The Past is the Dead in “Crimson Peak”

In Guillermo del Toro’s “Crimson Peak,” the Old World of Europe is dark, crumbling, and incestuous, populated by parasites who live off of titles and the labor of others, while the New World of America is bright, full of life, promise, and people who live by their own labor. Del Toro makes this distinction in the film’s color palette. Bright yellow dominates the opening scenes in Buffalo, but the scenes in England are grey, dark blue, and an unsettling green. The great aristocratic house is falling apart and literally bleeding. But this distinction between the past and the future is not as simple as it seems. There are ghosts on both sides of the Atlantic.

“You’re always looking to the past, Thomas,” American Edith tells her new English husband while they take shelter in an inn during a snowstorm. “You won’t find me there,” she says. Edith lays on a bed in warm, golden light, while the snowstorm casts a cold green light through the window. Thomas is lit in both gold and green, fitting for a man conflicted even before the story begins, a man of the Old World who wants to embrace the industrial spirit of the New World. It would be easy to read the film as a warning against living in the past.

Yet “Crimson Peak” has a far more nuanced view of the relationship between the Old and the New. As much as Edith’s father claims that America values hard work instead of privilege, the American aristocracy in this film worships the Old World: see the awe with which they observe Thomas’ demonstration of the “European style” waltz. And the unsettling green light occasionally appears in America, usually to herald the arrival of a ghost.

The film itself is drawn to the past. Del Toro’s camera is as in love with the European style waltz as the characters are. The story fully embraces the trappings and emotions of an old genre: Gothic Romance. Twilight has demonstrated how elements of that genre have filtered into modern pop culture, but Del Toro is not after an updated Gothic Romance. He’s trying to recreate the real thing. He also draws on fairy tales. The story of a young woman being whisked away to a mysterious castle evokes the Gothic Romance of Jane Eyre, a novel that drew from “Beauty and the Beast,” which in turn drew from Apuleius’ story of Cupid and Psyche. The addition of a husband who has murdered his previous wives evokes “Bluebeard.”

“Crimson Peak” is also filled with references to cinema history. The use of a secret key that the heroine must steal evokes “Bluebeard,” but it also evokes Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” as does the attempt to poison the heroine with tea. There are also numerous similarities to Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons,” another film with complicated feelings about the ending of one world and the beginning of another. The turn-of-the-century setting and the presence of one of those newfangled motorcars are perhaps minor connections, but the use of irises to open and close scenes is so striking that it is easy for a cinephile to be reminded of Welles’ film. The film may be frightened of the past, but it is also in love with it.

Paradoxes are often more interesting than simple declarations. It is far more interesting for Del Toro to present a nuanced view of the past than a simple condemnation of obsessing over it. The depiction of an American aristocracy that values hard work over European privilege yet worships European culture is particularly striking. Fundamentally, the film depicts the past as ugly and beautiful, frightening and alluring, something to escape and something to love.

Harry Potter and the Web of Authorship

Photo by Colloquium

The date on the previous post indicates that I have been rather neglecting this blog, but I hope this will function as a small gesture of atonement. A year ago, I completed a master's thesis on one of my favorite fantasy films: Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It is longer (though perhaps not too much longer) than the average blog post on this site, but I am very proud of it, and I hope someone might find it interesting.

And perhaps you might find it relevant to a lot of conversations happening now. Nearly every time a Marvel picture rolls around, people wonder about the capacity to which a franchise blockbuster can be a distinctive work in which a director expresses a personal vision. Critics like Matt Zoller Seitz and Scott Tobias have expressed misgivings about the homogeneity and lack of directorial expression that they perceive in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I enjoy nearly all of the Marvel films, love a few of them, and think Age of Ultron is one of the most interesting blockbusters in recent years, but I think I can sum up my similar misgivings by saying: the MCU hasn't had a Prisoner of Azkaban yet.

As I say in the thesis, I don't believe it would be completely accurate to call Prisoner of Azkaban an auteurist film. Even though auteurism rose out of studying studio genre pictures, it is possible that today's franchise framework does not allow a director-for-hire to make an auteurist work. However, Prisoner of Azkaban is a distinctive work of cinema that manages to fit into both the Harry Potter franchise and Alfonso Cuarón's filmography. It presents the possibility that authorship of a franchise blockbuster is not a matter of who has creative control, but is rather a negotiation, a web of authorship.

If that sounds interesting to you, I present my thesis:

The structure of a blockbuster franchise is one that suggests homogenization and broad appeal rather than idiosyncrasy and personality. In this context, the already collaborative and often corporate nature of most mainstream filmmaking sees an increase of influencing creative factors. A studio needs to make a global hit that provides a return on the investment of a large budget, armies of artisans and craftspeople work to produce images of spectacle, and there is often a need to maintain continuity with other films and fidelity to a source material. The nature of this context seems to stifle the notion of directorial authorship. As much as scholarship has complicated the romantic idea of the singular author of any artwork, it has not killed the idea of a director expressing a personal vision through a film. It is possible to see this in scholarship on a filmmaker like Alfonso Cuarón, who has attracted interest for distinctive films such as Y tu mamá también (2001) and Children of Men (2006), but whose contribution to a blockbuster franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), is mostly ignored. In works devoted to examining Cuarón’s films in depth, James Udden labels Azkaban “generic Hollywood fare” and Deborah Shaw defines it as “non-auteurist”; both make these definitions in contrast to a more conventionally auteurist work of Cuarón’s like Y tu mamá también. These views suggest a belief that Cuarón has had a strong authorial voice in creating other films, but that this voice could not be present in a Harry Potter film. Certainly a claim that Cuarón is the author of Prisoner of Azkaban would be an oversimplification, but an opposite claim would also ignore the tension among the multiplicity of creative influences on the film. Rather than simply being a case of a director imposing a vision upon material or being a servant to corporate interests, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban showcases the franchise blockbuster as a complex authorial web that serves as a site of negotiation between different authorial voices.
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Starlight, Wandering from the Path, and Failure in The Desolation of Smaug

Spoilers for The Desolation of Smaug, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Wrath of Khan.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is about mistakes and bad decisions.  Just as much of An Unexpected Journey was about trying to reclaim a glorious past, for those who see The Hobbit trilogy itself as a bad decision, this theme might seem very fitting.  But as someone who sees value in it, this theme unifies a movie that might seem to just be a formless series of events and creates some emotion unseen in any of the previous Tolkien films or in very many mainstream blockbuster films at all.

