The American

"It's Endangered"
or
"Good-Bye, Mr. Butterfly"

After a Main Title trip through an appropriately myopic tunnel, the "mechanic" ("I'm no good with machines," he says to several people, quite rightly) emerges into a wide, scenic Italian landscape bi-sected by a winding motorway, then stops at a phone-booth on a narrow cobble-stone street in a rustic Italian town.  He's boxed in, surrounded by two-story piazzas with open windows, with only two directions he can go—forward or backward. 

But the bullets can come from anywhere.  Because that is what he would do.

He stands half-way out of the open door of his rental car, standing at the transom.  He sees an man fixing a tractor, an woman sweeping her stoop, watching him, and a caffe habitue peering at him over his newspaper.  The bullet can come from anywhere.  He has only an Entrance and an Exit.

Stay or Go?  Commit or Run?

"The American" harkens back to a kind of film they don't make anymore: the art-house action film, where the locales and the characters are more important that the edit-to-shot ratio.*  Where today's action films feature the locales as a blur, the soundtrack overwhelms, and characterization is defined by the quality of quip after a kill, this one, with its long lens shots, its whole blocks of time without any dialogue (or explication of any kind) and unknowable character-cyphers is a challenge to the ADD'd afflicted audience, who expect all suspense films to defy that description and merely be FPS's.**

"The American" of the title is a "Man with No Name" like the many anti-heroes of the Sergio Leone films.*** He is also a man of many names: to his phone-contact, Pavel (Johan Leysen), he is "Jack;" his "client" calls him "Mr. Butterfly"—he's into lepidoptery, and he bears a stylized pappilon tattoo between his shoulder blades; he signs into his hotel as "Mr. Clarke;" his voluptuous Italian hooker-lover (Violante Placido) knows him as "Edward."**** 

But, nobody knows him.  And he doesn't reveal much.  George Clooney plays him much the way Cary Grant played his government op in "Notorious," bland, cool, serious, not reacting and never risking a smile.  Not even the requisite 
smirk.*****  Clooney's gunsmith-for-hire is thin, wiry, sports the same chopped salt-and-pepper hair-cut that, when worn by Harrison Ford, signalled that his character was "repressed," and is addicted to routine—the better to spot something out of the ordinary that might come hurtling at his neck.  There may be nothing but doubt there behind the hooded, suspicious eyes, that are always searching, searching, searching for the muzzle flash (which he might survive), or the echoing discharge (which he probably won't).  All he knows is that he can't let down his guard.  It's the rule of most men on the run: Suspect everyone.

Because there's a lot of space, visual and aural, in the film, unaccompanied by exposition, director Anton Corbjin ("Control," which I've never finished watching) has enough respect for his audience to let the pictures do the talking.  The film may reference Leone, but it's the style of Michelangelo Antonioni that Corbjin is emulating, and there's enough symbolic cinematography that one has a hard time distinguishing dream and reality, just as Clooney's gun-smith has difficulty distinguishing suspicion and reality.  So much of the movie depends on "the unseen possibility," that pretty soon you're sucked into the mind-set, watching the corners of frames, searching out the change of expressions (among the circle of assassins it happens rarely) that might signal an ambush.  That also jams it into the magazine-clip of "paranoid thriller" films popular in the 70's, post-Watergate.

But, like many of the art-house suspense films it reminds one of, the pace allows a great weakness: heavy-handed symbolism.  In fact, the final scene (which, if one thinks about it, strains credulity) is so over-layed with symbolism, that it actually undercuts the seriousness of the scene, evoking chuckles from the audience I saw it with.

Be that as it may, for most of its length, "The American" is compelling film-making, even though, in its dour staging, it tends to take itself too seriously,  a trap that film-makers have been trying to avoid since film-making began.  It's hard to determine whether it's a step forward or a step back.

"The American" is a Matinee.   

