Category / American Film

by Jonathan M

A Single Man (2009) – To Be or Not to Be?

You don’t understand me.  Nobody does.

When the dust has settled, the books have been closed and the time has come to write the intellectual history of the later stages of the twentieth Century, Historians will speak of two separate schools of thought.  Born on opposite sides of the world and yet joined at the hip.

From America, we have the cult of the individual, born of political ideology, carefully nurtured by a fledgling advertising industry and sanctified by a generation of psychologists, therapists, counsellors and psychoanalysts.  This school of thought stresses the importance and the potential of the individual in the face of endless pressure from the faceless masses.  Masses, of course, composed of equally heroic individuals.  In such a climate an act of individualisation, no matter how insignificant or trifling, is heroic.  What brand of coffee do you buy?  Are you a Mac or a PC?  Did you take in the BFI’s Ozu retrospective instead of going to see Avatar?  Under this world-view, the individual is not merely a building block of a larger society, he is an irreducible force.  A spiritual, political, moral and commercial monad.

From Europe, we have the phenomenology of self.  The Second World War swept away all certainties, even those of the Enlightenment.  There was a need to return to source.  To build again.  Where better to start than Descartes’ maxim?  The ultimate philosophical slogan : I think therefore I am.  We cannot trust old certainties, all that we know is that we are and that we think.  But where the Enlightenment used this as foundation stone for the construction of a new world of knowledge, the post-War philosophers took it as a boundary.  A limit.  An end.  And so emerged a need to fetishise the cogito.  To stress the importance of the subjective not only to philosophy but to our conceptions of self.  Under this school of thought, we are imprisoned within the walls of our own subjectivies.  Not only alone but utterly distant from those around us.  Our experiences and feelings suddenly so different to people of the same class, the same up-bringing and the same education that we might as well be speaking a different language.  Other people are utterly alien.  As Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation demonstrates, we can now sit in a crowded Japanese bar and be utterly alone.

So you see… nobody understands me.  Or you.  Not really.

Tom Ford’s mesmerising debut A Single Man – an adaptation of a 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood – is an examination of this school of thought.  Its title refers not only to the marital status of its protagonist, but also to the pervasive idea that our psychological states are somehow unique and that this uniqueness separates us from other people.  The reality, of course, could not be further from the truth.

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by Jonathan M

Where The Wild Things Are (2009) – Lost in Translation… With Muppets

There is a tendency in art house cinema towards the pseudo-intellectual.  It is a tendency not merely to tolerate witless navel-gazing, but to actively celebrate it.  To elevate its whiny introspection above all other forms of human activity.  To revel in its portentous self-indulgence.  To confuse its bourgeois posturing with grand tragedy and genuine insight.  This tendency is best summed up by the films of Sophia Coppola.

Coppola’s best known film remains the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation (2003).  Lost in Translation is a sordid tale of two wealthy Americans coming together in a foreign land and forging a bond of some kind out of their shared alienation despite the differences in age and life-experience.  It is not really a film about love.  Nor is it a film about cross-cultural alienation.  In fact, it is not really a film about very much at all but it does have lots and lots of footage of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson looking vaguely depressed in the middle distance.  Coppola’s skill as a director lies not in her understanding of the human condition, but rather her mastery of techniques used in art house cinema to create an aura of depth and thoughtfulness regardless of whether any actual ideas or insights are present in the text of the film itself.  Indeed, it is telling that two of Coppola’s other films deal with the emotional lives of people who are effectively children.  In the case of Marie Antoinette (2006) we have a film ostensibly about the ennui and alienation felt by a child-like Queen of France and in The Virgin Suicides (1999) we have a film that purports to be about the ennui and alienation felt by actual children.

Behind much of modern American independent cinema is the adult equivalent of a temper tantrum.  Grown-ups who throw themselves on the ground and roll around screaming because they do not know what to do with themselves.  They do not like their jobs.  They do not like their families.  They do not like their towns.  They do not like their children.  But they do enjoy staring wistfully into the middle distance while some pleasingly arcane piece of rock or pop plays over the soundtrack.

In a way, it is surprising that it has taken until 2009 for American film makers to realise the degree of similarity between the existential dramas favoured by certain strains of art house cinema and the simple coming-of-age tales favoured by much of children’s fiction.  Wes Anderson  – one of the acknowledged kings of middle-brow malaise – capitalised on these similarities by transforming Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1960) into a tale of mid-life crisis and existential alienation.  Spike Jonze continues this trend with Where The Wild Things Are, his adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book of the same name.

