They make a Robin Hood movie every few years, because the name recognition of the folk legend and its prior Hollywood iterations is free and in the public domain, and so any studio can poach the Robin Hood "franchise." Recently we had Robin Hood, the disguised remake of "Gladiator," directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe Last year there was a version with Jamie Foxx. No one cared, but studio executives must have had in mind the immense box office of the Kevin Costner hit (and perhaps the ubiquitous theme song by Bryan Adams).
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves looks irredeemably silly and dated now, and basically indistinguishable from the Mel Brooks parody, Robin Hood: Men in Tights. But the reviewers at the time saw something else entirely. Roger Ebert thought Costner's portrayal was "tortured [and] thoughtful," and saw the depiction of Robin Hood as something like the guerilla leader Che Guevara, or at least a "civilized, socially responsible Robin Hood." (Ebert correctly notes that Alan Rickman's performance is high camp: it "has nothing to do with anything else in the movie,
and indeed seems to proceed from a uniquely personal set of assumptions
about what century, universe, etc., the story is set in.") But having just watched it for the first time in 25 years, I can tell you it is only an "adult" and "modern" update if your point of comparison is the Disney cartoon.
I have just been reading Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, where Robin Hood hangs out at the edge of the narrative, displaying his feats of archery at the great jousting tournament, but then retreating back into the woods, only later to bring his band of merry men to aid in besieging the Norman castle in which Ivanhoe lies captive. Scott, as Georg Lukács notices in his critical study on the historical novel, situates Robin Hood (and all of the characters), his loyalties, his principles, his sense of immediate advantage, his relation to the ideology of chivalry, his alliances and friendships, and his personal history and background, within and against the historical class situation which it also illuminates. The good guys in Ivanhoe are the dispossessed and backward Saxon lords and their followers, and the bad guys are the foreign French conquerors who have the backing of the Church (especially its military wing, the Knights Templar). Somewhere in the middle of this is King Richard the Lion-Heart, who is himself a Norman ruler, but has been usurped and so is warring against Prince John (his brother) and his corrupt and irreligious followers.
In Scott's book, Robin Hood is "political" not because of the social vision he espouses, but because he is directly involved in a legible historical struggle. (Remember that the ultimate fate of Prince John was to have wrested from him the legal rights of the Magna Carta, when he ascended the throne after Richard's death.) "Politics" just means immediate historical necessity: how every aspect of ideology, material production, the state, and class struggle "light up" during moments of revolution and unrest. For instance, the Jewish characters Isaac and Rebecca in Scott's novel are always specified as Medieval Jews at the time of the Crusades, whose alliances are complexly mediated by the push-and-pull of that political and cultural situation. Their plot across the novel is a series of pressures that runs through each node of their historical insertion.
In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, nothing the characters do makes any sense because they are governed by attitudes and desires arbitrarily stuck onto a picturesque English landscape. Although the legend of Robin Hood--if we know one thing about it--is about class struggle, the historical class situation (between Normans conquerors and a backwards, residual form of production and rule) in England at the time disappears entirely. Robin Hood's own class position is reassigned; he is no longer a dispossessed yeoman but rather a spoiled "fortunate son" of aristocracy who returns home from the Crusades to find that his castle has been burned and his father disgraced. When he comes across a band of outlaws who are stealing from the rich (i.e. from him), he decides that he can wield them into a fighting force for his personal vendetta against the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Instead of a political explanation for the central conflict in the film, we are made to understand that the Sheriff dabbles in black magic and witchcraft, ravishes young women, starves the populace with unfair game laws, and conducts Ku Klux Klan-type raids, by torchlight, masked and cloaked in white. By contrast, we know that Robin himself has "good politics" because he liberates and embraces the humanity of his black friend, a Moor played by Morgan Freeman. And because Robin's gang "gives to the poor," which here is an obvious allusion to the failure of American troops in the imperialist war in Vietnam to "win the hearts and minds" of the colonized. But "the poor" here are just a rabble of peasants in a village somewhere; is it possible that they were formerly Robin's own feudal serfs, either directly owned or indirectly exploited?
