Lincoln

Noisy and Messy and Complicated
or 
WWLD?

At the end of John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln, "the jack-legged country lawyer" (as played by Henry Fonda) walks up a blighted horizon in the darkening gloom, as thunder rolls in the background, the rough-hewn fence he trudges along taking on the look of military barricades, as the young Lincoln walks with his long stride into the storm of history awaiting him.  Steven Spielberg's Lincoln starts where Young... left off—with the sound of thunder over credits, which evolves into cannon-fire before placing us straight on in the middle of the Civil War, blue-on-gray, white-on-black (and the reverses) amid the blood and the mud of the Earth.  The shots of the battlefield are tight, confusing, with no sense of place, no horizon—just a frame filled with humans killing each other by any means.  No glory.  No higher purpose.  Just the immediacy of conflict.  War is the point at which politics breaks down, and politics is where Spielberg's film is concerned to compare and contrast with today's stew of chicanery, graft, and playing fast and loose with the facts to the purpose of getting your way.  'Twas ever thus, and it was no different in Lincoln's time—they just didn't have cameras documenting everything then.

The approach is as good a starting place as any—that is, ending with Ford's last gambit—linking the two, as both films' main goal is to take the monument out of the man, and put him within reach of attainability, wart and all.  The canonization of Lincoln began at the moment of his death with the pronunciation "now he belongs to the ages" and his visage, homely, homespun, ragged sunken and contemplative, has been preserved in nickel, bronze, marble, granite to the point where one can hardly imagine it as flesh and blood anymore. 

Young Mr. Lincoln: walking into a History still to occur.

As portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln is pitch-perfect, not only in his make-up, but his high tenor rasp of a voice, and—the remarkable part for me—in his still-legged gait that kicks and plants itself on the earth, not too steps away from the ragged dance of Wyatt Earp (Fonda, again) in My Darling Clementine.  It's a big, robust cast—I had error alerts for all the names I tried to cram into this article's meta-data labels—but the hub of it all is Day-Lewis' Lincoln.  Soldiers (including Lukas Haas) quote his Gettysburg Address back to him (which the President tries to staunch: "Been there, delivered that."*)  His wife (Sally Field) constantly badgers him—but then she consistently badgers everybody, his cabinet is frequently frustrated by him, by his prevarications, his story-telling that constantly derails conversations to his agenda, and his thought processes which annoy them.  "Actually," says Secretary of State Seward (David Straithairn) after Lincoln quotes verse, "I have no idea what you mean by that."

What he means may be too pragmatic for them, it's just how he expresses it that confounds.  In one exceptional scene—Tony Kushner worked on this script for a long time and it shows—Lincoln explains in minute, often harsh, detail how he employed his newly granted War Powers Act and it comes down to what he thought he could get away with, legally.

His concern, in the waning days of the war, is to pass the 13th Amendment, thereby abolishing slavery, and it takes every trick, every dodge, every promise and appointment in the middle of a lame-duck Congress before the war could end.  The timetable is critical: Lincoln has just been re-elected and is riding a wave of popularity; a crucial number of Congressmen are in their last days of their jobs and are looking to their futures and not to the wishes of their constituents; and, if the war ends, the urgency to pass the Amendment will dwindle, amidst the rebuilding of the Nation.  Lincoln's Republicans will vote for it, but they need to tone down their rhetoric.  The Democrats are dead-set against it, but getting Democrats to agree on anything is like herding cats and Lincoln wants to exploit the party's fractures into fissures.  

So, the problem is attacked from several fronts (if only the war had started that way): Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), prominent Republican and journalist, is sent to the South to negotiate a Southern settlement, which the South is anxious to do (although Lincoln is reluctant).  Meanwhile, he wheels and deals with the largesse of power, offering appointments, threats, anything to curry votes, and unleashes a trio of stooge-lobbyists (James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson) to press the flesh and pass the greenbacks (not "officially," though).  Votes are critical.  On the home-front, Lincoln's son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is back from college, but feeling the weight of his kinship with the President and wants to enlist, which sends wife Mary Todd into another accusatory tailspin as she has barely survived the death of their son, Tad.

Throughout, Lincoln keeps his counsel. but sometimes erupts into spasms of frustration—with "Molly" (as he calls her), the congress and his cabinet, choosing his moments and pressing his advantage, knowing no peace except what he can create for himself.

As good as Day-Lewis is, he's matched by Tommy Lee Jones as House Republican Thaddeus Stevens.  In chambers, Stevens sits and fumes, then reaches his limit and bursts out in loud insulting harangues, just in control enough to get his point across, and even smiling tightly—very tightly—when when dressed down by Mary Lincoln over his tight reins over The White House purse strings.  Jones finds different ways to make his speeches crackle, while never betraying any sense that the words haven't sprung originally from his head.  And Spielberg has given special attention to casting key roles with the like of great character actors like Bruce McGill, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Lee Pace who make their relatively small parts punch out and become memorable.

