine ruins to the Isle’s peak to find that the uppermost building is inhabited by Swiss antiquarian Albrecht (Jason Robards Sr.). Albrecht blames himself for the cemetery’s desecration. Peasants had looted the graves to sell him relics until he stopped the trade and made his home on the Isle. Albrecht is sheltering travelers from the fighting; St. Aubyn (Alan Napier), a British diplomat, his wife Mary (Katherine Emery), and Henry Robbins (the unmistakable Skelton Knaggs), an apparently soused Cockney merchant. Albrecht’s housekeeper, the formidable Madame Kyra (Helene Thimig), idolizes Pherides and warns him that after the looting, they had to burn the disturbed corpses because of an unleashed evil, a vampire-like wolf-spirit called a “Vorvoloka," that she hints has taken possession of St. Aubyn’s young Greek maid Thea (Ellen Drew) and is preying on her sickly mistress. Thea, however, seems entirely normal. She refuses to serve wine to Pherides, who, irritated, wants to return to the army. Davis talks him into staying the night; Pherides strips his bed down to its bare boards.

Their dawn departure is stalled by the discovery that Robbins has died. Pherides sends for Drossos, who finds Robbins died of septicemic plague. The Isle is quarantined, and its inhabitants wait for the sirocco wind to blow and burn away the plague-carrying fleas. Drossos lays out a plan of contagion prevention that Pherides enforces with iron certitude. The next victim is St. Aubyn, leaving his wife in panic. She jabs a pin in his corpse to make sure he’s dead. She tells Drossos that she suffers from catalepsy and has an abiding fear of premature burial. Now, if I was a cataleptic in a place where people are being buried without much deliberation, I’d make sure everyone would know to stick a pin in me to see if I’m done, but Mary St. Aubyn is too English and proper to broadcast it.

Thea tells Pherides her reason for disliking him: Pherides once quelled a rebellion in her home district with field artillery. Albrecht sets up a pyre to pray to the Greek god Hermes on the theory that it’s as good as anything for warding off Fate. Drossos, listening to Albrecht’s prayer, adds twigs to the pyre, stating the gods are more powerful than his science—he’s dying. Mary begs him to take an opiate to ease his dying spasms, but Drossos refuses. His final words, amongst the most stringently stoic in any movie. move me: “I have watched so many times. I will watch this time too…Fight death all your days, and die knowing you know nothing."

Without Drossos to represent science and modernity, the survivors begin to splinter. Albrecht prescribes Christian prayer, hoping to regain the feeling he had as a small boy in church. Oliver and Thea have a gentle tryst and give themselves up to romantic fatalism. Kyra’s paranoia infects Pherides, who, with roots in unforgiving peasant life, abandons the rational and hunts for the Vorvoloka, harassing Thea so violently that Davis announces his intention to get Thea off the island. Pherides responds by smashing the boat. Mary, enraged, gives Pherides a tongue lashing, but upon returning to her room collapses. Thea spends a horrid night as Kyra hounds her in whispers through the door. In the morning Pherides kicks in the door, and she is found wringing hands guiltily over Mary’s body. Albrecht, mindful of Mary’s concerns, tests her for signs of life, but she seems very dead. When everyone exits the room, the camera gently zooms onto her mouth to show a brief twitch.

We all know what’s coming, and Robson stages it with cool brilliance. Davis and Albrecht place Mary’s casket in a stony crypt. The camera slowly slides up to the coffin, and we expect a scream at the climax of the dolly, but instead there’s a cutaway to Pherides and Davis on the terrace. The wind has changed, salvation is at hand, but Pherides realises he is infected and doomed. Cut back to the tomb, and the ugly jolt of Mrs St. Aubyn’s screaming and scratching. Night comes, the tomb is silent, apart from the steady drip of water on the box (Jack MacKenzie’s sharp photography at its best here). As Thea waits in the glens for Davis to come for their nightly tryst, she hears wood shattering. Kyra, tending Pherides in his death throes, also hears and sweats in fear. As Thea negotiates the dark, she encounters Mary St. Aubyn’s white-shrouded, insane figure and fetches Oliver and Albrecht to deal with her. Mary enters the house, and, armed with an antique trident, insane but with a remnant of her protective purpose, stabs Kyra and Pherides before falling to her death from the terrace. Dying, Pherides moans, “The Vorvoloka! I saw her! I saw her! Is she dead?" Albrecht tells him yes, and The Watchdog dies serenely. Davis and Thea are shoved off in the repaired boat by Albrecht.