No, it is not possible, because the movie is directly importing the
class relations of 20th century America onto 12th century England:
"rich" and "poor" are just different income brackets, not production
relations. (In Scott's novel, the first two characters introduced have metal chains around their necks to show they are the property of their Saxon lord. When Kevin Costner shouts some nonsense about "freedom," however, it lacks the context in which it could be understood as meaningful.) Likewise, we have no sense of the relation between the feudal nobility and the King, other than that there is a power vacuum into which bad actors can step in and have their own way. And yet this was the main political issue for more than 500 years! The return of Richard as rightful king would not settle this question, as the movie implies; it would open this question (as the story of Ivanhoe demonstrates). Furthermore, why are the Celts aligned with the Sheriff of Nottingham? No explanation is given, which means there is no dramatic interest in what happens to them. Without reasons, they are just stunt people demolishing Robin Hood's Ewok village.
This is not just griping about the film's inattentiveness to history, unsurprising anyways for Hollywood (although Braveheart and Rob Roy, from a little later on, are much more interesting and important as historical films). The basic drama of the film is undermined by hollowing out the reality of the situation and of the different characters. Why does Maid Marion side with Robin Hood (against her own class)? Why has the Church aligned itself with the Sheriff (since he is mixed up with witchcraft)? What is the difference between "the poor" and the outlaws--which brings us to the traditional class character of Robin Hood as a yeoman, a complex social position, but certainly neither indigent nor aristocratic (the two options in this film). But those are the major motivations in the film, and they are all nonsense, because "good" and "bad" are simply indicated by musical cues and costume (the bad guys wear black, the good guys are diverse). One of the symptoms of this incoherence is Costner's famously uncertain accent, which is so distracting that it never fails to take the viewer out of the scene. But then the viewer is never really "in" the scene in the first place, because the action is the mere propulsion and rebound of billiard balls, not the involvement and intensity of real persons with real reasons and purposes.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
First Man (2018)
First Man is not exactly a sequel to The Right Stuff, although it picks up the NASA story where that film ended, taking us through the Gemini and Apollo programs. It is more like a pendant to the earlier film, the way a painting of an Old Testament scene by one artist would call forth a response by another painter depicting a New Testament passage, echoing or commenting on the first. In many respects, First Man is a self-conscious inversion or negative image of The Right Stuff. But what the films have most in common is not the sequences of test pilots and rocket launches, but the understanding of the astronaut as stand-in for the artist. And even here they could not be more different.
To begin with the differences. On one hand, films like First Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Martian, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars all propel a vulnerable human being beyond the limits of our known world, so that the explorer or castaway encounters space not as a complicated individual, but as a specimen of humanity equipped with a basic human toolkit. In 2001, the existential drama concerns whether man (Dave) or machine (HAL) will lay claim to a spurious and limited, in any case homicidal, rationality. First Man and The Martian, products of our moment, tack on traumas and quirks by way of individuation, but without affecting the dramatic premise. In First Man, Armstrong is something of a "yes man," who never asserts himself in any kind of dramatic decision, who is not a figure of destiny but someone slotted into a roster.
The Right Stuff, on the other hand, is set up a series of epic contests, recalling the funeral games for Patroclus in Book XXII of the Iliad. It is about feats of daring: who can go the fastest, highest, etc., who can lay claim to being "the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen." Everything is a competition: Chuck Yeager versus the sound barrier; NASA versus the Russian space program; test pilots versus astronauts; even the romance between Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard is depicted as a horse race. One constantly has to prove oneself. For all that, it is also a movie about work, about bosses and "climbing the ladder" and problem-solving and team solidarity. (Most other space movies are about survival, so that Robinson Crusoe's constructions are, as Marx pointed out long ago, a paradigm of use-value.)
First Man is not about work but about vocation. As Franco Moretti glosses the concept, "we will find the key to the modern personality not so much in specific activities, but in a peculiar disposition of the soul. This infiltrates little by little into each activity." Armstrong models dispassionate dedication and training. He is self-directed, not combative but relentless. We don't see Armstrong deciding or persuading, just executing. Likewise, science does not work here as it did in The Martian, as a reserve of ingenuity; Armstrong physically wrests control of his craft. Science is not rationality--there is no sense of trying to master the laws of a wild nature--but control, as if the mission were a series of trials of the flesh.
In other words, it is a film about art, as were director Damien Chazelle's previous two films, Whiplash and La La Land. Whereas Silicon Valley has yoked technology to an improving social mission and "open" cultivation of creative capacities, and The Right Stuff marvels at rockets as if they were muscle cars, for Chazelle art and science are neither creative play or indulgent messiness. It is hard to imagine a more constrained--literally and emotionally--character than Armstrong, but this is Chazelle's artistic stand-in. Art is not about vision but dedication, single-mindedness.