Smaug establishes early on that it will be about “wandering from the path”: Gandalf warns the company of dwarves not to leave the path in Mirkwood, saying that if they do, they “might never find it again.”  The first film was about setting out on the path (literally and figuratively), forming the company, and asking its central thematic question: why would Bilbo join this quest?  Having answered that at the end of the first film (the answer: empathy), the second film takes the united heroes it has established and shows them making mistakes, which lead them to splinter their company and ultimately to fail in their quest to slay the dragon. 

The dwarves leaving the literal path in Mirkwood constitutes the first bad decision made in the film (I’m not sure Gandalf’s decision to leave the company is a mistake, though his decision to enter Dol Guldur alone most certainly is).  The Mirkwood sequence also marks when the film begins asking what causes people to make bad decisions.  There is a motif of hallucination, delirium and intoxication in the film: the hallucinations in Mirkwood, the Elf guards getting drunk, Bofur getting hammered and missing the boat out of Laketown (it just had to be the Irish dwarf, I guess), Kili’s delirious conversation with Tauriel after she heals him.  It’s fair to say that these things fall under the category of intoxication: they are things that overwhelm the characters’ reason and decision-making, causing them to do things they wouldn’t normally do.  Intoxication means they can’t see clearly, which itself becomes a separate motif in the film with three characters with a cloudy eye: one of the menacing men in Bree, Bolg, and the brief of vision of Thranduil with half of his face burned off.  And isn’t there another character with One Eye?

But these are mostly minor examples of intoxicating things that overwhelm the characters’ decision-making.  The real focus of the film is on Thorin’s obsession with the treasure of Erebor and Bilbo’s growing obsession with and thrall to the One Ring.  The motif establishes these obsessions as essentially an extension of being drunk, which makes sense in the context of these films given the way the filmmakers often characterized the Ring in LOTR as being like a drug and Gollum and Frodo as being like drug addicts.

Bilbo’s and Thorin’s obsessions are what cause them to make mistakes or do things they would not normally do.  For Bilbo, the Ring gives him the ability to do things he probably would not have been able to do without it: fighting the spiders, sneaking through the Elven-King’s halls, and entering Erebor.  But the desire to keep it also drives him into a murderous rage when he sees it near a large insect.  And most importantly, even though he knows that he should tell Gandalf about it, Bilbo hides the Ring from the Wizard.  The Ring has started intoxicating the hobbit and influencing his decisions.

Despite the Ring’s importance in the larger story, and the title of this trilogy, Thorin’s obsessions and mistakes are the primary focus of Smaug.  They are the ones with the most consequence.  It is his obsession with the treasure that leads the company into the mountain to awaken the beast.  “He cannot see beyond his own desire,” Bard says (there’s the eye/seeing motif again).  And it is his obsession which causes Thorin to turn his own sword on Bilbo.

The film’s decision to focus on Thorin rather than Bilbo has been justifiably controversial.  Bilbo does have some important things to do in the film (scaling the tree in Mirkwood, rescuing the dwarves from the spiders, rescuing the dwarves from the Elves, entering Erebor on his own), but there are sections of the film where he really does seem to disappear.  When we see him in the boat leaving Laketown, I had a feeling that we hadn’t really seen him in a while.  Given the powers of the Ring, perhaps it is fitting that Bilbo disappears from his own movie.  And it’s also probably a consequence of having a film with 15 main characters, and that’s before you add in the Elves and the Laketown characters.  Many of the dwarves also fade into the background this time.  Has poor William Kircher had more than one line as Bifur in this entire series?  At least Bombur gets to be a bouncing barrel.

Yet the emphasis on Thorin is more appropriate for a specific thematic focus that makes the ending of the film an actual ending.  If we think about an ending as the point where the story is over, then a cliffhanger like Smaug’s doesn’t constitute an ending.  But for me, that definition doesn’t really work.  No story is ever really over, and certainly most movie stories don’t end when the credits role.  The happy couple finally saying, “I love you” and kissing isn’t an ending.  Their lives don’t stop there, unless they’re about to be hit by truck.

I haven’t thought about it long enough to come up with the best definition for an ending, and I don’t want to propose anything too restrictive since that is the opposite of what I’m trying to do, but I have taken to using this definition for an ending: a movie can end if it has answered a central dramatic or thematic question.  I think this can apply to most types of stories, but I think it is useful for making a part of a series into a complete thought rather than just an episode.  The central dramatic question of The Lord of the Rings is: will Frodo destroy the Ring?  But the central dramatic and thematic question of The Fellowship of the Ring is right there in the title: can Frodo make this journey alone?  By the end of the movie, there is an answer: Frodo has to leave his friends to keep them out of danger, but he can’t make the journey alone.  Or to put it another way: “I’m going to Mordor alone.”  “Of course you are, and I’m coming with you.”  The central thematic question of An Unexpected Journey is: why would Bilbo join this quest?  The answer is that he empathizes with dwarves’ need to find a home.

The central thematic question of The Desolation of Smaug is: can these characters avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?  At the end of the film, we have an answer: no.

This film is not just about any kinds of mistakes.  No, this wouldn’t be a Tolkien story without the Shadow of the Past.

Memory is everywhere in Tolkien.  I already wrote about how An Unexpected Journey has a very Tolkien-like focus on the past: the framing device of an older Bilbo writing his book, Thorin’s desire to reclaim his people’s glorious past, the return of an ancient evil, even Peter Jackson’s clear desire to reclaim the glory of his LOTR trilogy.  And memory is still present in Desolation of Smaug.  Every time the characters reach a new place or meet a new character, there is a history that needs to be told.  When they reach his house, Beorn tells the company about his ancient grudge against Orcs.  When the company reaches Mirkwood, they find the ruins of the Elven gate and statues overgrown with vines: this place’s glory days were many years ago (or as a resident of Mirkwood would say about another forest in Middle-Earth: “This forest is old, very old, full of memory and anger.”).  Stuff like this is part of what I love about Tolkien’s work: it takes place in a world filled with reminders of an older world.  The Balrog is not just another monster for the heroes to fight.  It is a living memory of ancient history.