* This caused a lot of consternation to the Tacoma audience I saw it with: the three-some in front of me grumbled at the end, and the hip-hop wannabe's next to me loudly cursed their contempt.  "I slept through half that m*****-f*****!"  "That was SHIT!" said the other (he'd missed the best part to take a phone-call in the lobby, after dropping his cell under his seat—which I helped him find).  "It was good!" I defended, "just a little heavy on the symbolism is all."  "Man, you are stu-pid," said the guy I'd helped.  "F*****' stu-pid," said the other.  I was going to mention that they'd both paid full-price for it, while I'd gotten a discount, to base my idea that stupidity might have economic consequences, but I demurred.

** And I know that I only have to explain this to the older half of my audience—an FPS is a type of video-game, described as a "First Person Shooter."

*** (Leone is paid prominent and unsubtle tribute in this film, as a classic scene from "Once Upon a Time in the West" appears on a tv-screen, and the soundtrack in moments of high stalking suspense pays tribute to Ennio Morriconne's (and Jerry Goldsmith's) esoteric "thumping" suspense cues).

**** Heh.

***** Grant's agent in "Notorious" was "Devlin," (or as Grant pronounced it "De-ve-lin"), as if to point out that, if he DID have a soul under that icey manner, it probably belonged to darker forces.

Internatio-noir: Mother and The Square

"The Knots of the Heart"

"A boy's best friend is his mother."

Mother Yoon (Hye-ja Kim) ekes out a living dispensing naturopathic herbs and running an underground acupuncture practice, all for her backward son Do-joon (Bin Won), 28 and a perfect example of not knowing what he doesn't know. With severe ADD, he has problems with memory retention; the least little thing, shiny or not, will distract him. The phrase "Hold that thought" is lost on him, an impossibility with his sieve-like mind. His type never learns.

You'd think his mother would. Mother Yoon watches her son like a hawk, and though she doesn't approve of him running with "a bad crowd," she can do nothing, or else the boy will storm off and get into some other trouble, or go drinking until all hours, or get beat up. Something...and usually bad. The cops know all about him. He's crossed their paths more than once.

So, when a young girl ends up dead on the night Do-joon goes on a bender, the police arrest him and hold him for trial. And he has no answers for what he was doing that night. This sends Mother into a maternal tizzy, and she works the neighborhood, trying to make nice with the victim's family, obtaining the services of a shady lawyer, but when those avenues prove unrewarding, she begins to investigate the case on her own, pursuing every blind alley and path paved with her Good Intentions.

And you know where that leads.

One could say that this is a Hitchcockian nightmare with its themes of dangerous Moms and wrong-man incarcerations, but "Mother" (aka "Madeo"), directed by Joon-ho Bong (who directed the monster hit "The Host") hails from Polanski-town, with its themes of obsessiveness, self-delusion and destruction. As played by the internalized Kim, the title character is so wrapped up in her maternal self-sacrifice that that she doesn't see how much she's giving up to save her son. As she digs deeper into the victim's past, she must come to grips with her own, and for all the searching her final destination is her own Soul.

Sounds grim, and even a little cruel. Cruel, it is. But, Bong—as he showed with his previous monster movie—has created an intricate little trap of a film, with moments of horror and humor combined, sometimes with their arms so tightly wound each other, they could strangle, whether from love or malice. One senses an ironic glee from the director, who keeps inserting little touches of humor into the proceedings to keep things from getting too heavy, and makes one think that maybe God puts us through such trials, because it's such good sport to see us flail.

"Mother" is a Matinee.


"Thank Christ for infidelity, I say"

If Bong is having a good time torching the ants in "Mother," Australian director Nash Edgerton is chortling and cracking open a Foster's, making life miserable for the denizens of "The Square." It, also, is a tightly wound thriller—more in the classic film-noir mode—with its Aussie blue-collar workers effortlessly slipping into "tough-guy" mode. It begins, as many noir's do—with an illicit affair, and the attempt to make it legit—but it soon crumbles around its own foundation, turning into quicksand. Like construction, it's not a good idea to go in and throw away the blue-print.