This is the main contrast with The Right Stuff. In the Tom Wolfe book, the astronauts are also plainly versions of the artist (the journalist) himself: adventurers, men who strapped themselves in for a wild ride, pyrotechnicists, speakers of a professional dialect, etc. But the game here (in the movie, too) is to inhabit their voice, their attitudes, their cool. First Man takes an opposite and less successful strategy with its artist-astronaut. It does not try to inhabit Armstrong, to take any view from the inside. The climactic moment of the film shows only the mirrored image of the lunar surface on his helmet's reflective mask.
To begin with the differences. On one hand, films like First Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Martian, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars all propel a vulnerable human being beyond the limits of our known world, so that the explorer or castaway encounters space not as a complicated individual, but as a specimen of humanity equipped with a basic human toolkit. In 2001, the existential drama concerns whether man (Dave) or machine (HAL) will lay claim to a spurious and limited, in any case homicidal, rationality. First Man and The Martian, products of our moment, tack on traumas and quirks by way of individuation, but without affecting the dramatic premise. In First Man, Armstrong is something of a "yes man," who never asserts himself in any kind of dramatic decision, who is not a figure of destiny but someone slotted into a roster.
The Right Stuff, on the other hand, is set up a series of epic contests, recalling the funeral games for Patroclus in Book XXII of the Iliad. It is about feats of daring: who can go the fastest, highest, etc., who can lay claim to being "the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen." Everything is a competition: Chuck Yeager versus the sound barrier; NASA versus the Russian space program; test pilots versus astronauts; even the romance between Barbara Hershey and Sam Shepard is depicted as a horse race. One constantly has to prove oneself. For all that, it is also a movie about work, about bosses and "climbing the ladder" and problem-solving and team solidarity. (Most other space movies are about survival, so that Robinson Crusoe's constructions are, as Marx pointed out long ago, a paradigm of use-value.)
First Man is not about work but about vocation. As Franco Moretti glosses the concept, "we will find the key to the modern personality not so much in specific activities, but in a peculiar disposition of the soul. This infiltrates little by little into each activity." Armstrong models dispassionate dedication and training. He is self-directed, not combative but relentless. We don't see Armstrong deciding or persuading, just executing. Likewise, science does not work here as it did in The Martian, as a reserve of ingenuity; Armstrong physically wrests control of his craft. Science is not rationality--there is no sense of trying to master the laws of a wild nature--but control, as if the mission were a series of trials of the flesh.
In other words, it is a film about art, as were director Damien Chazelle's previous two films, Whiplash and La La Land. Whereas Silicon Valley has yoked technology to an improving social mission and "open" cultivation of creative capacities, and The Right Stuff marvels at rockets as if they were muscle cars, for Chazelle art and science are neither creative play or indulgent messiness. It is hard to imagine a more constrained--literally and emotionally--character than Armstrong, but this is Chazelle's artistic stand-in. Art is not about vision but dedication, single-mindedness.
This is the main contrast with The Right Stuff. In the Tom Wolfe book, the astronauts are also plainly versions of the artist (the journalist) himself: adventurers, men who strapped themselves in for a wild ride, pyrotechnicists, speakers of a professional dialect, etc. But the game here (in the movie, too) is to inhabit their voice, their attitudes, their cool. First Man takes an opposite and less successful strategy with its artist-astronaut. It does not try to inhabit Armstrong, to take any view from the inside. The climactic moment of the film shows only the mirrored image of the lunar surface on his helmet's reflective mask.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
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.
"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.
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Sully (2016)
If the coming attractions trailer for "Sully" was one of the most exciting I have ever seen, that is because all of the relevant action in the actual events--the emergency water landing of a US Airways flight out of Laguardia--fits into 3 1/2 minutes, about as long as a trailer. Even when replayed four or five times from different angles--like the highlight clips of a game-winning Hail Mary pass--we are still looking at only about 1000 seconds of dramatic incident. The problem that Clint Eastwood's "Sully" does not solve is how to fill the remaining screen time. Instead, one can discern all of the seams and elongating maneuvers, just as while reading a student's term paper I can tell how it was stretched to fit the minimum page requirement.