The company’s captivity in the Woodland Realm reintroduces the theme of memory by having Tauriel explicitly state it when she describes her people’s love of starlight.  The idea of starlight as memory is both strangely scientifically accurate for a fantasy story and appropriate for the history of the Elves, since the last of the Silmarils (the famous Elven jewels of the First Age, the cause of much wonder and grief) was sent into the sky as a star.  (Side note: this is Earendil, the most beloved star of the Elves; Galadriel gave to Frodo a vial with the light of this star, essentially the light of a Silmaril, which contained the light of the Two Trees of Valinor; Frodo who used it to fight Shelob, spawn of Ungoliant who helped Morgoth to steal the Silmarils from Valinor and destroyed the Two Trees in the First Age.  Shelob’s Lair is a rematch of the most ancient conflict in Middle-Earth.  How cool is that?)

The reintroduction of this theme is important because the Quest for Erebor is the quest to reclaim a memory.  When Thorin convinces the people of Laketown to help him, he uses his memories of the glory of Esgaroth and convinces them that he can return them to that past glory.  And when the dwarves finally reenter Erebor, Thorin and Balin are overcome with memories of what the Mountain once was.

The past is starlight, but the past is also a room full of the decomposing corpses of dwarves who could not escape from the Mountain.  The past is a ruined city that was turned to ash.  The past is full of death and mistakes.  And just as the adoration of the past is very much in the spirit of Tolkien, this film’s skepticism of focusing on the past is also in the spirit of Tolkien.

We tend to think of Tolkien as THE conservative Luddite, opposed to industrialization, the internal combustion engine and progress, and instead obsessed with the idea of an agrarian English countryside that was long gone and may have never really existed.  But there is evidence that he too had some skepticism about dwelling on the past.  I already touched on this a little in my post about An Unexpected Journey: the negative ramifications of Thorin’s obsession with the past are not an invention of the films.  This doesn’t necessarily suggest that Tolkien believed Thorin’s quest was a bad idea, since the book tends to focus on his greed.  But evidence of Tolkien’s skepticism of dwelling on the past can be found in one of my favorite passages of his writing.

In the Extended Edition of The Return of the King, Gandalf tells Pippin about the decline of Gondor, a speech that is taken almost verbatim from one that Faramir (the character out of all he had created in whom Tolkien saw the most of himself) gives in the book of The Two Towers, when he tells Frodo and Sam about Gondor.  The speech in the movie (almost the same as the book; the only thing missing is a mention of elixirs, which doesn’t really add to the theme) is: “Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons.  Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high cold towers asking questions of the stars.”

First things first: if that passage doesn’t excite you, then there’s nothing I can say to convince you to like Tolkien.  Second: if that’s not skepticism about dwelling on the past, I don’t know what is.  Of course, the passage is about a decline from former glory, spoken by someone who wants Gondor to return to it.  The speech in the film is prefaced by Gandalf saying: “The old wisdom borne out of the West was forsaken.”  There is no denying that Tolkien valued the past and believed much of it was preferable to the present, but this speech also sees a great deal of evil in dwelling on the past.

And it is this skepticism that comes to the forefront in The Desolation of Smaug, not the sense of nostalgia that we commonly associate with Tolkien.  The question in this film is not whether or not the heroes will reclaim the glories of the past, but whether or not they can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.  And past mistakes are everywhere in this film.  Thorin has the chance to repair the rift between his people and Thranduil, but instead he chooses to scorn the Elf-King again.  Bard is haunted (and publicly ridiculed) because of his ancestor’s failure to kill Smaug, and he still keeps a reminder of it in his house (significantly, the film ends before we find out if he repeats his ancestor’s mistake).  And Thorin is haunted by his grandfather’s greed, which summoned the dragon that destroyed Dale and Erebor. 

Two characters confront him about these past mistakes.  Bard tells him in Laketown that if they enter the mountain, they are sure to unleash the same fire that destroyed Dale.  And Balin reminds Thorin that the treasure of Erebor drove his grandfather mad, while Thorin’s face is framed by the head of an ancient Dwarf statue: the past is always present.  Bard’s warning comes with a prophecy that encapsulates the temptation of reclaiming the past, and the danger of repeating its mistakes: “And the bells shall ring in gladness at the Mountain King’s return, but all shall fail in sadness, and the lake will shine and burn.”

As the company returns to Thorin’s past home, with the memory of past mistakes, of a king that went mad and a town turned to ash, what happens?  They repeat it all.  Obsessed with the treasure, Thorin turns his sword on Bilbo, and Bilbo’s remark about the barrels sends Smaug back to kill the men of Dale.  In fact, Thorin’s plan to defeat Smaug is to complete Erebor’s last, unfinished construction project: creating a golden dwarf statue.  His plan is for it to fall apart, covering Smaug in molten gold, but it is interesting that Thorin fills in the outlines of a blueprint that was set more than a hundred years before to create a golden monument to past glory that falls apart after only a few seconds.  And it all still “fails in sadness,” Smaug flies out of the mountain, “and the lake will shine and burn.”  That last part is yet to happen at the end of this film, but there is nothing to stop it.  The central question of the film has been answered: the company of dwarves repeated the mistakes of the past.