The vivid quality of Isle of the Dead is the inescapable dread, contrasted with the characters’ attempts to retain their humanity—the fundamental theme of all Lewton films. Karloff rises to the challenge of playing a man who is both monstrous and sympathetic. It’s revealing to contrast Isle of the Dead’s evisceration of patriotic militarism with its celebration during the war years. Each character also represents less a nationality or a moral than a different way of dealing with existential fears. Pherides is a man of brute instincts but also deeply caring, a Hector used to the cold calculus of battlefield morality—if I have to kill 10 to save a thousand, so be it. His peasant background is the source of unyielding strength, though he doesn’t realize it; when he puts faith in an idea—even if it’s antimysticism—it is with mystical completeness. Albrecht, St. Aubyn, and Davis accept the limits of human capacity. Thea is a plain humanist, concerned only with peace and tranquility. Drossos, a warrior-healer, knows his combat is ultimately futile.

Isle of the Dead considers the human condition as necessarily self-deluding. When life is a hair away from extinction, the conduct of human beings toward each other is a paramount problem. Crisis in Isle of the Dead arrives when the unbalanced General threatens Thea, violating their multiethnic fellowship. As a warrior, he is both the problem and the solution. Mary St. Aubyn is Pherides’ opposite, seemingly fragile and doomed, she is the voice of morality and reason spoken from the edge of the ethereal, trying to the edge of death and beyond to defend rational decency even in a murderous rampage.

Lewton’s series concluded with the war, and transmitted its fatalistic air to noir - unsurprisingly, Lewton’s protégés Tourneur, Wise, and Robson, became major noir creators. Punctuated by Leigh Hurline’s atmospheric score, the best in a Lewton work, Isle of the Dead isn’t as symphonic an achievement as The Body Snatcher or as poetic as The Leopard Man and I Walked with a Zombie, but it is the most fully developed metaphoric drama of Lewton’s films. Given Lewton’s fragile health, he may have placed his personal anxieties in his stories. He would die within seven years of Isle of the Dead. Mark Robson’s later roster of films reflects the general lot of an A-list Hollywood director, including rock-hard classics like Champion and The Harder They Fall, and wretched junk like Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls and Earthquake. l

The review is part of the Val Lewton Blogathon, hosted by The Evening Class.

Atonement (2007)
Director: Joe Wright

By Roderick Heath

Ian McEwan’s celebrated 2001 novel Atonement is rare in its purposeful, forceful cross-breeding of modernist and postmodernist literary concerns (fractured perspectives, the unreliable author, urgent consideration of the nature of will, fate, truth, and fiction) with a story that mingled High Victorian epic elements and genre fiction tropes—a thwarted upstairs/downstairs romance, a wronged man, perverted justice, a shadowy villain, and a lone hero’s efforts to escape the disaster that befell a nation and return to his one true love. It was bound to be a difficult book to adapt. Intrinsic to its nature is more than one specifically literary conceit, starting with the fact that much of it is interior monologue that bends and stretches easily to provide exposition and background detail.

The novel’s first third takes place over the hottest day of the year in summer of 1935 and involves a kaleidoscope of both events and established individual perspectives of inhabitants of the swanky but ugly mansion of the Tallis clan. There’s young fantasist Briony, obsessed with writing and, as most young writers tend to be, a budding control freak who can barely tell truth from fiction; her subtly embittered mother Emily, wrestling with migraines; her elder sister Cecilia, fresh from an unimpressive showing at university, wondering what shape her future life will take; and Robbie Turner, son of the housekeeper whose education has been paid for by the Tallis paterfamilias. There are also three cousins—pretentious 15-year-old Lola and her twin brothers Jackson and Pierrot—foisted on their aunt’s household because their parents are divorcing. Arriving late in the day is Leon, the eldest of the Tallis kids, a cheery, vacuous chap, and his friend, Paul Marshall, a young chocolate magnate.