80 minutes of this film, then, is unforgivable padding. The main task of the filmmakers was to disperse this excess unobtrusively, as in "The Great Escape" the problem is how to dispose of the dirt displaced by digging the escape tunnels, without the Nazis noticing. Some minutes are chewed up with flashbacks to Simpler Times, when Captain Sully (Tom Hanks) first proved his mettle as a pilot. Then there are pointless reiterations of Sully's cellphone conversations with his anxious wife (a one-note Laura Linney), who never leaves the house or speaks to another character. The film lingers over the charmless and inert "humanizing" scenes of passengers taking their seats, and unblinkingly records Sully purchasing a sandwich before the flight. Yes, and if the film had needed to be even longer, I can imagine another scene of him buying gum, or coconut water, and another trip to Hudson News for trail mix. (A later scene involves his co-pilot, Aaron Eckhart, complaining about the price of Snickers at his hotel. We do not see the purchase.)
There is still time to kill, so Eastwood adds some computer-generated dream sequences of the plane crashing into Manhattan (at this point you will remember that this film was released for the 15th anniversary of 9/11 and celebrates a successful, efficient rescue operation by the New York emergency units), as well as clunkier computer flight simulations run onscreen to confirm Sully's assertion that landing the plane in the Hudson River was his only and best option. The insurance companies, you see, don't like to have planes dunked in the water unless it's *really* necessary.
Together with a rehash of the media blitz afterwards (who cares? I can see Katie Couric on TV any day) and three identical scenes of New Yorkers congratulating Sully (in a bar, in a hotel corridor, in a green room), plus the evacuation of the plane and the subsequent bureaucratic investigation, all of this barely staggers over the finish line, at 96 minutes. The supposed drama of the investigation as the structuring framework is plainly borrowed from "The Social Network": an inquiry, and several hearings, after the fact, scrutinizing the accomplishments of our hero while "replaying" those events. I don't need to tell you that the utterly decent Sully makes a less engaging subject for this sort of thing than Jesse Eisenberg's prickly and entitled Mark Zuckerberg.
More bizarre, though, is the decision to invest the film's dramatic arc in the technical confirmation of the Hemingway-ish "grace under pressure" narrative. That is, inasmuch as Eastwood despises the bean-counters of the insurance industry who restage the "miracle on the Hudson" as a mere "video game," the movie still climaxes (if that is the word) with the validation dispensed by the eggheads and their (implausibly unprofessional) testimony about Sully's heroism. This payoff shows rather how *dependent* our judgment is on the technical and abstract performance-reviewers that the movie pretends to cast as its villain. (It was either them or the Canadian Geese who flew into the engines, I suppose.)
Contrast this unsuspenseful device with the second-guessing and reserved approval of blunt, unfussy American heroism we find in "Patton" (to say nothing of the "Dirty Harry" films). In those movies, as here, the higher-ups (who just don't understand real masculinity and the necessity of hard choices) are wrong, but with possible dramatic consequences. Patton is straining at the leash of a politicized command structure (Eisenhower is going to be elected president at the end of all this), and there is a certain tragedy in how he continually confirms the doubts of his superiors. But the sense is that Patton is bigger than all that--that his character and genius don't NEED the judgments of the small-minded bureaucrats and politicians, and that the world was more interesting before they came along and generals were left to do their work their own way.
But "Sully" is desperate for the approval of the simulators and algorithms and insurance men. A much more interesting movie could be made where the heroic pilot was chopped down to size by the investigators. We would still have to judge him "as a man," which is surprisingly NOT Eastwood's conclusion here. Instead, the big climactic scene involves conceding our judgment over to the parameters of a flight simulator. Well, not one flight simulator, but (to take up more time) two.
80 minutes of this film, then, is unforgivable padding. The main task of the filmmakers was to disperse this excess unobtrusively, as in "The Great Escape" the problem is how to dispose of the dirt displaced by digging the escape tunnels, without the Nazis noticing. Some minutes are chewed up with flashbacks to Simpler Times, when Captain Sully (Tom Hanks) first proved his mettle as a pilot. Then there are pointless reiterations of Sully's cellphone conversations with his anxious wife (a one-note Laura Linney), who never leaves the house or speaks to another character. The film lingers over the charmless and inert "humanizing" scenes of passengers taking their seats, and unblinkingly records Sully purchasing a sandwich before the flight. Yes, and if the film had needed to be even longer, I can imagine another scene of him buying gum, or coconut water, and another trip to Hudson News for trail mix. (A later scene involves his co-pilot, Aaron Eckhart, complaining about the price of Snickers at his hotel. We do not see the purchase.)