It is this ending that I think makes The Desolation of Smaug special.  There is no denying that the film has problems.  I don’t mind the Kili-Tauriel romance, and I actually really like Tauriel as a character, but I don’t think a crude sexual innuendo is the best way to start off a fairy-tale love story.  The continued emphasis on digital rather than practical effects is also disappointing.  The CGI orcs are less interesting than the practical ones in LOTR, and while most of the effects look very good, holy moly does the molten gold look fake.  The CGI also tends to mean that the action scenes usually lack a real sense that the characters could get hurt.  The barrel chase scene is fun, but it relies primarily on a sense of kinetic energy rather than a sense of jeopardy.  I also don’t understand the decision to turn the dwarves into super heroes who can pretty much do anything.  The first movie introduced an idea that I really liked, that these dwarves aren’t really warriors and aren’t particularly suited for this quest, but the series hasn’t followed through on that.  They all seem pretty capable to me.  And while there are some great images (I love the wintry atmosphere in Laketown), sometimes I think the digital grading goes overboard, particularly in Mirkwood where a general washed-out brown look replaces what seemed from the production videos to be a darkly colorful and almost psychedelic-looking forest.  Of course, not all of the storylines get a satisfying ending with Legolas fighting Bolg and then riding off to… fight him again?  I like ending the movie with Gandalf captured, but I’m still not sure about the Dol Guldur stuff.  If he has faced Sauron and survived, will the Balrog in Fellowship be as formidable?

But there is so much in the film that I do think works, not least of which is the actual dragon Smaug.  He looks fantastic, and the whole scene with him and Bilbo is terrific.  Here is an actual villain in this series who is smart and cunning, and I love that he is actually able to challenge how Bilbo sees Thorin.  Most of the individual dialogue scenes work very well.  As much as I disapprove of the trousers line, I very much like the scene when Tauriel and Kili talk about starlight and moonlight.  I even think the borderline maudlin healing scene has a nice fairy-tale quality to it.  And despite the lack of jeopardy in the action scenes, most of the movie has a very exciting feeling of adventure.  And then there’s that ending.

How often do you see something like this?  A mainstream, blockbuster movie that ends with the heroes failing, with something bad about to happen that is the heroes’ fault.  The Empire Strikes Back ends with failure, but it also ends with optimism about rescuing Han Solo.  The Wrath of Khan ends with Spock dead, but Khan has been defeated, and there’s hope that Spock can come back (“life from lifelessness”).

Oddly enough, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (released about a month before) has a similar ending, complete with a sense of failure and a town being hit with fire from the sky.  Even still, Katniss does strike a blow against the Capitol, and the ending reveals a revolution in progress.  Smaug ends with complete failure.  While it is a better movie than Smaug, I also think Catching Fire slightly botches its ending by cutting to what is essentially a Mockingjay screensaver, reinforcing the sense that the movie was really just a trailer for the next one.  I also don’t think the forgettable, mumbly credits song helps very much.  Whatever emotions we’re supposed to be feeling (anger, excitement, despair), the song just backs away from.

Formally, the ending of Smaug functions better.  Rather than backing away from the emotion of the ending, it confronts it with a confident directorial flourish.  Jackson’s other Tolkien films usually fade to black at the end (the exception being Unexpected Journey) and always wait until well into the credits to bring in the anachronistic credits song.  In Smaug, Jackson starts the song (loud, mournful, and surprising) right after a cut to black, even before the credits have started.  It’s a bold choice that could put people off, especially Tolkien purists, but it perfectly fits with the emotion of despair that the film ends on.  If the film doesn’t work for you, I can’t convince you to care about it or feel this particular emotion, but seeing it the first time, I found it very powerful.

And again, the sense of failure is something special in the ending of a blockbuster movie, and more specifically, it’s something that isn’t found elsewhere in the Tolkien films (the ending of the book of The Two Towers comes the closest).  For me, this ending provides a justification for the trilogy decision.  If the whole thing was done as one film or two films, the same story moment would happen, but it has much more impact as the ending of a film.  Making a blockbuster, fantasy movie about mistakes and failure, and ending that movie with the heroes being wrong, making mistakes, and failing, whatever other problems there are, that ending is worth it.

A Celebration of Cinema for the Year 2012

I really was planning on doing the list earlier this year.  Most, if not all critics make their lists of the best films of the year in December before the year even ends.  Those of us without access to screenings weeks before release dates often have to wait until January to see some of the films that critics consider to be the very best.  But it just so happened that none of the films that I saw after deadline (so to speak) ended up on my Top Ten list, so really, I could have posted this during December, too.  But here I am again, just like last year, posting my list of the best films of 2012 on the same weekend as the Oscars.  Like I wrote last year, the timing actually makes sense.  As the Academy celebrates the year in film, we’re going to do our own celebration here at Esoteric.  The following is a list of what I think is worth celebrating in the cinema of 2012.

The best picture that I saw this year was Rian Johnson’s Looper: an exhilarating and emotionally powerful science-fiction film about time travel.  A scene midway through the picture provides its central image: two men are sitting at a diner, a young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and an older man (Bruce Willis).  They are, in fact, the same man.  Willis is from 30 years in the future and has been sent back in time to be killed by his younger self: Gordon-Levitt.  Here we have those questions that we think about all the time: what would you say to the person you were years ago or the person you will become?  Are you a completely different person?  What has happened in 30 years to turn that young man into that old man?

Of course, Looper is not only about existential questions.  It’s an exciting sci-fi crime thriller.  In the future, when the mob wants to murder someone, they send that person back in time to be killed and disposed of by an assassin like Gordon-Levitt.  Eventually, these assassins have to kill their own future selves, guaranteeing that there will be no loose ends.  When Gordon-Levitt fails to kill his future self, he becomes the target of his fellow assassins.  The first half of the movie is a pulse-pounding action picture with strong characterization, visual ingenuity, and such memorable sci-fi images as a man from the future watching parts of his body disappear as his past self is being tortured.

But the heart of the film comes in the second half when Gordon-Levitt hides out from the mob on a farm where a woman (Emily Blunt) lives with her son.  And while the excitement never drops, Looper becomes a more intimate character piece in its second half as the assassin discovers the true reason why his future self traveled back in time and the disturbing secret of the farmer’s son.  Writer-director Johnson displays remarkable storytelling dexterity as he shifts audience sympathy between the two versions of the same man: between Gordon-Levitt, who begins the story as a not entirely sympathetic murderer, and Willis, who is revealed to have heartbreaking and dark motivations for his journey through time. 