And Spielberg's eye for painterly detail shines, as Lincoln moves through the gloomy corridors of The White House or sets up an eerie dream sequence for the President.  And in one lovely scene, between Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant (Jared Harris), where the war's toll on Lincoln is expressed in Day-Lewis' exhausted eyes and the shadows of a long rank of soldiers trudging in front of a setting sun play across his face.  

You can't see the moving shadows...

Spielberg's regular team of artists: Kaminski, Kahn, Carter, and Williams construct a great quilt of imagery and dynamics, making Lincoln a fascinating display of historical intimacy writ large.  It would make a superb triple bill sandwiched between Young Mr. Lincoln and The Conspirator.

Lincoln is a Full-Price Ticket.

* There's a nice contrast of Licoln delivering a dedication at a flag-raising ceremony that lasts a measly few lines.  "That's my speech" he says as he tucks his paper back into his stove-top hat.  They can't all be gems.

The Bourne Legacy

Baby, We Were Bourne To Run
Or
Pursued By Our Inner Damons

The "Bourne" series laterals the ball to another player in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth film of the series, which, by now, has nothing to do with the Robert Ludlum books on which they are titularly based (which is fine, as I read the first one decades ago and found it one of the worst reads ever).

When last we left Jason Bourne, he'd jumped into the East River to make a desperate escape from his pursuer/handlers, a nice turnaround from when the series started with him being fished out of the water with no clue as to his identity.  We start there again, but this time, we're Bourne again in another body of water with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) on a training mission way out in nowhere, Alaska (all the better to see Russia, apparently), while the events of the previous Bourne trilogy play out in the States, sending a panic through the intelligence community and an order to purge the Treadstone Project (or is it Operation Outcome...or Operation Blackbriar...only Tom Clancy could keep track of this...and then he'd start a book-series (ghost-written) on each one!).  Whichever project is being scorched to the Earth, the talents from the previous movies (Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, David Straithairn) are dealing with the ramifications of Bourne's re-appearance, another intelligence head* (Stacy Keach-welcome back, sir) puts another middle-management type (Edward Norton) in charge of damage control (an impossible task in any recent spy film).**

As it becomes readily apparent on Renner's training mission, we didn't know diddly about the Bourne project (whatever name it was), as there are other agents like him, who are not only trained, but drugged to enhance their physical endurance, but also mental faculties (take the green and blue pills, but the yellow one you should really take with water or it gets stuck in your throat, evidently).  Just as Cross is about to rotate stateside, he and another agent get a drone-launched nasty-gram stating unequivocally that the mission is over.

That's how it starts, and goes all over the world, subsequently, even while it doesn't really go anywhere.  Oh, things happen, and things explode and people run around a lot (Rachel Weisz is a really good runner, by the way), but it's mostly just movement without any story momentum.  Most movies have a beginning a middle and an end, but this one is content to merely have a beginning, a middle and a chase.  

Tony Gilroy (who cracked the code for the first film—taking the germ of the idea and stream-lining it into a bare essentials man-on-the-run movie—directed the brilliant Michael Clayton and the disappointing Duplicity, one of those "I-get-the-drift-but-it-doesn't-work" movies) co-wrote this one and directed, employing the same kind of Paul Greengrass "run and shoot" style, but taming it down a bit, so it can be followed, as opposed to experienced in barely discernible flashes.***  It's a risk because the Greengrass adrenaline-fueled style keeps one from asking too many questions about the slowing-down factor of injuries and leaps in story-logic.  All well and good, I suppose, but one still gets the sense that Legacy is half-baked, with the kernel of an idea, some complications to keep things from getting too stale and large holes in the script filled with "a fight breaks out," "a chase happens," and "hero jumps from a fire escape into a window."  These all happened in the previous films, but I'll be damned if I can remember which specific ones—I suspect the answer is: "All of them."  They all blur together as the most memorable things are the action sequences, and there's a remarkable...uh...consistency to them.  The stakes are only the agent's own and most of the film's have very little resolution to them.  Legacy has none.  It just ends.

While one can admire the proficiency with which it is done, there's nothing all that memorable about this one...or the last one.  Even with fresh faces and a new idea of two, it's the same old thing, hardly worth being "Bourne" at all.

The Bourne Legacy is a Rental

  * You know, one could make a case for the excesses of "Big Gov'mint" just by noting the cast of good character actors in the "Bourne" series and all the different intelligence branches and mid-levels.

** Who fixes things in these films-and why haven't the unemployment rates dropped as a result?

*** This helped by a change in the style of Dan Bradley, who seems to have taken a film directing class in the interim, because his second unit direction in the chase sequences actually have some shots that feature relationship perspective going so far as to even including both participants in the chase in the same frame.  That's some kind of break-through after his disastrous work on Quantum of Solace.