Over the course of the day, we see a hundred trails of intention, hope, desire, planning, misunderstanding, confusion, and malevolence meeting and entangling, resulting in Robbie and Cecilia’s simmering romance combusting; Briony misinterpreting the scenes between Robbie and Cecelia as proof of him being a sex fiend, cad, and bounder; Lola being raped by Marshall; and Robbie’s subsequent conviction for the rape based on Briony’s falsified testimony. Robbie will end up joining the army to get out of prison just in time to be swept away on the tide of World War II and become involved in the nightmare of Dunkirk, whilst Cecelia utterly rejects her family, becomes a nurse, a job Briony follows her into at age 18, tyrannised by her act.

McEwan makes a show of deconstructing his tale. Dickens, of course, would have found a way to make everything right; Hardy would have torn your guts out with the impossibility of fate—McEwan does both through an elderly Briony’s decision to rewrite history. Briony finishes her life as she first defined it—forcing life to conform to her judgments, having things turn out as they should have, and asserting her godlike control, except this time with fully considered moral perspective rather than adolescent panic. I tend to distrust such postmodern show, but it’s hard to deny McEwan’s ultimate points: that fiction often overtakes truth, and for good reason, the truth being unbearable sometimes, and fiction, a godlike art, is a tool, and sometimes the only tool, to make sense of life. To be as vital a work of cinematic thought as the novel is of literary philosophy, Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton might have had to scrap the whole thing and start from a perspective that involves the medium of film. However, to a certain extent, I couldn’t help but feel that Wright and Hampton had almost managed the impossible and made something rather more immediate and vital than McEwan quite managed to present. His novel showed its hand on the last page, and despite his explaining words, it couldn’t entirely escape the nature of cynical trick, no matter how artfully done. His words sound much more true, and affecting, coming out of the mouth of Vanessa Redgrave, playing Briony on the edge of mortality.

After some striking TV work, including the Ken Loach-style “Nature Boy" (2000), Wright made his cinema debut with his fluent, organic adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. This version restored vitality, realism, and social relevance to a shopworn property. Wright immediately established a gift for handling actors and a dynamic interest in using Kubrickian tracking shots to establish a cinema space that is involving, detailed, and realistic – the second ball of Pride and Prejudice was one of the best examples of recent cinema.

Wright explores his gifts here on a grander canvas, conjuring a long shot that soaks up a landscape of violent, absurd, and heart-rending details of the British Army stranded on the beach of Dunkirk, his cinematic answer (with the help of DP Seamus McGarvey) to McEwan’s grunt’s-eye-view of battle chaos. Wright’s handling of the transposition is elsewhere meticulous and aware. The opening scenes, unnervingly scored by Dario Marianelli with a mix of music and typewriter clicks, establishes the omnipresent music of Briony’s imagination, a touch that returns consistently when she appears in the tale, altering its nature, or when she’s been absorbed into a different tune, that of the militarized nursing training of the period. Wright occasionally asserts his medium, unobtrusively at first, then more overtly when digital-age Briony’s videotaped interview stops and rewinds several times, his version of her revisionism. Most importantly, Wright makes clear, by showing different accounts, the fundamental split between young Briony’s view of Robbie (James McAvoy) and Cecilia (Keira Knightley)—intimidation and assault—and their own—seething, half-realised passion—until Briony discovers them rutting in the library of the house, Robbie’s dark suited body apparently having skewered Cecelia’s body in green to the wall like an exotic butterfly in a collection, splayed legs and arms about her.

Wright trumps McEwan in some regards. Cinematic pace makes some of the narrative more cohesive than it was on the page. It’s hard not to be suspicious that the middle-act move from Agatha Christie-esque, country house mystery to ripping war yarn is as much an act of literary opportunism as it is a fulfillment of the theme of the tyranny of circumstance. (The ticket to instant greatness in European literature these days is a WWII theme.) But it does make internal sense. Dunkirk, like Briony’s new ending for the lovers, was a triumph of spin that enabled the future,and the Job-like proliferation of difficulty that stacks cruelly on Robbie’s shoulders. Where Robbie’s and Cecilia separate ends are asides tossed at the reader on the last page, Wright gives their ends forceful dignity, with the terrible, astonishing shot of Cecilia, drowned in a tube station flooded by a ruptured water main, floating off into darkness. It’s a scene that strikes with high tragic force and independence of imagination for a film that is so often stuck wrestling with the demands of accurate transcription. For all the ingenuity expended on this point, Wright and Hampton can’t always maintain a rigorous grip. Robbie’s trek to Dunkirk, anticipating writing letters he will never send and a future he can’t have, is a web of tenses on the page that won’t work properly on screen, and so this bit seems scrappy and unfinished. Nor can the intricacies of the Tallis’ private lives—with Emily’s resentments and Leon’s weakness conspiring with Briony’s lies to destroy Robbie—be put across with competence.