The issue that always lurks at the heart of Looper is the question of how a person becomes the person he or she will be in ten, thirty or fifty years.  Will that be the same person?  Has that future been predetermined?  In its second half, Looper hones in on the most significant symbol of this question: raising a child.  The picture is filled with parental figures: a crime boss who guides a boy into a life of crime; a woman who heals a broken, middle-aged killer; and a mother who believes that with her love she can make her troubled son into a good man despite all evidence to the contrary.  It all leads up to a shattering, genius conclusion that solidifies Looper’s place as a masterpiece of science-fiction.

The first sound heard in Moonrise Kingdom is a thunderclap, and indeed a cloud of melancholy hangs over Wes Anderson’s tale of young love in an island town during the 1960s.  When two twelve-year-olds run away from their homes, the entire island becomes involved in the search for them, and all the while, a storm is preparing to strike.  As hilarious as the picture is, the characters are all so deeply sad and melancholy.  Even the children have a certain sadness just like the adults.  The young lovers are seizing their chance for a romantic adventure out of the young adult books that the girl reads constantly.  But the end of childhood is approaching in the form of a storm that threatens to wipe out the carefree kingdom that they have created for themselves.  Anderson brings to the picture his inimitable visual style, his witty dialogue, and his love for the beauty in things that are destined to fade.

Near the beginning of the dreamlike Turkish police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a police officer tells a doctor that he could tell the story of their long night together as if it was a fairy tale, and that perfectly describes the style of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film: the story of the hunt for a dead body in the Anatolian steppes.  Two men have already confessed to a murder, but they cannot remember where they have buried the body.  So begins a long night as the prisoners, several police officers, a prosecutor, and a doctor drive through the landscape searching for the corpse.  They appear to be journeying through a dream or a fairy tale with ghostly images of headlights floating through hills of waving grass, statues of monsters hidden beside the road, an anecdote about a woman predicting the exact day of her death, and a girl who walks through a village carrying a light in the dark like an angel.  But the fairy tale ends when the sun rises and the body is found.  And the story shifts from the dreamlike landscape to a cold, hard city.  There are no angels here, just the wife and son of a murdered man.  Now, the mysterious story of the woman who predicted her death has an explanation.  And a doctor discovers that some truths are too terrible to be told.  The dream is over.  The only thing left is an autopsy.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is far from just being a history lesson: it is a dynamic, thoroughly engrossing picture about the exciting, messy process of democracy.  Daniel Day-Lewis commands the screen as the 16^th President trying to get the 13^th Amendment passed through the House of Representatives.  His portrayal is incredibly human, bringing us the image of an often quiet, very eccentric man who could still use the power of his voice to sway others.  Tony Kushner’s script is fascinating and accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of turning the legislative process into an exciting entertainment.  Spielberg and his gifted cinematographer Janusz Kaminski make the picture a wonderful visual experience with depths of light and shadow filling the film’s many interiors.  And Day-Lewis’ performance is not the only great one in the film: Sally Field brings powerful resonance to her portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones has fury and thunder as abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.  Lincoln is not a rosy-hued look at the passage of the 13^th Amendment.  It acknowledges that this came about through shady backroom deals and compromises.  But in Stevens, the film finds a powerful moral center: after Stevens compromises his values on the floor of the House, one of his fellow abolitionists asks him with disgust if he would be willing to say anything.  Stevens responds that yes, in fact, he would be willing to do and say anything to end the evil of slavery.  This picture is Hollywood entertainment at its finest.

The Dark Knight Rises, the towering conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, is one of the great screen epics.  The film centers on a former superhero who is old, broken and past his prime.  It confronts him with a villain who is physically stronger and possesses a strong sense of his own moral righteousness.  The battle between these two characters takes place in a nightmare extension of our own reality in which the wealthy aristocracy is cold and oblivious to the people below them and the mob that replaces them is actually no better, in which the proliferation of nuclear technology comes back to threaten the American Empire, and in which the practice of invaders claiming to be liberators, so familiar after the Iraq War, is instead used against an American city.  In that vein, it is fitting that the picture would be about people whose sins come back to haunt them: about the child of a former enemy who returns to fulfill her father’s goals, and about two people who thought they had buried a city’s evil only to find that it has literally been building up underground.  While it doesn’t challenge the conventions of the superhero film like its predecessor, The Dark Knight Rises does create an incredible emotional power.  Part of this is due to the performances.  Christian Bale continues his portrayal of Bruce Wayne, not only as a superhero but as a man trying to bury his past; Michael Caine brings extraordinary emotion as he tries to talk Bruce out of his self-destructive behavior.  And Anne Hathaway steals the show as the Cat to Christian Bale’s Bat.  Nolan mounts an impressive spectacle that manages to give weight to both the grand and the intimate.  Nowhere is this more apparent than the sequence when a child sings the National Anthem at a football game as a masked villain lays out the final pieces of his plan and walks down a hallway to his destiny.

Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths is a wonderful, explosive mix of violence, pitch-black humor and surprisingly thoughtfulness, the story of two dog-nappers who must flee a mobster when they kidnap his dog, while their friend (Colin Farrell) struggles with a screenplay idea.  Sam Rockwell gives a wild, outlandish performance as a man obsessed with the excitement of movie violence, a performance only matched by the quiet soulfulness of Christopher Walken’s work as Rockwell’s partner, a man with his own history of violence.  The picture is funny, sickening and exhilarating, not at all surprising from the writer/director of In Bruges.  What is surprising is the thoughtful way McDonagh weaves America’s history of violence into the proceedings, particularly the violence of racism in the 20^th Century and the atrocities of the Vietnam War.  Farrell’s screenplay idea includes an unfinished scene involving a Vietnamese man preparing to commit an act of revenge for the atrocities at My Lai, a scene that Farrell can only see ending in violence.  So he doesn’t want to finish it.  The solution that Walken provides for this scene is one of the most thought-provoking and moving moments in any film this year.

