Film - Think

In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play husband and wife that both live secret lives as professional hitmen for competing assassin-for-hire companies. When discover each other’s secret, their marriage counseling gets an unexpected kick in the pants. Not since Grosse Point Blank has contract killing been so whimsical, and not since The War of the Roses have marriage problems inspired so much property damage. But as little more than a showcase for celebrity posturing and director Doug Liman’s knack for proper action cinema, Mr. & Mrs. Smith holds few surprises for summer audiences.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, probably not their real names, live in an affluent suburb. Very careful to mask their careers by being the perfect husband and wife to each other, they blend in well to the cozy doldrums of their neighbor’s lives. This careful attention to their roles even extends to their respective covers; Mr. Smith keeps his guns hidden in the garden shed while Mrs. Smith stores hers in the oven. As a bit of a screwball comedy, the film revels in its snarky descriptions of gender differences. And though it pokes fun at itself, it does end with husband and wife finally coming to grips with their respective roles. It is just a pity this pointed humor doesn’t extend to other elements of the storyline.

About halfway through the film, after they have started working together, they need to make a fast getaway in a neighbor’s minivan. These are the same neighbors that played Amy Grant in the background during a recent neighborhood gathering, so we already have them pegged as far less savvy than the two stylish assassins next door. And if you look really closely in the chase scene that follows, you can see one of those little fish symbols that Christians are fond of affixed to the lower left corner of the trunk. Liman seemed pretty intent on making sure that we see it. A few other details are inserted to make sure that we know these neighbors are Christians of the most garish sort. And just in case we didn’t pick up on these jibes, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (having fled in their undies) are forced to wear gaudy nylon jackets emblazoned with “Jesus” after they ditch the van.

The few times we do see these neighbors, they get the traditional Flanders treatment. This is fine at first, as the film’s comedy derives from pushing its stereotypes too far. But the fact that the script goes so far out of its way to identify these neighbors as Christians is interesting. What is the point? So they become embroiled in a violent car chase in a minivan, the traditional transportation of the soccer mom. I understand how this incongruence adds to the comedy. Especially with Mrs. Smith, a highly trained hitman (sorry, “hitperson”) standing in for the soccer mom. But why does this need to be a distinctly Christian minivan? It may be that Christians don’t generally drive about shooting at other vehicles, and here are two assassins driving a Christian minivan while trying to kill the people chasing them. Hitman ethics certainly don’t include “turning the other cheek.” But it seems to me that most people don’t drive about shooting other people, so the fact that this is a Christian minivan isn’t a logical necessity for the comedy. It could just as easily be a Buddhist, Christian Scientist, or agnostic van. It would actually have been funnier if there were an NRA sticker on the bumper.

The way this sort of comedy works is that everybody, screenwriter, director, actors, and audience all agree to accept the characterizations or stereotypes in the film as much larger than life. And by pushing them to comical extremes, we may just learn something valuable. These are caricatures, not editorials, so we agree not to take them very seriously. But the caricature of the “Christians next door” to Mr. & Mrs. Smith doesn’t seem to work the same way other caricatures in the film do. While the gender stereotypes end up finding closure in a successful marriage counseling session that ends the film, these overdrawn Christian neighbors are left dangling pointlessly many pages back in the script. The carcass of this bullet-ridden Christian minivan sits on a curb somewhere in Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s town only as a reminder that Christians are easy targets. Thankfully, this pointless caricature shoots itself in the foot. The one emotionally realistic scene in the film occurs towards the beginning of the film in these neighbors’ house as Mrs. Smith holds a baby awkwardly and the audience watches her grimace; she seems to realize that she isn’t capable of such domestic pleasantries. Maybe here the script tips its hand to the fact that maybe Christians aren’t so stupid after all. My quibble here is not that Christians are being made fun of in a summer blockbuster. Quite often we are begging for it. But this doesn’t mean that audiences must swallow half-hearted comedy because a half-decent script doesn’t have enough muscle to see its caricatures through to their conclusions.

A $25,000 prize is being offered in Winnipeg for whoever can produce the saddest song in the world. Set in the Great Depression, Winnipeg has been voted for the fourth year running as the “world capital of sorrow” and promises it citizens only one sort of relief from these exponential levels of anguish: copius amounts of beer. From all over the world the bands have come to face off in contests of musical woe, the daily winners sliding with glee into a large tub of lager, one day closer to the grand prize. What the world doesn’t know is that this contest is the advertising conspiracy of the legless matron of a large beer company, and behind the scenes of this conspiracy lurks subterfuge and intrigue. Well, the sort of subterfuge and intrigue one can expect from a Guy Maddin film in which one of the main female interests walks about on glass legs filled with beer.

Boasting a number of fine performances, The Saddest Music in the World is certainly Maddin’s most accessible feature to date. While still steeped in Maddin’s infatuation with the scratched and crackled images of the silent film era, its raucous narrative leanings actual feel quite a bit like a story, something that Maddin generally attempts to avoid in the traditional sense of the term.

As verité as Poids leger seems to be, its crowning moments are expressions, sincere and earnest images that muscle their way relentlessly into the film. Ameris, director of C’est la vie and Dangerous Liasons, turns to the tight, stripped-down camerawork in Poids leger that the Dardenne’s employ in Le fils. He keeps us close to its main character, leaving little breathing room other than a few lush flashback sequences that help develop the emotional arc of the story.

The film is about Antoine, an amateur boxer who supports himself during the day by working as a gravedigger. In this occupation, he continually rehearses the loss of both parents suffered by he and his sister as children. As a teenager Antoine finds a father figure in his boxing coach and a troubled solace in his new girlfriend. But when his coach leaves town and his sister gets married he finds himself coming face to face with the opponent he has carried in himself since his parent’s death. Poids leger, literally "lightweight," documents the self-destruction brought on by Antoine’s grief, tracking the systematic implosion of his last remaining relationships. True to the cliché of most boxing films, Antoine tries as long as he can to slug this anger out in the ring, but this burden eventually proves too hard to bear alone. One of the most troubling paintings the 20th century produced is George Bellows’ "Stag at Sharkeys." The scandal its unornamented bloodlust depicted is deservedly famous. Ameris’ great success in this film is the boxing element, tense sequences that like Bellow’s painting consolidate the frenzy of an entire match into a few frames. We are dragged into Antoine’s personal struggle through these tense abstractions of man vs. man, and the metaphor here rings clear as a bell. In Bellows’ painting we have everything from industrialization to an emerging modern angst being sweated out on the canvas by its bruised and battered brawlers. Poids leger succeeds in developing a similar feeling of senseless struggle in Antoine as he eventually attempts to break back into life.

Ameris’ film previous to Poids leger (C’est la vie) featured terminally ill patients acting out the script. In his personal introduction to Poids leger at the French Film Festival UK, he described how he left this previous film in a state of despair, as many of these actors actually died during the filming. In searching for a way to articulate this grief, he stumbled upon the book Poids leger and found that it perfectly described how he felt. According to Ameris, the film is about how hard it is to say goodbye to the past, which explains why much of the film is steeped in regret and hopelessness. But Poids leger must also then articulate the sense of relief that comes from putting the past in its proper perspective, as the end of the film is a remarkable shift in its visual and emotional tenor. Thankfully, I left the theater able to shed the nameless anxiety built up by Ameris’ images.

In many ways Exils is Winterbottom’s In This World in reverse. A subtly politicized road movie, it travels against the stream of immigrants making their way from Algeria to France. The script works in stages from the urban to the desperately rural, from cultural affluence to cultural anthropology, gradually pushing its aimless characters through a social looking glass. Zano, Franco-Algerian, and Naima, a thoroughly westernized Arab, decide on a whim to find his father’s birthplace in Algeria, leaving their urban flat with little more than the clothes on their back. Working as day laborers when they can, enjoying each other while they can’t, they travel through Spain to North Africa, and eventually to the birthplace of his father. At times their journey seems whimsical, as if the cultural alienation that has driven them from northern France leaves them stranded as homeless Adam and Eve figures, but Gatlif seems keen on grounding their experience in the daily struggle of the Gypsies and immigrants they encounter. One of the latter scenes in the films tracks them working forwards through a tide of immigrants fleeing North Africa en masse. If it weren’t for Gatlif’s gently bleached tones, this could be CNN footage.

Both seem to think that at their destination is some sort of historical memory more substantial than what their upbringing has offered them, but their initial experience of Algeria is markedly different. Zano’s family, anti-colonialists forced to move to France a generation ago, were much more intentional about maintaining their heritage abroad than Naima’s. She seems incapable of blending in, eagerly tossing off the traditional dress of the Algerian woman at her first chance, as it seems far too uncomfortable. Her loose tank top, while an everyday sight on any street in the western world, seems terribly out of place in these quiet streets.

As a film in reverse, Exils ends with what is most inexplicable. Less a resolution than an experience, Exils makes a complete shift from the vacant modernity of its opening to the primitive spirituality of their imagined past. In this blistering finale that elicited audible gasps from the audience, Gatlif pans around a passionate dancing ritual in which Naima is loosed of evil spirits. Zano watches both eagerly and apprehensively from the sidelines, concussed repeatedly by the elaborate percussion setting the rhythm for the ceremony. Viewer beware, this very extended scene is loud, abrasive, and hypnotizing, a well produced version of a late Maya Deren documentary.

I wonder if Gatlif made this scene so uncomfortable for the modern western audience just to confront our aesthetic biases. If so, it works. Zano and Naima seem to eventually accept the experience, but we are only left to consider their possible reactions to it. Throughout much of the film, Zano and Naima seem poised to leave one another. As they shed their urban context, they can find little in each other that serves as common ground. Perhaps, Gatlif uses this final scene as a question mark. Since cities have not done the job at homogenizing racial heritage, will urban Europe have to turn to the traditions of their fathers for any sense of continuity?

