Straight Outta Compton (2015)

There is a book I like by David Mamet called On Directing Film, which even at barely over a hundred pages consists of repeating just a few ideas to the point (inevitable with Mamet) of self-parody.

"Tell the story in cuts."
"A movie is not just following the hero around."
"The most interesting thing is what happens next."
"The audience requires not information but drama."

Whatever you think of Mamet's own films, or his cult of Eisenstein and Stanislavsky, these are sound (if analytic) principles. A film may have many good artistic reasons, notwithstanding, for breaking those rules. Straight Outta Compton, however, systematically ravages any rational conception of dramatic or cinematic necessity. Each scene is an untransmuted lump of information. The major characters are stranded in undramatic limbo half way through the film. Nothing happens next, because no scene leads to the next. The few times that cuts are used to advance the story (I am thinking of the scene where the cops have NWA members lying face down on the ground outside their recording studio; or the montage where they lay down the vocals for the album) stand out from the overall plan of having one character tell another character the meaning of the scene. (There are also two notable Steadicam shots, deplored by Mamet but effective here: in a hotel suite full of guns and naked women, and in the opening scene in a drug den.)

Straight Outta Compton has all the narrative thrust of a Wikipedia page. The New York Times review compares it to The Social Network, but remember the intricate double-framing device of that film and its airtight editing: the retrospective structure borrowed from Citizen Kane but also the antagonism (the two lawsuits) competing over the story itself. But Compton never adopts a dramatic structure (in Kane, the reporter is looking for the truth of Kane's last words; so is Kane, you see), so the characters are only ever responding to the latest blip of Important Events on their timeline. Embarrassingly, then, Ice Cube writes "Fuck tha Police" directly after the events narrated in the song. A better strategy would have been that advocated by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel, to show how Ice Cube's character and concerns arise from dramatic collisions within his social development (as, for instance, we learn about Michael Corleone's character in The Godfather from the way he responds to his family upon returning from war). The deplorable result is that "Fuck tha Police" seems like a narrow response to a specific incident of harassment, whereas the movie thematically wants to drape a concern about police white supremacy over the entire (unstructured) film.

This is the kind of movie where characters have to be announced with subtitles, which is unconscionable dramatic laziness. (Mamet: "To really make the audience understand that we're in a garage, what about a sign that says 'garage'?") How many characters and their nicknames and their specialties (and personalities! and accents!) did I learn from a film like The Great Escape (which is only six minutes longer than Compton)? The answer is fourteen. Not only that, but each of these marginal characters had little dramas (Donald Pleasance's blindness, Charles Bronson's claustrophobia) which added danger and irony. Characters like MC Ren or DJ Yella (the #4 and #5 members of the group) don't register at all. I know less about Ren now than I did when I started the movie, since his verses (i.e. his voice, his ideas) are almost entirely cut.

People have complained that the movie does not show Dr. Dre's history of beating women. At bottom, this is a dramatic problem, on two fronts. 1) There are no women characters in the film. Yes, women appear on screen (as sex objects ogled by the camera), they even have names ("Felicia"), they even have lines of dialogue. But in this last case they are never persons, but mouthpieces of exposition or directorial instruction. For instance, watching a clip of the "Sraight Outta Compton" music video years later, Ice Cube's girlfriend remarks how young they were back then, so that we will then notice this. One possible exception, Dre's mother, is not a character but a fantasy of approval and forgiveness. The movie, executive produced by Dre and Ice Cube, is incapable of reflecting on other characters, who are either obstacles (record executives) or temptations (Suge Knight) or blandly anonymous support (Snoop Dogg--what a sin to squander this most charismatic human!). Women fall entirely below even those lines. 2) The movie exists entirely to vindicate Ice Cube and Dre and Eazy-E as geniuses ahead of their time, as social realists, but really as innocents. Everything "bad" in the film is either not-bad (harmless antics like destroying someone's office in a tantrum or waving rifles around in hotel corridors) or is done by someone else. The "worst" thing that Dre does is (for no reason at all that I could discern) drive his car too fast in downtown LA--to signal his confused feelings about success.

Even the character of the manager-villain, Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) is unclear. The story is supposed to be that Heller pits the members of NWA against each other by coddling Eazy-E, "taking care" of the charismatic star (you have to imagine this, the performance by Jason Mitchell is so terribly boring) first, at the expense of the real geniuses behind the group. It is suggested, though, by Giamatti's very good interpretation, that Heller truly cares for Eazy-E, almost like the blinding love for a favorite child (the Mildred Pierce story), even that Heller is actually "good" for Eazy-E, whom he always calls "Eric." But nothing is made of this dimension in the story: Eazy-E does not "see" this, and the dramatic collision with Heller is reduced to the much simpler idea that the scales just fall from his eyes when some financial paperwork is at last explained to him.