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by Jonathan M

The Girlfriend Experience (2009) – The Best Things In Life Aren’t Free

As anyone who has seen Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self (2002) documentary series will doubtless agree, one of the most important developments in 20th Century psychology was the creation, by Abraham Maslow, of the hierarchy of needs.  The hierarchy of needs is one part pop psychology, one part classical philosophy and one part mysticism.  It presents us with a series of levels to human flourishing.  If you can sort out survival then you can work on security.  If you become secure then you can work on your emotional health.  Once you have healthy relationships you can work on esteem and after esteem comes Self Actualisation.  The beauty of Maslow’s hierarchy as it is not only a model for the growth of the self, it is also a justification for a rigid class structure.  Not only must the poor struggle to feed themselves but the fact that they are struggling to feed themselves suggests that they’re somehow less evolved as people than the rich people who never worry about skipping a meal.  Indeed, Curtis suggests that Maslow’s hierarchy maps directly onto the advertising industry’s ABC model of class.  When you market at rich, successful people, you are also marketing at Self Actualised individuals and you should treat them as such.

Obviously, Maslow’s hierarchy is deeply flawed.  If you want an insight into how Self Actualised the poor can be then I urge you to go and see Martin Provost’s Seraphine (2008), a film about the creative life of Seraphine Louis who, until she found a patron, washed dirty linen and scrubbed floors in order to buy art supplies.  However, Maslow’s hierarchy does demonstrate how easy it is to start talking about relationships in very capitalistic terms.  This is an idea that is powerfully explored by Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience.

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by Jonathan M

Marnie (1964) – The Abusive Nature of Therapy

One of my greatest bugbears in fiction is the concept of the “well-drawn character”.  If we wants to talk about a film in terms of its mis-en-scene or its shot selection then we can read books and treatises about such matters.  Books filled with Eisenstein’s montages and Welles’ long takes.  Similarly, if we want to talk about a book in terms of its narrative structure or its subtext then one can read Aristotle’s Poetics or the countless introductory guides to literary theory that fill the book shelves of people who really should be reading the original source material.  These elements of fiction are well understood.  Their subtleties catalogued.  Their aesthetics understood.  But what about the aesthetics of character construction?  What distinguished a well-drawn character from a tissue-thin one-dimensional empty suit?

Presumably this area of aesthetic achievement is comparatively less well-travelled because, as humans, it should be obvious to us which characters are believable and which are not.  We humans deal with each other quite a lot and so we presumably have a firm enough grasp of human psychology that we should recognise a character who is ‘off’ and unbelievable.  Perhaps they behave in an erratic manner, perhaps they do not speak in a voice of their own, perhaps their actions do not follow from what we know of their character.  In effect, we our ability to detect poorly drawn characters flows from the same place as our ability to read and interpret other people’s emotional states, the catalogue of theories, intuitions and received opinions that philosophers call Folk Psychology.  However, some philosophers question the validity of folk psychology.  They argue that most of our understanding of human behaviour is based on absurdly simplistic theories that are little better than superstitions.  I share this doubt.  This is why every act of characterisation strikes me as explicitly theoretical.  Underpinned by all kinds of beliefs about the way humans work which may, in fact, be profoundly flawed or ludicrously simplistic.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie is a film that wears its Folk Psychological assumptions on its sleeve.  It is a work of drama where the character arc of the main character is sketched not in bland generalities but in explicitly Psychoanalytical terms.  The result is not only a fascinating character study, but also a meditation upon the moral status of psychoanalysis as an activity.

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by Jonathan M

Frozen River (2008) – Liberal Guilt and Button Pushing

I remember going to see Alex Proyas’ The Crow (1994) in the cinema.  I remember the experience not because I have any particular affection for the film but because there were two of us in the cinema and the other guy was a Goth who would groan with outrage every time the little girl appeared on screen.  I can empathise with the reflex.  When I went to see Neill Blomkamp’s horrific District 9 (2009) I rolled my eyes and tutted when, after having spent half an hour making the Prawns look hostile and Other, the film wheels out a sympathetic Prawn.  We know that he’s sympathetic because he has a child to look after.  What annoyed me during the screening of District 9 is what annoyed the person I shared a cinema with back in 1994.  In both cases, the director has decided to influence audience sympathies not through the careful use of characterisation or narrative structure, but through a direct appeal to certain emotional proclivities the audience brought with them into the cinema.  Namely a desire to not see children needlessly harmed.  To me, these kinds of appeals invariably feel lead-footed and lumpen.  At best, they strike me as manipulative and rub me the wrong way.  Other times they backfire and force my sympathies in the wrong direction out of spite (as with Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, which becomes ten times more fun once you start rooting for the creepy murderous child). But are these attempts at appealing to audience sentiment invariably a bad thing?  Courtney Hunt’s thriller Frozen River suggests that they need not be.