Lili, a charmed upper-class art student, meets a mysterious Moroccan at a nightclub. They spend the night together. A few days later she gets a phone call from this self-assured suitor explaining that he is in the middle of a bank robbery that has gone wrong and he needs a place to hole up for a while. Soon, he and the only accomplice to survive the botched robbery show up on her doorstep with a pile of cash. Cue every New Wave "love on the run" cliché you can muster, toss in a continental flair, and polish it off with a crisply realized black and white DV cinematography and you have 2004’s Cannes prizewinner, A tout de suite.

Bada, an amateur Moroccan ganster, is a 21st century version of Jean-Paul Belmondo. He is every bit as self-absorbed and charismatic, but not nearly as likable. In Breathless, Belmondo’s character wasn’t a criminal as much as he was an ill-fated poser. For him, crime was an escape from the hum-drum of the modern middle class not as much for the cash it provided as for the thrills (and the girls). Would it be offensive to think of him as a noir counterpart to Tati’s Hulot? In A toute de suite, Bada and his compatriots steal from others for a much less noble and theatrical reason; they just need cash to cruise the Cote d’Azur. Lili, Bada, his accomplice, and his girlfriend flee to Spain, where the resolute Lili attempts to keep up even though she finds herself remarkably out of her depth. After the stolen cash turns out to be marked, the illusion crumbles and Lili is dumped at customs in Greece.

As Lili finds herself abandoned so far from home, the film comes to a screeching halt. Jacquot’s sharp tracking and crisp edits give way to rich and labored shots of Lili as a complete blank, apparently numbed by her carelessness. At times biting the hand that is feeding him, here Jacquot seems to turn a few New Wave conventions on their head. We are not really disturbed by the jaunty carelessness that leads to Belmondo’s demise in Breathless. The splashy score and playful storytelling allow us to not take it very seriously. But Lili’s distance from home, morally and geographically, is appalling and Jacquot immerses the viewer in it as the film loses all sense of timing and direction. Her story is far removed in tone from the classic noir tales it often mimics.

In terms of style, while the grainy candor of DV recalls the ad hoc feel of the early 60’s New Wave cinema, Jacquot’s camerawork is aware of its limitations. He monopolizes on its sharp tones, and as the film becomes a quiet character study of Lili in her dismay, Jacquot abstracts an impressive emotional portrait of youthful regret. Jacquot’s gentility is refreshing; this half of the film is as sensitive and private as an early Chantal Ackerman. It is unfortunate that Jacquot’s back catalogue isn’t as publicized as it should be. La fille seule (1995), and Le septieme ciel (1997), and Pas de scandale (1999) all played to small, but appreciative audiences. Seemingly content to work in relative obscurity, Jacquot’s films are candid snapshots of modern European life. Often, as is the case with A tout de suite, his films devolve into visual meditations in which we are allowed to investigate his backgrounds at our own pace. His slow, often dialogue intense films recall the French cinema of Rohmer rather than catchier fare that is given more access to independent distribution.

Pialat and Cassavetes - Filming the Body
(A summary of Lubac's translated Senses of Cinema article.)

Pialat and Cassavetes make for odd bedfellows, and this extended (7500 word) comparison seems to prove it. As directors laboring in the limbo between the French New Wave and whatever it is that came next, each did seem content to simply work parallel both to the mainstream and to the variety of fringes dipping their toes in more experimental waters. Pialat has always struck me as one of those guys that shows up late for the party but manages to shoulder his way into the action anyway (his first film, L’enfance nue, appeared in 1969 after Godard and Chabrol had already racked up more than 25 films between them).

It is a long essay, packed with very dense readings of the films it is looking at, but the basic premise regards the way each director uses the actual physical bodies of their actors within the frame itself. Lubac wants to demonstrate both what the positioning of these bodies communicates to us, and what they say about the actor – director relationship. As test cases, he looks at Pialat’s L’enfance nue (1969) and A nos amours (1972), and Cassavete’s Faces (1968), and A Woman under the Influence (1974).

In terms of the first question, the essay highlights a scattershot of issues the presence of the body raises in these four films. Pialat tended to work with both professional actors and beginners in his films, allowing this interaction between innocence and expertise to breathe a spark of life into what could often become fairly droll storylines. In the scene that opens A nos amours, a poem is read inexpertly by a young girl. Her obvious, though sweet, ineptitude is grating on the audience. This essay helpfully interprets this puzzling opening through the lens of Pialat’s use of his actors, as this specific use of an untrained voice sets us up to percieve the film as a living progression, as something that takes on a life of its own. Lubac says, "Pialat thus inserts into the very core of his fiction this idea of the actor's body, "primary material" in its raw state, yet to be chiselled into shape by the director." And then, I suppose, Pialat sets at the work of setting these bodies into his film. On the other hand, Cassavetes sets the human body within his close frames in a way that maximizes the unpredictability of his performers. Their grimaces, tears, and telling glances happen upon the viewer with no warning. In this way their bodies, and not framing devices, bear the weight of the narrative. This really does explain many of the odder formal features of A Woman Under the Influence. I have always been unsettled by the raw physicality of the film, which I previously just assigned to the ad hoc nature of Cassavetes’ approach.

In terms of the second question, the essay covers an equally random ground. But generally, for Pialat: "The idea of taking non-professional actors and making them into central pivots of the fiction also reveals a desire to print and capture traces of their reality, their own past life onto film." For Pialat, realism is a result of the physical presence of his actors and their histories. By using a combination of professionals and amateurs, there are points in his films where the fiction is grounded in an almost documentarian moment. The presence of an actual person, not an actor, allows this to happen.

Lubac pulls out a ripping J. L. Comolli reference to describe Cassavetes’ similar quality:

"… The behaviour of the characters – who provide the sole fictional basis in Faces – no longer refers to a realistic slice of life which they might more or less faithfully represent, the characters only have coherence and realism in relation to each other, to the film itself. Certainly, nothing is produced on screen which might not also be produced 'in life', but this 'in life' here means in front of the camera and because of the camera. Cassavetes and his friends do not use the movies as a means of reproducing facts, movements, faces or ideas, but as a means of producing them."

He identifies this also at work in a famous sequence towards the end of A Woman Under the Influence. Here Peter Falk walks listlessly in the rain down the sidewalk in front of his house. Towards the end of this scene, an umbrella pops into the side of the frame, leading us to postulate that here Cassavetes has directed Peter Falk mid-shot to continue past the predetermined cut. (The umbrella probably belonged to one of the crew who just couldn’t step back far enough.) In this scene then, we have Cassavetes literally pulling Falk further into the frame, and as an actor farther away from his physical expectations. What happens here is a little improvised parable for the film as a whole.

Werckmeister Harmonies opens late at night in the local bar of an anonymous Hungarian city. Janos, who soon becomes the haggard centerpiece of this baffling tale, steps in to conduct what must be a periodic ritual. Standing one drunken patron in the middle of the floor as the middle of our galaxy, he trains two others to circle around each other in orbit around this bedraggled sun. In halting rhythm these planets circle, a vague memory of cosmic order in a city that has lost all sense of direction. Bela Tarr’s camerawork embodies the finer points of Eastern European cinema. Moving in clean and thoughtful strokes across simple sets and themes, Tarr’s work seems devoid of style and pretension. But if gravity and transcendence can be construed as a style Tarr may be one of the most successful formalists of his day.

This brilliant opening sequence turns out to be the gentlest moment of the film: the young Janos directing these old broken spirits in a rehearsal of the natural determinism that soon unravels the city. Werckmeister Harmonies is about a travelling carnival that by night unleashes a violent anarchy on the towns it visits. By day it only seems to offer people a chance to see the world’s largest stuffed Whale, and the townspeople use these precious daylight hours to combat the inevitable assault. Unfortunately, their only hope is an aging musical theorist fixated with the octave and a purer cosmic scale that can be achieved by what appears to be untuning your instrument. These odd tones are "Werckmeister Harmonies," music in a world controlled by a much different sense of order. As night falls on the carnival workers milling about the Whale parked in the town square, Tarr’s dogged steady-cam unflinchingly witnesses this irrational sense of order taking over. In one memorable attack, Tarr slides his camera in and around a group of men emptying a Soviet-era hospital with wooden sticks and pipes until they encounter an old man, standing frail and unclothed in a cracked bathtub. This raw humanity is enough to stave off the onslaught for a moment.

Here the scene cuts as the haunting score crescendos and Tarr moves on to his next set of images. This score, every bit as engaging as Tarr’s imagery itself, runs only at select moments in the film, serving to root each image it accompanies in a common sense of reluctant despair. At times these major elements of the film seem vague and unrelated. Janos’ first viewing of the giant whale, accompanied by the soundtrack, is obviously a rich and important experience, but we are left with little reasoning as to why. Does this whale draw on the Biblical image of prophetic certainty? Or is it the monolithic offering of the sea, that traditionally represents the chaotic and unknown? Perhaps it is like Janos, a silent and inmpotent spectator to the anarchy of the carnival. They drag it around as a relic of the past in which things were much simpler and safer.

Eventually, it is Janos that breaks down, unable to shoulder the burden of the entire town. We realize that the opening scene of the film marks Janos as a sort of Atlas, and that the anarchy of the carnival may be little more than the concentration of the same malaise that lurks at the heart of this village. Throughout the film Tarr’s village has been tipping on its axis, his camerawork operating at a pace just slow enough for us not to really notice. The genius of Bela Tarr is his universal appeal. Though his films are absolutely rooted in a specific place and timing, his stories are ancient, simple, and endlessly repeated in history. And Werckmeister Harmonies is exactly this, a philosophy of history whose first real reader, Janos, simply can’t handle.