There is still time to kill, so Eastwood adds some computer-generated dream sequences of the plane crashing into Manhattan (at this point you will remember that this film was released for the 15th anniversary of 9/11 and celebrates a successful, efficient rescue operation by the New York emergency units), as well as clunkier computer flight simulations run onscreen to confirm Sully's assertion that landing the plane in the Hudson River was his only and best option. The insurance companies, you see, don't like to have planes dunked in the water unless it's *really* necessary.
Together with a rehash of the media blitz afterwards (who cares? I can see Katie Couric on TV any day) and three identical scenes of New Yorkers congratulating Sully (in a bar, in a hotel corridor, in a green room), plus the evacuation of the plane and the subsequent bureaucratic investigation, all of this barely staggers over the finish line, at 96 minutes. The supposed drama of the investigation as the structuring framework is plainly borrowed from "The Social Network": an inquiry, and several hearings, after the fact, scrutinizing the accomplishments of our hero while "replaying" those events. I don't need to tell you that the utterly decent Sully makes a less engaging subject for this sort of thing than Jesse Eisenberg's prickly and entitled Mark Zuckerberg.
More bizarre, though, is the decision to invest the film's dramatic arc in the technical confirmation of the Hemingway-ish "grace under pressure" narrative. That is, inasmuch as Eastwood despises the bean-counters of the insurance industry who restage the "miracle on the Hudson" as a mere "video game," the movie still climaxes (if that is the word) with the validation dispensed by the eggheads and their (implausibly unprofessional) testimony about Sully's heroism. This payoff shows rather how *dependent* our judgment is on the technical and abstract performance-reviewers that the movie pretends to cast as its villain. (It was either them or the Canadian Geese who flew into the engines, I suppose.)
Contrast this unsuspenseful device with the second-guessing and reserved approval of blunt, unfussy American heroism we find in "Patton" (to say nothing of the "Dirty Harry" films). In those movies, as here, the higher-ups (who just don't understand real masculinity and the necessity of hard choices) are wrong, but with possible dramatic consequences. Patton is straining at the leash of a politicized command structure (Eisenhower is going to be elected president at the end of all this), and there is a certain tragedy in how he continually confirms the doubts of his superiors. But the sense is that Patton is bigger than all that--that his character and genius don't NEED the judgments of the small-minded bureaucrats and politicians, and that the world was more interesting before they came along and generals were left to do their work their own way.
But "Sully" is desperate for the approval of the simulators and algorithms and insurance men. A much more interesting movie could be made where the heroic pilot was chopped down to size by the investigators. We would still have to judge him "as a man," which is surprisingly NOT Eastwood's conclusion here. Instead, the big climactic scene involves conceding our judgment over to the parameters of a flight simulator. Well, not one flight simulator, but (to take up more time) two.
Friday, January 29, 2016
Le Pont du Nord (1981)
Discussion of Jacques Rivette falls easily into two positions; a first, either a bored philistine or sharply analytic fan of modernism (whose descriptions converge, if not their valuations) finds his work to be allusively deep, "a radical and disruptive intervention in mainstream cinema on the formal level." The second position then asserts that, no, Rivette is actually "playful," whimsical, creative, improvisatory, collaborative.
This film is quite similar to--and in my judgment, more likable than--Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating. Both films turn around a pair of eccentric Parisian women, thrown together and into the meshes of fantasy and conspiracy. (In the link above, the author breaks down the following binaries found in Celine and Julie: "Reality" vs. Fiction; Present vs. Past; Spontaneous vs. Staged; Freedom vs. Entrapment; Autonomy vs. Marriage; Female-centered vs. Male-centered; Telepathic Communication vs. Suspicion and Distrust; Friendship vs. Enmity; Childishness vs. "Maturity." All of these could be found in Pont du Nord without much trouble.)
But aren't these movies telling us something else, by the very people whom Rivette puts on screen? The two women in Pont du Nord (played by real life mother and daughter) are afflicted, broken, damaged, paranoid, detached, even dissociated, at no point functioning in any kind of social life outside of their own (fraught) dynamic. The elder woman, Marie, knows all of this, is self-conscious and anxiously worn down by the difficulties she knows represent her only options and (fringe) mode of being. She can't be indoors or in cars or trains, and sleeps outdoors, periodically meeting up with obvious bad news Julien. Baptiste, on the other hand, represents a Quixotic refusal to see her lonely, homeless existence as it is. At one point, she fights a dragon. ("Real life is a reign of terror," she has said.) The last scene finds her no longer concerned with the inevitable tragedy of Marie, who has capitulated to reality and abandoned the unhinged Baptiste in favor of her own death wish at the hands of Julien. The movie ends with Baptiste doing some kind of judo training at sunset, definitely beyond the grip of the "plot" we had been following up to this point.