Foreman Raymond Yale (David Roberts in a fine "everyman" performance) is building a resort of "honeymoon suites" for Hubbard Construction in Sydney, Australia. He's getting a bit of side-work in, as well, (or "a bit of mischief" as is the phrase) in an affair with Carla Smith (Claire van der Boom). Both are trapped in loveless marriages: he's just "middle-age-crazy" and her husband (Anthony Hayes) is a low-life criminal. One day she discovers hubby has stashed a bag of cash in the attic—a sizable sum. She decides to tell Ray in an attempt for them to skip out and start anew with a nest-egg. Ray's hesitant. Carla takes that as a sign that an affair is all it's going to be and dumps him.

And if everything was going to be fine..that's where the movie would end. Ray can't give up Carla, so they plan their escape and to hide the theft of the loot, they arrange to burn down the Smith's house—the evidence of the switched bag will burn up, and no one will be the wiser.

Well, the last part's true, anyway. "The Square" is a noir deep in the tradition-ditch of such illicit classics as "Double Indemnity," "The Postman Always Rings Twice," and "Body Heat." The perfect plot starts to unravel before it can be set in motion, and soon both Carla and Ray are hip-deep in complications that get worse and worse, and messier and messier—the perfect trial for a relationship. For all the efforts to "make things better," things simply couldn't get worse...until they do. Director Edgerton, who, before he started turning out short films* worked as a stunt-man, always finds the good angles to shoot from, and is more than happy to lead the audience into several very uncomfortable situations that have a gritty realism to them, all to make the audience squirm as much as the characters do, then tops it off with a neat little irony that twists the knife. Like his protagonists, this director might be too clever for his own good. It will be interesting to see what he does in the future and whether he'll deepen his material. For now, though, as an exercise in noir, this one is pretty special.

"The Square" is a Full-Price Ticket.

* "The Square" is preceded by Edgerton's 2007 short "Spider," which is a good preparation for how sadistic a film-maker he can be to his audience. The less said the better, but don't be surprised if the film leaves you wary of the director, and tempted to walk out before the feature starts.

Caché

"Caché" (Michael Haneke, 2005) Pronounce it with the accent, please, because it doesn't refer to a hiding place. The french is an attribute, as in "hidden," "secret," or "covert." "Caché" is all of that, and more taking a small situation and blowing it up in the background until it becomes an indictment of a secret sin, not only of an individual but an entire country.

I forget which of the early astronauts said it, but when asked to describe space-flight he drawled: "It's hours of boredom punctuated by moments of blind terror." He could have been talking about life, as well. And so, too, is "Caché," sly enough to take what might be boring for a viewer and turning it into a subtle trick, like the dinner guest depicted in the film who tells a long and involved story only to have it explode in the punch-line. That risk of boredom is the key, for Haneke employs long unbroken takes, sometimes not even moving the camera, but employing a stock-image—a staging area—through which the world and his characters move. The longer it takes, the more anticipation is built up in an audience; one begins to question why one is looking at something for so long, and then to look for the importance of that image and one's senses go on alert: what is that in the corner of the frame?; is it a still image, or is something moving?; one hears the doppler of a car-engine and anticipates its entering the frame. Why are we here, and why are we looking at this, are the questions.*

The answer is a joke and also a key to the suspense of the story. A well-to-do nuclear family—he (Daniel Auteuil) is a televised literary critic and she (Juliette Binoche) is a book publisher, their son, a diffident middle-schooler—begin receiving mysterious video cassettes wrapped in violent child's drawings. Viewing the cassettes, the couple realize they're being targeted and monitored, but they don't have a clue as to why or by whom. The answer must be some secret one or the other is hiding, and soon the couple are quibbling and quarrelling...and keeping their own secrets from each other.