Collateral is a few good movies packed into one. Sure the script has its faults, and at times we are forced to suspend a bit more judgement than even Mann should require us to, but hear me out. While it revisits the slick criminal realism that Mann has built his career on, Collateral is also a thoughtful urban chamber drama and an exhilarating tour de force in DV filmmaking. The same cool tones that dominated his classics Manhunter and Heat have become formulaic for Mann. He creates complex levels of passion and vigor that linger right beneath the smooth, taut skin of his manicured visual sequences, and the formula always works. Set against many Hollywood flicks that are content to spend millions on explosive special effects and car chase scenes to shock and awe the audience with ridiculous levels of violence, Mann’s action scenes are almost articulate or artful. A few scenes in Collateral are among the most violent from the American cinema this year, but Mann somehow brings a humanity to them that at times seems an implicit criticism of the thoughtless violence that often passes for film. Behind this deceptively slick presentation are a few themes neatly developed that enable us to forgive the film’s utterly flimsy conclusion. As a chamber drama that takes place in a taxi, we watch two men from different social and racial backgrounds clashing on a number of fronts. What emerges is a dialogue touching on key cultural nerves in compelling ways, as Cruise and Foxx become an interesting set of polarities that are far too easy to identify with. In Collateral, Mann has crafted his finest urban landscape. By using DV so boldly, the film becomes a seamless garment of the strange, grainy textures distinct to nocturnal digital videography. Collateral comes across as a sort of fever dream, a humid and claustrophobic fiction. It would be far too easy to compare it to the tone of a number of J.G. Ballard short stories, which for a crime thriller is a pretty serious compliment.

“The power of silence was once so great in the human face that all external happenings were absorbed in this silence. The resources of the world were thereby as it were unspent and unexhausted.”

Max Picard (from World of Silence)

Yusuf travels to Istanbul after being laid off from his factory job in search of work. His plan is to stay with Mahmut, a relative who used to live in his village who has since become an accomplished photographer, still clinging to a fading dream of following in Tarkovsky’s footsteps. Yusuf’s inability to find a job in Turkey’s depressed economic climate gives him enough free time to experience urban life for the first time, and he comes face to face with the unattainable dreams of the big city while aimlessly stalking a woman who lives on Mahmut’s street. Yusuf’s desire to travel and see the world through a job on the ships plays well against Mahmut’s “been there, done that” resignation. It is a tale as simple as the city mouse and the country mouse, but the forced interaction between Mahmut and Yussuf brings to light the hidden tensions and personal difficulties that lead Distant to its unexpected conclusion.

In many ways, Distant is a travelogue of the human spirit through economic hardship. Ceylan doesn’t really tell an explicit “story” through the film, but rather lets us linger on key emotional landmarks of its characters, pitting our need for resolution against our need for understanding. He seems determined to force us into submission to his thoughtful pace, in the tradition of Tarkovsky patiently allowing us to identify the purpose of the spaces he creates. But Ceylan also brings to Distant a controlling subjectivity that Tarkovsky often seemed to deny the cool sterility of his images. In the evolving tradition of Sokurov, Ceylan materializes intriguing personal moments through attention to the physical actions of his actors. His approach to drama could be construed as minimalist, as the gentle striking of a few chosen notes over the course of time. But it would be better to think of Distant in terms of the arousing singularity of something like Gorecki’s Third Symphony. In this famous symphony, Gorecki allows dichotomous elements of tone and pattern to react to each other in a fluid arc. Though intentionally simplistic, it is by no means minimalist. Its textures and themes, though stark, draw their power from overwhelming the narrow channels they follow. This is a perfect analogy to the interaction between Mahmut and Yusuf. Minimalism often doesn’t intend to take us anywhere, but rather seeks to expose us to a repeating (or non-repeating) theme over time through an intentionally limited medium. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with this approach to storytelling. Sokurov’s Mother and Son, and perhaps even Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia to a lesser extent, are great examples of how well this can work. But Distant weaves its social oppositions carefully, taking us to realization at the pace that it genuinely occurs in life. Its simplicity is an invitation to participate in its elaborate social point that occurs within its balanced visual form.

At times we are simply carried along aurally by specific sounds in the same way Bresson carries us along visually by a specific series of close-ups. This use of sound is often matched with another tendency of Ceylan that steps beyond the intentioned passivity of Tarkovsky. Almost reminiscent of a few of Maya Deren’s early shorts, Ceylan will take a lengthy scene with little or no dialogue and break it up by use of turning lights on and off in a proportioned rhythm or playing with our perception of the presence or absence of characters in the frame. A woman will seemingly appear on the street out of nowhere, or someone will slip behind a mirrored pillar that removes them momentarily from the frame.

In one telling scene, Mahmut and Yusuf sit watching the trolley car sequence from Stalker, in which the three trespassers are moving down the tracks, peering into the overly green trees and buffeted by the overly quiet wind of the Zone. All around them rings the metallic click of the tracks splitting the eerie silence with wave of diminishing noise. For several minutes Tarkovsky lets this foreboding sound fill the scene, keying us into the elemental abstractions of the Zone. It certainly is one of the few spots in Tarkovsky’s work where sound itself becomes a dominant element. In a smirking take on what most wouldn’t admit is a common experience of Tarkovsky, Mahmut watches this scene for a while before switching over to an adult film. It turns out that Mahmut’s plan was to bore Yusuf so much that he would leave the room, thus letting Mahmut watch his other “movie” in privacy. Ceylan seems lightheartedly aware of the lengths to which he forces his viewers to go.

Ultimately, this key Stalker scene in the film links Ceylan’s preoccupation with sound, rhythm, and time with the broader social context of the film. Distant is all about passage, transience. The final image of the film, inconclusive and unfinished, seems to point this direction.

Before Sunset is a story about getting old that masquerades in the guise of a desperate romance. Sure, it is about the reunion of the twenty-somethings that wooed us and each other a decade ago in Before Sunrise, but these beloved characters are now old and tired and perfectly willing to admit it to each other. The film begins with Jesse at a book signing in Paris, talking about the book he wrote about his experience meeting Celine and never seeing her again (the storyline of this film’s prequel, Before Sunrise). When one of the reporters at the signing asks him whether or not the book is autobiographical (which we know it is), he only responds with a shrug. Little does he know that Celine is right around the corner listening to him pawn off their unforgettable romance as good fiction. “Everyone wants to believe in love right?” he says, “It sells!”

In Before Sunrise, they promised that they would meet each other six months later in Vienna. Unfortunately, it never happened. Now years later they pick up effortlessly where they left off, their conversation renewed when Celine finds out that Jesse really did go to Vienna and left after waiting for her to show up. Before Sunrise was one of those rare films, like My Dinner With Andre or My Night at Maude’s, that mainly exist as a backdrop for a really good conversation. This sequel is no different even though their conversation this time is marked by a decade of living in the real world. Relationships, kids, and career changes have watered down their wanderlust with the dullness of middle age. Jesse and Celine, once icons of carefree dialogical passion now express how trapped and disenfranchised they feel with life.

Shot literally in real time, the film takes place for however long it takes them to get from the bookstore to her apartment. Filmed in long, continuous takes through parks, at benches, or in a boat down the Seine, Linklater's camera moves like a reverse Spike Lee dolly shot. There is a bold approximation of realism solicited from these long shots, in which we are permitted to inspect every mannerism, little bits of body language, and unvocalized responses. But is is a Rohmer sort of realism, one that he claimed is "not an end in itself, but a means." In abandoning technique for the realism of silent cinema, his films are caught up in the magic of cinema, which is connected to the poetry of bodies moving through space, interacting, becoming storied. Likewise, Linklater's camera is tuned to the deep focus of this walk through Paris, granting a spontaneity to what is obviously a carefully staged set of scenes.

Jesse is married, Celine is confused, and the audience knows that the end of the film looms closer every minute, bearing down on us with all the apprehension and regret implicit to the storyline. This agony further unfolds when Jesse and Celine discover how close they came to reuniting years ago, and how much they still think about the one night they spent together. And in sharing their recent history something very sad happens. We discover two people who are so overwhelmingly defined by an event in the past (the events of Before Sunrise) that their present is intolerable. They are caught in storylines that they haven’t written and that they are powerless to control. Even though years ago they had a real shot at love, they have become who everyone is at middle age, dissatisfied and exhausted. Both films that chronicle the story of Jesse and Celine have been approached by critics as very personal and engaging experiences. The films address us as individuals with memories of love and innocence and a present of disillusionment and boredom. Before Sunset is completely engaging on this level, even more so considering that Jesse is now married. This adds a moral dimension to the film that causes each viewer to work through this moral dilemma with Jesse, deciding with him what it is that now defines us. Is it our daydreams or our commitments?

In the last shot of Jesse, we can clearly see him playing with his wedding ring, spinning it on his finger in a way that suggests the weighing of his options. Celine dances before him like something out of a dream, or at least like something out of the dreams that have sustained him over the last few difficult years. The “fade to black” is a technique in film that we are all familiar with. It is usually used to add drama to a scene that needs a little visual kick, imposing a gravity and resolution to whatever has happened. Sometimes the “fade to black” sears the final details into the viewer’s mind, forming a sort of visual punctuation. Before Sunset ends with a brilliant “fade to black” that really isn't either of these things It closes off the real time experience of the story almost with a wink, the vanishing composition of the final frame a point at which Linklater makes the viewer, who has attended this story over the course of two films, complicit with the range of possible conclusions here. We aren't permitted to finish it ourselves, unguided, but neither are we offered any drama or closure. Celine dances off to the side of the screen, as if she is no longer a spectacle for us. The audience, who has been part of this very personal conversation and relationship that started years ago, isn’t invited into the private ambiguity of how their story ends...and then the credits roll.