The movie shows us two competing forces: an anonymous (male) conspiracy, surveilling, collecting clippings on everyone, involved in crime syndicates and assassinations, building and demolishing a barren, depopulated outer urban zone... and on the other hand, the defiant, tender, needful, feminine perseverance and individuality that dodges and weaves through this sinister and coercive world. The latter is essentially "exposed," left in the open. This is not the Matrix. But there is a heavy, terrible price for this "whimsical" side--it could also be described as neurotic, obsessive, self-endangering, and extremely tenuous. It's not a question of good vs. evil or "strong female roles," but of the sacrifices and unendurable demands of being a free, creative self. What is "whimsical" here is a kind of sickness, a fatal, myopic flight from reality and health into compulsive regimens, "training," and incomprehension. But the human need for one another, is definitely on this side--it is ranged with the forces of reality-making, which are wan, exhausted, pushed to the brink, defeated--if only that was something Baptiste could ever admit or see.
This film is quite similar to--and in my judgment, more likable than--Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating. Both films turn around a pair of eccentric Parisian women, thrown together and into the meshes of fantasy and conspiracy. (In the link above, the author breaks down the following binaries found in Celine and Julie: "Reality" vs. Fiction; Present vs. Past; Spontaneous vs. Staged; Freedom vs. Entrapment; Autonomy vs. Marriage; Female-centered vs. Male-centered; Telepathic Communication vs. Suspicion and Distrust; Friendship vs. Enmity; Childishness vs. "Maturity." All of these could be found in Pont du Nord without much trouble.)
But aren't these movies telling us something else, by the very people whom Rivette puts on screen? The two women in Pont du Nord (played by real life mother and daughter) are afflicted, broken, damaged, paranoid, detached, even dissociated, at no point functioning in any kind of social life outside of their own (fraught) dynamic. The elder woman, Marie, knows all of this, is self-conscious and anxiously worn down by the difficulties she knows represent her only options and (fringe) mode of being. She can't be indoors or in cars or trains, and sleeps outdoors, periodically meeting up with obvious bad news Julien. Baptiste, on the other hand, represents a Quixotic refusal to see her lonely, homeless existence as it is. At one point, she fights a dragon. ("Real life is a reign of terror," she has said.) The last scene finds her no longer concerned with the inevitable tragedy of Marie, who has capitulated to reality and abandoned the unhinged Baptiste in favor of her own death wish at the hands of Julien. The movie ends with Baptiste doing some kind of judo training at sunset, definitely beyond the grip of the "plot" we had been following up to this point.
The movie shows us two competing forces: an anonymous (male) conspiracy, surveilling, collecting clippings on everyone, involved in crime syndicates and assassinations, building and demolishing a barren, depopulated outer urban zone... and on the other hand, the defiant, tender, needful, feminine perseverance and individuality that dodges and weaves through this sinister and coercive world. The latter is essentially "exposed," left in the open. This is not the Matrix. But there is a heavy, terrible price for this "whimsical" side--it could also be described as neurotic, obsessive, self-endangering, and extremely tenuous. It's not a question of good vs. evil or "strong female roles," but of the sacrifices and unendurable demands of being a free, creative self. What is "whimsical" here is a kind of sickness, a fatal, myopic flight from reality and health into compulsive regimens, "training," and incomprehension. But the human need for one another, is definitely on this side--it is ranged with the forces of reality-making, which are wan, exhausted, pushed to the brink, defeated--if only that was something Baptiste could ever admit or see.
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Schindler's List (1993)
The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács offers a very useful expression, "intellectual physiognomy," to describe the fictional construction of characters' worldviews--how authors integrate a personality as a synthesis of a life history and an individualized way of thinking. Characters ought not to be mere "mouthpieces of the spirit of the age" (Marx's expression), but vivid and particularized voices emanating from a unique subjectivity.