Fracture

"Fracture" (Gregory Hoblit, 2007) Gregory Hoblit has had a long career shepharding quality television work as a co-executive producer/writer/director on such shows as "Hill Street Blues," and "L.A. Law." He can be counted on to lend an air of verisimilitude to his legal films (though when he strays off-court into such films as "Hart's War," he brings no real style to the proceedings--even though there was an extended trial scene in the Bruce Willis/Colin Farrell P.O.W. film). But he does have an unerring eye for talent as his "Primal Fear" was a fine showcase for Laura Linney, Andre Braugher, and especially Edward Norton, all eclipsing star Richard Gere.

The cast for "Fracture" is just as impressive with great character actors like Fiona Shaw, David Strathairn, and Bob Gunton lending strong supporting roles. But the film is a bit too "legal procedural" for its own good. Let's see what legal cliches can we trot out:
- the cocky upstart lawyer (Ryan Gosling) begging for a come-uppence: Check
- the genius (Anthony Hopkins) using the legal system for his own ends: Check
- the distracting affair with a legal superior (Rosamund Pike) that throws "upstart" off his game: Check
- the mentor (Straithairn) who warns "upstart" every step of the way, while secretly pulling for the kid because he has such "pluck:" Check
- the legal maneuvering that twists a seemingly open-and-shut court case into a series of technicalities that derail any sense of justice: Check
- the tony upscale-silvery locations that serve as contrast (and siren call) to the "upstart's" stuffy offices of wood-panels and metal desks: Check
- the red herring revealed only at the end which casts a different light on the whole proceedings: Check

Will the clichés please stand while the judge enters the chambers?

Ultimately what it comes down to is an acting duel between old war-horse Hopkins, and "new turk" Gosling, and there it's no contest. Hopkins can do more leaning back in his chair and stretching his neck suggesting megalomania than any actor doing movies. Hopkins has bags of tricks he hasn't gotten to yet. Gosling, then, tries to match him by going the opposite route--doing too much so that his legal eagle looks jittery and scattered; Gosling's busy performance reminds one of the bizarre early work of Nicolas Cage--too much over-thinking the part, and trying too hard to get noticed, that one is distracted by the tic's in the foreground to notice any subtleties that might be working. By the ending of the film, Gosling settles down, but it comes off as too little (finally) coming too late.

The Notorious Bettie Page

"The Notorious Bettie Page" (Mary Harron, 2006) If Marilyn Monroe was the blonde goddess of sex in the 1950's, Bettie Page was her player on the other side. Marilyn was blonde, Bettie, brunette. Where Marilyn had success in Hollywood, Bettie never got beyond stag reels. Where Marilyn's sexuality was paired with a psychic pain, Bettie was exuberant. Marilyn had booze and pills for sanctuary. Bettie had Jesus. Marilyn died fairly young. Bettie's still alive and kicking*** and getting royalties from the continuing interest in her, thanks to devotees such as artist Dave Stevens, who used her as the model for the girlfriend of "The Rocketeer." Both Marilyn and Bettie appeared as centerfolds within the first year of the publication of Playboy Magazine. And this has to be said--Marilyn had talent. Bettie... wasn't much of a dancer. Marilyn was the epitome of sex in Tinseltown, while Bettie worked in the squalid back-rooms of seamy pornographers, and panting "photo clubs."

Bettie's story mirrors Marilyn's: Pretty girl, growing up dirt-poor and abused, an early marriage that doesn't work out, and heading to the Big City to get into acting. There they diverge: Marilyn to fame and early death; Bettie to obscurity, long life and delayed fame. Bettie quit modeling in the 50's after she was hauled to DC to testify in Estes Kefauver's pornography hearings (she was never called in to the hearing room), and so both Marilyn and Bettie are frozen, existing in images of their prime.

Does Mary Harron's film explain Bettie Page and her circumstances and times? Not at all. The facts are laid out, stopping precisely at the hearings that ended Bettie's modeling days and goes no further. The closest it comes is her repeated defense for her nude modeling: "Well, I figure Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden." Point taken, but it doesn't explain the spike heels, whips, spanking and ball-gags (The real Bettie always dismissed her bondage photos as being "silly" and paying the bills). Considering that most people only know her through her looks, Gretchen Mol does an amazing impersonation, right down to a clumsy dance in the end credits, that has just the right touch of amateur clunkiness. In fact, it's downright eerie. Still, it's nice to see this story have a happy ending. I think Bettie would be pleased to know that the copy I watched was from the Public Library. If that's not vindication, I don't know what is.

*** Bettie has been publicly reluctant to be photographed, preferring that people remember how she looked "in her prime." Still, an Image search for "Bettie Page" will reveal rare recent photos of her, and she looks GREAT! The woman's over 80!

Update: The "notorious" Bettie Page died December 11, 2008