If we were to extend the metaphor across the 17 years since its prequel, The Barbarian Invasions is all about the inevitable result of the The Decline of the American Empire. Into this vacuum of intelligence and passion rushes the untutored and unenlightened, the unwashed hordes of a generation of children borne by the protagonists of The Decline of the American Empire, by now old enough to be successful businessmen or seasoned junkies. Having survived the broken homes of their philosophizing and philandering parents they have taken whatever route they can to the security their parents could never offer. But The Barbarian Invasions isn’t really about them, and it really isn’t about their parents. It is about an ungainly micro-culture of people at the deathbed of an elegant professor witnessing the unfolding of a generational exchange.

This exchange in Remy’s opinion is nothing less than a full-scale invasion. From Remy's hospital room we watch documentary footage of the 9/11 catastrophe as an historian on the screen explains how this terrorist attack was so much like the barbarian invasions that contributed to the fall of Rome. Things like the Korean War or the Gulf War only nibble at the edges of the empire. They are neutralized and contained. But even though many more lives were lost in wars such as these than in the World Trade Center, 9/11 struck America at its heart. This is Remy’s deathbed vision. The passionless life of his successful, technologically literate son is a deliberate attack on the heart, the idealism and romanticism of a dying generation.

Remy’s condition is terminal and we discover him in hospital packed with far more patients than nurses. Apparently the Canadian healthcare system isn’t the wine and roses Americans think it is, and Remy’s fate on this anonymous bed is a pathetic one at best. That is until his ex-wife Louise calls his estranged son in London to come help her deal with the misery of the situation. Her compassion for Remy is remarkable considering the adulterous lifestyle of her pretentious husband, and for some reason Sebastien does decide to come and be by his mother’s side during his death. Sebastien and his beautiful fiancee find exactly what they expect when they arrive at the hospital, an unrepentant and uncaring ex-father. From Remy’s point of view his capitalist son still has little or no understanding of what is important in life. Nevertheless, tossing around wads of cash, Sebastien has a room built in an unused wing of the hospital and sets about to find him a number of close friends to be with him as he passes away.

Sebastien’s business acumen takes over as he arranges for his father nothing short of a paradise in the socialized hospital until they take him to a cabin on the lake for his final days. At one point Remy sits with his friends by this lake discussing the “barbarians” and as Sebastien approaches he exclaims: “Their prince approaches!” One has a hard time feeling pity for a man who would characterize the unbelievable compassion of his son as barbaric, especially since it is Sebastien and his mother who have had to shoulder the effects of his philandering lifestyle treated so cavalierly in The Decline of the American Empire. But we feel pity nonetheless, a horrible tearful pity. Arcand really gets across the fact that death is always sad regardless of its subject.

Remy’s pain becomes so overwhelming that Sebastien hits the streets of Montreal looking for something stronger than morphine. His search for heroin ironically leads him to Nathalie, the daughter of his father’s ex-lover, who by now is seriously addicted to the drug. Though by this point the general storyline and the sordid complexity of the relationships of its characters could be enough to tilt the story into melodrama, Nathalie’s introduction to Remy and his plight begin to expose how truly sad and pointed Arcand’s tale is. In a heroin delirium his life winds down into a series of dialogues just as witty as those in Decline, but this time as serious as an assisted suicide. While Remy is the classic “man coming to grips with his failures,” his son is the sort of person we rarely see in life or on the screen. His inexplicable compassion for his father has no boundaries. In his father’s eyes, his soul-less generation of tech-savvy corporate acolytes is all analysis with no passion, all method and no truth. What we see in Remy on his deathbed is all passion with little or no moral reason. At one point Remy sits with his friends and they rattle of the series of movements and ideologies they aligned themselves with as trends rose and fell. It is their self-important history of idealism versus Sebastien’s successful financial history. (The one by the way which is bankrolling his father’s much more comfortable death than the one the Canadian healthcare system offers.) Somehow Arcand keeps all of these dramatic elements right beneath the surface of the film, letting the setting of the narrative take on a life of its own under the direction of his subtle visualization of Montreal.

The patience that Arcand’s delivery requires is well rewarded at every point of the film, but particularly in the final scene following Remy’s quiet death. This may be one of the most delicate moments of film I can think of, it is certainly the most potent scene this year’s crop of films has to offer. It is certainly akin to the waning moments of In the Bedroom, whose understated finality lends the film a dramatic genius. In this moment all of these unspoken emotions Arcand manages to uncover finally vocalize themselves between Sebastien and Nathalie. There in his father’s old house that he has just given to Nathalie he is forced to decide whether his or his father’s way of life is best, the most shocking turn of all here is who decides it for him. I can’t recall being more moved by this sort of social realism since Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing. This is cinema on an incredibly grand scale.

A cheesy soap opera producer cruises through the streets of suburban L.A. in his Jaguar convertible listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s classic paean to the common man: “The Boxer.” Through no uncertain irony, he tries to sing along but barely knows the words. Little does he know that he will soon be poked in the rear with his Daytime Television Lifetime Achievement Award by his wife, whom he catches in flagrante delicto.

This is the unconsciously superficial world of Intolerable Cruelty. One in which the leading lady can say to the leading man: “I eat men like you for breakfast.” and it doesn’t seem cheesy at all. It just blends in with every other over-exaggerated glimpse into this hyper-stylized high society America. And little lines like that fit so well into this new concoction of the Coen brothers not just because they make comical sense in the scripted world they have created, but because somehow Catherine Zeta-Jones pulls it off. Evenly matched by George Clooney as the overly-successful lawyer who even “has a man to wax my jet,” Intolerable Cruelty forces us to suffer through the lunatic half-parody of a world in which marriage is a commodity, nothing more than a venue of financial success for the more adventurous sort of female.

For such women Miles Massey is both cheerleader and enemy. On the one hand he dismisses marriage as compromise and explains to us that in the context of divorce proceedings financial victory is life, everything else is death. On the other hand, he is the inventor of the indestructible Massey pre-nup, which is guaranteed to preserve the original financial assets of each party in any situation leading to divorce, thus the bane of all gold-diggers. After being laughed out of the courtroom after a cross examination by Massey at a divorce hearing, Marylin Rexroth is up for the challenge of beating Miles at his own game. She is out partly for the thrill, mostly for the money, but primarily just to win. And the contorted artistry which she brings to bear on the impenetrable Massey rivals is enough for three screwball comedies, earning her a place next to a few of Hawks’ most venerable leading ladies.

The Coen brothers are merry pranksters. They give us precisely what we want us to see, but make us work for it through a continual nod to the giant inside joke that their scripts depend on. Their scripts intone worlds of their own device, intentioned collections of parodies and overly indulgent intrigues that tend to leave the uninitiated with narrative whiplash. This is not because they are determined to leave us with something profound or even helpful; it is mainly just because they can. Together with Jonze/Kaufmann, their films are the amusement park rides of the American art-house scene. Intolerable Cruelty is so traditionally screwball that it deserves a feminist reading. Not only is it intentionally screwball, but it is self-conscious of its gender stereotypes to the point of parody. In the grand tradition of the femme fatale Zeta-Jones navigates the patriarchal system of marital law like a preying mantis. But we all know (wink-wink) that she really just needs to be loved, that she needs the emotional security of the strong arms of a man who smells good and has a lightly cleft chin. The Coen brothers give us exactly what the gender codes of the genre demand, a resolution that occurs only when the lantern-jawed Clooney wins and she falls into his arms. Thus she proves to us that women are strong and intelligent, but she also finds the love that she needs to fill up her otherwise empty existence.

But... Miles Massey does win. And the film closes with us wondering when exactly the satire rug was pulled out from underneath our feet and slid cleverly back in place without us noticing.

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”

At first glimpse Harvey Pekar is not quite the guy you love to hate, like his associate R. Crumb who has already been immortalized in film (in Terry Zwigoff’s justly acclaimed 1994 documentary Crumb). And neither is he the guy you hate to love. But rather it seems that it is hard to muster up anything but an unintentional despondency that matches the way he would probably think about you if you ever met him. Pekar is that guy whose life millions have followed in detail through the decades in the pages of the graphic novel series American Splendor. From the frustrated grumblings of his stick figure self-portrait scribbled out nightly after his file-clerk day job arose an unsettling everyman, just living his measly little file-clerk life by the light of the splendor that is America.

His “America” is the editorially squalid, industrial complex that is Cleveland, a fitting landscape for the medium of pen and ink. In the comic series we simply watch Harvey’s life happen against this minimalist environment. His high points include: divorces, a dead-end day job, the absurdly unromantic relationship with the love of his life: Joyce Brabner, literally finding the daughter they always wanted, life-threatening cancer, etc... For such a commonplace life that is presented in such a low-key monotone, it is a remarkable matter of public knowledge. The film version of American Splendor, however, takes us one step beyond the covers of the infamous comic. Paul Giammati channels the witty snarl of Harvey in this compelling narrated film version of the highpoints of his life that at times leap immediately out of the pages of the comics themselves. The unique feature of the film is an interchange between the realism of the camerawork and the pasting of stark comic images right into the frame itself that enables each to expose the limitations of the other. Since Pekar used a great number of illustrators over the course of his life, his visage has been penned through the series of comics in any number of permutations that differ greatly from each other.

These different versions of Harvey hover around Giammati’s character as an evolving commentary on the character himself. In a telling scene, as Brabner waits to meet him for the first time in a train station, she glimpses several common versions of Pekar in his comics. She sees Crumb’s version with the stink lines in one corner juxtaposed by the clean and pensive version sitting on the bench. Perhaps the attractiveness of the American Splendor series is that it justifies our ability to create and abandon our own self-perceptions, while at the same time acknowledging that we can never do anything about the way others perceive us. Somewhere in this distinction lies the capacity to be who you really are without having to apologize to everyone for it.