It’s also hard for McEwan’s overall thrust to come across. The book is a thesis on free will and fate. It begins with Briony mystified by the process of her thoughts controlling her finger’s movements, and the miniscule but real mystery of their connection, a point that soon becomes all-important—that thought does control action, that imagination can become fact, that small acts coalesce to become events, and that circumstance can soon tear out of anyone’s control and become inescapable, all-consuming Fate. In the end, Briony revolts against a fate that has entrapped all of them, Robbie most brutally, for whom the last few years of his life are a series of slowly expanding, utterly merciless trial. As a nurse, Briony (played at 18 by Romola Garai) finds in looking after a dying French soldier,that fiction might be a dangerous thing, but it can also make a cruel end less cruel; she despairingly goes along with his dazed perception of her as an English girl he knew as a lad. It’s virtually impossible to communicate this point as this film is presented, which becomes instead just a sad love story, precisely what McEwan was trying to avoid. Perhaps that’s just as well. McEwan gets to have his cake and eat it—conjure an epic yarn and then remind you he’s not responsible for it. Big themes make for Big art, and both McEwan and Wright know they’re onto something the award givers will love. Yet Atonement also resists the grand, cathartic flourishes that make for audience-seducing epicism. Atonement can’t quite congeal into a complete, satisfying whole, partly because of its own intentions. It offers a deliberate anticlimax, making for a yearning, questioning work.

Despite these hesitations and in terms of immediate effect, Atonement is a pretty undeniable achievement. Wright surrenders some of the fresh simplicity that made Pride and Prejudice rare for some gauzy visual effects and prettified touches at the start that belong to a more sentimental type of drama. But his pacing and handling of detail are superb. Rather than distance himself from ’40s weepers, Wright courted them; he had Knightley and McAvoy watch Brief Encounter and its ilk, influencing Knightley’s line readings toward Celia Johnson’s interpretive style. Wright has drawn comparisons of his work to David Lean, but the film of Lean’s that Atonement most evokes is the fragmentary Doctor Zhivago.

Because of the structure, no actor gets a real opportunity to dominate or showboat. Robbie and Cecelia lose psychological subtlety but become vastly more vivid by being filled out by real, gorgeous actors. Knightley is fine but ironically not as strong in the role, theoretically perfect for her, as she was as Lizzy Bennett; neither she nor McAvoy get much chance to expand their characterizations. Briony is best served by the three terrific performances in the various stages of her life: Saoirse Ronan’s incarnation of her self-obsessed youth; Redgrave’s haunted, fading fight; and in between, Garai’s breathtaking embodiment of skin-shivering guilt. Benedict Cumberbatch contributes notably as Marshall, perfectly embodying shallow charm. l

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

My Dinner with… Fred Waller

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I know in this “look at me" world in which we’re living, the lot of those who largely remain in the shadows may not seem to be a very happy one. Certainly some resentment at being overlooked can’t be avoided, but as a person who is very attracted to the world behind the scenes, I can say that, in general, standing a bit below eye level is a wonderful place to be. As part of the Lazy Eye Theatre Meme: My Dinner With..., I’ve chosen to break bread with one of the most fascinating movie persons you’ve never heard of: Fred Waller.

Waller cut his teeth in the film business as cinematographer for five silents by the estimable director Frank Tuttle. He also did visual effects for D.W. Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan. He turned his hand to directing in the ’30s. He specialized in making short music films featuring America’s great jazz musicians, beginning with Duke Ellington in A Bundle of Blues in 1933. The man had great musical taste, the foresight to see that these great performers needed to be captured on film for future generations, and an uncommon notion that filming African Americans being themselves was nothing out of the ordinary.