Michael Haneke’s Amour is a love story about death.  More specifically, it is about inevitable death, death that you can see coming for a long time but have no power to stop.  It is a love story about an old man whose wife has a stroke.  Director Haneke simply watches the husband care for his wife as she slowly slips toward death.  He must feed her, wash her, even help her to use the toilet.  Eventually there comes the moment when her words stop making sense, and he realizes that he will never actually have another conversation with his wife.  They used to talk about music, poetry and art, but even though she is still alive, they will never do that again.  The next step is inevitable.  There is no hope, no last minute cure.  The picture is almost unbearably painful at times, but what keeps it together is the simple fact that this is a film about true love.  The kind of love that is simply flowers and candy would not last this long.  The love onscreen in Amour is true love.  It’s not pretty, and no one writes poetry about it.  No one, that is, except Michael Haneke.

The Cabin in the Woods is a picture charged with excitement and originality.  It appears to be a horror film about a group of college students being chased by monsters through the woods.  At least, it appears so from the trailer.  In fact, the first scene of the film is straight out of an office comedy.  But the office is no ordinary office.  It is the control center for a real-life horror film.  The script from Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard dances back and forth between comedy and horror as the office workers in the control center monitor the actions of the college co-eds who have stumbled into their trap and take bets on how they will be killed.  But the picture doesn’t just stop at that twist.  As the film progresses, more secrets are revealed, and more and more hell breaks loose.  The film works as a fascinating deconstruction of the horror genre, but it works even better as a wildly original entertainment.

One of the reasons why I go to the movies is to see pictures like Safety Not Guaranteed: a film so completely unexpected, so funny, and so full of humanity that I forget that I’m sitting in a movie theater while I’m watching it.  The picture finds a young magazine intern (Aubrey Plaza) assigned to investigate an incredibly eccentric man (Mark Duplass) who claims to have invented time travel.  She convinces the man that she wants to time travel with him, and as he tells her his paranoid stories, involves her in crimes, and gives her his training lessons for the journey she’s sure is impossible, she falls in love with him.  The movie enfolds so naturally and effortlessly that we hold our breath, hoping that this experience isn’t too good to be real.  Even though it loses a bit of its magic in the third act, the picture still ends up being an absolutely wonderful experience.

As the first part of a trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is not a complete narrative, but it is a complete emotional experience, a grand and glorious adventure.  Martin Freeman gives a wonderful performance as Bilbo Baggins, the home-loving hobbit who is convinced to join in an adventure with a wizard and thirteen dwarves, an adventure that will have important consequences leading to the story we know as The Lord of the Rings.  Director Peter Jackson does not disappoint in delivering spectacular action sequences: standouts include an encounter with three trolls, a rollercoaster battle with goblins, and a cliff-hanging climax in a mountain forest.  But the most memorable moments are quiet dialogue scenes.  The lengthy opening party scene at Bilbo’s home in the Shire is reminiscent of the wedding scenes in The Godfather and The Deer Hunter in how it establishes the many characters we will follow on the journey: it features two particularly wonderful dialogue sequences in which Gandalf the wizard tries to coax Bilbo to go on the adventure and a cautious dwarf attempts to talk his leader out of the quest.  One of my favorite moments comes later in the picture as one of Bilbo’s companions realizes that he has never known what it is like to have a home.  But the most memorable scene in the entire film is the confrontation between Bilbo and Gollum beneath the Misty Mountains.  Here is where Bilbo finds a very special gold ring and makes a crucial decision to spare a life.  In returning to Middle-Earth, Peter Jackson has created another stunning adventure.

A list of ten films is certainly not enough for a celebration of film, so here is a list of the other pictures that I enjoyed in 2012 (in alphabetical order):

Argo: Ben Affleck’s 1970’s-style thriller about the attempt to rescue six Americans from Iran after the 1979 revolution using a cover story from Hollywood.  The opening sequence depicting the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran is masterful cinema.  A summer entertainment for adults.

The Avengers: Joss Whedon’s exhilarating comic book epic was one of the finest mainstream entertainments in years.

Beasts of the Southern Wild: A dreamlike examination of nature and destruction from a child’s point of view.  Young Quvenzhané Wallis has a commanding screen presence.

Bernie: Richard Linklater’s biting dark comedy starring Jack Black as a beloved man in a Texas town who almost gets away with the murder of a widely-hated old woman.

Brave: Pixar’s visually wonderful film about an independent-minded Scottish princess and her mother.

Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino’s violent, funny and disturbing slavery-western-exploitation picture.  Jamie Foxx creates a classic Western hero and Christoph Waltz brings great emotional resonance to the film.

Flight: Denzel Washington is fantastic in the role of an alcoholic pilot who comes under scrutiny after he pulls off a miraculous landing of a broken airliner.  Director Robert Zemeckis returns to live action with an intimate character study that also happens to contain an airplane crash that is one of the most terrifying sequences in recent film history.

The Grey: A harrowing film about survival in a land of ice and wolves with a fantastic lead performance by Liam Neeson and surprisingly thoughtful dialogue about life and death.

The Hunger Games: The exhilarating adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ novel about a futuristic dystopia where teenagers fight to the death on national television.    

Killing Them Softly: A fascinating crime picture about a stickup that sends shockwaves through a community of New Orleans criminals.  Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins give great performances as people who have spent far too many years in their lives of crime, and the robbery scene is a masterpiece of suspense.

The Master: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious and elusive film about a cult leader and the disturbed war veteran who encounters him.  I must admit that I still don’t understand this picture, but I also have to admit that I have never seen anything quite like it.

Prometheus: A thought-provoking and visually astonishing science-fiction/horror film from Ridley Scott about a group of scientists searching a distant planet for the creators of humanity.

Red Hook Summer: Spike Lee’s messy, exhilarating return to Brooklyn with an astonishing performance by Clarke Peters as a preacher with a secret.

Silver Linings Playbook: David O. Russell’s romantic comedy about a man just released from a mental institute and a woman with her own emotional problems.  Jennifer Lawrence gives an exciting, high-wire performance.

Zero Dark Thirty: A thrilling and horrifying account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.  Jessica Chastain is terrific as the woman who doggedly pursued him, representing an entire country that destroyed its soul in a decade-long pursuit of vengeance.