And then there is yet another layer of deconstruction that picks at the edges of who Harvey really is. This serially punctuated drama is framed by interludes of conversation with the real Pekar that take place on an eerily half-decorated set. At times his wife and various frequent visitors to the pages of his life appear on this set to clean up the rough edges of the storyline with their own observations and perceptions of certain events. And what we find here behind the iconic American image that is “Harvey Pekar” isn’t a hero or an auteur, but just the person he always said he was: a file clerk.

One of the most recent issues, Our Cancer Years, chronicles the emotional life of Harvey as he deals with a malignant lump discovered over the course of a brief manly scratch. In this fateful episode, the characteristic wry misery with which the comic also faces this difficult time is exposed for what it is: the heartfelt reaction of someone in touch with his hopeless place in life. But what we then gain access to in the film version are the tender moments and chance gleams of hope that lie behind all of the doom and gloom. Not to say that the film in any way undercuts the classic Pekarian persona, but rather it seems to put a human face on Harvey’s intense rhetorical perspective. Giammati’s hunch-baked performance of Pekar as a man literally bent low by the pressures of life is illuminating. He brings this influential personality to life in every gesture, glare, and pensive step. The sheer intelligence of this performance is matched by Hope Davis’ attempt to become Harvey’s wife. If anything, their chemistry together reveals that at the heart of the film version of American Splendor is a genuine love story, as refreshing as it is strange.

From a novella entitled “The Age of Grief,” The Secret Lives of Dentists is a vigorous peek into the dark side of a marriage meeting middle age. The title itself evokes man’s fascination with the question: “What is really there?” We are all terminally curious as to what secrets and mechanics of life lie behind the people we walk by every day. In an appropriately passionless monologue Dave Hurst gives us this backstage access as he passes through a dark hour of his life. “Death is nothing to a tooth,” he says. “Life is what destroys teeth.” And then he lets us watch life grind him down into nothing.

Dave and his wife are dentists who share a practice as they raise their three daughters by night. Dave’s transition from dentist chair to dinner table is hardly discernable, as he usually seems to treat his wife with the same professional detachment he uses at work. Often he will drop his bedside manner for his children, but in the main the cool and steady-handed demeanor that has made him successful at work spills over into his personal life as well. Campbell Scott’s tight-lipped performance at times is so convincing that his passivity alone channels the tension the “coming of middle-age” storyline is trying to build. In the background are his wife and her unrequited love for opera and performance. She is successful at work, intelligently artistic, but otherwise totally unappreciated. Dana also has the peculiar habit of running off on random errands that often keep her out much longer than she had expected. Unfortunately, Dave is not puzzled by this at all. He knows, or is pretty sure he knows, exactly what is going on because he caught her kissing another man backstage before one of her performances.

Dave’s decision not to tell his wife that he had seen her leads to remarkable consequences for his family. In one deliriously extended scene, Rudolph lets the camera drift through the house during a psychosomatic outburst of the flu. The unspoken tension between Dave and his wife exerts a dominating and nauseating influence over the house for a five day period of quarantine in a sequence that almost feels that long. Rudolph’s acute emotional sensitivity really comes through here though and we see Dave as caring father and aching husband trying to come to terms with himself as a frightened individual wondering what to do and when.

The most successful feature of the film is how Rudolph really captures the range of emotions we don’t often see on film in this situation. Infidelity often leads to rage, to anger, to revenge, and even to resigned acceptance. But in the crafted nuances of Dave and Dana we see shame, unspoken marital desire, and fear. This fear is exacerbated for Dave by the fantastical presence of Denis Leary in the form of Slater, a burned-out trumpet player whom Dave met in reality in his dental office. Dave’s psychological decline is marked by the frequent mix of fantasy and reality in which his worst fears concerning his wife come true, and Slater is the only thing there to make sense of it all for him. Needless to say, Denis Leary is not the one you want to have whispering in your ear through a time of profound marital crisis and Dave’s journey back to decisive action results in a radical reorientation of what is real and what isn’t in his life. The Secret Lives of Dentists is not a charming film by any means. But it is a compelling look at what really lies at the heart of marriage. In an age not exactly characterized by conviction and commitment, Dave’s ultimate decision ironically amounts to what is a surprise ending.

“We are all angels. It is what we do with our wings that separates us.”

(Yes, that is actually a line from the film...)

Northfork is a deceptively simple story as bare as its 1950’s Montana backdrop. In a mostly vacant town about to be submerged beneath the reservoir of a new hydroelectric dam, a little orphaned boy named Irwin lies fitfully at the hallucinogenic edge of death in the gentle care of a limping priest. Most of the people have already left, and the last few hold-outs are being “relocated” by three two-man evacuation teams. Each team has been comfortably supplied with clean black sedans and a special box whose contents are designed to be an encouragement to those who take the team’s advice. Save for an embittered shotgun owner and a man who plans to brave the flood with his wives (yes, plural) in a homemade ark, the teams are for the most part successful and fill the otherwise empty film with bits of screwball dialogue and the occasionally appropriate sight gag. The Polish brothers so far have found a niche market on bleakness. With films like Twin Falls, Idaho and Jackpot they have honed their talents at visual reduction, at creating tired little worlds and stories with startlingly few embellishments. In Northfork their decision to eradicate any color but shades of grey for the entire wardrobe is an indication of how far they are willing to go to create these open spaces.

And Northfork certainly is an open space.

It is dominated by the steel grey hills of Montana and the cool shadows of the new dam. Just in case anything else snuck in, the cinematographer was careful to bleach all life from this sterile backdrop through some digital manipulation. That is until we meet Irwin’s dreamscape companions to the edge of his own evacuation, a relatively colorful bunch of rag-tag angels apparently on the search for a special angel. But between the four of them, and their individually absurd characteristics, they hardly seem to make a functioning whole.

It is at this point that Northfork becomes a movie that feels like it was directed by steadfast cinephiles, thankfully drawing on some of my favorite films. Darryl Hannah quite obviously and successfully channels her andriodic androgyny from Blade Runner. The tightly shot opening sequence is right out of Bresson’s more focused moments. The surrealist angel scenes are right next door to Lynch’s red room sequences, even though the costuming of these characters reminds me of Gilliam at his best. The brilliant play with color took me back to the evergreen forests of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. There is an over-determined play with dialogue that hints at the “regionalism” of the Coen brothers. I could probably conjure up a few more...

But in spite of all of this, it is with chagrin that I say Northfork doesn’t work very well. I am on board with the agenda, with the effort. But the film’s vision is much deeper than the film itself. There are all the elements of an invigorating intra-textual epic. One in which the slick self-referentiality alone closes the film on itself, rendering it opaque enough to stand on its own two feet. This could be a "Montana Mulholland Drive" or a "Naked Lunch out on the range." But there is good abstraction and there is bad abstraction. The broad range of details and storylines the Polish brothers attempt to incorporate only really ends up relating in a tangential manner. Being comfortable with not knowing what is going on is fine with me, and I don’t even mind if I know I am not being taken anywhere. But Northfork doesn’t really seem to have the power to go beyond its own confines, and thus leaves little elbow room for the imagination. At one point we meet an ambulatory quadruped that is the random psychedelic generation of some unknown origin. Though it does lead the boy to a house he needs to visit, all it really does is to serve as a symbol of the state of consciousness of the young boy. That’s it. Its form is by no means related to its purpose. So even though it is interesting, it verges on fading away into the film as an empty sign, an entity bent on short circuiting itself. Northfork is cluttered with such dead ends. Same with the snowy split through the house that the angels seem to occupy. It is a wonderful image, but pretty much a dead end in meaning.

Northfork is worth seeing - and on the big screen - for one reason: it is simply and purely gorgeous. Even though its imagery is not as well thought through as it could be, it is expertly presented and the film does leave us with a divinely memorable sense of the poetic in the tragic life of this young boy.

"There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him…The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign."
(Albert Schweitzer)

This may be one of the most famous images of Christ that modern scholarship has produced. Here we see Jesus as a man, bloodied and mangled by a heartless world, his only legacy a barely tenable social agenda that has become the most influential system of ethics in history. If Schweitzer’s social Jesus was the Christ for the 20th century, then Mel Gibson’s iconic Jesus may have set off the conversation that will introduce us to the Christ for the 21st century. I am not saying that his film is this new Jesus, but his film forces us to ask the sorts of questions that may result in his discovery.

Schweitzer’s puzzling, apocalyptic Jesus was not encumbered by being at the center of a massive media controversy, and was able to rest in academic obscurity for the most part. But Mel Gibson’s Jesus has proven so newsworthy that we have all had the odd experience of seeing veteran scholars like Bock, Crossan, and Wright on prime-time talking about typically dull aspects of New Testament history. The prospect of details about the 1st century Jewish judicial system being a topic for conversation at the water cooler is intriguing to say the least. But soon this media frenzy will pass, just like it did with The Last Temptation of Christ or Jesus Christ Superstar, and all we will be left with is a few The Passion of the Christ t-shirts and a number of magnificently important questions.

The traditional question scholars ask about Jesus is how he relates to history. This is a fine question to ask, but the way modern culture (we can include much of contemporary Christianity in this) talks about Jesus implies that he only has meaning insofar as we can talk about him in terms of history. Thus Mel Gibson’s film is bad because: it misrepresents the Jews, it over-emphasizes the suffering, it plays around with the text of the Gospels, etc. These are all matters of historical discussion. But what can we say about The Passion of the Christ as a film?

True, the marketing for the film has focused on its function as an historical document. But this is unfortunate, because where the film stumbles in terms of historical detail it excels as a work of art.