But what really sets Waller apart for me—in the immortal words of Henry Graham, "Every science has its fans."—is that he was an engineering wizard. If you look to the right, you’ll see the link for the American Widescreen Museum Web site on my blogroll, alphabetically first but also one of my very favorite Web sites, period. Fred Waller is responsible for that site’s very existence because he invented widescreen movie formats. He debuted the first widescreen process, called Vitarama, at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where it made a huge sensation. He later extended and refined that process by inventing the most famous widescreen technology of them all—Cinerama. Listen to Waller describe the process.

That's Clara Bow on the left hawking Waller's AKWA SKEES.

Waller’s mind was too active to give it just to Hollywood. For example, if you had a relative who was a WWII pilot who returned safely from the war, you both probably can thank Fred Waller for helping to make that safe return possible. He invented the first virtual-reality technology, based on the Vitarama process, and applied it to flight simulation, allowing pilots to gain valuable flight time. Oh, and if you’ve ever water skied, yes, thank Fred Waller for perfecting and patenting the first water skis. In all, Fred Waller held about 1,000 patents. He’s as close to a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci as they get.

I’m a pretty good cook with a brand-new kitchen and a love of entertaining, so naturally, I’d invite Mr. Waller to my home. I’d set out all the good crystal on the formal dining table and set up lots of jazz from the ’30s and ’40s for the CD player. I imagine Mr. Waller would like fine American food, so I’d serve cider-onion soup, homemade rustic bread, herbed lamb chops over orzo, and candied yams—all served with a medium-aged Beaujolais. For dessert—cherries jubilee and cognac.

I’m not one for a list of questions normally—I like to see where the conversation leads—but Piper asked me to, so I’d ask:

1. Mr. Waller, tell me why you decided to film jazz musicians and what the musicians you worked with were like? Any good stories to tell about them?

2. What were the challenges of transitioning to sound, and particularly, recording musicians? Did you invent anything to improve sound recording quality and reliability to help you and others?

3. What do you see as the purpose of movies?

4. As someone who spent a lifetime trying to improve movie images, are you a believer in the primacy of the picture in motion pictures? Why or why not?

5. Tell me more about your favorite inventions, what they do, how they work, and how long it took you to invent them? What drew you to want to solve these particular problems?

And wait for all the answers—for as long as it takes! l

The six bloggers I have invited to participate in the meme are:

Joe Valdez of This Distracted Globe

Pat at Doodad Kind of Town

Peter Nellhaus of Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee

Ed Howard at Only the Cinema

Campaspe at Self-Styled Siren

Kimberly Lindbergs at Cinebeats

Open Your Eyes (Abre los Ojos, 1997)
Director: Alejandro Amenábar

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The questions of identity and the nature of reality have penetrated deep into the world zeitgeist in the past 10–15 years, if we are to judge by the movies that have been made. From the visually dazzling juvenile entertainments like the Matrix films and genre-bending films by Quentin Tarantino to perceptually distorted horror films like Identity, it seems that the new generation is trying to figure out who they are in the same way my generation used drug movies, genre benders of the various New Waves around the world, and perceptually demented horror films to mirror our confusion. The year 1997 saw the release of two superior examples of this class of identity thrillers—the American independent film Habit and ace Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes.

In both films, the main characters are men in their 20s dealing with loss. Habit’s Sam is grieving the death of a father he barely knew and a relationship that has ended. César (Eduardo Noriega), the main character in Open Your Eyes, is grappling with a drastic change in his body. Both men are plagued by vampiric women and a hallucinatory existence that keep them separated from ordinary existence.

The film opens onto a black screen with a woman’s voice gently urging, “Open your eyes. Open your eyes." An alarm sounds, waking a young man. We see his naked back as his outstretched arm silences the alarm. We next see him staring drowsily at himself in the mirror. We see him through frosted glass as he showers. Then, his hand wipes away the steam on the mirror as he regards himself again. Now dressed, he races down the stairs of his exquisite, modern home and out the door. He drives his vintage VW bug through the streets of Madrid and notices that absence of people. He pulls over, gets out of his car, and wanders into one of the city’s main drags. He is the only person there.