Haneke is an austere film-maker with a trickster's heart—his most controversial film is the sadistic "Funny Games" which he made in both European (1997) and U.S. (2007) versions—and here, it's basically the same gambit but without the smirking meta-smugness. Here, its about story-telling (and audience puppeteering), his camera moves are controlled, liking riding on a secret rail, formal and distancing, not so much mindful of Hitchcock, as Brian De Palma's magically smooth and impersonal camera-glides, just an extension of those monitoring tapes, coolly surveying.

But the film is punctuated by the rare burst of upsetting violence that occurs quickly (so quickly it takes a moment to register..."Did they just...?") and is usually the end-point of a strategy (real or imagined) by the players. One is left contemplating responsibility as the characters in the play do, with no end (or conclusion) in sight. It's frustrating, but not false, and gives the film the grit of reality...while also keeping an audience on the edge of their chairs waiting for the next shock.

Mon Dieu, où est Waldo?

* One of my favorite shots in Bryan Singer's film-career (there aren't many) occurs in "The Usual Suspects," when at one point in the movie there is a short sequence where, once the movie is over, we realize "that was a shot of nothing." No importance, whatsoever, except as a red herring thrown to the audience to play on their suspicions and ability to anticipate plot-points.

Tomorrow: Haneke's latest—"The White Ribbon"

The Butcher

"The Butcher" aka "Le Boucher" (Claude Chabrol, 1969) Life is hardly a banquet if you're a serial killer.

Chilly suspense film of a Hitchcock blond (Stéphane Audran), a schoolteacher in a small provincial town, who strikes up a friendship with the local butcher and begins to suspect him of a series of brutal knife-slayings in the area. Chabrol, a former film critic, knows his film language down cold, and you look at his movies knowing that he's not going to waste a single frame without telling you something important in the process. Taking cues from Hitchcock and Hawks but making them his own, "The Chabrol Code" tells you what you need to know, even if Chabrol the director is holding back information or repressing emotions in his actors.

Chabrol the critic is not making his movies for himself, but for an audience, setting up its own mystery and for those who know why he chooses to shoot through a window (distancing, separating but transparent—an important element in a movie about craving...and carving) to make a point, the film is like a treasure chest of tiny clues to what is going on, even if it appears there's not a lot on the surface.

You have to cut deeper.

There, you'll find an odd romance of predator and prey. But which one is which is the question. Helene is blond, cold, her face impenetrable. The butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne) is tortured, subservient, a combination of both stalker and victim. She suspects him, and he suspects she suspects, and a perverse tango of attraction and repulsion locks them into a relationship that runs deeper than the marriage the town celebrates at the beginning of the film. Who will survive? Chabrol tells us from the opening credits: the fittest. And if the film doesn't exactly keep you on the knife-edge of suspense (all the deaths take place off-screen), it is because Chabrol is much more interested in the compulsions, rather than the actions they inspire. And his essay on the Nature of Man (or Woman), by way of the cinema of the past prismed through his own view-finder, makes "Le Boucher" prime cinema.

The Day of the Dolphin

"The Day of the Dolphin" (Mike Nichols, 1972) After a series of films in which each one is a bit of an accomplishment in things artistic, cultural and societal ("Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?," "The Graduate," "Catch-22," "Carnal Knowledge") Mike Nichols lightened up on the weltschmerz--slightly--to present a relatively frothy entertainment, but in a downbeat kind of way. Robert Merle's best-seller was a thick book that delved more into the philosophical and moral issues of teaching dolphins to express themselves in English. But that probably wouldn't do for the movies, so Buck Henry devised a cloak-and-dagger story about operatives training the mammals to blow up the President...something subtle like that.

The implications of ESL for dolphins takes a back-seat for conspiracy and makes one wonder why one would waste such a top-heavy cast of George C. Scott, Trish VanDevere, Paul Sorvino, Edward Herrmann, and Fritz Weaver and talking dolphins on just another spy movie. But waste it, they do.*

Despite Scott's presence (and he's operating on relatively low gear here), the stars are the dolphins, named "Alpha" and "Beta" (or, as they squeak, "Fa" and Bee") In fact, every audience I saw this film with cooed audibly when the first dolphin popped out of the water and breathed "Pah!" in a baby voice at Scott. Like the rudimentary language signed by chimps, the dolphins' grasp of concepts is basic--they know "love," "Ma," "Pa," "Ball," and "Not"--that last one covering a lot of ground from negativity to death.