Gibson mainly directs us through the Stations of the Cross as we follow Jesus to Golgotha. Along the way we watch his trial unfold between flashbacks to his life and ministry, and cutaways to the reactions of his mother and disciples during the trial. Simple in plot and structure, much of the dialogue really is an afterthought, an addendum to the images that seem to be Gibson’s point. Book ended by lush, minimalist scenes in the Garden and the empty tomb, the film is occupied with the beaten body of Christ. This lack of context has been to many the biggest drawback of the film. Those with little or no knowledge of the Gospels will have a hard time understanding who this younger Mary with Jesus’ mother is, or who exactly this young man is to whom Jesus trusts Mary’s care. The character of Satan is even more striking in this regard, as his odd presence in the film as a character occurs even outside of the confines of the Gospel narratives.

But this is not to say that one needs a few years at Sunday school to experience the film as it was intended. To watch the film having never read the Gospels would be like reading C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces with no knowledge of classical mythology, or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury having never spent any time in the Deep South. It would be the experience of something totally foreign, the shocking clarity of its images powerful not because they make sense but because one would be sure that somehow, in some grander story, they do make a great deal of sense.

In a strange parallel, this is the same experience many had as they sat and listened to the teachings of Jesus. His parables cast new visions of society and history veiled in a mysterious sort of poetry, one profoundly intelligible to those with the right set of keys but still scandalously alluring to those without.

In the Gospels we learn that people were attracted to Jesus because he “spoke with authority, not as their teachers of the law.” How Jesus taught things was just as revolutionary as what he was saying. Throughout history, Christian art has tried to speak with this same sort of authority, a moving blend of action and mystery. The Passion of the Christ works along the same lines. To be sure, it is little more than twelve hours of Jesus’ life ripped from three years of revolutionary teaching and practice. But as a work of art that functions as a meditation on the sufferings of Christ, its limited scope may be its greatest strength.

Most serious criticisms of the film have simply questioned why anyone would make a film like this. Many see Jesus in this film as Gibson’s ultimate fighting champion, the archetype for Braveheart’s William Wallace, or Lethal Weapon’s cop duo, equal parts stamina and justice. Many have found anti-Semitisms lurking behind the story, or at least things that resemble what have been thought of as anti-Semitisms in other periods of history. Others have found the lack of context crippling, and find Gibson constructing a Jesus that doesn’t exactly fit in with everything else we find in the Gospels.

Some of these are serious criticisms. And the marketing for the film didn’t help at all. Calling something “the greatest tool of evangelism the Church has seen in 2,000 years,” and then proceeding to market the film directly to people certain to enjoy it was sure to guarantee it an audience. But it did little to underscore the fact that The Passion of the Christ really is a great work of art. We were told: it is the “best Jesus film ever made,” a “masterpiece of modern cinema,” or “the next best thing to actually being there!” (Okay, I made that last one up.)

Anything that gets this sort of press deserves the intense critical reaction that The Passion of the Christ has received. But all of this marketing, and its resulting critical backlash, seem to be about a different film. The Passion of the Christ that I saw was a simple, well-produced work of art that could hang next to any number of stained glass windows or triptychs that make our most famous cathedrals as awe-inspiring as they are.

It isn’t the most “historically accurate” depiction of Christ’s last hours ever made. There are a few historical inaccuracies, and a few mythic embellishments of the historical events. It isn’t a clear identification of the motivations of those responsible for Christ’s death. Even though Gibson could have put different words from the Gospels in the mouth of the Sanhedrin and maybe added a little more cynicism to Pilate’s response, the film is obviously not showcasing these scenes as anything other than stops on the way to the Via Dolorosa. The film isn’t even an overt attempt to convert others to Christianity. Its utter lack of any context pretty much guarantees that for these two hours you are going to be thrust into a mindset, into a personality, and into a set of motivations that will feel mystifying even to those very familiar with the events of the crucifixion. It just draws on the same mysteries that make the Eucharist such a central practice in the Christian tradition.

We simply can’t talk about “history” and “ this film” at the same time. We don’t have to. Most discussions of the film, both positive and negative, stumble over this important point and lose their way in the forest for the trees. The idea that something has to be “historical” to be meaningful is the bane of the modern church. This is true even when we are talking about Jesus. In The Passion of the Christ we come imaginatively into contact with the profound personality of Jesus. Pieced together through bits of church tradition, painfully detailed imagery, and a few choice subtitles, The Passion is a seamless garment of good film.


"Even if the Historical Jesus has something strange about Him, yet His personality, as it really is, influences us more strongly and immediately than when He approached us in dogma and in the results attained up to the present by research."
(Albert Schweitzer)

In The Passion of the Christ we come into contact with this strange personality. This is the point of the film and the tradition of Christian artwork in which it belongs, and this is precisely where the film succeeds. As a test case for rendering truly Christian language in film, the language of contemporary culture, The Passion of the Christ is an eloquent example of the possible future of theological discussion. One can question whether the level of violence that Gibson depends upon to get a reaction from us is necessary. It probably isn’t. Just seeing Jesus as a small child tripping over stones, or Jesus drawing a line in the sand as the defender of social outcasts is powerful imagery enough.

The greatest fault of the film may be Gibson’s reliance on imagery of suffering to evoke the same response that the merest fragment of narrative from the rest of the Gospels could if filmed in a way that squeezes every drop of power out of the medium.

But Christian art is the activity of thinking creatively and “Christianly” about things. Though the subject matter of Christian art doesn’t always need to explicitly be the key images and stories of the great Christian narrative, sometimes it can be. Gibson’s film is a great work of art that thinks creatively and “Christianly” about what a Jesus film in the 21st century would look like. Its shortcomings are outweighed by the plain fact that he succeeds on this point. It is hard to relate The Passion to other films of the great “Jesus film” genre because it simply does something the other films don’t. It speaks about Jesus in a different way, it stretches these images to the limits of their capability, and it forces us to take them on their own terms.

My review of The Passion of the Christ was remarkably positive considering the important misgivings of a large number of critics from both religious and secular media outlets. The detailed level of gore that occupies the attention of the film is so severe that it would be hard for all but those intimately familiar with the details of Christ’s life to wade through it and come in contact with the person Gibson is intent on helping us discover. This violence is distracting enough even for those of us who are.

But I think there are enough positive things about the film to not simply toss it on the scrap heap of outmoded religious artifacts that secularized criticism has proudly built up over the years. Right on cue, mainstream Christian audiences have by and large appropriated the film as a masterpiece of faith. In some circles, criticizing this film is pretty much criticizing the person of Christ. At times, when a work of art is tied in so closely with our identity, this seems like the only appropriate response. And movie theater pre-screenings were packed to the gills with anxious ticket holders piling in to see The Passion.

Keep in mind that these are the same theaters that are stocked daily with movies that are either agonized over by more conservative Christian critics, cautiously enjoyed by the more adventurous average church-goer, or discerningly appreciated by others who have “by reason of use” exercised the great Christian ability to discover truth in unique places. In one of the many brief monologues about the film that have attended worship services and sermons in the past few weeks across the country, I actually heard (true story) someone instruct the congregation: “As you leave the theater after seeing The Passion of the Christ, let it sink in. Don’t just walk out and then mix in with all those people who are coming out of something like Starsky and Hutch.”

I don’t want to imply that this somewhat misguided instruction is representative of the Church’s reaction to the film. But it is an important attitude to address; a statement like this can misdirect our attention from a more discerning perception of these recent events. I would like to suggest two points that put The Passion of the Christ into a more reasonable perspective.

1. There are other good Jesus films out there
The Passion of the Christ is one film in a family that has a lot of interesting members. Above and beyond Zeffirelli’s classic treatment of Jesus of Nazareth, the recent adaptation of The Gospel of John, and Pasolini’s reading of The Gospel According to St. Matthew there are a number of films that ask much different questions about Jesus than Gibson does. Life of Brian, Jesus Christ Superstar, and The Last Temptation of Christ just to name an important few. But there is also the rare film like Jesus of Montreal that does such a great job of describing Christ’s odd social significance that has mostly flown under the radar of the mainstream Christian audience over the decades.

Not only are there other good Jesus films out there, but at the risk of sounding heretical, there may even be a few that are better than the one Gibson has offered us. If you are interested in seeing the words and works of Christ written in film, then don’t limit yourself to The Passion of the Christ. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew is not only a masterpiece of contemplative spirituality, it also takes full advantage of the tremendous capacity of film to show us things we may not have considered about such well-worn narratives. In terms of context, Pasolini’s film works very well where Gibson’s falls flat, and does so with an uncanny visual sensitivity.

2. There are other good films out there
What is probably most egregious about the “exit instructions” I quipped about above is that they assume that film has nothing nearly as meaningful to offer us than The Passion of the Christ. As if there is never a reason for the Christian church to become involved with a raging pop culture discussion unless it has something explicitly to do with the core symbols of our faith.

It is easy for us to assume The Passion of the Christ is so meaningful simply because of its subject matter. But it is hard to imagine a church whose followers are so keen on being engaged by the sufferings of Christ that is not also keen on participating in the exploration of the human condition so cogently expressed in his ministry. Film is the closest point of contact we have to the key spiritual and philosophical issues of our day, and in many ways embodies and initiates these issues. This is true on a global scale; they don’t call it “the Great Conversation” for no reason. The Passion of the Christ doesn’t exist in vacuum, but will stand as simply one of many cultural documents that will engage society over the next year of film. It is interesting to see the Church en masse only tuning in to this key discussion when it hears its name in the middle of it.