Spielberg's Schindler's List is about the changing responses of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) to Nazism, and particularly to the Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews. But Spielberg presents this response not in the context of Schindler's character (his morality, his conscience, his prejudices, his ideology, his understanding of history, his politics) but in the context of our (the audience's) character. The movie is not about the conflicts in Schindler's breast, which would need to be resolved dramatically--but rather about the obvious repugnance of absolute evil, which is as it were built into our perception of the film. It is not possible to struggle intellectually or emotionally with what we are seeing onscreen (everything Nazi is unambiguously bad and villainous, just as in Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies); and yet the movie asks us to be interested in the pseudo-struggle of the hero faced with the same events!
In order for us to care about this man's disavowal of Nazism, and his dawning awareness of Jewish suffering, we have to understand why someone could be a Nazi. (After all, there were millions of Nazis!) But the answer the film gives, in the person of Ralph Fiennes's character Amon Goeth, is: Nazis were psychopaths. (The closing text informs us that he was arrested while in a mental institution.) This, you will notice, is not an explanation but an evasion.
How did Nazism function as an ideology? What aspects could be accepted under the heading of everyday political cynicism? How much of an illusion (about Hitler's plans for the Jews) were ordinary Germans (and even committed Nazis) living under? To what degree were the Jews themselves asked to buy into the program of their restricted freedom? What sort of personalities resisted and which buckled under? What kind of apologetic arguments were offered by rational people?
We know from history, for example, that the German army was opposed to Hitler in limited and insufficient ways (as were institutions like the Catholic church). But this opposition was couched in terms far from removed from Good Versus Evil. The Wehrmacht had its own privileges to defend, its own authority, its own response to the Versailles treaty, its own history of anti-semitism, its own ideas about strategy, and (above all) an opposition to the Nazi SS as a politicized, ideological intruder into military affairs. One can imagine hours of riveting, fraught argument in opposition to Nazism within the German Army... but one cannot imagine that this opposition could take the form of condemning the badness of Nazism. Schindler's List, however, is limited to this kind of response. (Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, has reproached Spielberg for numerous scenes carried out "without nuance," where "one should, instead, have worked with a pair of tweezers.")
What that means is that the characterization and drama is extremely pallid. Take, by contrast, the varied ideological arguments put forward in Spielberg's Lincoln, which is a flawed and bloated movie but which allows that the argument over slavery was not a matter of "good" and "bad" people lining up according to their basic human decency. This movie is filled with scenes of Abraham Lincoln explaining himself, and it is these rhetorical and argumentative scenes which most convey his personality, his warmth, his reflection on his own life. Take by contrast David Lean's film Bridge on the River Kwai, where Alec Guinness's character, a captured British officer, persuades himself to build a bridge for the Japanese using prisoners of war, through an agonizing and shameful decision that emphasizes an ideology of officers commanding their own troops (rather than the Japanese captors giving the orders to workers). This is a believable and interesting mistake, because it takes place against the background of that character's life and ideological formation.
Nothing of the sort occurs in Schindler's List. We do not understand Amon Goeth (because he is crazy); we do not understand the collaboration of the Judenrat and Jewish ghetto police (because it is conveyed as mere information: this existed, without further probing); we do not understand the mass of Jews saved by Schindler (because they are not characters, they are so many lives to be preserved). And lastly, we do not understand Schindler, because he has no one to speak to about his conflict and understanding: his reversal of conscience is presented not in dialogue but in a vision (the little girl in the red coat).
Not only does this make for a fairly tedious movie, since the central conflict cannot be put onscreen, but it does a disservice to the avowed project of historical memory of the Holocaust. We leave the movie feeling good about ourselves, but with an incredulity that anything so very bad could ever have happened, and a curious belief that the Holocaust was carried out somehow unconsciously, by no one. This is the pernicious line of thought that Marcel Ophüls skewers in his film The Memory of Justice, when an actor admits (I paraphrase): "I am the only surviving Nazi. I must be, because no one else will admit to having been in those mass rallies. And I must also have been the narrator of all of those films you see, because no one else has come forward, it was only me."
The ideas of the individuals are not abstract, generalized and unmotivated. Instead the total personality of each character is synthesized and exemplified through his mode of thinking, in his mode of self-expression, and in his conclusions regarding the subject at hand. Through the specific style and process of thinking, [the author] is able to expose the characteristic approach of each individual: how he confronts a problem, what he accepts as axiomatic, what he seeks to prove and how he proves it, the level of intellectual abstraction he attains, the sources of his examples, what he underplays and evades and how he does so.Lukács offers many examples of characters whose way of thinking--abstract ideas, prejudices, intellectual insights and errors, and so on--is an indelible characterization: Aristophanes, Socrates, and Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium; Levin in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; Shakespeare's Othello; Julien Sorel in Stendhal's The Red and the Black. (The current debate about the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is precisely about the intellectual physiognomy of Atticus Finch.)