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by Jonathan M

Surrogates (2009) – Disconnecting the Internet

It is rare to come across a piece of cinema that actually engages with the internet as a cultural phenomenon.  When the net first crept into our lives, films such as Irwin Winkler’s The Net (1995) saw it as a disturbing and demonic presence that seemed poised to erode our freedoms and generally smash our civilisation like Alaric the Visigoth.  Even those rare films that tried to accept the internet as fact of our day-to-day lives struggled to achieve anything close to technological verisimilitude.  Who remembers the real-time email exchanges in Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997)?  Or the computer viruses with expensive-looking graphics in Iain Softley’s otherwise charming Hackers (1995)?  When Hollywood finally bit the bullet and represented the net in positive terms, it was mainly due to similarities between aspects of online communication and older, more established technologies.  This trend is particularly obvious in the work of Nora Ephron whose You’ve Got Mail (1998) remade the great Ernst Lubitsch’s story of anonymous letter-writing The Shop Around The Corner (1940), while her most recent film Julie & Julia (2009) links together the story of Julia Childs writing her first cookbook with a 21st Century woman blogging about cookery.  Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates in no way signals the end of Hollywood’s deep ambivalence about the internet, but it does at least know enough about the net for some of its criticisms to hit home.

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by Jonathan M

The September Issue (2009) – The Lair of the Clockwork God

Due to a lack of money, a lack of time, a lack of people to impress and a lack of a body that someone would want to make clothes for, I have little interest in what is fashionable.  I dress in pretty much the same way I did when I was 14 and I think I still have some of the same socks.  As a result, you might expect me to have little interest in R. J. Cutler’s documentary about the construction of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine.  Well, you might very well expect that, but you would be utterly wrong.  It is precisely because I have no interest in what is fashionable that I find the world of fashion so profoundly compelling. Films about the fashion industry are explorations of another culture completely different to my own.  A culture with a good deal of impact upon the world that we all inhabit.  Because of its power and the strangeness of its people and institutions, the fashion industry is a fascinating subject for a film.  Regardless of whether it is explored through mockery (as with Robert Altman’s 1994 Pret-a-Porter), hagiography (as with Rodolphe Marconi’s 1997 Lagerfeld Confidential) or thinly veiled contempt (as with David Frankel’s 2006 The Devil Wears Prada).

R.J. Cutler’s The September Issue approaches the subject with a mixture of awe and mockery but, despite some initial setbacks, the film provides some genuine insight into how it is that the world of fashion functions and why it is that it has so much power over our society.

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by Jonathan M

Inglorious Basterds (2009) – Inglorious Narrative

I feel, in the words of Malcolm X as though I have been bamboozled, led astray and run amok.  I refer, of course, to the trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009).  When it first filtered out at the beginning of the summer, the Guardian devoted a blog post to it referring to it as one of the worst trailers ever made and it was difficult to disagree with that assessment at the time.  Having just got rid of a government who resorted to arguing semantics when addressing allegations of torture, it seemed tasteless in the extreme to produce a film that seemed to be all about torture.  Torture not as a necessity to save lives but torture as an expression of basic natural justice.  Torture as funny and entertaining.  The trailer even included Eli Roth, one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘torture porn’ sub-genre.  However, the film I saw is not about torture and it certainly isn’t about cartoonish violence and stylised action.  It is a film about talking.  Just talking.  And therein lies its greatest successes as well as its greatest shortcomings.

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by Jonathan M

Public Enemies (2009) and Digital Projection

I will begin with a brief review : Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009) is a completely unexceptional crime thriller.  Its characters are extremely simplistic, its engagement with historical or social context is minimal, its writing is functional, its performances are adequate (with the exception of Stephen Graham as Baby-Face Nelson) and its pacing slightly saggy but ultimately reasonable.  Much like Mann’s Heat (1995), it is a film best remembered for one beautifully staged shoot-out.  However, despite having nothing to say and failing for all of the thematic reasons that Richard Kovitch mentions in his review, the film does do one thing well : It provides a fantastic justification for the roll-out of digital projection.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – High Art (1995)

A new month and a new batch of reviews from VideoVista.  Here is my review of Lisa Cholodenko’s really rather spiffing High Art.

A comparison that occurs to me just now is that High Art is, in some ways, like an art house version of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) or How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008) except that rather than presenting the desire to prostitute oneself in order to get ahead in journalism as something a) natural and b) easily walked away from with few consequences, High Art presents it as profoundly soul destroying and incredibly costly.

I’m also pretty sure that a lot of other critics took this to be a fairly straight-forward tragic LGBT love story.