To be absolutely blunt, The Passion of the Christ is not the best film I will see this year. Already there are a number of films I caught at festivals last year that are sure to beat it out on my top ten list for 2004. Time of the Wolf, Distant, and Dogville are all a much bigger bang for the buck. Especially when it comes to judging a work by its ability to either expose or create realities in a way marked by the ability of film to peek around dark corners of truth or chance upon inexplicable moments of beauty. To assume that a film about the author of the gospel is more meaningful than one about its subject is to undercut the purpose of the message in the first place. Sure, the subject matter of Starksy and Hutch doesn’t even compare to that of The Passion, but the human face of international cinema certainly does.

Mystic River really is a great idea. On the overcast shores of an urbanized bend of the river that splits Boston gather a few of Hollywood’s most intentional artists to bring an epic Dennis Lahayne noir tragedy to life. Sean Penn’s trademark lunatic intensity lurks skin deep next to Kevin Bacon’s sterile impassivity. Tim Robbins prances about, his manic edginess providing a foil for Marcia Gay Harden’s compassionate confusion. Laura Linney channels the pain of a mother losing her child to an absurd tragedy, culminating in what should be a breathtaking monologue that ties together all of the audience’s emotional loose ends.

From such an idea we should expect such scenes as the following: In a room cast with gray light Linney’s mythic leonid femininity lays submissively with baited breath against the hulking edifice of a tattooed Sean Penn. She whispers aphorisms of dark confidence into his ear as street noise flutters in from the open window, the camera waiting gently in a close up of their prone torsos. All the stuff of great contemporary American film. And then imagine all of these elements being pieced together by the renegade “film for film’s sake” mentality of Eastwood. This time around he is so committed to creating a specific atmosphere that he personally crafts a score, laying it emotively over the stories’ transitions and the film’s edits. His penchant for finely staged exchanges and subtle environmental moods that attempt to bring into the present a sense of the scents and textures of the past should have ample space to play out in the context of what really is a gripping and complex script.

But unfortunately, even though it all is a great idea, Mystic River doesn’t quite pan out. Lahayne is a master of the gripping generational epic. As is Eastwood, having already tried his hand at these themes of past and present in films like Unforgiven and The Bridges of Madison County. But the sprawling efficacy of the tale doesn’t fully translate to the screen as effectively as it does to the page. Quite possibly, this is a result of the tangled drama of the storyline in which the experiences of Jimmy, Dave, and Sean are the result of massive personal forces that lie in secrets which are often tangential to the storyline and intersect the script at odd angles.

Mystic River opens on the abduction of ten-year-old Dave by two men impersonating a cop and a priest as Jimmy and Sean watch puzzledly on. We leap immediately then many years into the future to the same neighborhood where Jimmy is a small time career criminal, Sean is a successful detective, and Dave is a man on the fringe of a breakdown that has been simmering in him since his childhood abduction. Jimmy’s 19-year-old daughter turns up brutally murdered down the street from the houses they all grew up in. Sean is called in on the case, Jimmy is determined to beat the cops to the murderer, and somehow Dave ends up caught between the two. At times the remainder of the drama is more of an unfortunate urban, working class The Big Chill then a cut and dried crime thriller. We watch these formative boyhood memories reclaiming the present and leaving a series of tragic coincidences in their wake.

A wide range of complex emotions are supposed to comprise the identities of these three friends, each dealing with the horror of life in their own way. Jimmy through sheer will and a criminal perception of loyalty, Sean through the interrogation room and police radio, and Dave through the sensitive adulation of his son’s baseball games by day and vampire movies by night. Though the intent of Mystic River is to tell this dark and difficult tale of murder, it attempts to do so through the creation of five intriguingly detailed characters. It really isn’t the story about a murder, it is simply a story about five adults and how they are dealing now with the same absurd tragedies they experienced as children. And somehow, without any warning at all, everything seems to just fall together in the end in a way that is supposed to register shock. But the lackluster ending really isn’t able to muster up more than a stifled yawn.

For all of its faults though, Mystic River is intense. So intense that the performances can’t seem to keep up with it and at times reduce the story to melodrama. Yet, Eastwood’s camera is still, brooding, and engaging. Through this visually accurate and meditative approach he takes us deep into this unfortunate psychological mess. Frame by frame the film moves with the patient pace of tragedy, the inevitable conclusion cresting in a volatile sequence of crescendo. There are a few scenes that really are brilliant, and even elegant in their own terrible way. Even though this elegance doesn’t carry over into the admittedly difficult script, Mystic River is still worth visiting.

Million Dollar Baby is a film made by old men. Eastwood, directing his 25th film, soon turns 75. Jerry Boyd, the author of the book that inspired Million Dollar Baby, died at the age of 70 after decades as a fight manager. Rosenbaum points out that Henry Bumstead, Eastwood’s favorite production designer, is an astonishing 90 years old. One striking thing about the film is its slow-paced gravity. It seems like the tired reminisce of an old man not so anxious to tell his story that he needs to rush to the end; he wants us to absorb much from the few details he tosses in. This sentiment also appears in an aging Morgan Freeman’s narration, who periodically intervenes to move the story along with a choice bit of backstory about the main characters or sparse aphorisms about boxing. The film is not geriatric by any means, but Eastwood’s stories seem to be becoming richer with an aged wisdom about basic human themes.

Mystic River was a tangled story about people making decisions that permanently affect their moral compass. As far back as Unforgiven, Eastwood seemed to be toying with the idea that we can act in ways that will cause our moral landscapes to contract, and he seems engrossed with these characters that eventually turn in upon themselves. Million Dollar Baby may be his clearest look into the processes that create such a spare figure. Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, an old boxing manager and gym owner that has just lost what will probably be his last chance at leading someone to the title. His only shot at redemption is a 31-year-old woman who shows up and starts training in his gym until Frankie agrees to take her under his wing. What transpires is the traditional boxing film plot. Scrap, the gym manager who is also responsible for narrating the film, keeps us abreast of Maggie’s successful rise as a boxer, and then leads us perilously through the incredible twist that literally sends the film limping towards its conclusion. Packed in and around this central narrative are the rabbit trails of Frankie’s unspoken past. There is the estranged daughter that doesn’t respond to his letters. There is the mass that he has attended daily for years even though he doesn’t seem even slightly interested in any sort of repentance, a fact that his priest is wise to point out. There is the tale of his history with Scrap that eventually surfaces. There are the thoughtful silences that are crafted so well in unexpected moments of the film. Eastwood does well to let us learn just enough about these skeletons in Frankie’s closet that we don’t lose focus on his present struggle.

Eastwood’s noir storytelling and camerawork elevate the predictable conventions of the script to an artfulness that enables us to see Frankie as more than just another broken boxing manager. He is a man into boxing because it so closely mimics his experience of life. When his fighters stumble back to his corner after every match he is there to literally patch their faces back together. But one can only stop the bleeding so many times until it makes sense just to call it quits or the referee calls the match for you. We eventually find out that Scrap quit boxing because he lost an eye in the ring. He just couldn’t step out of the ring when it was smart to do so, at a time that Frankie thought it would have been smart to stop. The end of the film finds Frankie in the same position with another one of his fighters, this time Maggie. Frankie literally has a chance just to stop the fight, just to pull the plug and put one of his fighters out of their misery.

When Maggie becomes paralyzed in the ring during her title fight, the traditional boxing film is over. Now we have a story about what happens to people that want to die. Maggie is certainly not ready to now face the next horrible round in her life, and her manager Frankie eventually calls the fight for her. And critics have been perplexed as how to respond to such an explicit example of ambiguously ethical euthanasia. Such bold social statements have been rare for Eastwood, a typically conservative director. Well, at least we can say that Million Dollar Baby isn’t a film about euthanasia, it is about these characters that took two hours to develop before the fateful twist at the end. The film simply continues Eastwood’s penchant for characters forced to make ethical decisions that they know will cost them their souls. At the very least, the film seems to imply that the act of euthanasia, even if as an act of mercy, will cost the euthanizer a great deal.

25th Hour is such a good film that it helps us ignore a few its crippling flaws. The film is a glimpse of the new New York, the one that has lost a bit of its swagger. It is a city whose affluence is now a matter of hesitancy, not a casual way of life. And Spike Lee goes so far as to set the most bluntly determinist dialogue of the film, Monty ruminating on his impending doom, against the backdrop of Ground Zero, now mere concrete footprints in a vast broken space in which all rationalizations ring hollow. (On the other hand, something nags me about the easyness with which Lee incorporates 9/11 into the film. Does he read 9/11 as America's 25th hour? Is he treating Monty's growing resignation towards his own moral fabric as an act of terrorism? Or is he simply posing Monty's growing resolve in the face of prison as a post 9/11 self-reflection?)


Monty has one day left before he has to check into the prison up the river for a sentence that will be long enough to permanently affect his life. As he gathers a few friends to have one last stand in the hip nightclub of his Russian mafia associates, we watch them coming to terms with the way their relationships are going to change due to this incarceration. In the same way that Bresson broke the back of superficial narrative tension by telling us through the title of A Man Escaped that his main character would successfully escape, so does Spike Lee do away with any dramatic tension regarding Monty’s destiny. Now the subject of social forces totally beyond his control, we are left only with the same apprehension that is growing in him.


What most critics haven't realized is that the entire film actually just takes place in the one 30 second scene in which Anna Paquin floats through the nightclub on a "Spike Lee dolly shot." Anything before and after that shot is just a bookend, filler, an explanatory device, a progession towards and regression from that 30 second sequence that so hauntingly expresses the ambivalence of all New York bacchanalia post-9/11. This is Lee's most effect dolly shot to date, the ghostly movement of a soul through its own space.