Finally, even the antagonisms between the three main characters are dissolved when they realize that it had all been a big mix-up (owing to their manager's deceptions). Huh?! The movie should ask me to BELIEVE in its dramatic conflicts. Instead it wants me to EXCUSE its having any tension between the three heroes. The result is that none of the characters have anything to do after the half-way point in the film, since the only interesting thing would be their turning-against one another. The movie, instead, is a kind of wish fulfillment that dispels interesting conflicts, scrubs out character complications, renders arbitrary any causality linking events, and has no consciousness beyond the grandiosity and banal self-appraisal of its heroes.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

It now appears that Toni Erdmann will be adapted/remade for Hollywood, in the grand tradition of Breathless, Diabolique, Dinner for Schmucks, The Ring, etc. This makes sense to me, because the nearly three-hour German comedy has a great deal of Hollywood DNA to begin with. It is part Uncle Buck, part Mrs. Doubtfire. Uncle Buck, because of the unsavory, dark aggression with which the life lessons (love life, be yourself, don't judge success by the approval of others, have fun) are doled out; Mrs. Doubtfire, because of the prankster father in disguise.

But there is another strand of Hollywood DNA, what I would call the "saving the soul of uptight executives" genre: Up in the Air (with George Clooney), Money Monster (with George Clooney), Michael Clayton (with George Clooney), The Big Short (Steve Carell's part), Margin Call, The Company Men (I don't think anyone saw this, but it has America's sweetheart Ben Affleck). The lesson here is the incompatibility of workaholic dads and faceless/greedy corporations with the all-important tenderness of white paternalism. This list of movies is of variable quality and explicitness of ideological justification: The Big Short ties itself in knots trying to make heroes of its heroes; Margin Call I've reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

The big exception to this is Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, which portrays Leonardo diCaprio's character as fundamentally redeemable. (Also in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, everyone is horrible and there are no families.)

In Toni Erdmann, Sandra Hüller plays Ines, a German consultant working in Romania, whose job is to recommend strategies of neo-liberal outsourcing, downsizing and other methods of efficiency/austerity. Meanwhile, the executives she is working with are untrustworthy men who can be relied upon only to marry vapid blonde Russian trophy wives. What the executives really want are the most savage cuts, but this has to be imposed from outside recommendation. Ines, in turn, is a no-fun, uptight, overcritical boss. The plot of the film is that the spontaneous, kooky father tries to teach her lessons in having fun and being authentic. (Not unlike Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.)

Of course, in those other films, the movie is trying to be as funny as possible, and so the straight man is as loathsome as possible (think Steve Martin in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) and the non-conformist is as loud and outlandish as can be. The disturbances in Toni Erdmann, however, are more askew and awkward (inducing low-level anxiety attacks) than uproarious. It is more like we are watching a drama *about* this "funny" person; as film scholar Genevieve Yue remarks, it is a "sad clown" story, like Pagliacci or Rigoletto, not a comedy.

What I admire about this film is that, having set itself up between these two very predictable formulas (1) Uncle Buck and 2) the movies where we care about George Clooney), director/writer Maren Ade declines the resolutions they imply. In movies of type 1, the life lessons are learned and the "bad" new/alternative family (in Mrs Doubtfire, for instance, Pierce Brosnan) is rejected in favor of some synthesis of establishment values and the capacious humanity of the avuncular non-conformist. (Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning is another, earlier movie of this sort, although I forget how it ends.) In movies of type 2, there are two options: the dad can QUIT the firm/brokerage, choosing to take up some more acceptable and humanizing vocation to spend more time with his family. We should believe this, however, as much as we believe in the disgraced congressman who, having been caught absconding with funds, leaves "to spend more time with his family." The other option is to somehow reconcile the good objective of the corporation with a renewed commitment to honesty, from which we had regrettably departed. This may be combined with a "few bad apples" defense of capitalism, in which the bad boss is at fault for essentially criminal misdeeds (see my forthcoming book's chapter on Dickens's Little Dorrit).

Toni Erdmann studiously rejects all these options. Ines leaves her company (a cesspool of toxic masculinity), but for what we can only assume is an identical job elsewhere. There is zero implication that she will bring some new ethos with her; if anything, her father's reign of misrule has rather ALLOWED her to make a clean break with her current job and advance her career. Certainly she does not take up baking or parenting or any project that would clear her conscience. And then it is totally unclear what "life lessons" she has taken from her father, what effect this whole business is to have had on her. In the NY Times review, A.O. Scott writes that "Erdmann may be able to save Ines", but if this is so, it is nothing like the Uncle Buck formula. One feels, rather, that the comfort offered is cheap, her problems insoluble with the "lessons" on offer, and that it is perhaps too late, or that her resistance to her father AND her acceptance of him have not been cleanly untangled. "Erdmann" himself would appear to need some saving; if the film is about Ines's moral fate, we can only feel that she is WORTH saving but that no ideological prestidigitation can effect that redemption.