It all feels a bit gooey and icky, and when Nichols and Henry crank up the melodrama in the final act, one has a tough time taking it with any of the gravity of, say, a "Lassie" movie, probably not what the director intended, making it all for "not."

I do remember one interesting story from the time of the film, from an interview with Nichols at the time the film was made. It has nothing to do with the movie, but is more of a backstage story about the making of it. Nichols found that no matter how ell-trained the dolphins were, they were not the most disciplined of performers. Oh, they understood what they had to do, they just didn't really feel like doing it. They were constantly blowing takes, goofing around, playing--probably stealing donuts from the craft-services table--until tempers got short, and then, they'd do everything on cue--not unlike Peter Bogdanovich's story about directing Tatum O'Neal.

Anyway, on the last day of filming, on the last take the plan was to release the dolphins back into the wild. The crew gets ready. The dolphins swim out and perform their bit perfectly--it's a "Take." Then, as if knowing they weren't needed anymore, they simply left and swam out to sea. "We're outta here." They just swam away. It left Nichols wondering at the creatures he'd been working with, and wondering if he'd done right by them.**

Maybe they decided to quit "The Biz" before the movie was released.

There's a lot of talent behind it, though--production design by Richard Sylbert, cinematography from William A. Fraker and a too-good score by Georges Delerue. But it was all for "Not."

When one considers the possibilities, "The Day of the Dolphin" was a day wasted.

* The New Yorker's Pauline Kael suggested that if all Nichols and Henry could come up with for a movie was talking dolphins, they should probably retire from movies. Kael was on the right idea, but off the mark (as she could be)--if all Nichols and Henry could come up with for talking dolphins was a plot to blow up the President--even if it was Nixon--then they should have probably made another movie.

**I will always remember a PBS special on dolphins, hosted by Robin Williams. His first encounter with dolphins in open water, he was enthusiastic to bond, and reached out to one of them, only to get thumped by the other, protective dolphin. He went to a research institute where dolphin behavior was studied, and as he was walking around the tank with a rep, a dolphin poked his head out of the water and watched Williams, who went into "perform" mode and became quite manic, which delighted the dolphin. The scene went on for some time, with Williams and the dolphin playing at each other on a basic level, Williams running from one part of the tank to the other, the dolphin following--the two spinning in place, both fascinated with their play-mate. Finally, Williams was told "we're going to another location," and regretfully left, leaving the dolphin leaning its head out of the tank watching him leave, practically love-sick at his new "friend."

14 Hours

"14 Hours" (Henry Hathaway, 1951) Its place in film history is assured by being the first film role of a high-toned girl from Philadelphia who lived a cinderella existence in Hollywood, and traded it all in for life as a real princess in Monaco--Grace Kelly. Her role is small, but she does make an impression as an innocent by-stander whose life is affected by the circumstances in the movie.

But there's much more to this film than that. Another young star is introduced--Jeffrey Hunter, who is another of the morbid on-lookers as a troubled youth (Richard Basehart) walks out on a ledge and threatens to jump. There's only one beat cop (Paul Douglas) he'll talk to, so cop-in-charge Howard DaSilva puts Douglas out on the ledge as much as he can. He's not helped by the guy's parents (Agnes Moorehead and Robert Keith), or the former fiancee (Barbara Bel Geddes), or the increasingly restless crowd below, egging the jumper on.