The City of God is full of contradictions that manage to pass themselves off as simple juxtapositions. This is not meant as a slight on the film as perhaps it is only by such scandalous mechanics that the true terror of poverty attains representation. The origins of this community (the “City of God” is a soiled complex of slums designed to keep the poor from the center of Rio and its tourist populations) is shaded in sepia tones, rendered in a quaint, folksy hue. In contrast, we see the same complex years later having been upgraded from an orderly collection of small homes on dirt streets to a full-fledged concrete jungle. These same streets are now shot in sharp, crisp colors, mire and grime in high-definition and flashy jump-cuts. Like an action film shot in a slum. The juxtaposition here, between a romanticized past and a hyper-realist present, just begins to toe the line of fraudulent contradiction before the film falls apart. It concludes with the very same cycles at work in the beginning of the film, the apparent difference between past and present made by the different visual periods of the film film sadly collapses in the final scene. There are a number of other dichotomies that present themselves the same way, the beach and the city, the City of God and the countryside, the police and the reporters. Each of these sets of imagery are pushed as far as possible, just to the point of caricature, before being realized as genuine conflicts rather than simply narrative games or screenwriting flare.

This issue of representation comes to a hilt in the very end of the film. We follow Rocket, long-term resident of the City of God, from childhood to young adulthood as he unwittingly lands a job as newspaper photographer and becomes a chronicler of this beastly underworld of which Rio isn’t even aware. In this final scene, armed only with camera, Rocket becomes witness to a grand street battle that takes down one of the City of God’s most ruthless empires. Well hidden, Rocket can only watch as this gang’s boss meets an ironic demise, stripped of whatever brand of dignity he had forged for himself. Rocket is there as a public witness, a witness from outside this awful cycle, but only from a distance. Reportage in this case becomes caricatured as impotent, distant, and only present by chance, perhaps an act as pointless as the deaths of all these children it is there to witness. The polarity in this last scene, between Rocket as a reporter and this gang boss as his dead subject toes the line of contradiction in the sense that both have done something futile. The cycle hasn’t been broken. This same sense of contradiction is evoked by the title, City of God. As a place name, it is as false as it isn’t. Where else would God be than such a place? A place ripe with such awful juxtapositions.

In the production notes for To Be and To Have, Philibert writes:

“I don’t know what you think but when it comes to summing up a documentary, all one can do is refer back to the subject. This invariably leads to such sentences as: it’s a film on Papous, on a chewing-gum factory, on a country school… In short, you always talk about 'a film on' and in doing that, in spite of yourself, you act as if there were no story. You need to know what it’s about and identify the subject. You must know how to describe and write it before filming it. You say in advance what you’re going to show in order to get across what it is you 'want to say'. Everything has to be smooth, legible, articulate, forseeable, and transparent. If only I could say, ‘This is a film…without a subject!' Not on school but at school. An open and accessible film to dive into without knowing how deep the water is.”

To Be and To Have is an enchanting experience in the most literal sense of the word, its careful handling of such delicate material as magical as the last few moments before naptime. A theologian once said of the Gospel of John, "It is shallow enough for a child to play in, but deep enough for an elephant to drown in." One has the same sensation during a viewing of this Cannes award winning film, a documentary only in the best sense of the term, as it eschews an imposed narrative arc for the natural rhythm and routine of an active classroom.

To Be and To Have has the presence of mind to keep a foot planted firmly in both realism and reflection, framing larger blocks of the film with establishing shots of the French countryside, of snow falling impudently on dirt roads, or of two turtles pacing out the confines of the warm classroom. This sensitivity to both motivation and environment play sympathetically with each other as we wind our way to a moment of climax. Eventually breaking out of the third person mode, the camera takes on the role of interviewer, Lopez tearfully telling us why it is he does what he does. By this time his magnamimous character is well established, but to hear him tell us as confidants what keeps him in this dying tradition is perfectly riveting. “Being” is such a typically French preoccupation, films like To Be and To Have come along every now and then to remind us that it really is a worthwhile thing with which to be occupied. In Philibert’s terms, it now becomes apparent what the “subject” of his film has been all along, not really the children or the teacher, but the space in which they interact, grow, and eventually pass on. It is this space that has been challenged by changes in contemporary French society, a cultural distinction lost on the EU bureaucracy. The fundamental building blocks of French grammar, “etre” and “avoir,” and the wane of their traditional educational setting, make the pedagogical process documented here a metaphor for something vaguely sinister. I have long thought that the French have a special knack for filming children. Films like Small Change and The 400 Blows only encounter the rare gem like The White Balloon as rivals. To Be and To Have proves once again that it is only the French that have enough peculiar charm to make 2 hours of watching children to be as whimsical as it is didactic.

"[Films are]…polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus."

- Haneke

Time of the Wolf claims its title (Wolfszeit) from an old German poem describing an apocalypse, a poetic rendering of the world in stages of social chaos. As Haneke's story goes, Anna is leading her teenaged daughter Lise and shell-shocked son Ben through the French countryside in search of food and shelter after some unknown catastrophe has pushed Europe into an ungoverned, informationless confusion. Making their way from shelter to shelter with no food or water, they eventually come upon a small gathering of vagrants in an abandoned railway station. With the rest of this group of survivors Anna decides to wait for a train to happen by, hopefully on its way toward or from civilization. Haneke’s sparse tale dispassionately tracks the devolution of this micro-society as they wait. Women are reduced to bartering leverage and men to their status on the scale of the will to power. As a larger band of dislocated vagabonds descends on the station, a sort of tribalism emerges. It is one that hasn’t completely stepped beyond traditional European race tensions, which, other than a few packs of cigarettes, remains the only shred of European cultural identity in the film.

Throughout the film Haneke continually plays with the depth of field, alternating between and isolating his characters. This destabilizing effect engages us in the frantic anarchy of his script. He lets sound dribble from frame to frame, at times moving from silence to intolerable din back to silence over the course of a few frames. In one memorable scene Anna stumbles through pitch-black darkness for several moments as we see nothing but that odd blackness of unexposed celluloid. It sits at the beginning of the film like a negative space, as if a scene used to be there but has been taken out, and in the jarring resumption of the film we never recover from a nagging sense of loss. In this way, Time of the Wolf takes from us far more than it gives to us.

Perhaps this initial setup what makes the final image of the film so haunting. It is inconclusive, draining the film of any sense of myth that may have developed. Haneke seems to be implying that his film is not a "parable for our time," a "cautionary tale" or any description that is regularly applied to post-apocalyptic fantasies. Rather the film is an exercise in hopelessness, abandoning myth rather than leading us to it. It becomes a reverse apocalypse. Rather than unveiling the future, it further cloaks it in cynicism, robbing us of the possibility of anticipation. The film really only begins after this ending, the preceding scenes a way for Haneke to develop the well-marked edge of this side of the chasm spawned by the conclusion. It is like Lessing’s ugly ditch, Wittgenstein's raft, or a host of ways we use to describe the unspeakable. Perhaps in terms of film, Haneke has enacted here the reverse of the Starchild sequence in 2001. We can only say: “My God, it’s full of nothing.”

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened. - Hemingway

Mark Moskowitz tossed a copy of a book named The Stones of Summer in a box when he was a teenager. A review he had read of the book back then praised it as a masterpiece, as a voice of his generation. This was enough for the burgeoning bibliophile to rush out and buy a copy, but only a few chapters in he found it wasn’t worth his time. Years later, he opens the same box, reads the same book, and realized he was drastically wrong. The book is a masterpiece. While trying to track down a little more information about the book, Moskowitz finds nothing, which sparks an oddly writerly documentarian search for its enigmatic author, Dow Mossman. Camera in hand, Moskowitz makes it his mission to track Mossman down. This proves difficult, and his dramatic crusade for the "voice behind the text" takes him from literary scholars to agents to book jacket illustrators. Most of the film passes these offices and studios, wherein aging literary scholars give voice to a love few die-hard readers are able to articulate. And when the search becomes difficult enough for us to start questioning Mark’s motivation for the ongoing film, he tells us about the first real book he ever read.

He talks about the first time he read Catch-22. This is American literature pre-Vonnegut, when Heller was all there was on that horizon (...can't actually imagine that, but I went along with it). And then after reading Catch-22, Mark read a biographical piece about Heller in the New York Times which revealed that the guy just leads a normal life, works a normal day job, and is working on his next book whenever he can get to it. The piece also has Heller talk about how he writes and how his work simply takes on a life of its own as it progresses. At times he doesn’t even know what it is about until it is finished. Somewhere in this article Moskowitz discovers what the reading and writing of fiction is all about: a strange communion that happens somewhere behind the text. A network of real people reading, writing, and wondering in uncanny networks. His discovery of Heller, the "historical Heller," unfolded a literary subtext in Catch-22 along seams of recognition between author and reader. His search for Mossman is articulated as an extension of this desire for personal encounter through literature, of that odd sensation6 of feeling "the author’s soul pressing out from the text." (Moskowitz' words.) This is Gadamer writ large, the creative transaction between writer and reader a protracted road trip towards a "new horizon," making the camera's eventual discovery of Mossman necessary. At the risk of giving too much away, after having watched this documentary I now find myself wondering how much I really want to know about "the author." When does our desire to "meet" the author of a text become misguided, impossible, or simply unrecommended?

It is often said that filmed adaptations of literature often don’t work because of one simple reason: The things that make books good don’t make good films, and things that make films good don’t make good books. As a documentary about reading, Stone Reader does little to break this impasse, over time building an accumulation of readerly moments that seem to be teaching us a corollary to the classic rule: what makes a good reader does not necessarily make a good documentarian. Moskowitz only really has here about enough material for a tale the size of The Pearl, but manages to stretch it out to Grapes of Wrath proportions. Granted, the avid reader, the bibliophile, the literary junkie, will all willingly hop along for this long ride. It is ripe with little a-ha moments. But the casual reader may find themselves wanting to dog-ear the story about half of the way through.