After this stunning, empty cityscape, the film repeats the same sequence as the opening credits roll and extends it. This time, the streets are abuzz with life. The young man, César, stops on street corner to pick up his best friend Pelayo (Fele Martinez). “You own three cars. Why do we always have to drive in this piece of junk?" asks Pelayo. César is an orphan made rich by his inheritance of his family’s catering business. Pelayo complains that César‘s extraordinary good looks and money help him get any woman he wants, that he basically leads a charmed life, doing exactly as he pleases. The pair play a hard game of racketball. After one intense point, the scene shifts. César, sitting on the floor with his head down, is being questioned by Antonio (Chete Lera), a psychiatrist at the prison for the criminally insane where César is being held. César has killed someone, and Antonio is trying to determine if he was legally insane when he committed the crime. Antonio is drawn to helping César, who hides his face behind a mask.

Slowly, the events leading to César’s incarceration are revealed. César is a playboy who never sees a woman more than twice. This doesn’t sit well with his latest conquest, Nuria (Najwa Nimri). She crashes a birthday party César is throwing for himself. To get away from her, he begins to chat up Sofia (Penélope Cruz), the beautiful woman Pelayo has brought to the party as his date. César tells her he is in catering; she says she’s an actress. “I don’t like actors," says César. “They’re so skilled at hiding their true feelings." Nonetheless, César begins his seduction of Sofia—much to Pelayo’s disgust. They leave the party and go to her place. César looks at pictures of a happy and clowning Sofia surrounded by friends and loved ones; he’s touched. They sketch pictures of each other. Sofia’s picture is a caricature that shows César surrounded by expensive cars and bags of money. He’s offended by it, then shows her the beautiful sketch of her he has done. They watch TV, on which a man is being interviewed about cryostasis. It is light when he finally leaves her apartment, but their night has been a chaste one.

He is greeted on the street by Nuria, who convinces him to let her drive him home. Jealous, she accuses César of sleeping with Sofia. She starts speeding and then asks César if he believes in god. She intentionally plunges off the road and down an embankment. The car hits a solid wall and crumples. The horrific crash kills Nuria and grossly disfigures César. Surgeons work on his face to allow him to breathe and talk normally, and they give him the good news that he has suffered no long-term neurological impairment. But they can do nothing to rescue his face. He is outraged. They provide him with a mask, which they only offer in cases of “extreme rejection" of their cosmetic efforts. César is shunned, particularly by Sofia. He confronts her in the park where she earns extra change as a mime/statue. She agrees to meet him at a nightclub, but when he arrives, he finds Pelayo is there at Sofia’s request to provide a buffer between her and César. César gets drunk and passes out on the street.

Luckily for César, Sofia has a change of heart. She finds him in the street in the morning, kisses his disfigured face, and tells him she loves him. A few months later, the doctors call and say they have new, experimental technology that could restore his face. About a month after the surgery, Sofia approaches César, who is sitting in a chair with plastic molds on his face. She pulls them off one by one to reveal César as he looked before the accident. They make love in a scene of touching beauty. It is then that César’s mind begins to play tricks with him in scenes of confusion and terror, with Nuria and the man from the cryostasis commercial popping up where they are not expected, and César’s appearance randomly changing from gruesome to woosome and back again.

Amenábar’s nightmarish thriller weaves us through César’s experience, confusing us along with him, and providing Antonio as our guide through César’s dreams and experience every bit as much as he is one for César. The cinematography and art direction of brothers Hans Burman and Wolfgang Burmann are flawless. I was particularly struck by the nightclub scene; it’s bluish glow a ghostly metaphor for the unconscious, it quite reminded me of another nightclub in another movie in part about madness—Sean Penn’s The Pledge. César’s despair over his change in appearance is so profound that we realize that he is lost to himself without his good looks. Indeed, his struggle has larger implications for the surfaces of life we all maintain like a smooth, but fragile layer of skin. Would the people in our lives be willing to accept us if our status changed drastically? Were our existential masks to crack, we might go into the self-annihilating despair César experienced.

Eduardo Noriega is one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen; he’s also one of the best actors around. He knows how to radiate confidence as a birthright and anger at his loss of control in all its many shades. Those who may first have been introduced to Penélope Cruz in Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise’s remake of this film, will see how good an actress she really is when able to use her native language. She has since developed more as an actress in English, but I still prefer her work in Spanish. Chete Lera is a wonderfully compassionate psychiatrist whose fate is unbelievably heartbreaking.