Since I did not have a chance to see everything I would have liked to see this year, here is a list of all the films that I wanted to see but missed: Anna Karenina, Cloud Atlas, The Deep Blue Sea, Haywire, Holy Motors, The Impossible, The Imposter, The Kid With a Bike, Rust and Bone, Side by Side, This is Not a Film, The Turin Horse.

And here we are again, at the end of a year in cinema and the start of a brand new one…

The UnMasterful "Hitchcock"

The new film Hitchcock has just opened in the UK, leading to a new milestone: my first negative review, which can be found at the LSE Beaver.

http://issuu.com/readbeaveronline/docs/785/18

Actual Movie Reviews

I normally don't consider most of the posts on this blog to be actual movie reviews.  The purpose of a review is to give the reader a sense of what the experience of a movie is like so that the reader can decide whether or not to see the picture in question.  These posts are more like rambling, nerdy essays where I obsess over one or more particular details or themes of a movie, and they rarely make any sense if you haven't seen it.

But now I've finally written some movie reviews!  Here are links to two reviews that I've written for The Beaver, the student newspaper of the London School of Economics.

The first is a review of a re-release of Lawrence of Arabia from last November:
http://issuu.com/readbeaveronline/docs/778/15

The second is a more recent review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, essentially a shorter and probably better version of the post about it that I wrote on this blog.
http://issuu.com/readbeaveronline/docs/782/21

“What was before we’ll see once more”: Peter Jackson Taking Back Erebor

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey begins with four people looking through memories of a glorious past, dreaming of the day when those glories will come again.  Bilbo Baggins is an old hobbit.  He turns 111 years old this very day, in fact.  It has been 60 years since he went on a great adventure, and his hole is filled with reminders of this: golden treasures lie about, an old map is on a table, and a strange sword sits in a chest.  Bilbo finds a drawing of his younger self and gasps in astonishment at just how young that hobbit looks (though how will this make sense with the exclamation soon to come that he hasn’t aged a day?).  And those of us familiar with the events to come know that later this day, Bilbo will try to reclaim the past and begin a new adventure.  But before he does this, he wants to relive his memories one more time and pass the true version of the events to “my dear Frodo.”

Yet, telling his tale requires memories that belong not to him, but to the dwarf prince Thorin Oakenshield.  Thorin is heir to the kingdom of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain that was the home of the dwarves until they were driven out by the dragon Smaug.  For many years, Thorin has wandered in exile, but now the time has come for him to not just reclaim the homeland of his people but also to reclaim their glorious past.

The decision to begin the story with 111-year-old Bilbo looking back on his memories was absolutely correct (even though the scene ultimately goes on a bit long with Bilbo and Frodo discussing the problems with the Sackville-Bagginses) because it sets up the thematic nature of the tale.  This is a story about characters that are living after the glory days.  Old Bilbo sets this up because he has been living “peacefully” in the Shire for 60 years after his adventures, wanting to go on another adventure, wanting to see mountains again, “mountains, Gandalf!”

And while this is not the Bilbo we see once the real story begins, the Thorin that we see for the entire story has been living with the glory days of his people in the past.  The Dwarves wander in exile.  There is organization among them, enough for them to have a council that Thorin has just returned from when he arrives at the Unexpected Party, but none of them are willing to confront Smaug and reclaim their lost kingdom.  None, that is, save for 12 dwarves.  The heart of the picture comes during the party in Bag End, after the dwarves have had their fun at Bilbo’s expense and Gandalf and Thorin have explained the quest.  Balin, Thorin’s oldest friend, tells the prince that it might be best if they did not undertake this journey.  “What are we?” he asks.  “Miners, tinkers, toy makers.”  And the few warriors they have with them are “old warriors.”  One of the gifts of the decision to expand the story into three films is the time spent with the dwarves in Bag End.  When Ori stands up and exclaims that he is not afraid of the dragon before his brother Dori brings him back down to his seat, we can sense the uncertainty in his voice, and we know that these dwarves might not be ready for this journey.  But they were the only ones who answered Thorin’s call.  Balin knows that the dwarves have been brought low, and he wonders if it might not be better to stay that way.  He tells Thorin that they have a good, peaceful life now that is “worth more than all the gold in Erebor.”  But Thorin knows that this is his last chance reclaim his heritage.

The emphasis on the past is very fitting because the third person who begins The Hobbit by looking into the past is J.R.R. Tolkien.  You could say that The Shadow of the Past plays a large role in all of Tolkien’s work.  Much has been written about Tolkien’s fondness for the English countryside before it was eaten away by industrialization, but even without knowing about the author’s life, it is clear that the past is very important in his stories.  The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place in a world that has already seen its glory days.  The events that Tolkien describes in The Silmarillion are so epic that they dwarf (pun intended) the most spectacular events of The Hobbit and LOTR: the Battles of Five Armies and Pelennor Fields pale in comparison to the Battles of Sudden Flame and Unnumbered Tears; Smaug and Shelob would be no match for Glaurung and Ungoliant; even Sauron is never as powerful his old master Morgoth.  Yet all of this makes the tales of the Third Age all the more powerful.  It gives the stories an incredible sense of history.  The Balrog in Moria and Shelob in Cirith Ungol are not just monsters; they are the remnants of a lost world.  As much as I love The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin, I’m more interested in the stories that take place when the glory days are only a memory.  The elegiac feeling of The Lord of the Rings is part of what makes it so powerful.

The Hobbit is not as elegiac as The Lord of the Rings, perhaps because Thorin would rather fight to reclaim Erebor than write an elegy for it, while the Elves write elegies for the lost land of Beleriand.  Yet the past is always present in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  While on the road, Gandalf comes across a ruined building and observes to himself, “A farmer and his family used to live here.”  After a group of trolls turn to stone, Gandalf again looks into the past, saying that trolls had not been seen so far from Misty Mountains in a long time: “not since a darker power ruled these lands.”  And that brings us to the major subplot of the picture: the return of Sauron.  The adaptation adds a scene only described in the Appendices of The Return of the King depicting a meeting of the White Council: Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond and Saruman.  Tolkien does not specifically describe this meeting beyond saying that Gandalf believes an evil power has come to Dol Guldur and that Saruman will not agree to an attack.  The meeting is also a little different in the text: Tolkien has the meeting occurring 90 years before it occurs in the film and specifies that Gandalf has already discovered that it is actually Sauron in Dol Guldur while in the film he never actually says this.  However, even with the changes, this scene in the movie does justice to Tolkien because its presence emphasizes how important the past is to this story.  Does the past remain in the past as “no more than a memory?”  Or (to quote another great 20^th Century writer) is it “not even past?” 