Fox is releasing "14 Hours" as part of its "noir" series, but it's not noir. In tone and execution, it more resembles a Hitchcock scenario--a limited space, lots of process work, POV shots, and a rather wicked sense of humor. It also has a passing resemblance to a film that would be released two months later--Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole"--which also dramatized the callousness of mob mentality and reporters covering the story. Yes, it travels the back-alley of human emotions, and the last part of it does take place at night (albeit with klieg lights blazing away), but at the end of the day, dark it might be, but noir it ain't, although Hathaway directed a number of them in his career. And he makes good use of his previous films shot like documentaries for this story. Ultimately, though, it's a suspense film that hangs on a slim thread, anchored by performances uniformly delivered in the higher registers.

Zodiac

"You're doing it again! That thing I don't like that starts with an 'L'"

Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) in "Zodiac"

David Fincher's "Zodiac" is the most disciplined and least-flashy movie in his career. A 2 hour, 45 minute overview of California's "Zodiac" serial-killer case from almost the start to the finish--a nearly thirty year tale that is less about the crimes, specifically, but more about obsession: the obsessions that sparked the crimes and the obsessions, in turn, sparked by them. Over time as personalities change, careers and fortunes rise and fall, as the city morphs and hem-lines and side-burns flare and recede, the obsession burns and inflicts its own damage. It's a movie about that damage and the shockwaves that killers inflict beyond the immediate victims.

This is not to say that "Zodiac" is not violent--it is, at least for the first half-hour or so, but it is the cold-blooded casualness of the violence that stuns (at one point "Zodiac" is seen pummelling a woman and you realize to your horror that she is being stabbed--these are the least "theatrical" killings I've seen on-screen), and those expecting a gore-fest will be let down by the lack of screen-time devoted to the actual murders, but Fincher maintains a looming (that "L" word mentioned above) unease that infects later scenes with dread.

Stay to the end of the credits and you'll be presented will three big-screen pages of technical consultants (many of whom are the real-life characters portrayed in the film) and a long list of thanks to communities who figured in the convoluted path of the tale. Meticulously researched and painstakingly recreated (I've seen glowing comment threads from San Franciscans amazed at the scruplulousness of the production), the same care is also taken with the many performances from a non-stellar, but reliable cast of character-actors all doing subtle, nuanced work. From Robert Downey Jr.'s fussy turn as a scruffy San Francisco Chronicle reporter, to Anthony Edwards and Mark Rufalo as the two lead SFPD detectives investigating (you can imagine Rufalo's Detective Toschi serving as a model for both Steve McQueen's "Bullitt" and Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" even though his performance is far-afield of those star-turns), and Jake Gyllenhaal as the character involved longest with the case...except for the killer.

"You've got the look." An acquaintance of a Zodiac suspect guesses immediately that's what Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith wants to talk about and it's the eyes that are the dead give-away. Gyllenhaal has used that moony-goony look of his to great effectiveness in "October Sky" and "Brokeback Mountain," but put an edge to it and he's got the most effective "thousand mile stare" in Hollywood as in "Jarhead" (He's matched by Rufalo's Toschi, his eyes glinting hard-cold while maintaining a disarming, constant half-smile). It pays off towards the film's end when two stalkers who've never met recognize each other immediately. For all the period detail that informs the movie, the drama is carried along and climaxed by the look in people's eyes.

Fincher harkens back to the paranoid thrillers of the 70's, even going so far as to use the Paramount and Warners Studio logos from the era, and reviving the career of composer David Shire whose sombre, oppressive scores provided the low rumblings of such films as "The Conversation" and "All the President's Men."

But despite the intricacies of plot, the labyrinth of clues and puzzles, the shadowy corridors, darkened streets and blind alleys, the film is never allowed to lose focus or drag. One is never aware of the length of the film, only the passage of time in the film. And that's an amazing accomplishment, but not the last one.

Because for all the time-lapse CGI tricks Fincher employs (and some of the essential clues that are focussed on), there is an acknowledgement made of the most lethal serial killer: in the end, time gets all of us. Our life-histories catch up, and right or wrong, no one goes away unpunished.

"Zodiac" is a full-price ticket