Slowly, the film reveals its secrets in ways that any thriller/scifi fans will love. The ending is both shocking and satisfying as it returns to César control of his life. The film’s opening is repeated at its end, after we, too, have opened our eyes. l

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Director: Tim Burton

By Marilyn Ferdinand

It’s not often that a director like Tim Burton can shop for a script on the ready-to-wear rack. It’s kind of a shame that Sweeney Todd, a 1979 Broadway hit that won eight Tony awards, seemed to have anticipated Burton’s career to the letter. I saw this audacious musical when it first hit the boards in New York—more Metropolitan Opera than Tin Pan Alley—and remember what a shocking sensation it was. If this campfire horror story hadn’t been such a natural fit for Burton to bring to the big screen, he might have tried harder to differentiate it from his other works, not that any Burton/Depp/Harry Potter fanboys will mind. For musical theatre fans and most of the rest of the moviegoing population, Burton and his alter ego, Johnny Depp, get in their own way far too often to make this film anything near the diabolical happening the stage version was. Nonetheless, the glorious music of Stephen Sondheim on the glorious sound systems most theatres have these days manage to create, all on their own, an emotionally satisfying journey to the heart of hell.

Horror films do opening credits exceptionally well, and Sweeney Todd weaves us through them with a luscious stream of blood, like Jackson Pollock dripping a trail of crimson red across a canvas of words. Todd was an artist of sorts in the art of murder, drawing a straight line with impeccably sharpened razors across the lumpy landscape of his victims’ throats, so I was very intrigued by this opening.

In the preamble, we meet Sweeney Todd (Depp) on a ship closing in on its last port of call, London. He thanks a young seaman, Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), who spotted him floating on the open ocean and secured his rescue. The boat-docking scene is a beautiful composition, almost like a JMW Turner painting. When Anthony asks Sweeney if he may look the older man up after they are both settled, Todd says he is likely to be found in the vicinity of Fleet Street. At this point, a dizzying animation ripped off from Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge and giving the impression that we’re about to watch The Corpse Bride speeds us through the dingy back alleys of London to a haunted house of a shop on a corner. Lovett’s meat pies are advertised on the sign below a slope-roofed second story, the scene of many future crimes to come.

Todd cringes in Mrs. Lovett’s (Helena Bonham Carter) filthy shop as she nonchalantly sings of her talents in making “The Worst Pies in London" and smashes gigantic cockroaches in 3/4 time. It is then that Todd inquires about the availability of the space above her shop. “It’s available," she says. Nobody wants to rent it. “They says it’s haunted." She takes him up the outside staircase and shows him a threadbare room. In “Poor Thing," she tells of the misfortunes of the Barker family—poor Benjamin, a simple barber, convicted on trumped-up charges and transported to Australia by Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), his beautiful wife Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly) raped by the judge and driven to swallow arsenic, and their baby girl Johanna adopted by the judge. Lovett catches a look in Todd’s eye and exclaims, “It’s you! Benjamin Barker!" “No," he says, “that man is dead. The name is Sweeney Todd." He removes some floorboards and lifts out a fancy box. In it are several beautifully crafted razors. He intends to open his shop again where he will give one future customer—Judge Turpin—the closest shave of his life.

Mrs. Lovett helps Todd gain recognition as a barber of excellence by taking him to the square where the current barber of choice, Signor Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), holds forth. Pirelli’s young assistant, Toby (Ed Sanders), sings “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir," to hawk Pirelli’s bogus hair-growth tonic. Todd accuses Pirelli of selling the rubes piss and challenges him to a shave-off. Judge Turpin’s slimy partner in crime, Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall), will judge who gives the fastest, closest shave. While Pirelli preens and sings “The Contest," Todd easily bests him with lightning speed. Bamford, having seen his skills, talks Todd up to Turpin, who has decided to marry Johanna (Jayne Wisener) to prevent someone younger from taking her away. He has already had Bamford thrash young Anthony, who has fallen in love with Johanna after watching and listening to her sing “Green Finch and Linnet Bird" from the second-story window of Turpin’s home. Anthony has learned her name from a beggar woman in the street and sings the beautifully haunting “Johanna," vowing to make her his.