Actually, there is an interesting parallel (one that I’m sure Professor Tolkien would reject, but no matter) between Sauron and Thorin: two figures who were driven from power and seek to reclaim what they once had.  And that creates a parallel between Smaug and the White Council: both have grown too comfortable in their power, not foreseeing that an ancient enemy will return for revenge.  There is a danger in ignoring the past, yet I think Tolkien also sees a danger in trying to reclaim it.  After all, Thorin, Bilbo and Sauron are all unsuccessful in their attempts to reclaim the past.  I suspect that Tolkien would not quite agree with Faulker that “the past is not dead; it is not even past” or with Fitzgerald that we are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  While Tolkien constantly looked to the past, would have us be mindful of the past, and probably believed the past to be better than the present, The Lord of the Rings, with its elegy for the Eldar Days and its greeting of the new Age of Men suggests that Tolkien believed that the past is the past and will probably stay that way.

And this creates interesting implications for the fourth person reliving the glorious past at the beginning of The Hobbit: director Peter Jackson.  It would not be a stretch to claim that The Lord of the Rings trilogy was probably the peak of Jackson’s career.  Not only was it a milestone in the history of cinema, but it also lifted him to a level of success and acclaim beyond anything he had reached previously, even the Oscar-nominated Heavenly Creatures.  And he has not been able to repeat the same success or acclaim since, though his remake of King Kong has moments of real beauty and majesty and I haven’t seen The Lovely Bones so I cannot pass judgment on it.  It would be tempting to characterize Jackson’s motives in making The Hobbit as greedy, particularly as there are so many references to gold in this picture.  But I just don’t think this is really the case (also, speculation about the filmmaker’s motives doesn’t really belong in film criticism, though I know I’m kind of doing that anyway).  The impression that I’ve gotten from Jackson’s production videos is that he is genuinely excited to be making another trilogy in Middle-Earth.  To indulge in some inappropriate speculation about filmmaker motives, I would say that I think Jackson wants to repeat the experience of The Lord of the Rings which means the experience of making the movies, spending years with Tolkien’s mythology and then giving it to the fans for several years.

So, the question on everybody’s mind (and the question that it took me nearly two thousand words to finally start answering) is this: is Peter Jackson succeeding in his quest to reclaim the past?  Of course, it is impossible to fully answer that question until the quest is complete, but at this point, my answer is yes.  Well, it’s not as good as The Fellowship of the Ring, but I put that picture on my list of the Ten Greatest Films of All Time, not to mention that it’s probably my favorite movie ever made.  I can hardly penalize An Unexpected Journey for not equaling that.  Part of the reason it falls short is because I don’t think the source material equals LOTR either.  And while The Hobbit will ultimately end up with some big emotion, the emotions in Unexpected Journey don’t reach the level of the powerhouse sequences in Fellowship, particularly the Bridge of Khazad-dum and the climax at Amon Hen. 

And there are some missteps.  The prologue with Frodo and Old Bilbo goes on a bit too long.  A little bit of it is good, but at a certain point we want to get into the story (though I like the transition from Old Bilbo to Young Bilbo).  Despite what you may have heard, the pacing of this movie is not too leisurely, but actually a little too frenetic at times.  One section involves, in quick succession: a battle with trolls, a false alarm with Radagast, a flashback to Radagast’s investigation of Dol Guldur and a subsequent chase through Mirkwood, a quick fight with wargs, then a lengthy chase scene with the wargs.  I think the quick rhythm of these scenes prevents each of them from really being involving on their own terms.  Finally, while I’m sure the scenes involving Dol Guldur and the return of Sauron will pay off in films two and/or three, the lack of payoff in this film is a little frustrating.

But even with those missteps, what a glorious film this is.  Martin Freeman is terrific as Bilbo, and Ian McKellen is great as Gandalf, not unexpectedly.  Their first meeting is wonderful.  The dwarves are all great, too.  And what a fantastic, wonderful idea to slow down the film and take time to set up the characters and the tone for the story (something I find lacking in a lot of modern cinema).  The whole Bag End sequence is a masterstroke: the arrivals and introductions of the dwarves, the first dwarf song, the scene of Gandalf explaining to Bilbo why he should go on the quest, the conversation between Thorin and Balin (both of whom are shaping up to be great characters), and the chilling second dwarf song.  The big action sequences do not disappoint either; the standouts are the battle with the three trolls, the stone giants in the mountains, and the dwarves’ escape through Goblin Town (there is an interesting parallel between the dwarves and the goblins: they both have vast, subterranean dwellings that look very similar).  But I think the scenes that meant the most to me where some of the dialogue scenes: the sequence in Bag End, a conversation between Bilbo and Bofur, and of course, the riddles in the dark between Bilbo and Gollum followed by what may be the most important moment of the entire saga.  I even liked the 3D!  I haven’t seen it in 48 frames per second so I can’t comment on that yet.  But I liked how the 3D gave a sense of depth to the visuals, particularly the scenes in Bag End.  By the end of my first viewing (I’ve seen it twice now), I was rather exhausted by the picture’s frenetic pace (which, even though I thought it was too frenetic in the first half, works rather well in the second half), but I was thoroughly exhilarated and eager to see the story continue.

Is The Hobbit equal to The Lord of the Rings so far?  No, but then Rivendell is not equal to Gondolin.  It cannot quite equal the glories that have come before.  But you know what?  Rivendell is pretty great, too.  From now until 2014, the experience of The Lord of the Rings is not just a memory.  So far, Peter Jackson has been successful in reclaiming the past.