Spielberg's Schindler's List is about the changing responses of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) to Nazism, and particularly to the Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews. But Spielberg presents this response not in the context of Schindler's character (his morality, his conscience, his prejudices, his ideology, his understanding of history, his politics) but in the context of our (the audience's) character. The movie is not about the conflicts in Schindler's breast, which would need to be resolved dramatically--but rather about the obvious repugnance of absolute evil, which is as it were built into our perception of the film. It is not possible to struggle intellectually or emotionally with what we are seeing onscreen (everything Nazi is unambiguously bad and villainous, just as in Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies); and yet the movie asks us to be interested in the pseudo-struggle of the hero faced with the same events!
In order for us to care about this man's disavowal of Nazism, and his dawning awareness of Jewish suffering, we have to understand why someone could be a Nazi. (After all, there were millions of Nazis!) But the answer the film gives, in the person of Ralph Fiennes's character Amon Goeth, is: Nazis were psychopaths. (The closing text informs us that he was arrested while in a mental institution.) This, you will notice, is not an explanation but an evasion.
How did Nazism function as an ideology? What aspects could be accepted under the heading of everyday political cynicism? How much of an illusion (about Hitler's plans for the Jews) were ordinary Germans (and even committed Nazis) living under? To what degree were the Jews themselves asked to buy into the program of their restricted freedom? What sort of personalities resisted and which buckled under? What kind of apologetic arguments were offered by rational people?
We know from history, for example, that the German army was opposed to Hitler in limited and insufficient ways (as were institutions like the Catholic church). But this opposition was couched in terms far from removed from Good Versus Evil. The Wehrmacht had its own privileges to defend, its own authority, its own response to the Versailles treaty, its own history of anti-semitism, its own ideas about strategy, and (above all) an opposition to the Nazi SS as a politicized, ideological intruder into military affairs. One can imagine hours of riveting, fraught argument in opposition to Nazism within the German Army... but one cannot imagine that this opposition could take the form of condemning the badness of Nazism. Schindler's List, however, is limited to this kind of response. (Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, has reproached Spielberg for numerous scenes carried out "without nuance," where "one should, instead, have worked with a pair of tweezers.")
What that means is that the characterization and drama is extremely pallid. Take, by contrast, the varied ideological arguments put forward in Spielberg's Lincoln, which is a flawed and bloated movie but which allows that the argument over slavery was not a matter of "good" and "bad" people lining up according to their basic human decency. This movie is filled with scenes of Abraham Lincoln explaining himself, and it is these rhetorical and argumentative scenes which most convey his personality, his warmth, his reflection on his own life. Take by contrast David Lean's film Bridge on the River Kwai, where Alec Guinness's character, a captured British officer, persuades himself to build a bridge for the Japanese using prisoners of war, through an agonizing and shameful decision that emphasizes an ideology of officers commanding their own troops (rather than the Japanese captors giving the orders to workers). This is a believable and interesting mistake, because it takes place against the background of that character's life and ideological formation.
Nothing of the sort occurs in Schindler's List. We do not understand Amon Goeth (because he is crazy); we do not understand the collaboration of the Judenrat and Jewish ghetto police (because it is conveyed as mere information: this existed, without further probing); we do not understand the mass of Jews saved by Schindler (because they are not characters, they are so many lives to be preserved). And lastly, we do not understand Schindler, because he has no one to speak to about his conflict and understanding: his reversal of conscience is presented not in dialogue but in a vision (the little girl in the red coat).
Not only does this make for a fairly tedious movie, since the central conflict cannot be put onscreen, but it does a disservice to the avowed project of historical memory of the Holocaust. We leave the movie feeling good about ourselves, but with an incredulity that anything so very bad could ever have happened, and a curious belief that the Holocaust was carried out somehow unconsciously, by no one. This is the pernicious line of thought that Marcel Ophüls skewers in his film The Memory of Justice, when an actor admits (I paraphrase): "I am the only surviving Nazi. I must be, because no one else will admit to having been in those mass rallies. And I must also have been the narrator of all of those films you see, because no one else has come forward, it was only me."
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