In the meantime, Pirelli arrives at Todd’s shop, revealing himself to be a phony through and through. He’s a native Londoner who used to work in Todd’s shop and, realizing that Todd must be an escaped convict, threatens to go to the authorities if Todd doesn’t give him half his earnings. Enraged, Todd beats Pirelli senseless with a tea kettle and stuffs his body in a trunk. Toby comes up to look for his master, whose twitching hand is sticking out of the trunk. Todd persuades him to go down to Mrs. Lovett; he then finishes the job with his razor. Right after this "rehearsal," Todd is gleeful as he spies Turpin coming up the stairs.

Johanna motivates Turpin’s entry to Todd’s shop, where Sweeney is poised to carry out his revenge. The pair sing “Pretty Women," a song so beautiful that it manages to triumph over Rickman’s croakings. Johanna also motivates Anthony to burst in on Todd at his crucial moment of revenge, declaring he is set to take Johanna away that very night. Turpin vows never to return to the shop and to make sure Anthony never sees Johanna again. The shock of losing his chance to kill Turpin and see his daughter again sends Todd off an edge to which he was always very, very close. He sings “Epiphany," announcing the arrival of the demon inside him set to wreck vengeance on all humanity: “There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/And it's filled with people who are filled with shit/And the vermin of the world inhabit it./But not for long..."

In a macabre act of economy, Mrs. Lovett decides not to “waste" Pirelli; she and Todd sing the hilarious “A Little Priest" to illustrate the various virtues of different types of men as meat pie fillings. The film bounds through one gruesome, random murder after another in Todd’s chair, now rigged to flip up and deposit corpses down a shaft to Mrs. Lovett’s oven room for butchering and grinding. Predictably, the shop thrives. Suspicions are aroused in Toby (now Mrs. Lovett’s helper), an apparently crazed street person, and eventually, the authorities. Events move swiftly to a just and murderous end for many of the major players.

Despite an extremely lurid plot, marvelous music, and cleverly descriptive lyrics, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd often plays flat and lifeless. Compare “A Little Priest" by Depp/Bonham Carter with the Broadway version by Angela Lansbury and George Hearn. The movie version is a good deal shorter—not necessarily a flaw in my mind—but Bonham Carter puts absolutely no personality into her interpretation. Burton puts the humor into the song visually by turning his camera on a priest, a poet, and other characters mentioned in the lyrics. Ironically, Bonham Carter gives the most emotionally connected performance in the cast, but in a sung-through piece like Sweeney Todd, not being able to emote lyrically puts a real strain on visual interpretation for the bulk of the movie and highlights the limitations of casting stars who aren’t trained singers or dancers to boost box office.

In another bit of irony, Johnny Depp is very good at interpreting lyrics—perhaps because he is a musician as well as an actor—but has a catalog of three facial expressions for Todd: diabolically polite, distractedly brooding, and angrily brooding. The sequence in which Mrs. Lovett imagines a quaint, middle-class life with an unfailingly morose Todd in “By the Sea" would have been funnier if we hadn’t already seen Depp locked in a brood of epic proportions for two-thirds of the film.

The look of this film is very inconsistent. We’re all familiar by now with Burton’s blue/gray palette, but Sweeney Todd stretches this to very close to monochrome in several scenes. It’s most glaring in the scene where Todd challenges Pirelli, whose flamboyant blue satin creates a staggering visual contrast that the plot does not yet warrant; Todd isn’t in full demonic mode, and Mrs. Lovett is very much alive, with a passion for Todd that leads her far astray. It’s rather a relief for the eyes when geysers of blessedly red blood flow from the necks of Todd’s victims in the second half of the film. I was starting to think Burton had to ration his color film stock for the couple of fantasy/flashback sequences that are supposed to let us know that happiness is always in color. Honestly, Tim, we’re not that dumb.

Sweeney Todd is a musical for grown-ups, but I could never escape the fact that this film was really made for fanboys, particularly with the casting of Harry Potter alumni Timothy Spall and the unfortunate Alan Rickman, who used to have an interesting career before he started playing villainous characters. I had a few moments respite when the superb voice and melancholy air of Jayne Wisener, in her screen debut, reminded me of why I went to see the picture in the first place. Jamie Campbell Bower had an oddly right period look to him and projected a decent singing voice as well. Ed Sanders also was excellent as Toby. It’s a shame Wisener and Campbell Bower had so little screen time.

I am a fan of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp—quite a big fan, actually. But they bit off more than they could chew in tackling Stephen Sondheim’s macabre masterpiece. l